By Tala Abou Ali | Staff Writer

In her debut novel Bonjour Tristesse (1954), a then 18 year old Francoise Sagan tells the story of Cecile, an adolescent girl who has been pursuing a life of pleasure and fun with her father Raymond ever since she exited the nunnery. The novel takes place the summer after Cecile fails her baccalaureate exam, during which our protagonist spends her break with her father and his mistress on the Cote d’Azur. However, Cecile’s vacation takes an unexpected turn when Anne, an old friend of her deceased mother, joins the group and gets engaged to her father. Seeing Anne’s maturity and strict ideology as a threat to her pleasurable lifestyle, Cecile plots a scheme to break the engagement, and ultimately leads her father to return to his old mistress. Heartbroken, Anne leaves the house and dies in a car accident – which the protagonist suspects to be a suicide. The summer ends and our protagonists return to their old habits, now released of Anne’s reasonable influence. But something is different this time; when she is not out enjoying herself, Cecile is filled with a previously unknown, foreign feeling – she is inhabited by sadness. 

Cecile and her father live a life of hedonism, which aims at fulfilling desires through momentary pleasures. Etymologically, the word “desire” derives from the Latin de sidere, which signifies “from the stars”. In this sense, desire implies a certain fall from perfection; it is an attempt to gain back what we have lost. Desire is a proof of our finitude, an eternal quest to fill a void and to be complete. Such a definition of desire is not surprising, as it is reminiscent of Plato’s myth of the Androgyne, or even the story of Adam and Eve. In both of those stories, desire is a punishment given to humankind for their attempt to challenge divine entities. Desire is thus a form of suffering; we yearn for something outside of us to fulfill us, taking away our agency and independence from our own sense of satisfaction. For that reason, rather than an inherently immoral philosophy, hedonism can be seen as an attempt to annihilate this suffering through the most accessible, worldly activities. The question remains: Is such an attempt ever successful? 

In the novel, Cecile’s feelings following Anne’s death act as a proof of the inability of such a lifestyle to provide happiness. Anne is the symbol of a moderate, reasonable life, opposite to the ideology that Cecile and her father abide to. Anne encourages Cecile to invest in her future and her intellect rather than chasing fleeting moments of enjoyment, thus acting as a symbol of maturity and adulthood. For instance, she attempts to tame Cecile’s behavior by forbidding her to meet with her lover and by forcing her to study for her baccalaureate – which the adolescent takes as a personal offence. However, despite her successful attempt to eradicate Anne from her life, Cecile does not feel as happy as one would think she would; she feels guilty and sad, mourning not only the woman she has lost, but also the life she could have had. 

By leading Anne to her death, Cecile fails to gain maturity and to grow out of her hedonistic lifestyle. Her attempt to break her father’s engagement is an undeniable act of selfishness, as our protagonist prioritizes her own pleasures over both Anne and her father’s fulfillment. By refusing to let go of her old life, she is fighting to stay in a permanent state of adolescence and insouciance, refusing to make sacrifices for others or to take on responsibilities – which leaves her feeling unhappy at the end of the novel. Cecile thus fails to form meaningful connections and to find a real purpose to her life. She uses pleasure as a form of distraction, to forget what she did and what she regrets doing. Rather than healing her wounds, Cecile tries to cover them with superficial bandages – which will never lead to a true form of satisfaction.

Now that I have argued for hedonism’s incapacity to provide happiness, the question remains: How can we truly reach happiness? As we have seen, desire is a lack – it opposes itself to happiness, which is synonymous with plenitude and satisfaction. Happiness is thus an annihilation of all forms of desire, rather than a pursuit of desires. 

In that sense, happiness is not a chase for anything, it does not aim for something more than itself: It is then a static state of inaction. But if happiness is wholeness, and wholeness is immobility – should we truly strive to be happy? It is desire that drives us to pursue projects and to expand our horizons; it is our finitude and the suffering that it causes us that make us alive and that lead us to perpetual evolution; it is precisely because we are chasing something bigger than ourselves that we can seek knowledge and improvement. To have no desire is to have no ambition, no purpose, to let oneself rot in contentment. Would life be worth living in that case?