In The Trial Kafka described the human condition from the perspective of the absurd, but found that terrain too barren and desolate. He could neither live there nor find a way out. He remains haunted by the absent absolute, which becomes the central theme of The Castle. “The Trial poses a problem which The Castle, to a certain degree, resolves. The first describes, following a quasi-scientific method, and doesn’t conclude. The second, to a certain degree, explains. The Trial diagnoses and The Castle imagines a treatment” (E, 205; MS, 130).
In the movement from the one to the other Camus sees Kafka making explicit the experiential path by which existentialist thinkers have sought to resolve their personal struggles.
The more truly absurd The Trial is, the more moving and illegitimate the impassioned “leap” of The Castle seems. But we find here again in a pure state the paradox of existential thought as it is expressed, for instance, by Kierkegaard: “Earthly hope must be killed; only then can one be saved by true hope,” which can be translated: “One has to have written The Trial to undertake The Castle” (MS, 134).
Camus finds in Kafka both the evocation of the absurdity of contemporary existence and the inability to give up hope in a salvific future.5 In spite of failure, discouragement, and lack of support or evidence, “nostalgia for a lost paradise” draws him on. “Here is found the secret of the melancholy peculiar to Kafka .. . that probably futile trip, that probably wasted day, that probably empty hope. ‘Probably’—on this implication Kafka gambles his entire work” (MS, 131).
“If nostalgia is the mark of the human, perhaps no one has given such flesh
and volume to these phantoms of regret” (MS, 137) as has Kafka. But have I
not here drawn forth the threadbare strands by which we struggle to sustain a transcendent faith by which we can no longer live, but have not yet learned how to live without? Arc these not the existential roots that tear apart the modern soul? Are not here the Christian themes of existential thought? It may sound strange to suggest that even such an avowedly atheistic existentialist as Sartre is deeply marked by Christian themes, and yet, at the ontological level here being excavated, that is what Camus is suggesting. The metaphysics of Christianity is the historical ground of that ever renascent hope that must be laid to rest.
Kirlov’s Gift
The burden of that liberation is freely undertaken by Kirlov, who will finally “bring forth into the light of day this subterfuge” (E, 1455; cf. E, 211 & MS, 138) that is Christ’s message. Christ died so that we might be saved, but from what? From the responsibility and anguish, from the burden and ultimate failure, that are the lot of natural existence. Christ brings the message of resignation in this life and of subordination of concrete meanings to otherworldly perspectives. Salvation is promised to those who turn their backs on the incarnate present. Metaphysical hope is born out of historical humiliation. Resignation to the suffering of innocents will be rewarded by eternal life.
Kirlov in fact fancies for a moment that Jesus at his death did not find himself in Paradise. He found out then that his torture had been useless. “The laws of nature,” says the engineer
[Kirlov], “made Christ live in the midst of falsehood and die for a falsehood.” Solely in this sense Jesus indeed personifies the whole human drama. He is the complete man, being the one who realized the most absurd condition. He is not the God-man but the man-god. And, like him, each of us can be crucified and victimized—and is to a certain degree (MS, 107).
It is this subterfuge that Kirlov will lay bare. The illusions of another life rob humans of the possibility of recapturing their capacity to make something of this life. These illusions must be torn away. By killing himself he will reveal that there are no limits other than mortality to what humans can be.6
Freed of the illusions of another life, we can now face the challenge of what to make of this one. “If God exists, all depends upon him and we can do nothing against his will. If he does not exist, everything depends on us.” Only by realizing that we cannot look elsewhere for salvation, will we be able to turn our attention to the truly herculean task of assuming responsibility for the direction of our own lives. Enthralled and seduced by the exemplary sacrifice of Jesus, we remain prisoners of illusion. Kirlov, “out of love for humanity,” must kill himself in order to “show his brothers a royal and difficult path” to their own liberation. “Once he is dead and men are at last enlightened, this earth will be peopled with tsars and lighted up with human glory” (MS, 108-9).
In dramatic form, Kirlov offers the sacrifice that Meursault is forced to make. But his decision to kill himself expresses a still lurking messianic sensibility, by which he dreams of being the man-god. His attitude remains framed by the metaphysical “all or nothing.” ” “Do you believe in eternal life in the other world?'”Stavrogin had asked. To which Kirlov responded: “‘No, but in eternal life in this world'” (MS, 108).
Camus describes Kirlov’s thinking as follows: “If God does not exist, Kirlov is god. If God does not exist, Kirlov must kill himself. Kirlov must therefore kill himself to become god.” For Camus, it is no wonder that the followers of Kirlov are led to such destructive extremes of behavior. Such is the snare of Absolute Truth.7
Meursault’s revolt, on the other hand, bespeaks a quite different sensibility that has dispensed with such messianic aspirations. It is the aim of The Myth to make this alternative believable.
THE ABSURD
The Emergence of the Absurd
In a now classic statement, Camus observes that the absurd emerges in “that odd state of soul in which the void becomes eloquent, in which the chain of daily gestures is broken, in which the heart vainly seeks the link that will connect it again” (MS, 10). To be sure, his description of the collapse of the stage setting is in no way exhaustive of the situations in which the absurd may arise. But it is suggestive. In “The Hollow Men,” T. S. Eliot brilliantly evokes this contemporary sense of dislocation: Between the idea And the reality Between the motion And the act Falls the Shadow . . .
Between the conception And the creation Between the emotion And the response Falls the Shadow . . .
Between the desire And the spasm Between the potency And the existence Between the essence And the descent Falls the Shadow . . .
Camus explores five sources of existential dislocation: society, time, nature, others, and death. At any moment, in ways often quite unexpected though seemingly endemic to the modern world, the natural flow of events may be cut short. We may feel life slipping away from us, or lose our sense of purpose, or be struck by the inevitability of our own death. Nature may be brusquely encountered as a powerful and alien force; or we may suddenly recognize the ceremony that is social routine.
“But one day the ‘why’ arises and everything begins in that weariness tinged with amazement” (MS, 13). From dislocation to articulation and response, a new world emerges, frightening and uncertain. There is no unique experience of the absurd, rather an innumerable series of fundamentally di-chotomous experiences. Intellectual problems arise as soon as one tries to make sense of the experience. “Between the certainty I have of my existence and the content I try to give to that assurance, the gap will never be filled” (MS, 19).
If there is an initial common response to the encounter with absurdity, it is probably a mixture of outrage and despair. While the despair invites passivity, the outrage demands satisfaction, thus instituting the original movement of revolt. Outrage, it should be noted, is the root experience that’s seen in The Rebel as giving rise to rebellion (MS, 47).
Expressions of outrage vary as to direction, scope, and intensity. At one extreme might be Caligula’s metaphysical rebellion against the order of things when he realized that “men die, and they are not happy.” Alternatively, despair might turn inward as resignation, resentment, indifference, or the more definitive judgment that it’s not worth the effort to which suicide testifies.
In any case, we must take care to avoid excessive pathos. Whatever the importance of this sensibility of life’s fundamental dislocation and its attendant quest, Camus takes pains to remind us that the perception of the absurd is “but one perception among many,” and its standpoint is provisional. For example, the absurd plays a quite limited role in The Rebel.
“The feeling of the absurd is not, for all that, the notion of the absurd,” writes Camus. “It lavs the foundation for it, and that is all. It is not limited to that notion, except in the brief moment when it passes judgment on the