Joining the cheery Sartre in the pantheon of existentialists is Albert Camus, a French playwright and author who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957. I'd never read Camus's The Stranger (apparently, neither had George W. Bush, until 2006), although it is a French literary classic, and I majored in French in college (not that this is a subtle commentary on the department or anything). It is not a happy book - the main character, Meursault, is drawn into an absurd series of events, culminating with the killing of an Arab man on a beach near Algiers. The book is divided into two parts, detailing events before and after the homicide. Throughout, Meursault displays a stoicism that the townspeople find freaky: in Part One, having just found out that his mother died, he attends the funeral, expresses no desire to look at her, smokes a cig, and drinks coffee ("with milk"). His beautiful girlfriend Marie--whom he begins seeing the day of his Maman's funeral--asks if he wants to marry her; he responds that "it didn't make any difference to him, but they could if she wanted." (Romantic!)
Mersault's lack of emotion is used as damning character evidence in the second part of the book, where he is placed on trial for murder. At one point, he's asked if he feels remorse, and he feels the need to explain that he had never been able to feel remorse for anything because "[his] mind was always on what was coming next, today or tomorrow." The book resolves with his observation on the meaninglessness of life, the absurd disconnect between the uncertainty of fact and the certainty of the verdict and of the punishment: death by guillotine.
Maybe it's just because it's hard to feel angsty with such abundant sunshine, or maybe it's just that I haven't ever really identified with existentialism, but I did not enjoy this book; it ultimately felt empty, which perhaps was the point. I'll give it another read during a New Haven winter and get back to you.
My Tuesday read was similarly angst-producing and anxiety-ridden, but for completely different reasons. Zeitoun, recommended to me by a lovely friend of peerless taste, is written by Dave Eggers, whose work I have always enjoyed. (What is the What is probably my favorite--if you haven't read it, you must--it's the rare, life-changing book.) Zeitoun did not disappoint; it is the story of Abdulrahman Zeitoun, a Syrian contractor living in New Orleans with his American wife and young children in 2005--the year of Hurricane Katrina. I'm ashamed to admit I don't know very much about Katrina, and this book--which is non-fiction but novelistic--is illuminating (not to mention heart-breaking). Absolutely read this book--a paperback version's out on the 15th, and the proceeds go to Katrina relief efforts.
The story follows Zeitoun (known to everyone by his last name), who decides to stay behind in New Orleans while his wife and children evacuate; having seen dozens of storm warnings before, he's sure this one will blow over in a couple of days at most. Instead, the levees break, the streets flood, and the city devolves into chaos. In the aftermath, Zeitoun uses an old canoe to literally row across streets, rescuing families who are trapped in their houses. One day, as he goes back to his house, he is mistaken for a looter and arrested by the National Guard, forced to spend the next several weeks in a Guantánamo-style cage. From the moment the storm hits onward, the complete incompetence of the rescue effort is abundantly clear; the villain in the book is insurmountable government bureaucracy.
Looking at the Gulf Coast five years later, that is angst I can believe in.
If the conclusion of the book was that life is meaningless, I wonder why he bothered wasting a few hours of our precious time only to tell us that, essentially, what we read was meaningless.
ReplyDeleteZeitoun shed light on post-Katrina events that somehow never made it into Anderson Cooper's news reports. After reading this book, I felt disheartened knowing that no reparation or apology from the government could atone for what happened to Zeitoun. The only way for our government to make amends is to ensure that it doesn't continue to disregard civil rights and that it upholds the Constitution; however, with the way things have played out in our country for the past nine years, I doubt that our government will be rectifying its behavior in the near future.
Existentialism doesn't claim that life is meaningless and that therefore all our efforts are meaningless. It claims that there is not an inherent meaning or set path in life, that a person is just thrust into their existence and presented with what there is (what they call facticity), with no further meaning or guide. But, the major project of existentialism is to explain how this situation should be dealt with, how one can take hold of it and make choices without a set path, and how that is true freedom.
ReplyDeleteI haven't read "The Stranger" in a while, but I believe that Mersault is existentialism's tragic character in that he doesn't overcome his facticity, doesn't make his own choices, and lives a reactionary life of instinct, without accepting life's absurdity and acting by his own will within it.
I think I'm a biased judge because I've almost automatically loved everything the existentialists have written, but I would recommend "The Plague," as it actually has some heroes with whom the reader can identify, and a pretty compelling story to boot.
In conclusion: CAMUS ROCKS WOO!
Haha, thanks Alex! I'll give "The Plague" a try!
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