Though the Myth of Sisyphus is the essay in which Camus best expresses his philosophy of Existentialism, he is most familiar to many of us through this short novel. Influenced by American hard-boiled fiction and film noir, it tells the deceptively simple story of a young French Algerian named Meursault. As the novel opens he announces, in one of the best known opening lines in all of literature: "Maman died today." (In the most widely read previous English language version, by the great translator Stuart Gilbert, the line was rendered: "Mother died today.") Meursault travels to the nursing home where she is to be buried, but mystifies the staff and his mother's friends by his failure to react emotionally to her death. He does not cry, does not ask to view the body and leaves immediately after she is buried. At the close of the day he observes:
It occurred to me that anyway one more Sunday was
over, that Maman was buried now, that I was
going back to work, and that, really, nothing had
changed.
This establishes him as an Existential hero, someone who recognizes the futility of human existence, but continues on even in the face of it's fundamental absurdity.
In the ensuing days he interacts with the other tenants of his building, including Raymond Sintes, a pimp, and with his coworkers, including Marie Cardona, actually a former coworker with whom he starts having an affair. He further demonstrates his indifference to mundane concerns in a couple of episodes. He angers his boss by not responding with sufficient enthusiasm to a promotion:
'You're young, and it seems to me it's the kind of
life that would appeal to you.' I said yes but that
really it was all the same to me. Then he
asked me if I wasn't interested in a change of life. I said
that people never change their lives, that in any
case one life was as good as another and that I
wasn't dissatisfied with mine here at all.
He looked upset and told me that I never gave him a
straight answer, that I had no ambition, and that
this was disastrous in business. So I went back to
work. I would rather not have upset him, but
I couldn't see any reason to change my life. Looking
back on it, I wasn't unhappy. When I was a
student, I had lots of ambitions like that. But when I
had to give up my studies I learned very quickly
that none of it really mattered.
And when Marie asks him if he wants to marry her:
I said it didn't make any difference to me and that
we could if she wanted to. Then she wanted to
know if I loved her. I answered the same way
I had the last time, that it didn't mean anything but
that I probably didn't love her.
Eventually he gets drawn into a violent dispute between Sintes and a gang of Arabs. There is a knife fight on the beach one day and Meursault ends up with a gun. Later, walking by himself on the beach, he meets up with one of the Arabs and shoots him, then shoots him four more times after he's fallen to the sand.
In the second half of the novel he is put on trial for murder. Everyone from his own attorney to the judge is mystified, even horrified by Meursault's indifference to his own actions and to the proceedings which will determine his fate. During the prosecutor's summation, Meursault reflects:
I was listening, and I could hear that I was being
judged intelligent. But I couldn't quite understand
how an ordinary man's good qualities could become
crushing accusations against a guilty man. At
least that was what struck me, and I stopped listening
to the prosecutor until I heard him say, 'Has
he so much as expressed any remorse? Never,
gentlemen. Not once during the preliminary hearings
did this man show emotion over his heinous offense.'
At that point, he turned in my direction,
pointed his finger at me, and went on attacking
me without ever really understanding why. Of
course, I couldn't help admitting that he was right.
I didn't feel much remorse for what I'd done.
But I was surprised by how relentless he was.
I would have liked to have tried explaining to him
cordially, almost affectionately, that I had never
been able to truly feel remorse for anything. My
mind was always on what was coming next, today or
tomorrow.
He is convicted and sentenced to the guillotine. While awaiting execution he entertains one fleeting dream of escape:
The papers were always talking about the debt owed
to society. According to them, it had to be
paid. But that doesn't speak to the imagination.
What really counted was the possibility of escape,
a leap to freedom, out of the implacable ritual,
a wild run for it that would give whatever chance
for hope there was. Of course, hope meant
being cut down on some street corner, as you ran like
mad, by a random bullet. But when I really
thought it through, nothing was going to allow me
such a luxury. Everything was against it;
I would just be caught up in the machinery again.
And so, having accepted his fate again, Meursault finally has a moment of apotheosis. A priest is trying for the umpteenth time to counsel him, when:
Then, I don't know why, but something inside me snapped.
I started yelling at the top of my lungs,
and I insulted him and told him not to waste his
prayers on me. I grabbed him by the collar of his
cassock. I was pouring out on him everything that
was in my heart, cries of anger and cries of joy.
He seemed so certain about everything, didn't he?
And yet none of his certainties was worth one
hair of a woman's head. He wasn't even sure
he was alive, because he was living like a dead man.
Whereas it looked as if I was the one who'd come
up emptyhanded. But I was sure about me, about
everything, surer than he could ever be, sure of
my life and sure of the death I had waiting for me.
Yes, that was all I had. But at least I has
as much of a hold on it as it had on me. I had been right,
I was still right, I was always right. I had
lived my life one way and I could just as well have lived
it another. I had done this and I hadn't done
that. I hadn't done this thing but I had done another.
And so? It was as if I had waited all this
time for this moment and for the first light of this dawn to
be vindicated. Nothing, nothing mattered,
and I knew why. So did he. Throughout the whole
absurd life I'd lived, a dark wind had been rising
toward me from somewhere deep in my future,
across years that were still to come, and as it
passed, this wind leveled whatever was offered to me
at the time, in years no more real than the ones
I was living. What did other people's deaths or a
mother's love matter to me; what did his God or
the lives people choose or the fate they think they
elect matter to me when we're all elected by the
same fate, me and billions of privileged people like
him who also called themselves my brothers?
Couldn't he see, couldn't he see that? Everybody was
privileged. There were only privileged people.
The others would all be condemned one day. And
he would be condemned, too.
Exhausted by this outburst, Meursault sleeps and when he awakes a calmness has settled upon him:
For the first time in a long time I thought about
Maman. I felt as if I understood why at the end of
her life she had taken a 'fiancé,' why she
had played at beginning again. even there, in that home
where lives were fading out, evening was a kind
of wistful respite. So close to death, Maman must
have felt free then and ready to live it all again.
Nobody, nobody had the right to cry over her.
And I felt ready to live it all again too.
as if the 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 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 was a large crowd of spectators
the day of my execution and that they greet me with
cries of hate.
So ends the novel, with Meursault having become a nearly Christlike figure, with grace descending upon him as he awaits execution.
But, of course, the message here is anything but Christian. Meursault's passivity in the face of life and his indifference to the quality of his own actions, up to and including murder, are the inevitable culmination of Existential philosophy. For if it's true that nothing matters, why regulate your behavior? You may as well act on your every impulse. The irony is that Camus used this as the jumping off point to try to reconstruct morality, but on a Godless basis. Unfortunately, experience demonstrates that this task is impossible, not because of any intrinsically religious quality of God, but because it removes the concept of the absolute and necessarily replaces it with the relative. And once morality is deemed a relative set of principles there is no logical underpinning that makes one moral precept better than another. If life does not matter there's no difference between "Thou shalt not kill" and "Kill when convenient."
Ultimately, this novel, and the philosophy of Existentialism itself,
must be considered a noble failure. The novel succeeds only as a thought
experiment, envisioning how a man might act if he carried these beliefs
to their logical extremes. But as we look upon the results, we can
only feel revulsion. Meursault, the quintessential Existential hero, is
a character whose pending execution we welcome.
(Reviewed:03-Aug-00)
Grade: (C+)
