On giving up, comedy, and paying attention
If tragic heroes are what happens when people don’t give up, does that mean giving up belongs to a comic world?
I’ve just read - late to the party - Adam Phillips’ On Giving Up (Hamish Hamilton, 2024). As Phillips puts it, the book is about ‘the essential and far-reaching ambiguity’ of a ‘simple idea’: what it means to give something up.
The most ordinary way we come across the idea of giving up is when people talk about ‘smoking, or alcohol, or chocolate, or any of the other anaesthetic pleasures of everyday life’. But Phillips is really interested in the bigger things it’s possible to give up, and the bigger implications of giving up in general.
He goes early on to the most consequential of all the things it’s possible to abandon, reject, cast aside, or cut loose: our own lives. He theorises that ‘one of the reasons giving up has such a bad press’, is that ‘the giving up that occurs regularly in everyday life is felt to be an ominous foreshadowing of, or reminder of, the ultimate giving up that is suicide, or just the milder version of living a kind of death-in-life’.
“‘the giving up that occurs regularly in everyday life is felt to be an ominous foreshadowing of, or reminder of, the ultimate giving up that is suicide, or just the milder version of living a kind of death-in-life’”
It might feel a bit of a stretch to make a connection between suicide and some of the more prosaic examples of giving up that most of us will enact as part of normal, everyday living. Giving up on attempts to convince oneself that one has the right face for a fringe, for example, or giving up on ever getting round to decorating the living room, don’t feel like they have much to do with giving up on life.
There are other activities that, abandoned or unfinished, might seem more likely to prompt existential reflection. The example that springs to mind from unfinishing is speaking to the professional rock climber Franco Cookson who, contemplating the idea of not completing the routes he set out to, told me ‘it’s kind of like the definition of life itself, eventually there is a failure, even the best climbers that have ever been, there’s always been the project they didn’t do…it’s almost like a guarantee that you will have things that you don’t climb’. Climbing is one of those things that age or anything else causing a decline in physical and mental fitness will eventually put a stop to - and such finitude makes sense as a memento mori. There’s also of course the additional layer that for a climber at this level, a ‘failure’ to complete a climb - or giving up on a climb - may literally result in death.
Yet the question of whether or not we experience giving up as a reminder or foreshadowing of death might be less about the proximity of a given activity to death and more about our attitude or outlook. Giving up more ordinary things can and does prompt feelings that are a bit existential.
Phillips writes about the ‘tyranny of completion’, and also about the ‘tyranny’ of what we feel we should be: ‘when our preferred versions of ourselves are not an inspiration, they are a tyranny’. Especially if you’re prone to associating self worth with productivity and achievement, it’s easy to see how the preferred version of yourself might be someone who gets lots done (finished things, that is), or else someone who persists - for instance at learning the trumpet, overcoming a fear of driving, or perfecting a triple axel jump on the ice rink. From there, it’s not too much of a stride to see how we might question our own point or purpose if we ‘fail’ to complete or stick out the things we intend to.
On his mission to look at giving up through a ‘more promising’ lens, Phillips talks about attitudes to giving up though the medium of literary tragedy. Tragic heroes, he says, ‘are out catastrophic examples of the inability to give up’, and he turns to Sisyphus as ‘the absurd, tormented, exemplary master of not giving up’. Phillips couldn’t not have ended up with Sisyphus - the king of Ephyra (Corinth), who in Greek myth is condemned to push a boulder up a hill, only for it to roll back down and for the task to begin again, into eternity. The Sisyphus myth is unavoidable because Albert Camus used a version of the story to talk about the question that’s also central to Phillips’ work. In Camus’ famous 1942 work Le mythe de Sisyphe he addresses, ‘the one truly serious philosophical problem’, which he says is that of suicide, or of ‘judging whether life is or is not worth living’.
If tragic heroes are the paradigm for what not giving up looks like, does that mean that the ability to give up or the action of giving up belongs to a comic world (a world in which things are accepted to have gone more or less right)? When thinking about more positive framings of giving up, Phillips suggests ‘we could, for instance, see Sisyphus as a comic turn’.
“‘If tragic heroes are the paradigm for what not giving up looks like, does that mean that giving up belongs to a comic world?’”
The idea of the comic turn implies actual amusement, and looked at from the right angle, Sisyphus - at least in abstracted, metaphorical form - is both funny and heroic. It is absurd that we tend to live life pushing inevitable rocks up inevitable hills, knowing that in the end everyone will die, even though, from a certain compelling if not inarguable perspective, there’s therefore no point in the rock, the hill, or us. And it’s even more absurd that we behave as though the rock and the pushing really matter. At exactly the same time, it’s also outrageously brilliant and heroic that we do find and follow the compulsion to care.
It’s maybe the noticing of the absurdity or hilarity of life that allows certain people to then find the kind of ‘happiness’ that Camus, in the end, imagines Sisyphus to possess. Sisyphean happiness is not so much about being amused - though amusement could be a first and recurring step - but more of a longer-lasting way of being. It goes something like this:
Camus is interested in Sisyphus’s thoughts when he’s walking back down the hill. At this point - conscious of and contemplating his situation, he could be seen as a tragic figure. He ‘knows the whole extent of his wretched condition’, and it is this consciousness that makes his life tragic. However, ‘the lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the same time crowns his victory. There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn’. Because of his ability to recognise the absurdity of his existence, Sisyphus attains some freedom and contentment. ‘Crushing truths perish from being acknowledged’, and the ‘struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy’. For Camus:
Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth [...] happiness necessarily springs from the absurd discovery. It happens as well that the felling of the absurd springs from happiness.
The experience of joy also deserves an honourable mention here, as part of the emotional mix of happiness and the happiness of giving up. Camus envisages that Sisyphus’s descent from the top of his hill ‘can also take place in joy’.
To confuse the myth slightly but to go down a related path, it’s possible to find a large amount of joy from giving up - from letting go of the ‘tyranny’ of completion or of commitment to the preferred self Phillips talks about. Putting this into the frame of the Sisyphean metaphor, we might think about Sisyphus as finding joy in giving up on the idea of physical escape, or giving up on being angry or dismayed by his toil. Or, as a different illustration, Andrew Bird’s take on the myth in his 2019 song ‘Sisyphus’ focusses on the rock itself being imaginatively let loose: ‘just let the rock roll / Let it roll, let it crash down low, / There’s a house down there but I lost it long ago’.
When it comes to finding joy from giving up, there’s also a lot to be said for not being too attached to expectations, and clearing them out of the way. Giving up on them can make space for something else. It’s partly to do with not being blinkered looking at particular goals, fixating on what we imagine we desire, or becoming too taken - like a tragic hero might - with grievance. The results of which new way of seeing are often happier.
The happiest person I know has no particular attachment to what we normally think of as ‘success’, no problem giving up on - or at least putting to one side - ‘projects’, and is sensitive to absurdity. He isn’t in other words plagued by the nagging inner critic, and almost permanently wears comedy goggles. The world he lives in is as a result that comic world where things are believed to turn out pretty much better in the end - absurdity, and twists and turns, accepted. This isn’t about ignoring nuance, there’s still room for seeing doom and gloom - as Sisyphus sometimes still does even in Camus’ version of him. But as the comedian Brett Goldstein commented when discussing very serious films - if it’s all doom and gloom you’re not paying attention. Humour, and having a sense of humour, can help you give up on what’s unhelpful and notice other stuff.
Links of interest:
Adam Phillips, On Giving Up (Hamish Hamilton, 2024): On Giving Up : Adam Phillips : 9781405958035 : Blackwell's
Franco Cookson’s interview on unfinishing: with Franco Cookson. Mental preparation, castles, and guaranteed failure. — unfinishing
Brett Goldstein’s Films to be buried with: Films to Be Buried With List
Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus: The Myth of Sisyphus | Summary, Analysis, & Facts | Britannica
Andrew Bird, Sisyphus: Andrew Bird - Sisyphus