I slowly opened the door to my apartment building and entered the hallway.  I moved up the stained carpet steps toward my apartment, juggling the key chain slightly to find the right one, feeling for the long jagged one that unlocks my flat.  I was welcomed by my cat, Calypso, who scrambled through the first crack in the door, busting out of jail toward freedom from the inner boredom.

I grabbed her before she escaped and forced her back into the boredom.  I gazed around the room and saw the pile; a stack of hand-written papers on the coffee table, the products of my work; a crumpled piece of paper on the floor; an empty soda can that Calypso had rolled across the floor.

Rubbing my eyes, I prepared for the work that a writer must bear.  I sat upon the couch and stared pensively at the papers.  What’s the use, I thought.  With a slow dispassionate sweep of my arm, I brushed the papers to the floor, leaving the table bare, except for the crumbs left by a thousand sandwiches.  I leaned back and closed my eyes, waiting for something to make me move.  Nothing happened except the realization that nothing would happen if I didn’t make a decision of some kind.

What’s the use?  What good would it do to write all these words?  For whom should I write?  To whom shall I speak?  Nobody, not even the universe would listen.  Who cares?  People?  What are people but small fragments of life imprisoned within incarnate vacuums, with petty emotions and blind misconceptions about their meaningless lives.  What’s the use?

I got up and walked to the bar, searching for a narcotic, something to soothe my mind—scotch on the rocks—nothing like an artificial infusion of unreality to deaden the pain of reality.  Oh, what the hell!! What was bothering me?  Nothing.  It was just another day.  I stared at the yellow water now in my drink, at the tainted cubes of ice surrounded by the liquid; like the coldness of my mind surrounded by the aloneness of my life.  In a swift motion and a quick tilt of my head back the drink disappeared into my mind.  I slammed the glass on the bar breaking the silence of my silent despair.

I walked to the window, noticing that the night was now giving me a reflection upon which my image was returned.  I saw a tired though young face and could only stand to look for a minute.  I walked to the bookshelf and chose a book by Albert Camus.

The foregoing episode is a version of what happens when I arrive home toward evening.  The only difference is that it is painted liberally with despair, an emotion that is the hallmark of existential philosophy.  Albert Camus, a much-revered novelist and existentialist thinker displays these finer points of despair in his novel THE STRANGER that is a staple of college classrooms.  The style and exposition of this book provide an eloquent fictional declaration of existentialist views.  I would like to examine Camus’ novel in order to show how the views of a novelist can be interpreted so as to discover his philosophical premises.

METAPHYSICS

 Camus’ philosophy appears to begin and end with metaphysics, with a view about the nature of the universe and man’s relationship to it.  His hero, Meursault, a young Frenchman, is attending his mother’s funeral.  With a quite unusual and dispassionate attitude, he goes through the motions that are required at the funeral of a loved-one.  One senses that this young man does not care one way or the other, that to him his mother’s death is an occurrence, something that happened.

After the funeral, he returns home and meets a young girl friend named Marie.  They spend a few days swimming and relaxing, after which she asks him to marry.  He replies that he “didn’t mind,” that if she was keen on it, they would.  It really didn’t matter to him.

Camus establishes Meursault’s attitude toward the universe at the outset.  Nothing really matters.  Nothing is of importance.  Our hero feels this from the beginning and he practices his feeling as best he can throughout the entire story. 

Later, after Meursault’s conviction for murder, Camus encapsulates his concept of certainty by bringing the hero face-to-face with death, the goal toward which he has moved.  Meursault describes his conversation with a priest in the prison:

“Then, I don’t know how it was, but something seemed to break inside me,  and I started yelling at the top of my voice.  I hurled insults at him, I told him not to waste his rotten prayers on me; it was better to burn than to disappear.  I’d taken him by the neckband of his cassock, and, in a sort of ecstasy of joy and rage, I poured out on him all the thoughts that had been simmering in my brain.  He seemed so cocksure, you see.  And yet none of his certainties was worth one strand of a woman’s hair.  Living as he did, like a corpse, he couldn’t even be sure of being alive.  It might look as if my hands were empty.  Actually, I was sure of myself, sure about everything, far surer than he; sure of my present life and of the death that was coming.  That, no doubt, was all I had; but at least that certainty was something I could get my teeth into—just as it had got its teeth into me.  I’d been right, I was still right, I passed it in a different way, if I’d felt like it.  I’d acted thus, and I hadn’t acted otherwise; I hadn’t done x, whereas I had done y or z.  And what did that mean?  That, all the time, I’d been waiting for this present moment, for that dawn, tomorrow’s or another days’ which was to justify me.  Nothing, nothing had the least importance, and I knew quite well why.  He too, knew why.  From the dark horizon of my future a sort of slow, persistent breeze had been blowing toward me, all my life long, from the years that were to come.  And on its way that breeze had leveled out all the ideas that people tried to foist on me in the equally unreal years I then was living through.  What difference could they make to me, the deaths of others, or a mother’s love, or his God; or the way a man decides to live, the fate he thinks he chooses, since one and the same fate was bound to ‘choose’ not only me but thousands of millions of privileged people who, like him, called themselves my brothers.  Surely, surely, he must see that?  Every man alive was privileged; there was only one class of men, the privileged class.  All alike would be condemned to die one day; his turn, too, would come like the others’.  And what difference could it make if, after being charged with murder, he were executed because he didn’t weep at his mother’s funeral, since it all came to the same thing in the end?”

Camus’ hero is caught up in a universe poised against life, in a hostile, malevolent, and yet indifferent wind.  Reality struck this man full-fisted.  There was no escape, not in life, not in death.  Camus cleverly puts into this young man’s mind all his own views about religion and God, futility, hope and pretense to piety.  He uses his hero to voice his revolutionary hatred of those who profess to provide love and forgiveness and are themselves victims of the same despair that existentialism projected into the universe.  Unfortunately, for his hero, it is these very ideas that have brought him to a place where he has no choice but to listen to the priest’s pretensions.  His honesty and rage at this façade are futile because his despair has brought him to this place as a prisoner.  There is nothing he could have done, nothing anyone could have done…we are all going to die.  There is no hope in this universe, no joy, no reason to grieve at one’s own or one’s mother’s death.  His rage, of course, reveals the contradiction.  There would be no rage if he truly felt life was meaningless.

EPISTEMOLOGY

Epistemology studies theories of knowledge, theories of how man develops and organizes the material obtained from his sensory contacts with reality.  Novels, of course, seldom get deeply involved in epistemological theories.  Rarely does a novelist hold an explicitly developed epistemology while describing his characters’ thoughts.  Yet, we find in Camus’ writing an almost explicit development.

Meursault is a receptacle.  He makes no effort to learn because there is no reason to learn.  Meursault merely floats through existence, resting on the momentum of life, affected and moved by random undigested sensations, random moods, random events, moving like a blind man bumping into treacherous and murderous objects that one cannot see or understand.  His certainty, as we have seen is comprised of two facts:  we live meaninglessly and we die unavoidably.  He did not really learn these facts but just as with a mystic; they seemed to always have been obvious to him.

An excellent example of Camus’ epistemological views is to be found in the murder scene.  Meursault and his friend Raymond had just faced a group of Arabs who were intent on killing Raymond.  A confrontation had occurred on a beach and the Arabs had fled, after which Meursault and Raymond had returned to the bungalow where they were guests: 

“When we reached the bungalow Raymond promptly went up the wooden steps, but I halted on the bottom one.  The light seemed thudding in my head and I couldn’t face the effort needed to go up the steps and make myself amiable to the women.  But the heat was so great that it was just as bad saying where I was, under that flood of blinding light falling from the sky.  To stay, or to make a move—it came to much the same.  After a moment I returned to the beach, and started walking.

There was the same red glare as far as eye could reach, and small waves were lapping the hot sand in little, flurried gasps.  As I slowly walked toward the boulders at the end of the beach I could feel my temples swelling under the impact of the light.  It pressed itself on me, trying to check my progress.  And each time I felt a hot blast strike my forehead, I gritted my teeth, I clenched my fists in my trouser pockets and keyed up every nerve to fend off the sun and the dark befuddlement it was pouring into me.  Whenever a blade of vivid light shot upward from a bit of shell or broken glass lying on the sand, my jaws set hard.  I wasn’t going to be beaten, and I walked steadily on.

The small black hump of rock came into view far down the beach.  It was rimmed by a dazzling sheen of light and feathery spray, but I was thinking of the cold, clear stream behind it, and longing to hear again the tinkle of running water.  Anything to be rid of the glare, the sight of women in tears, the strain and effort—and to retrieve the pool of shadow by the rock and its cool silence!

But when I came nearer I saw that Raymond’s Arab had returned.  He was by himself this time, lying on his back, his hands behind his head, his face shaded by the rock while the sun beat on the rest of his body.  One could see his dungarees streaming in the heat.  I was rather taken aback; my impression had been that the incident was closed, and I hadn’t given a thought to it on my way here.

On seeing me, the Arab raised himself a little, and his hand went to his pocket.  Naturally, I gripped Raymond’s revolver in the pocket of my coat.  Then the Arab let himself sink back again, but without taking his hand from his pocket.  I was some distance off, at least ten yards, and most of the time I saw him as a blurred dark form wobbling in the heat haze.  Sometimes, however, I had glimpses of his eyes glowing between the half-closed lids.  The sound of the waves was even lazier, feebler, than at noon.  But the light hadn’t changed; it was pounding as fiercely as ever on the long stretch of sand that ended at the rock.  For two hours the sun seemed to have made no progress; becalmed in a sea of molten steel.  Far out on the horizon a steamer was passing; I could just make out the corner of an eye the small black moving patch, while I kept my gaze fixed on the Arab.

It struck me that all I had to do was to turn, walk away, and think no more about it.  But the whole beach, pulsing with heat, was pressing on my back.  I took some steps toward the stream.  The Arab didn’t move.  After all, there was still some distance between us.  Perhaps because of the shadow on his face, he seemed to be grinning at me.

I waited.  The heat was beginning to scorch my cheeks; beads of sweat were gathering in my eyebrows.  It was just the same sort of heat as at my mother’s funeral, and I had the same disagreeable sensations—especially in my forehead, where all the veins seemed to be bursting through the skin.  I couldn’t stand it any longer, and took another step forward.  I knew it was a fool thing to do; I wouldn’t get out of the sun by moving on a yard or so.  But I took that step, just one step, forward.  And then the Arab drew his knife and held it up toward me, athwart the sunlight.

A shaft of light shot upward from the steel, and I felt as if a long thin blade transfixed my forehead.  At the same moment all the sweat that had accumulated in my eyebrows splashed down in my eyelids, covering them with a warm film of moisture.  Beneath a veil of brine and tears my eyes were blinded; I was conscious only of the cymbals of the sun clashing on my skull, and, less distinctly, of the keen blade of light flashing up from the knife, scarring my eyelashes, and gouging into my eyeballs.

Then everything began to reel before my eyes, a fiery gust came from the sea, while the sky cracked in two, from end to end, and a great sheet of flame poured down through the rift.  Every nerve in my body was a steel spring, and my grip closed on the revolver.  The trigger gave, and the smooth underbelly of the butt jogged my palm.  And so, with that crisp, whipcrack sound, it all began.  I shook off my sweat and clinging veil of light.  I knew I’d shattered the balance of the day, the spacious calm of his beach on which I had been happy.  But I fired four shots more into the inert body, on which they left no visible trace.  And each successive shot was another loud, fateful rap on the door of my undoing.”

One will notice that Meursault seems so affect by the universe around him that he is totally incapable of rational thought that, in effect, he is not thinking.  In a situation of this sort, knowledge of a usable kind is impossible, and the only knowledge possible is unusable.  Camus seems to be saying that though man can think, the blinding light of the universe and sweat and heat conspire to keep him from using his knowledge.  Man does not think, he reacts negatively.  He does not know but knows he does not know and knows there is nothing that one can do that matters except rebel against the hypocrisy of a world that presumes to be real and knowable.

ETHICS

The same scene will serve to illuminate Camus’ ethics.  Because the universe is poised against life, and because this is the only certainty, we must conclude that any action based upon “the ideas that people tried to foist on” Meursault is false; that no ethics will apply to man since he can do little about the more overpowering blinding light of the universe.  Meursault borrows the old cliché, “’it’s common knowledge life isn’t worth living anyhow.’”  Ideas like civilization, violence, individual rights and long-range values are nothing compared to the feeling of the sun, the sweat of one’s skin and the crack of a pistol in one’s hand.  All thoughts are imposing and overwhelming except those that give life.  Those that give life, to the existentialist, are false, fake and non-existent.

POLITICS

The state is a sham, the unnecessary convention devised to stifle the individual, a corrupt organ made of hatred and ritual.  What is one to do about it?  Submit to the silly fools.  In the long run we are all dead.  You can’t convince them of their absurdity.  After all, here is this man who murdered another without any motive, almost totally unaware that he was doing it, and in the final analysis, at the mercy of a cause beyond his control...and yet he is presumed guilty as if he had control of his actions…as if he knew what he was doing and could have done differently.  How could one possibly convince the fools that he is innocent?  Why try?  How absurd is the state for trying to determine such unnecessary drivel as laws when it cannot possibly know the true nature of things?

The contradiction in Camus’ politics, of course, is that young Mersault might have been acquitted by a jury of his peers.  Camus has set up an absurd context where if the young man had known what he was doing, he might have avoided the incident, or if the conflict was unavoidable, he might have been acting in self-defense.  But Camus needs a situation where you and I, the readers, know that the young man is innocent, in order that you and I and he can conclude that the world is unfair and that revolution is the only desirable movement.

ESTHETICS

From the start, Camus sets a mood that is carried consistently through to its logical conclusion.  The novel rises to a crescendo of despair and ends with the same quiet noncommittal attitude:

“Once he’d gone (the priest), I felt calm again.  But all this excitement had exhausted me and I dropped heavily on to my sleeping plank.  I must have had a longish sleep, for, when I woke, the stars were shining down on my face.  Sounds of the countryside came faintly in, and the cool night air, veined with smells of earth and salt, fanned my cheeks.  The marvelous peace of the sleepbound summer night flooded through me like a tide.  Then, just on the edge of daybreak, I heard a steamer’s siren.  People were starting on a voyage to a world which had ceased to concern me forever.  Almost for the first time in many months I thought of my mother.  And now, it seemed to me, I understood why at her life’s end she had taken on a “fiancé”’ why she’d played at making a fresh start.  There, too, in that Home where lives were flickering out, the dusk came as a mournful solace.  With death so near, Mother must have felt like someone on the brink of freedom, ready to start life all over again.  No one, no one in the world had any right to weep for her.  And I, too, felt ready to start life all over again.  It was as if that great rush of anger had washed me clean, emptied me of hope, and, gazing up at the dark sky spangled with its signs and stars, for the first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe.  To feel it so like myself, indeed so brotherly, made me realize that I’d been happy, and that I was happy still.  For all to be accomplished, for me to feel less lonely, all that remained to hope was that on the day of my execution there should be a huge crowd of spectators and that they should greet me with howls of execration.”

Art is a recreation of the artist’s views about life and the universe.  There is nothing more to say about Camus’ view of life and the universe.  He has said it himself.

 Posted on 6/2/04