Albert Camus - The Stranger - Episode 1 -Introduction To Absurdity!I’m Christy Shriver and we’re here to discuss books that have changed the world and have changed us.
And I’m Garry Shriver and this is the How to Love Lit Podcast. Today we begin a three part series on Albert Camus’ mostly widely translated and perhaps even read book, “L’Estranger”- which in English has been translated “The Outsider” as well as “The Stranger”- both apply and apply well, which we’ll talk about more in episode three. The initial critical reception to the novel was mixed but after WW2 as well as an aggressive marketing campaign for its first English translation, the book took off. It was a critical success as well as a commercial one. Camus’ book today is translated in over 60 languages and has sold over 6 million copies.
It's a favorite with teenagers as well, although, I will say, most wouldn’t care to tell you all about the absurdism or existentialism in the text. They just relate to it. It’s easy to read. In fact, a lot of high school French students will read it in the original French for the very obvious reason that they can- the language is itself deliberately simplified to the most basic of verb tenses. Camus wrote for everyone not just for everyone to read but to express the condition of every individual who engages the world, and although the language is simple, the book is not…in fact, it’s intimidating.
Well, it is intimidating not just because it asks questions that are difficult, but because it doesn’t allow you to answer questions with anything like a cliché or a simple answer- in fact, for Camus to do so is to commit philosophical suicide- it is to give up on life itself- to become the Meursault of part one- to not be the protagonist of our own lives- so to speak. But in all of its grimness on the surface, Camus is not a dark guy. Literally or metaphorically- his favorite symbol, at least in this book, is ironically, the sun. He wouldn’t like the word “hopeful” because that goes against his world view, but he might like the phrase- defiant against darkness.
I agree with that, but before we get into the paradox which is the thinking and writing of Camus, let’s talk a little about this man who managed to be the second youngest man to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, and that was in 1957.
As an aside, who was the youngest.
Rudyard Kipling did it in 1907 at the age of 41. Camus was 44 years old, and seems to me, was more surprised than anybody that he won. He comes across as embarrassed to have earned it, and very humbly said if he’d had a vote as to who got the award, he wouldn’t even have given it to himself. He would have given it to a different writer. I love the fact, that He also immediately wrote a letter to one of his elementary school teacher sback in Algeria, with this to say, “
“When I heard the news, my first thought, after my mother, was of you,” The name of the teacher, by the way, by way of a shout out was Monsieur Germain. “Without you, without the affectionate hand you extended to the small poor child that I was, without your teaching and example, none of all this would have happened.” As a teacher I find that so very endearing. It’s what every teacher would love to hear some day from a student who made good, not just one that won the Nobel prize for literature.
Well, of course.
Anyway, I mention he was from Algeria because that is an important detail in understanding him as a person, and although arguable in many critical circles, we contend is something helpful to know when understanding a person’s worldview and work.
Some would call that rhetorical context.
Yes, I think they would. Anyway, Algeria is the largest country in Africa, if you go by total area.
True, but it’s large by world standards as well. It’s the tenth largest country in the world. It’s the world’s largest Arab country. It’s in North Africa. Tunisia (where part of Star Wars was filmed) is on one side and (Morocco where Casablanca was set) is on the other side.
Let me add that “Casablanca” was released two years after Camus published The Stranger if that gives you any visual context. Garry, tell us a little bit about the place Camus called home, where The Stranger is set, and the place that held Camus’ heart his entire life.
Of course, Algeria, historically, has an extremely long and rich history dating remarkably to 200,000 bc, but I’m guessing you’re not interested that far back.
Yeah, I’d say that would pretty much eclipse Camus, Homer, Sophocles or pretty much anything we’ve ever featured, let’s go with modern history.
Of course. As you would expect, as with every other part of Africa, Algeria experienced European colonialism. By 1848, nearly all of Algeria was French. And just like we saw with the American experience, many Europeans who were having trouble in Europe or looking for a place to find upward mobility looked to migrate to this new colony- and why not, if you were a struggling French man or woman. Algeria is beautiful; it’s warm, has beaches- there was much allure. Camus’ great grandparents were part of this movement. These French Europeans who came to Algeria in search of a better life were called “pied Noirs” or black feet. But just as we saw in our series “Things Fall Apart”, colonialism takes a toll on indigenous populations. European colonial governments did not treat local peoples equally or even respectfully, although they were technically French citizens. In the colonial system, pied noirs dominated government as well as the wealth of Algeria. This of course, went on during Camus life and obviously he had ample opportunity from his earliest days to watch the abuses of this system from all sorts of angles. His views on how these inequalities should be solved eventually made him antagonistic to both the far right as well as the far left.
You know, I’ve read his views and what people thought of them, and at first pass, I agreed with the accusation that his “peace first- never violence” approach was naïve and something only a pie in the sky philosopher could afford to indulge, but the more I think about it, the more sense it makes to me. His idea was ahead of his time in some ways. During his day 15% of the population was of European origin, that’s a minority and one that was imported, obviously, but they were indeed still Algerian and a significant number of individuals. In his case, he was born there. Yes, he wasn’t of the same skin tone as people whose ancestors had been there more than two generations, but it was still his home. His idea was, find a way- make peace- live together. The idea of the indigenous people was something like everyone of a different skin tone needs to get out. And the French approach was, dominate and subjugate all local peoples of different ethnic origins.
Which of course is not a peaceful attitude on anyone’s part. After the end of WW2, which by the way, over a million soldiers from all over Africa but mostly north Africa, fought on the European front of that conflict, including many Algerians. But after the war, Algerian Muslims demanded and eventually won their independence. However, independence wasn’t simple. The Algerian war was bloody, deadly and long. Algerian independence did not come until 1962. Almost 1,000,000 pied noirs fled back to Europe, France sent 100s of thousands of soldiers to Algeria to fight against the insurrections. Tens of thousands of young men on both sides died. Terrorist tactics were used on both sides. Napalm was even employed- if you recall that was the toxin of choice Americans associate with the war in Vietnam. There were horrible internment camps. But the death count isn’t the only measure of devastation. By the time Algeria finally proclaimed its independence, 70% of the workforce in Algeria was unemployed, businesses that had been run by European descendants had been confiscated by the state, but many were not being administrated productively. Independence created a power vacuum internally. Political factions vied for control. For average people, life was a real struggle.
So, this was Algeria during Camus’ lifetime. He died in 1960 right before its independence.
Yes, and let me add, even into the 1990s and the early 2000s Algeria has experienced incredible internal violence and civil strife. It does make Camus’s call for peaceful resolution seem more and more reasonable- at least less costly for average people, which of course was his upbringing, and who he cared about protecting.
Yes, and it is Camus’ understanding of Algeria that shaped his personal story, his politics, his philosophy and his art. As you mentioned, Camus was a pied noir, but he certainly couldn’t be described as being a member of any ruling class. He was born in Algeria to a very low-income working-class household, and passionately loved his homeland. I think it’s important to understand, he was not European; however, he was, in many ways, an outsider in Algeria. He was born there, but his people were not indigenous- think the title of his book- the Stranger. There is so many ways this title could be the subtitle to the author, as well. Let me be clear, I’m certainly not suggesting the novel I autobiographical because it is not in any overt sense- but I will suggest that his experiences did him an heightened understanding of feelings that are, of course, universal. Mersault, the name of our title character, by the way, was a pen name Camus had used before in other writings- so do with that what you will. But the experiences of his life that left him an outsider are not just about his geo-political situation. Camus’ father died in one of the first battles of WW1 when Camus was one year old, and as a result, the family had to move in with Camus’ uncle and their grandmother. He has fatherless which is itself a handicap, but as you might expect, this situation wasn’t awesome financially. The family was left left in poverty. Here, little Camus experiences another version of being an outsider. He’s the poor kid with no dad. His mother worked in factories, she was also a maid, all the things poor single moms do to make ends meet, but nothing that inspires a child with pride. She was illiterate, was mostly deaf and suffered from a serious speech impediment. The deafness and speech problems were a result of a childhood illness that went untreated. Camus deeply loved his mother, but I’ve also read she was a distant person emotionally- we can only speculate perhaps it was because of the circumstances of her life, maybe she just was- I don’t know, but I can imagine that those challenges created barriers in building relationship and intimacy. Camus said this about his mom later in life, “"When my mother's eyes were not resting on me, I have never been able to look at her without tears springing into my eyes."
I also read, although this is getting farther along in Camus’ personal story, that he commented when he received the Nobel Prize, that his mother was one woman who would never be able to read his speech.
True, and I think it’s important to bring his relationship with his mother out because of his famous first line in The Stranger, but we’ll get to that in a minute. Camus, without any privilege of birth or education was still a brilliant student who managed to stand out to the point that he received scholarships to attend a very fancy high school there in Algiers- let me add, another way to be an outsider- the poor kid in the rich kid school.
True, but he was successful there- and more than just academically. He played soccer, and in fact; was good at it.
He was a first string goalie, and perhaps might have had a shot at sports on a bigger level, except…at age 17 he contracted tuberculosis- yet another set back- one more way to be an outsider. His disease shocked him, as you can imagine. NO 17 year expects to be confronted with potential death, and especially not an athlete. He had to drop out of sports, out of school, out of everything. So, I hope you are seeing some trends here. I am. He can’t cut a break.
Yeah, Camus is definitely not the cliched spoiled rich kid privileged “thinker” who attends elite universities then sits around Parisienne cafes or salons discussing personal omniscient theories about existence and nature of the universe.
No, his buddy Jean Paul Sartre is much closer to that description than Camus, although, Sartre’s ideas are actually interesting and not cliches- in fact, his explication of The Stranger is fantastic. But before we get the Sartre/Camus drama- and they are often associated together although not always on good terms, but before any of that, sweet Camus is getting his butt kicked by life itself in every imaginable way. When he does show up in Paris, he’s got an edge to him that’s sexy to the upper crust. He’s this brilliant, good-looking bad boy from the provinces, if you want to think in cliches- the James Dean of Algeria. But before that, he recovers his health and returns to school in 1933, marries a girl named Simone Hile- a beautiful girl apparently but one with a bad drug habit. The marriage was not good- another set back. In 1936, he graduates from school and gets involved in supporting the Algerian Muslims and other workers in Algeria. He joins the Communist party and even creates a theater group trying to bring the arts to the working class people of his community.
This is interesting, Camus joins the Communist party precisely because he doesn’t believe in how the French are treating local people in Algieria. He believes in fairness, equal opportunity, and sees that the power in Algeria is disproportional. It’s obvious to everyone that the French are abusing the local populations. He wants to be part of the solution, and he wants a peaceful solution. He wants maximum freedom for the maximum number of people. All the things the Communists were espousing with their words. However, through the war, he eventually changes his attitude towards the communists.
At first I thought that meant he moved towards the right. But he doesn’t really. He will always be a leftist- he just has this very consistent view of equality- and the Communists when they got in charge did not live out the message that got them his support.
Exactly, and we see that as a problem in politics for all times- from antiquity and it’s a problem today. Camus finds Stalin and the Communists to be as awful as Hitler and the fascists. He does NOT believe the ends ever justifies the means, and so he eventually be became disenfranchised and despised by both the right and the left.
I would say that is to his credit especially in 1940. But speaking of that year, that’s the year he divorced Simone and moved to Paris- which in retrospect, wasn’t the best time to be moving to Paris.
Ah, no I would say not. France falls to Germany in June of 1940. There are famous pictures that most of us have seen of Nazi soldiers marching through the Arche de Triomphe.
Camus gets trapped. He tries to get home, but he’s stuck in occupied Paris. And so, he does what he can. He takes an active role in the resistance. He literally risks his life through his journalism. He inspires the people of France to not give in to the Nazis; to hold on to the resistance- his essays from their period are actually published and people still find them inspirational. (One example would be “The Almond Trees” if you are going to try to Google them). But more interesting for us, tt’s also during this period that he writes the three works that would change his life. First there is novella, if we’re going to call it anything, The Stranger, but there is also and the philosophical companion piece published four months later titled, the myth of Sisyphus, as well as the play Caligula. Camus called these three works, “The Cycle of the Absurd”. The Stranger, which is where we want to focus, expresses the feelings of the absurd, but obviously, we can’t avoid reading it without the lens of The Myth of Sisyphus but the essay is designed to help explain the impressions or the experience we should have when reading the story.
You know, in some ways it makes total sense that Camus would write about the meaningless of life in the backdrop of WW2, but in other ways, it’s a total paradox. He doesn’t advocate rolling over and surrendering to the Nazis. His political writings instill hope, but while encouraging people to resist fascism, ironically he’s writing a great philosophical work on the idea that there is no hope.
Exactly, and Camus IS a paradox. But, in many ways, he’s the most relatable philosopher most high schoolers or maybe just many of us, will ever read. I actually love his stuff, and I’m not even an atheist, to be honest.
And I do think we need to point that Camus is an atheist, or at least an agnostic and this thinking is predicated on exactly that. He said this, “I do not know whether this world has a meaning that is beyond me. But I do know that I am unaware of this meaning and that, for the time being, it is impossible for me to know it. What can a meaning beyond my condition mean to me? I can understand only in human terms. I understand the things I touch, things that offer me resistance.”
And of course, that is a completely rational position to hold and easy to understand. He’s one of the few philosophers I would have loved to have met, and I think it’s a real loss that he died so young. We may talk about his untimely death towards the end of the series, but I think this is a good spot to break from biography and open the book. It’s time to read that famous first line- and make no mistake about it…it’s very famous and recognizable. Garry, in your best Camus voice…would you mind.
“Maman died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don't know.”
It is the sentence that shocked the world. In a sentence that feels so cold, he uses the personal way of saying mama- he doesn’t open with “Mother died”. He doesn’t call his mother by her first name. In French, Maman would be like us saying mom, mum or mommy or mummy- it’s the term kids use to call their mothers. And yet…look at the rest of this phrase- she died today or yesterday. I don’t know. What do you mean you don’t know? Are you a psychopath? Are you a monster? Why would you seeming blow off the death of your mom. Except Meursault isn’t a psychopath. He’s not a monster. He’s lost.
If we keep reading the next sentence, we see that maybe he’s not a monster, maybe the nursing home is. The nursing home sent him this telegram.
I got a telegram from the home: "Mother deceased. Funeral tomorrow. Faithfully yours." That doesn't mean anything. Maybe it was yesterday.
it’s not cruel it just feels cruel. just because it’s a telegram and they have to be short. Or, another idea, maybe it’s the culture of the area to be so short, or maybe, or maybe…it’s absurd.
And now we got down to the point. Camus is introducing to us through these very short phrases a feeling we get from our world. At this point, he’s not telling us what to think, he’s showing us how we fee. Camus’ world is not theistic at all, it’s not deistic. So that’s important to understand. Camus doesn’t believe in God nor does he believe it’s rational to believe in God. But he’s also not naturalistic or deterministic either- he’s not like Steinbeck who will say, there are forces in the world and we are just victims of nature and the laws that govern it. Camus would not even claim to be existential, although today we would say he most definitely falls in this broad category. But he didn’t call himself that- he saw existentialists like Kierkegaard, Nietche, or even Sartre, or Kafka as different, but for our purposes we don’t need to really go there. The point Camus is making here, and it’s a point so many of us understand, is that the world is really an absurd place to live, and although we can go through the routine of our daily lives, making ourselves busy, doing things we think are important, there will be moments in our lives, if we are lucky (he would suggest) where we are absolutely hit in the face with an undeniable truth that the world is one heck of an absurdity. And as a young man in his twenties, there is anger here.
So once again the author tells the whole story in the very beginning-
Yes, but let me add- this is a book that will with all intentionality will offer almost NO commentary or NO explanation about anything at all for anything that will happen in the story, but here we will receive some of the only words of explanation- and let me remind you we will see in a lot of scandal later on but here’s the explanation- that doesn’t mean anything”.
Well, in context doesn’t he mean that it doesn’t mean enough for him to know when she died?
Well, of course, but what, I think, we’re seeing is beyond that. His mother’s death sets off events that will define events, if we’re looking for meaning which, of course, we shouldn’t because we can’t find- although we will still try, even subconsciously as we go through each event in the story. Our brains will try to find a correlation as we see Camus take as many pains as he possibly can to clearly disconnect every single action in the story. It will be a futile hunt for meaning in a book that is meant on teaching us that there is no connection between events- it is the nature of our existence and this we will express with this term “the absurd”.
And as soon as we read these first lines, if we are honest, we intuitively identify with them…especially if we have lived more than five minutes in this world. We know exactly how this feels – this book describes the feeling of not being able to feel, or to feel an unidentified guilt, or to feel impulses that are even self-sabotaging. It’s acknowledging feelings that are fair and indeed human to feel. There is a moment in everyone’s life, hopefully, if you’re not a sociopath or narcissist, when we realize things just don’t matter in the grand scheme of things, and Meursault is experiencing this at the death of his mother. He describes asking off from work and being made to feel guilty to the point where he literally says “it’s not my fault.” This guilt feeling is an abstract guilt, he’s aware it’s coming from somewhere outside of him- he’s not important enough to matter that his mom is dead. He goes on to describe his bus ride to the old people’s home- and its remarkably plain. The world is the same. His mother is dead and as he says to himself before he catches the bus, “it’s almost as if Maman weren’t dead. After the funeral, though, the case will be closed, and everything will have a more official feel to it.” There is a sense he understands the universe but just doesn’t care.
I want to go back to something you mentioned. The word “fault” is used on the first page and in this book where the main character seems so detached from everything, it’s strange that his boss is to make him feel guilty for something that is entirely NOT his fault. This is something to take note of. We will see him revisit next episode we will discuss this idea of guilt, in full, because it is the most important idea in the text- Meursault does commit an action that IS his fault, at least we think it is, but then we’re made to question whether it is or isn’t . Camus is interested in guilt and wants to solve the problem of guilt. So there is something to look forward to.
But on to your important point- as we read Meursault’s recollection of the death and then funeral of his mother, there’s much to relate with.
For one thing, Meursault’’s mother’s death is reduced to a telegram without even a definitive point of time. Both she and he are specks in the universe and the death of a speck is of no consequence whatsoever.
I totally remember the moment I understood this about myself. When I graduated from high school, my parents sent me back to America, are you know, I grew up in Brazil. As a child, I thought I was the center of the world, but for me, I went in one day from being a somebody in a community to being a nobody from nowhere- a speck. I remember showing up at college in Arkansas. I went to a dance the first week on campus. I drove myself to a skating rink, that’s where the dance was held hoping to make friends. I walked it, was greeted by no one. I tried to go up to a couple of people, but it seemed strange. They all knew eath other. I was invisible. I was unwanted. I was a speck. I remember the overwhelming nature of that realization.
Every one has those moments- and there will be more than one. At some point, many of us will all of a sudden become keenly aware of a certain level of pointlessness to almost every human enterprise- hence the myth of Sisyphus which Camus thinks is the perfect metaphor for our everyday existence.
Yeah- we didn’t have time to really talk about Sisyphus, but he’s a guy Odysseus meets in the underworld. Garry, read for us the paragraph about this guy. Now, he’s in trouble with Zeus so he has a punishment. Let’s read it.
When I witnessed the torture of Sisyphus, as he wrestled with a huge rock with both hands. Bracing himself and thrusting with hands and feet he pushed the boulder uphill to the top. But every time, as he was about to send it toppling over the crest, its sheer weight turned it back, and once again towards the plain the pitiless rock rolled down. So once more he had to wrestle with the thing and push it up, while the sweat poured from his limbs and the dust rose high above his head. (Odyssey, Book 11:593)
For Camus, this is a metaphor for our everyday routines- a pointless sameness over and over. To use Camus’ words it’s the, “getting up, tram, four hours of work, meal, sleep, and Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, in the same routine.” And for Camus, after a while, it all just seems absurd. So, it’s not just in the big moments where we recognize the absurd, but it is in the routine of our daily life-
Indeed, but here in the Stranger, it’ feels a little overwhelming here at the start of a novel. “Maman died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don’t know.”- if I read it this way, it reminds me that it really doesn’t matter. Her life doesn’t matter. Her death doesn’t matter. The fact that I loved her doesn’t matter. The fact that we’re here doesn’t matter. It’s pretty depressing. It’s an expression of lostness.
And that’s where Camus starts his philosophical treatise which he titles and wrote to explain the Stranger, “The Myth of Sisyphus”. Let me read the first line of that famous essay. It reads, “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.” Camus goes on to say that “the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face.” We’re to feel like we’re being slapped in the face by Meursault’s sense of absurdity. And I think it’s important to understand as Camus clearly differentiates that the feeling of the absurd isn’t the same as the idea of the absurd.”
That kind of makes me confused pretty much immediately and tired and depressed if I think about it too long. Sartre calls it “hopeless lucidity”. It’s a tiresome feeling- and we see Mersault just wanting to sleep basically all the time. The idea being that there will come a moent when we become lucid or aware of a certain hopelessness- and that is our beginning point. If you’re reading this book and feel disoriented- that’s a good thing. You’re supposed to. If the next feeling is one of boredom- you’re getting the point.
Such irony there- so we’re supposed to be bored by reading- I guess every student can identify with that. In fact, I think that’s happened to me in lots of books that are not about existential meaning of life!
HA! So true. The scene Camus goes on to describe in chapter 1 is described in as brief a way as humanly possible. When you read the book at first, you think it’s going to be about a mom and a son, but that’s really only 12% of the book. In reality it has nothing to do with anything else and making arbitrary connections between the funeral and the events that follow is an obvious point of absurdity.
Here are a few of the sentences as Camus writes them. They sound like a journal someone is keeping for themselves when they have to document their actions for some court case or something. “It was very hot. I ate at the restaurant, at Celeste’s, as usual. Everybody felt very sorry for me…I ran so as not to miss the bus. I slept almost the whole way. The home is two kilometers from the village. I walked them.
Exactly, All these short isolated sentences that have no connection with anything. No connection is made between them. They do no explain each other like you would expect in plot progression. They are just declarative observations, and somehow we arrive at a feeling of “lucid hopelessness”.
Another feature of the text that I want to point out because it’s going to become incredibly important next episode is this emphasis on the sun. When I read this book, I got the impression that Algiers must be this incredibly hot place with a boiling sun- like Memphis, btw, but then I looked it up. It turns out the weather in Algiers is pretty much perfect. It rarely gets excessively cold in the winter or mercilessly hot in the summer. But in this book, we feel an intensity of heat that is stifling. The sun is oppressive. In fact to use Meursault’s exact words he says this, “but today, with the sun bearing down, making the whole landscape shimer with heat it was inhuman and oppressive.” It is a presence during the procession. It makes sweat pour down Mersault’s face.
And so we walk with hand in hand with our narrator this absurd man, Meursault. And Meursault undeniably is the absurd man- and, as Sartre tells us, the absurd man does not explain, he describes. He doesn’t prove anything. And so with no reason, he experiences th sun. It bears down. The glare from the sky is unbearable. It gets to the point where it makes Mersault feel lost. He literally says that. Here’s another description. Let’s read it.
“All of it- the sun, the smell of leather and horse dung from the hearse, the smell of varnish and incense, and my fatigue after a night without sleep- was making it hard for me to see or think straight.”
And this is where reading the Myth of Sisyphus is helpful. For Camus, the absurdity of life comes from realizing a few undeniable things about the world- and this is regardless of worldview. 1) There is something in the heart of man that seeks to find meaning. We are not absurd. We are wired to NOT be absurd. We as non-absurd people look to find meaning. We’re wired like that. But then there’s this second reality. 2) There is something in the arbitrary nature of the way life works that defeats us. We will lose and we know it. We desire immortality but we will die. Life is rigged against us. Nature wins. The absurdity of life will absolutely win. Good things will happen for bad people. Bad things will happen to good people? These are truths, and certainly obvious during Camus days in occupied France.
To use his words, “The world itself is not reasonable, that is all that can be said.” So, this is our beginning point. Now what do we do.
In the Myth of Sisyphus, Camus talks about suicide, and he does mean physical suicide for sure, but physical suicide is not such a simple thing to understand. And it’s not the only way to kill yourself. He uses the term “philosophical suicide”. And this is something that Camus is really against. But he thinks that most of us will actually commit philosophical suicide. Benjamin Franklin thought so too. Franklin said it this way, “
“Many people die at twenty five and aren't buried until they are seventy five.”
In other words, in order to not face the reality that life is absurd, they choose to live dishonest lives. We lie to ourselves about almost everything. We can use God as philosophical suicide- if you can’t explain it put it on God- I’m doing this because it is the will of God. It is a simple answer to a complicated question, but if you can just chalk everything up to god, than it’s an easy answer- a way to stop asking the question that reminds us we’re absurd. Camus focuses on religion quite a bit, but religion certainly isn’t that only thing in this world that can bring meaningless for the absurd man. I would suggest that in the year 2022, we literally use drugs- . We use entertainment. In a rich country like the United States, we use the pursuit of wealth to find meaning. More recently, we’ve used morality- not religious morality, but secular morality. We parade it over social media, proclaiming this platform or this other one- but in reality, it’s all pretty absurd. Camus says we have a mind that desires meaning and a world that disappoints.
And so we walk on with Mersault. We experience with him the very basic feelings of life with Meursault- Maman’s death SHOULD mean something, but it doesn’t. It’s an inconvenience and it’s uncomfortable. It makes him hot; it makes him tired. We experience the absurd. With Meursault we experience what we glean from our senses, but not a lot more than that. In chapter one, we feel a lot of physical discomfort, but we will see next episode that sex, food and cigarettes are strong physical sensations as well. We will watch Meursault be pushed around and do things that I find morally repulsive. He’s not a part of anything really. He’a into nothing- he’s not a soccer fan, a company man, or even a film buff.
He’s quite an outsider in almost every way. Although, I will say, he doesn’t have any trouble getting a girlfriend, but even Marie seems attracted to him because he’s a wierdo. He’s a stranger. He’s l’estranger.
Christy, at this point, you’re not leaving us a lot to look forward to. This seems like we’re heading toward nihilism and a foregone conclusion that we know the answer to the suicide question and it’s not a good one.
True, but we’re really only in chapter one. Although, I will admit, there’s a lot more boredom and a whole lot more poor decision-making or lack of decision-making in Meursault’s immediate future. But let me end with this, if this was all Camus had to say, he would not be interesting. I had a friend in high school from France, ironically. His name was Laurent. Laurent was nihilistic, by 18. He had this saying that he would go around saying all the time. To this day, I can hear him say it in my head as I can see him put three cigarettes in his mouth at one time. He loved to smoke, and I would fuss at him for it. He would say, “You die. You’re dead. So what.”
But that is not Camus. Camus never lost faith in justice, the life of the spirit, the power of truth. He rejected nihilism completely. He said this, “All of us, among the ruins, are preparing a renaissance beyond the limits of nihilism.” At another point he says this, “No, everything is not summed up in negation and absurdity. We know this. But we must first posit negation and absurdity because they are what our generation had encountered and what we must take into account.”
And so we begin…with the uncomfortable sun glaring down from the sun making us hot, sweaty, sleepy and reminding us that nature always wins.
Yeah- that’s the idea- the absurd reality Starts with honesty- that is opposite of philosophical suicide.
Negation and absurdity are just the beginning. It takes a certain amount of courage to do what he’s asking, but of course, I agree. The alternative is the Meursault of part 1- the absurd man- and as you said, he’s not really that likeable.
Thanks for listening……
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