French Literature: Albert Camus - Term Paper Example

ALBERT CAMUS Both The Stranger and The Myth of Sisyphus are excellent illustrations of Albert Camus’ views on existentialism. That is not to say theytell the same story in the same format. Indeed, reading them side-by-side provides a great deal of nuance to a philosophy that is sometimes stereotyped simply as: God is dead and the world is an empty place. Camus’ vision is more various and is in some ways more interesting than Samuel Beckett’s—which is exemplified by the patient and ridiculous vagrants of Waiting for Godot. Camus’ version comes out from an engagement with the world and its passions and is indeed more humanist than the rigorous and sad philosophy of his frenemy Jean-Paul Sartre. Indeed, both the The Stranger and The Myth of Sisyphus are kinds of surveys of life—how can it be withstood? What should we spend our lives doing?—that end with positive, if slightly conflicted, epiphanies. Both show us that the key to life is attitude. He does not mean something so simple as “Keep your chin up!” Instead, the correct attitude, according to Camus, is one of defiance. The energy that comes from defiance is indelible; it is the only force that will allow a person not to be crushed. As he writes in the famous line from Myth: “There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.” That said, Myth is a much less ambiguous work than The Stranger, and this too shows the complications at the heart of Camus’ philosophy. The drudgery and meaninglessness of their current existence plague both Sisyphus and Meursault, the two main characters in the works discussed in this essay (both of which were written when Albert Camus was in his late twenties). Although their lack of belief, or exclusive self-belief, inspires the notion that they are free and have the will to choose how they would like to live, instead their lives are circumscribed by things beyond their control. Sisyphus is a plaything of the gods. Although he has again and again attempted to assert his independence and embrace the passions of the world, he is consistently foiled by the gods. As Camus writes, “Many years more he lived facing the curve of the gulf, the sparkling sea, and the smiles of the earth. A decree of the gods was necessary. Mercury came and seized the impudent man by the collar and, snatching him from his joys, led him forcibly back to the underworld, where his rock was ready for him.” His freedom is really an illusion. This is not to say there are any deistic powers. The gods in this version of the story could simply stand in for the natural limitations of life. He enjoyed many years living by the sea before he died, before he was forced to leave this world. In existential thought, the absence of a god or gods does not in any way connote true freedom. One can choose to do anything, but there are no real consequences to these choices. It is similar to flipping a coin. Freedom is only freedom of being in the world, and this being is sharply circumscribed by reality which places significant restrictions on what people can do. Indeed, these restrictions are often not even knowable in advance—they come and go and sometimes hide from sight. There are many illusions and we are judged in part on how we deal with them. Although Meursault could have anticipated that he would be caught and prosecuted for his crime, much of the actual prosecution and the case built against him is completely arbitrary. There is a real resonance with the great existentialist Kafka’s novel The Trial where the prosecution of Josef K. is completely arbitrary. The machinery of the world sucks in these characters whether they believe in it or not. Attitude is all. Indeed, society or the political world are not even required for this—although certainly it is poignant to see how we have created our own cage in many ways—but the natural world itself betrays us. Thus Meursault is not acting consciously when he shoots the Arab on the beach: it is the sun that betrays him, glinting off the knife—inspiring him to commit a self-destructive act. The world conspires against us sometimes. This lack of control clearly begets desperation. There are times that both Sisyphus and Meursault feel that their only true act of control might be to take their own life. This would be a statement against the wanton and restrictive world that they find so tedious. As the critic Lev Braun writes: The subject of the Myth is suicide—especially philosophical suicide . . . Having rejected all belief in God or in any superior principle, Camus casts a desperate glance at the inexplicable universe around us, at the meaningless routine of social life, at our mortal fate. Then, reflecting on the impotence of our reason, entangled in its own contradictions, Camus wonders why the most lucid among us do not simply finish it all by suicide. Yet, the wish for happiness and meaning is so strong as to sustain a proud and vital man against his fate . . .1 There is always the temptation to desperation, but it is an attitude or perspective that Camus ultimately rejects. He says that the only philosophical question is that of suicide, and using philosophy comes to the conclusion that suicide is not a correct approach to life. This is the message in Myth, and it also in a way is the message of The Stranger. Meursault, convicted of murder (and of having no emotions), could resign himself to death; he could even embrace it. Instead, in the strange final words of the book he does not. He sets himself against extinction with a different kind of attitude. As if that blind rage had washed me clean, rid me of hope; for the first time, in that night alive with signs and stars, I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world. Finding it so much like myself — so like a brother, really — I felt that I had been happy and that I was happy again. For everything to be consummated, for me to feel less alone, I had only to wish that there be a large crowd of spectators the day of my execution and that they greet me with cries of hate. This is the scorn that Camus talks about in Myth. Knowing his fate and knowing he will be subject to it, no matter what else happens, Meursault refuses to embrace it. Instead, he welcomes the scorn of the crowd and returns it. This is a very important fact about the book. This is the independence of spirit that makes life worth living, Camus seems to be saying. One cannot give up and resign oneself to fate. One must seek out meaning even in adversity and stand tall against the unforgiving machinery (in Meursault’s case the guillotine) of the world. The routine of life is crushing. And consciousness of it makes it even worse. However, consciousness also brings with it the possibility of choosing how to respond. One can carry out the everyday activities without and never be aware that there is a chance to make them more exciting or to seek out a new life. Only consciousness allows a person to see the relativity of their position: that is why it is such a double-edged sword. In an imaginary dialogue with Camus the writer Hayden Carruth quotes Camus as saying intelligence (i.e. consciousness) is the problem for both Meursault and Sisyphus: Once the factor intelligence is admitted, then the train of anxieties appears in its weak: awareness of self, awareness of death, awareness of radical doubt, awareness, ultimately, of the absurdity of existence. At once the intelligence begins searching for . . . a ‘way out,’ a means of evading itself and making an intuitive leap into an ultraintelligent posture from which it can resolve its anxieties through an act of faith . . .2 For Camus the only admissible faith is a kind of lucid recognition of absurdity and a stance against it. This stance, as stated above, by its very nature contains an element of rebellion. Not only are such individuals by definition standing against the masses, but in a way they do so against themselves. The absurdity inside all of us. So Carruth also quotes his version of Camus—one very close to the truth—as saying, “Speaking broadly, the notion of Meursault’s crimes are a gesture of revolt against the absurd to use your language, would be acceptable, I imagine, to any perceptive reader. The question then is whether or not the gesture was successful.”3 Of course Meursault’s revolt, just like Sisyphus’, can only take him so far. Eventually the net closes in: Meursault is put into a prison; Sisyphus is forced to roll a rock up a hill. Both are punished with an unremitting tedium. They cannot escape; there is no possible escape. All that is left is to adjust themselves to the circumstances. This adjustment in a way is their heroism. An unflagging acceptance of reality and a refusal to give up, Camus seems to be saying, is the best that can be expected considering the circumstances. In his prison cell, at first Meursault begins to despair. He dreams of going to the beach and feels profoundly how small his prison cell is and how limited the possibilities of his life now are. But gradually his attitude begins to shift. He does not fall into fantasy or vainglorious hopes. Simply, like an ascetic, he begins to accept his fate: which is not the same as an embrace of death. It is carving out a specific attitude, half-defiance and half-acceptance. Like Meursault, “All Sisyphus silent joy is contained therein. His fate belongs to him. His rock is his thing. Likewise, the absurd man, when he contemplates his torment, silences all the idols.” There is nothing else on earth, in their captivity, than Meursault and Sisyphus. They both engage in empty pursuits, but at least these pursuits are there own. From his prison cell, Meursault says: As for the rest of the time, I managed quite well, really. Ive often thought that had I been compelled to live in the trunk of a dead tree, with nothing to do but gaze up at the patch of sky just overhead, Id have got used to it by degrees. Id have learned to watch for the passing of birds or drifting clouds, as I had come to watch for my lawyers odd neckties, or, in another world, to wait patiently till Sunday for a spell of love-making with Marie. Well, here, anyhow, I wasnt penned in a hollow tree trunk. There were others in the world worse off than I. I remembered it had been one of Mothers pet ideas--she was always voicing it--that in the long run one gets used to anything.4 In some ways this reminds the reader of an individual who is too drugged out to care about his or her circumstances and can respond to reality only with cliché. Indeed, the void at the center of the man called Meursault, the lack of emotional dynamism or indeed emotional response at all, might call into question Camus’ philosophy. Meursault is such an outlier, so unlike an ordinary human being, that it might seem to be impossible to ask of an ordinary person to respond to life in the way of Meursault. What can he teach us? So it is, indeed, with Sisyphus who is also an archetype. But Camus’ strategy is not to represent reality. In both works it is to create a philosophical allegory. Both Meursault and Sisyphus are ideals, not realities. We can learn from them how to respond even if their own responses are likely far beyond our capacity. Just as Meursault’s Algeria, with its hypnotic sunshine and sea, is not comparable to the places we live, so he is not comparable to us. But we see in the story before us hints of our own lives and responses, and these we can attach ourselves too and bring into our own ways of being. Finally, how do these two characters end their stories? In a way both end with an empty epiphany, the best they can do in the circumstances. Meursault listens to the sounds of the natural world wafting into his prison cell and feels at peace. He thinks of his execution and hopes that a huge crowd turns out. In part this is so that he is not alone, but perhaps more importantly it so that his life and his defiance are finally acknowledged. He wants the crowd to howl at him, to recognize how different he is from them, to descend into bestiality while he remains aloof upon the scaffold. It is a striking and memorable attitude. Sadly, for Sisyphus, he will have no audience, and he will have no real death as his job is eternal. There can be no dramatic denouement for him, as there is for Meursault. Nevertheless, Camus compares Sisyphus’ attitude to his sentence to that of a mortal when he imagines Sisyphus again setting out to roll the stone up the impossibly steep incline: At that subtle moment when man glances backward over his life, Sisyphus returning toward his rock, in that silent pivoting he contemplates that series of unrelated actions which becomes his fate, created by him, combined under his memorys eye and soon sealed by his death. This is very similar, if slightly less grandiose, to Meursault’s adjustment to his circumstances and pivot on the scaffold to face the crowd and guillotine—the end result and consequence of his life. It is both profoundly sad and also terrifying. Camus seems to sum up his attitude to the world in this scene. But how representative are these two books of what Camus really thought, of the philosophy he came to expound in later life? Can we take both The Stranger and The Myth of Sisyphus at face value? Indeed, is there something overly romantic about these absurd heroes, something slightly off-putting and unrealistic? We have already discussed how impossible a model they are to emulate, if indeed Camus suggests they are models of any sort—is the idea that the only way to properly live life is with an attitude of defiance in any way a supportable idea? Camus’ philosophy—especially this early version of it—is not without its critics. They see the proud scorn of Meursault as overly romantic and too much of an embrace of violence. Meursault is a seductive figure and seems to imply that there is no such thing as guilt. What is murder?—Camus seems to be saying—just something that happens; one cannot be guilty of it as guilt is only constructed by the social machine. It has no independent existence. The critic English Showalter finds the “pose of indifference, the concealed longing for recognition, the devious provocations, all [characterizing] the not-yet successful young writer . . .” that Camus then was before The Stranger’s publication. He believes Camus later set out to correct this novel by way of later work. By the time he wrote The Fall, Camus recognized the inadequacy of his presentation in The Stranger, in part perhaps because he had outgrown his youthful romanticism. When he returns to the problem in The Fall, however, it is not only because he wants to correct an earlier mistake but also because the “innocent murderer” still haunts his conscience.5 We can see in his style how Camus reifies his own philosophy. As the years go by and he has made his point, his style too changes. The world of [his] fiction [is] perceived by the reader as through a glass darkly, a glass that, in the case of L’Etranger, Sartre had likened to the glass door of a telephone booth. The reader’s vision of that world was somehow blurred, his angle of vision oblique.6 In later novels, however, Camus’s style becomes more distinct and unequivocal. As Brian Fitch says, it takes on “a certain opacity.” Having decided to exist, it points to its own existence. “With this relative opacification of the language of the text, language drew attention to itself and away from the fiction that provided its ostensible raison d’etre.”7 In effect, Camus is using himself up. It would indeed be curious to see what he would have been able to write had he lived longer. His books would probably have reflected a more nuanced and mature view of things. Both The Stranger and the Myth of Sisyphus are classic works of both philosophy and literature. Perhaps they would be clearer or better understood if they did not have a foot in each discipline. Nevertheless, in a basic sense they communicate an important idea about life. If one chooses to believe the world is empty of meaning, that the values of religion have no grounding in reality, and all we have is our physical existence, how can we stand the tedium and repetition of so much of life? It is indeed difficult. But in both of these works, Camus provides instruction. Attitude is all. Being conscious, a person is free—not to do anything—but to choose how to respond to the humiliations of life. The key is to rebel: to strike an attitude of defiance, be it on the scaffold or as the rock again begins to slip from your grasp. Works consulted Braun, Lev. Witness of Decline. Rutherford: Dickinson University Press, 1974. Camus, Albert. The Stranger. Trans. Matthew Ward. New York: Vintage, 1989. Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus. http://www.nyu.edu/classes/keefer/hell/camus.html Carruth, Hayden. After the Stranger. New York: MacMillan, 1965. Fitch, Brian. The Narcissistic Text. Toronto: University of Toronto, 1982. Showalter, English. Exiles and Strangers. Columbus: Ohio University Press, 1984. Read More