While more needs to be said about the contribution of bourgeois society to our contemporary ills, it must be clear that the precondition of any renaissance for Camus involves the
transformation of bourgeois sensibilities. The inability to grasp even the possibilities of such a transformation dooms us to the ravages of nihilism. To this preliminary effort The Myth of Sisyphus was dedicated.
We must not fail to appreciate the profound sense in which The Myth is a continuation of the stranger’s systematic attack on the values of Bourgeois-Christian civilization: of what Nietzsche called the spirit of seriousness. This is the hidden meaning of Camus’s ethics of quantity, namely that hierarchic values rooted in a divine transcendence are denied by the realities of the
absurd. There is only one source of value for the human being suffused with the absurd perception: lucid consciousness. The natural world is without value; it simply is, in all its impersonal grandeur and destructiveness. The supernatural seems at best an unsubstantiated hope, at worst a vain delusion. In either case it is a distraction that threatens to rob us of the weight, the beauty, the intensity of the present, until death takes it from us forever. Value is to be found for contemporary humanity, if at all, only in the sentient animal’s conscious confrontation with life. And this confrontation can be sustaining only if it is freed from the hope for a transcendent salvation, for which experience offers no evidence and which an inevitable death seems to deny. To replace the spiritually transcendent with the materially efficient or consumable in the not-too-distant future is hardly an ennobling prospect that speaks adequately to the existential problem.
Yes, the encounter with death is the ultimate “absurd wall,” which seals the empirical meaninglessness of a life devoted to transcendent values. But a lucid perception of that reality and of the absurd, by cutting to the core of a ritualized life, can be the occasion for a liberating transformation of consciousness. Liberation from habitual enslavement to unobtained and unbelievable abstract values can become the condition for the discovery of those sensual values offered in the spontaneity of innocent involvement with nature and others. An ethics of quantity is meaningless, or worse an invitation to the rule of force, without a preliminary transformation of awareness. “The succession of presents before a lucid consciousness in the face of death is the ideal of the Absurd Man.” For a life devoted to hope and embedded in routine, an eternity of presents would not suffice. The multiplication of meaninglessness by infinite time would simply leave us with an infinite meaninglessness.
Lucid perception of the absurd, then, is not an end but a beginning, for a consciousness committed to integrity, to honesty, and to seeking from life its utmost significance. “The only progress in history,” wrote Camus early in his life, “was the creation of conscious deaths.” It matters not what one’s place in life, whether conqueror or post office clerk. For a transformed consciousness, freed from bondage to alien absolutes, whether spiritual or material, death is the only limit; beyond that all else is possibility.
It thus becomes clear that not only can a life be lived without transcendent appeal but that it will be lived better and more fully on such terms. Lucid reason, noting its limits, becomes the occasion for the human animal, while locating itself firmly in its epoch to regain contact with its trans-historical destiny. Freeing itself from the grasp of history, it may return to the eternal source of its being in union with the natural world and with others in an experience that is fated to pass away, “All my idols,” wrote Camus, “have feet of clay.”
PART TWO
Dramatic Contours
Having started from an anguished awareness of the inhuman, the meditation on the absurd returns at the end of its itinerary to the very heart of the passionate flames of human revolt (MS, 47).
3
The Stranger
A man devoid of hope and conscious of being so has ceased to belong to the future, and no gospel keeps its meaning for him (MS, 31; E, 121, 1436).
WHO IS THIS STRANGER?
“Mother died today. Or maybe it was yesterday, I don’t know. I received a telegram from the rest home: mother deceased, burial tomorrow, very truly yours. It doesn’t say anything. Maybe it was yesterday” (STR, l).1 Not exactly the normal reaction of a son to the news of his mother’s death. What kind of person responds in this matter-of-fact way? Are we not at first put off by such casualness? Perhaps even scandalized by our initial encounter with Patrice Meursault?
Is not this Meursault a stranger to our normal feelings and expectations? We sense a distance. Not that he seeks to scandalize or offend. Far from it. He is rather quite unassuming, almost shy. He wants neither to offend nor to be hated. Expressing an air of naivete, he often experiences an undercurrent of uneasiness as to what is expected of him. Occasionally he is moved to apologize without quite knowing what he is guilty of. When asking his boss for two days off to attend his mother’s funeral, for example, he feels that he “ought not to have said that to him.”
Or, when sensing the reproach of the director of the rest home, he begins to explain himself.
A subtle tension thus pervades our relation with Meursault from the first. Between the complete unassuming naturalness of his actions and observations, on the one hand, and his insensitivity to normal feelings and expec-tations, on the other, a gulf emerges that makes it quite difficult for us to coordinate our emotional response to him. We are drawn to identify, even sympathize, with him. And yet how can we not feel a condemnation begin to arise within us to which we are not yet able to give expression?
In short, we are disoriented, perhaps even slightly offended, by our encounter with a being who shows no sign of sharing normal human feelings. Nor does he attest to any normal aspirations. Slowly we are familiarized with his world, even led to see our own world through his eyes. Stripped of
our normal “conceptual lenses,” we see that world increasingly as arbitrary, capricious, pretentious, even hypocritical. By the time of the trial we may even find ourselves tempted, if not actually inclined, to side with Meursault against the prosecutor and jurists who inhabit the world that was ours at the beginning of the novel. However short-lived that experiential voyage may prove to be, the stylistic accomplishment is remarkable.
Perhaps Meursault is Camus’s portrait of the being he might have become had not M. Germain, to whom he dedicated his Nobel Prize address, rescued him from the life of physical plenitude and spiritual exhaustion that was the lot of lower-class French Algerian youth. Recall Camus’s friend Vincent, mentioned in “Summer in Algiers,” whose direct and uncomplicated lifestyle and morals, though lacking in love, suggest a closeness to the vital and sensuous qualities of existence.2 Meursault resides in that shrunken present rich with sensations that lead nowhere.
But that must not be misunderstood. He is not without feelings or morals. He feels for Salamano, is moved by the testimony of Celeste, and feels concern for several individuals, including the magistrate. Throughout his ordeal, he treats everyone with consideration and is even able to see the point of view of the prosecutor. He simply refuses to interpret his experience or to give it a significance beyond what is immediately present to the senses.
A lively sensitivity to the play of light and shadow colors his day. The weather, qualitative changes in experience and in the modulations of nature practically enrapture him. He takes them as they are, asking and expecting nothing more. At the same time he remains practically blind to the socially established meanings with which others embellish events.
Nowhere is this more evident than in his relation with Marie. Like-Vincent, he knows nothing of love and cares nothing for the institution of marriage. But when Marie smiles in a certain way he is attracted to her and wants her. His desires are not without warmth, but they lack premeditation or foresight. They are spontaneous responses to sensuous qualities and reflect little if any conceptual interpretation or social propriety.
The fascination of Meursault and the young journalist with one another may also be seen in this light. Camus became a journalist as a result of having by chance had Louis Germain as his teacher. And so with the novel. Had Meursault not been compelled by familial poverty to give up his education and abandon his career aspirations, he might have found himself in the audience covering a murder trial. Thus their fascination with each other suggests the chance nature of their destinies and their reciprocal being for one another. In the journalist Meursault sees the person he might have become, fascinated with the person the journalist Camus might have been.
And similarly with the problems of poverty with which Camus’s early