Over the years I have developed a dim view of the how-to, non-fiction and the self-help genres. Literature and philosophy have altogether crawled under my skin and are seeping into my veins. My latest literary escapade has been with Albert Camus’s The Stranger. It is my first with Camus and I must say, it is one of those strange masterpieces that seduces the reader into seeing what they would hope to unsee, but cannot.
The Stranger has a simple and unassuming plot. The book is short, the words are easy, and things seem to just happen until, by inevitably connecting the dots, the reader is caught up in a web of sympathy and indifference. As the reader tries to make head or tail of what’s happening, they get entangled even more to a point of helpless vexation, albeit at nothing apparent. This is an odd portrayal, but accords with Camus’s underlying philosophy — the philosophy of the absurd.
In an earlier work, The Myth of Sisyphus, Camu wants us to think about suicide as the only true philosophical question. Why continue living, when life is but a sea of unreasonable trouble? Many would point to meaning, purpose, God, or simply the will to live. But is this not an injection of meaning into life to make it more bearable? There comes a point when the threads of meaning snap and the nakedness of reality induces the glaring question, “but, why am I even doing this?” And is met with silence rather than reason. Thus we latch onto the breast of reality, from which the milk of life refuses to flow.
We look around and see that other creatures are endowed with fur, claws and fangs, and for all we lack in those features, we have reason that prompts us to pry and question and dream and construct even the things seemingly beyond mere survival. We seem to have a window into the primordial and the everlasting. But as we push the frontiers of reason, we arrive at the unreasonable, at contradictions, and ultimately at silence — at the absurd. And so it is not from a sea of trouble that suicide might become impressive; trouble is after all meaningful. But it is in the void; in reckoning with the sea of trouble for no reason; in the unanswered question; in the unscratchable itch!
Camus thus presents Meursault, the main character in The Stranger, as someone whom I think, from the reading, has overcome the absurd. He kind of wafts through life from one event to the next without attachment. He is presented with countless opportunities to get involved in life, but remains aloof. He participates rather than gets involved. His mother dies and he observes night vigil but does not weep; he is reminiscent but does not grieve. Upon returning from his mother’s funeral he gets entangled at the loins with a girl whom he finds irresistible, but does not love her. Or maybe he ordinarily would, but love is an involvement in which he finds not reason to indulge. His neighbour, Salamo, beats his dog twice a day on their walks, and Meursault understands the man, understands the dog, and altogether understands their relationship as well.
Another one of his neighbours, Raymond, is a pimp, whom everyone finds unseemly. Meursault talks to him in similar monochrome. And when Raymond relays his grievances against his girlfriend whom he wants to beat up for cheating, Meursault gets it. And when Meursault is solicited by Raymond to write a letter, convincing the girlfriend to visit so he could beat her, Meursault writes it, not in enthusiastic support, but because he can. And when Raymond gets arrested, Meursault testifies to have him released, again because well; why not?
Raymond and the girl’s brother get into a brawl, with Meursault present, and the brother is beaten up. Before the brawl, Meursault takes Raymond’s gun, not to use it, but to, as it were, free Raymond to do his deed. The fight ends. They leave. Then Meursault later takes a walk, and encounters the beaten bother who pulls a knife at him. Meursault shoots — four times. But all is mechanical with Meursault. There’s no deep tug of meaning and purpose; there’s only life taking place.
I will not spoil how the book ends.
Camus wants us to see that we do what we do because we find ourselves here with proclivities for pleasure, pain aversion, meaning-making, pattern-matching, but all of it is contingent. “Thought is anthropomorphic” and there is nothing beyond the song-and-dance and the hum-drum of living. The urge to realise one’s potential, to embody the image of God, to embrace the good — all of it hangs on nothing.
But Camus is at the same time optimistic. It is not the human who is absurd. No, the human is rational. It’s not the world that is absurd. No the world is doing what it does, following whatever ineffable designs. But it is when we want to reason with the world, using a mind that expects answers and cannot conceive of, nor tolerate the unreasonable, that the absurd is revealed as a membrane that binds together the incompatible. Followed to its logical conclusion, one is apt to feel disillusioned and therefore contemplative of suicide. But suicide ends the absurd — it is a dismemberment and only proves that one is beholden to the mind’s hallucinations and construction of a non-existent meaning — and Camus wants us to realise that the absurd is nothing to get rid of, it is just there. Living with it is actually freedom itself.
Camus counsels us to worry less about meaning and purpose and higher beings. All of these are ways of escaping the absurd. Instead, we must multiply our experiences despite the absurd. We ought to do everything we can without trying to make sense of it in some supposedly deep way. Be a poet today and an engineer tomorrow and a farmer the next day and a cyclist on Saturday and a school teacher and a parent, or be one thing your whole life, whatever — if that’s what you want to and can do, then do it. But beware of the pretences of meaning. Pay no attention to why because there is only silence (if we are to be honest) behind the ultimate why! Instead, live and embrace the absurd and let the chips fall where they may.
Camus wants us to be a stranger in the world — a profound, dangerous, and ultimately a reprieve for a society tortured by meaning.
