The Pursuit of Happiness in Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You
by Mark Wallace
I mentioned in my last post that Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You (Faber, 2021) is a novel of ideas. One of the ideas its two protagonists are most preoccupied with is happiness. They are both conscious that they are not happy:
I suppose I’m very unhappy [said Alice]. He looked at her. Seriously? he said. Why? Nothing specific. It’s just how I feel. I find my life difficult. [Note Rooney does not use quote marks]
P. 51
Reflections on the generally unsatisfactory state of the world – inequality, exploitation, environmental destruction – also come back to the protagonists’ personal unhappiness. Eileen writes in a letter:
I don’t need all these cheap clothes and imported foods and plastic containers, I don’t even think they improve my life. They just create waste and make me unhappy anyway. (Not that I’m comparing my dissatisfaction to the misery of actually oppressed peoples, I just mean that the lifestyle they sustain for us is not even satisfying, in my opinion.).
P. 38
Eileen, in particular, has a conflicted attitude to happiness. She can’t stop thinking about it, but cannot get a handle on it enough to know if she really wants it or not:
I tell myself that I want to live a happy life, and that the circumstances for happiness just haven’t arisen. But what if that’s not true? What if I’m the one who can’t let myself be happy? Because I’m scared, or I prefer to wallow in self-pity, or I don’t believe I deserve good things, or some other reason.
P. 211
This gets to the nub of the issue of happiness. I have written before in the context of John Stuart Mill and Thomas Carlyle’s writings about how happiness is a concept of such abstraction yet such cultural ubiquity that we can never attain it, but also never ignore it. Mill had a breakdown brought on not by unhappiness per se, but by the conviction that the ideals and life he had inherited could never bring him happiness. It was not just that he was not happy, but that he could not even imagine himself being so. Carlyle, too, wrote much about his youthful unhappiness (in the semi-autobiographical Sartor Resartus, among other places), before entirely rejecting the concept of happiness. I won’t rehash my former post here, but will quote its conclusion:
Therein lies the dialectical bind of happiness: the more conscious one becomes of it, the more conscious one must also become of its absence. The more one must ask oneself if one is happy and, if not, why not. This activity of ceaseless questioning is in itself not a pleasant one, and conducive to anxiety. Happiness is an essentially abstract concept centralized by utilitarian philosophy and economics. We can no longer unthink it, or remember that not all societies have prized it. Happiness does not come naturally, as Mill and Carlyle found. Aristotle’s eudaimonia, remember, was an activity, not a state. As such, it was as close to Carlyle’s ideal of work as to Mill’s happiness.
From A Black Spot in our Sunshine: Happiness in Mill, Carlyle and the Present Day, The Victorian Sage, 17 March 2019
Writers like Carlyle and Sigmund Freud have found in work the closest thing humankind can get to the impossible (except for brief unpredictable periods) state of happiness. On the necessarily transitory nature of happiness, Freud writes:
What we call happiness, in the strictest sense of the word, arises from the fairly sudden satisfaction of pent-up needs. By its very nature, it can be no more than an episodic phenomenon. Any prolongation of a situation desired by the pleasure principle produces a feeling of lukewarm contentment; we are so constituted that we can gain intense pleasure only from the contrast, and only very little from the condition itself. Hence, our prospects of happiness are already restricted by our constitution.
(Civilization and its Discontent, Penguin, 16-17)
For Freud sublimation in work is the answer. It is striking that neither of Rooney’s protagonists, both of them in the field of literature (an author and an editor), the same field signalled by Carlyle as that which would provide the Heroes of the modern age, consider that their work will bring them fulfilment. Eileen wants to be a writer in some vague sense, but seems to have little positive intention that way and does not see it as a route to happiness:
If, as I think is quite possible now, I never have any children and never write any books, I suppose I will leave nothing on this earth to be remembered by. And maybe that’s better. It makes me feel that rather than worrying and theorising about the state of the world, which helps no one, I should put my energy into living and being happy. When I try to picture for myself what a happy life might look like, the picture hasn’t changed very much since I was a child – a house with flowers and trees around it, and a river nearby, and a room full of books, and someone there to love me, that’s all. Just to make a home there, and to care for my parents when they grow older. Never to move, never to board a plane again, just to live quietly and then be buried in the earth. What else is life for?
P. 212
Eileen’s vision of happiness does not involve any work, and very little in the way of activity and movement. It is an image of perfect stasis, almost death in itself even before death is directly invoked at the end. Its details are generic. “When I try to picture for myself… a happy life”, she says, and the trying is important. For all her focus on happiness, it has not come any clearer and cannot be imagined in detail. Nevertheless, the concept haunts her communications and is itself the cause of much of her anxiety.
What Beautiful World leaves open is the possibility that happiness can be attained between two people. Simon, Eileen’s love interest (though the term lacks a literary flavour, it is accurate), is motivated precisely by the ambition to make Eileen happy:
Silently with his eyes on the wheel of his bicycle he prayed: Dear God, let her live a happy life. I’ll do anything, anything, please, please.
P. 242
And again:
if you think there’s any chance that I could make you happy, I wish you would let me try. Because it’s the only thing I really want to do with my life.
p. 323
And at this climactic point, Eileen also allows herself a moment of optimism:
maybe I’m not so bad, maybe even a good person, and we’ll have a happy family together. Some people do, don’t they? Have happy families, I mean. I know you didn’t, and I didn’t.
P. 335
Here, still, Eileen is defining her future life in terms of the nebulous concept of happiness. She again seems deeply confused about it, unsure whether happy families exist, knowing only that she does not class her own family life as happy. Her knowledge of happiness is not empirical. She has not experienced it (except in the fleeting glimpses mentioned by Freud), but is intent on believing in and chasing it. In its absence, it shapes her life.
The Carlyle-Mill debate about happiness is over. Happiness won. Reading a novel like Beautiful World it is clear that it is a ruling conceptual paradigm in the stories we tell about ourselves in a way that meaningful work as recommended by Carlyle very rarely is. Yet it is equally clear that the pursuit of happiness brings Eileen more unhappiness. That is the great paradox of happiness, as recognised by Freud. At best, it is fleeting. At worst, the concept is an incubus sucking the possibility of peace of mind and spontaneity from those who believe in it, even when their own experience provides little support for such belief. Perhaps Eileen would be better off returning to the long forgotten words of Carlyle. The phraseology of his work (such as using “man” when referring to humankind) is outdated, but the sentiment is worthy of recovery from the dustbin of intellectual history:
[M]an is actually Here; not to ask questions, but to do work: in this time, as in all times, it must be the heaviest evil for him, if his faculty of Action lie dormant, and only that of sceptical Inquiry exert itself. Accordingly whoever looks abroad upon the world, comparing the Past with the Present, may find that the practical condition of man in these days is one of the saddest; burdened with miseries which are in a considerable degree peculiar. In no time was man’s life what he calls a happy one; in no time can it be so.
Characteristics, 1831
The Victorian Sage 