Greetings from New York
short documentary about New York City (1983)
Wednesday, July 29, 2020
Tuesday, July 28, 2020
Book Review
Book Review
The Fall by Albert Camus
People are two-faced. If you haven’t figured that out by now you haven’t made much intellectual progress in life. Albert Camus wrote The Fall to illustrate this point. Not only does he portray the inner and outer life of a modern man but he also wants you to realize that you are two-faced as well. This short novel is a product of its time and seems dated today.
The narrator is Jean-Baptiste Clamence, a lawyer who defends criminals who committed their acts of crime because of unfavorable circumstances. He helps blind people cross the street, picks up objects dropped by frail old ladies, and treats everybody with kindness and respect. His public persona is that of a good-natured saint. He is also a womanizer, a mind-fucker, a manipulator, and he acts with indifference when he walks by a woman on a bridge and realizes she has fallen into the canal after he goes by. In his inner life he thinks of himself as an ubermensch, a man who needs no morality because he is superior to everybody else. Just like Bill Cosby, his public persona and the reality of his inner mind do not match.
The story is told first-person by Clamence. He addresses you, the reader, as if you are physically there in his presence. His life story is a confession in which he tells all his dirty secrets. As a reader you are supposed to be horrified by him and you are also supposed to see yourself in him because, most likely, you have done some of the things he has done and thought some of the same things he has thought.
Well, yes but so what? This was written after Freud’s psychoanalysis and Erving Goffman’s social action theory were introduced to Western intellectuals. This theme of the multi-faceted individual had even been explored in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. There was nothing especially ground-breaking or revolutionary about this book. It might have been when it was first published but now it mostly seems like a retelling of an old tale.
I have very little to say about The Fall. The writing is good but I’m too old to appreciate it. If you’ve lived long enough and gone through periods of self-analysis and deep introspection, this book will seem like what it really is: a good book for a young college student starting on their own intellectual or literary journey.
Camus, Albert. The Fall. Vintage Books, New York: 1956.
Thursday, July 23, 2020
Disinformation Campaigns Are Murky Blends of Truth, Lies and Sincere Beliefs
Though disinformation does serve an agenda, it is often camouflaged in facts and advanced by innocent and often well-meaning individuals.
Book Review
Book Review
Memoirs Of a Beatnik by Diane Di Prima
In eastern India there are ancient Hindu temples that are famous for the sexually explicit sculptures lining the outsides of the buildings, showing every conceivable act of intercourse known to the minds of ancient civilization. The purpose of these pornographic artworks are to distract those who are unworthy of entering the temples. People who are preoccupied with their carnal pleasures get stuck looking carefully at every detail and can never enter the inner sanctum where the divine cosmic truth is revealed only to those who have proven themselves worthy by bypassing the prurient carvings. These Hindu temples can act as an analogy for reading Diane Di Prima’s Memoirs Of a Beatnik. While this book is neither a profound work of religious faith nor a highly crafted work of classical art, the analogy still holds because if you get distracted by its sexually oriented passages you will miss out on the more significant writings about the bohemian life in 1950s New York City.
Some people have criticized this book for being pornographic. While it is true that some sections of each chapter have explicit descriptions that leave nothing to the imagination, it is not fair to call the book itself a work of pornography. Even though Di Prima’s depictions of sex are sometimes raw, vulgar, and even written with banal language, she does write with a certain sensibility and self-confidence so that it does not come across as sleazy. In the group sex passages, she and her partners transgress gender and racial barriers. In another part, she sleeps with two male friends because one of them is sublimating his homosexual desiresthrough her; she curiously even exhibits some sexual sadism during this encounter. One particularly harrowing chapter involves her lesbian relationship with a girl named Tomi; the author spends a weekend with Tomi’s family only to find herself in the middle of a nightmare involving alcoholism, voyeurism, sodomy, rape, and incest. Promiscuity and sexual experimentation have typically been parts of the bohemian lifestyle going back at least to the beginning of the 19th century and Diane Di Prima does not try to hide this aspect of the Beat Generation in any way.
Those explicit scenes can be taken lightly. The real thrust of this book is Di Prima’s coming of age story. In her late teens, she leaves her parents’ home to go to college. She drops out and does all the things you would expect a beatnik to do. There are coffee houses, jazz, dancing, pot smoking, parties, living n the streets, art, book stores, squatting, and whatever else you might expect from any given counter-culture. The content of her story is nothing new or surprising but she writes in a way that is frank and honest. The clear and simple descriptiveness never comes off as pretentious. The prose may not be complex but it is smoothly and finely crafted to convey a sense of freedom and loose living. Her prose is celebratory and liberating. Also, one personality trait that pervades all her writing is the motherly and nurturing care she provides for all her friends in the scene. Whether it is sex, food, shelter, drugs, or money, she gives of herself generously to all the ragged souls who wander into her charmed circle.
Diane Di Prima wrote Memoirs Of a Beatnik solely to make money at a time when she was broke. It was published in 1968 by the infamous and controversial Olympia Press. The semi-fictional sex was added it because the publisher demanded it. The unspoken rule is that real art is never made for the sake of money. So this book may not actually be completely authentic. But the author did draw on her own life experience to write some of it and there are certainly times when her sincerity shines through. This is not the best of Diane Di Prima’s writing though. If you want to know what she is truly capable of, read her poetry. She writes excellent poetry and unfortunately, she is terribly underrated.
If you’ve ever been part of a counter-culture, you have probably met a few people like Diane Di Prima and there will be a lot you can relate to in these pages. If you haven’t been part of a scene then it’s time to throw your cellphone away and start living for a change.
Di Prima, Diane. Memoirs Of a Beatnik. Last Gasp, San Francisco: 1988.
Wednesday, July 22, 2020
My Most Difficult Book: The Story of Lolita
My Most Difficult Book: The Story of Lolita
documentary about Vladimir Nabokov (1989)
Sunday, July 19, 2020
On Evil May Day, Londoners Rioted Over Foreigners Stealing Their Jobs
It’s been 500 years since London’s artisans turned a festival into a rampage
The long history of how Jesus came to resemble a white European
The portrayal of Jesus as a white, European man has come under renewed scrutiny during this period of introspection over the legacy of racism in society.
Where are the bones of Hans Holbein? I spent lockdown solving art's grisliest mystery
He was a star of the Renaissance, an unflinching painter of death and horror in a time of rampant plague. Yet he ended up in an unmarked grave in London. Or so it has always been believed …
Friday, July 17, 2020
The Black Death: The Greatest Catastrophe Ever
Ole J. Benedictow describes how he calculated that the Black Death killed 50 million people in the 14th century, or 60 per cent of Europe’s entire population.
Book Review
Book Review
The Plague by Albert Camus
In The Plague, Albert Camus tells the story of the Black Death reappearing in the French Colonial town of Oran on the coast of Algeria. This novel was written as a companion piece to his theoretical work The Rebel. The principles in that book are explained through the thoughts and actions of the main characters.
The idea of metaphysical rebellion is central to Camus’s thought; it is the belief that the world, as it exists, is meaningless and humans must rebel against such absurdity to make life meaningful and worth living. Oran itself can be seen as a microcosm of world society and the appearance of the plague can be interpreted as the absurdity that must be rebelled against and overcome. The plague serves no purpose and it has no meaning in and of itself. The citizens in this novel need to choose what it means so they can defeat it. Otherwise the plague is just a plague; it has no consciousness or volition, it is entirely neutral and can only do what it does because that is all it can do. The plague also corresponds with Camus’s concept of absolute nihilism which he defines in The Rebel as a negation of all existence. Absolute nihilism destroys without creating anything in its place.
As the town’s rats begin to die en masse, Dr. Rieux, the central character begins to take notice. He runs the town’s main hospital and manages the handling of the crisis. It is through his interactions with the other characters that his stoic point of view is expressed and it is through his relations with them that the ideas they represent also get revealed.
One important character is Paneloux, the Catholic priest who gives two sermons in the town’s cathedral to inspire the people of his flock. In one sermon he declares that the plague is meant to punish the town for turning away from God and only those who embrace God will live until it ends. Rieux and the others reject this notion but since Paneloux wants to serve humanity as well as God, they allow him to help in caring for victims of the disease. In another sermon he explains again that the Black Death is meant to inspire people’s love for God but by the end of the book it becomes obvious that his religious theories have no correspondence with reality. Camus uses Paneloux to show how religion is not a sufficient form of rebellion against absurdity since it signifies a submission and acceptance of the will of God and church, which he also believes to be a false belief. Paneloux made the wrong choice by embracing religious faith and his actions and beliefs ended up being of little consequence in Oran.
Another significant character is Tarrou. This heavyset man works closely with Rieux in the care and management of the patients. In one conversation he explains how he embraced communism when he was young. The pacifist Tarrou later rejected communism because he saw how it eventually curtailed people’s freedom and dignity, resulting in violence and mass murder for the sake of a ruling elite. He admits that he had little interest in the mechanics of Marxist economics or politics but the idea of serving humanity motivated him more than anything else. Tarrou represents Camus’s view that communism worked as a form of metaphysical rebellion but ultimately failed because it resulted in the enslavement of people rather than their liberation.
It is significant that both Tarrou and Paneloux die of the plague. Their deaths are emblematic of his rejection of religion and communism as forms of rebellion.
One character who does not die is the journalist Rambert. He is a young man who has recently fallen in love with a woman living in Paris. He can not get out of Oran to see her because the town is quarantined to prevent the plague from escaping to other places. He makes arrangement with some Spanish gangsters to be smuggled out. Rambert gets caught between his individual desire for love and happiness and his duty to help Rieux in treating the patients. He asks Rieux for advice on what to do but Rieux is indifferent; both choices are equally ethical from his point of view. It is the choices one makes that give life its meaning. Rambert symbolizes Camus’s concept of the ultimately moral form of rebellion so the author allows his character to live and get his due rewards at the end of the story.
Two lesser characters are the ironically named Grand and the gangster Cottard. Grand is an elderly man, possibly at the onset of senility, whose goal in life is to write a novel even though he has no talent and rewrites the first sentence over and over again as if he is suffering fron obsessive compulsive disorder. During the time of the plague, he sacrifices his writing to volunteer his time and effort to assisting Dr. Rieux at the hospital. Even though he plays a minor function, Rieux describes him as an ethically pure man. Cottard is the opposite. He is the happiest person in the book since the police were after him for a crime he committed long ago and then leave him alone while they work to maintain order in Oran. Meanwhile, Cottard, through his connections with the Spanish gangsters, finds ways to make money off smuggling operations since resources are scarce due to the town’s quarantine. His happiness is gained through bad faith and ignorance, the opposite of what Camus wishes to idealize in his study of metaphysical rebellion. Incidentally, Cottard is subtly linked with Meursault from The Stranger; in an early chapter he gets into an argument with some people in a grocery story who want to see Meursault get executed but Cottard wants the protagonist of that novel to be set free. Cottard does not die but you can tell what Camus thinks of him by what happens to him in the end.
The Plague is not without it problems. The narrator’s voice is too intrusive at times and there are long passages where he describes thoughts and situations in abstract language. Several sections read more like essays than fiction and the omniscient description can be overbearing. It could have been more like a story if Camus had allowed his ideas to be expressed through the actions and conversations of the people in the book. But then again, when he does allow that to happen the effect is not as strong as it could have been either; the characters all symbolize concepts that Camus explains in his philosophical writings but they do not act like natural people because of their all too obvious symbolical function. Since they are characters built up around ideas rather than being characters with ideas, they come off as flat and two-dimensional. When Rieux has discussions with them, it reads like Camus talking to himself rather than real people debating and analyzing issues.
The Plague is not one of Camus’s best books. The brevity of his other novels makes them stronger while the length and depth of his theoretical works also makes those books more complete. But familiarity with the latter makes it easy to see how The Plague continues on from The Stranger and functions as an auto-correction for those who misinterpret that first novel by thinking of Meursault as a hero.
Camus, Albert. The Plague. Vintage Books, New York: 1972.
Wednesday, July 15, 2020
Sunday, July 12, 2020
If You Drink Coffee Black, You’re Probably A Psychopath
When a friend orders coffee just as it is and drinks it black, you might get a little suspicious. You might think that they are tired and do not want to dilute the caffeine or perhaps that they have a little bit of a caffeine of addiction. Among these suspicions, you may make inferences like that the coffee-lover is working too hard and that is why they are tired. What you probably don’t think of first, however, is that your friend may be a psychopath
Friday, July 10, 2020
Turkey Converts Istanbul's Iconic Hagia Sophia Back Into A Mosque
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has ordered the Hagia Sophia museum, one of Istanbul's most famous landmarks, to be converted into a mosque.
Thursday, July 9, 2020
THE DAY DASHIELL HAMMETT WAS DRAGGED INTO COURT OVER A BAIL FUND FOR POLITICAL PRISONERS AND REFUSED TO NAME NAMES
The godfather of noir fiction went up against a notorious Communist hunter and refused to back down. It would cost him his freedom.
Wednesday, July 8, 2020
Melania Trump sculpture in Slovenia set on fire on US Independence Day
A quirky wooden sculpture of US First Lady Melania Trump is reported to have been set on fire near her hometown in Slovenia, prompting its removal.
'Landscape of fear': what a mass of rotting reindeer carcasses taught scientists
When 323 reindeer were killed by lightning on a remote Norwegian plateau, their bodies were left for nature to take its course
Tuesday, July 7, 2020
Gimme Shelter: the Brief And Strange History of CHOP (AKA CHAZ)
The end has come for CHOP—or CHAZ. At first the six-block area just east of downtown Seattle was called CHAZ. The area was occupied by protesters on June 8th after it was reluctantly ceded to them by Seattle Mayor Jennie Durkan and the police. That was the day that the Seattle Police Department vacated and locked up its East Precinct building on 12th Avenue. When the police left, the occupiers painted “People” over the “Police” in the sign, “Seattle Police Department, East Precinct.” Then they declared the surrounding area the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, soon referred to simply as CHAZ. Whatever exactly it was, it had a name. Then some black community leaders suggested it be called Capitol Hill Organize Protest. Hence, CHOP, although CHAZ was still being used. Whatever you call it, as of the First of July it was no more.
Monday, July 6, 2020
Book Review
Book Review
The First Third & Other Writings
by Neal Cassady
Neal Cassady was possibly one of the most famous non-fictional literary figures ever. Written about most famously by Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, he also played important roles in the writings of John Clellon Holmes, Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson, Ken Kesey, and Sonny Barger. So when the rising stars of the Beat Generation literary movement insisted he try to write a novel, Neal Cassady gave in and tried. The results were not spectacular but for fans of the great American counter-cultures of the 20th century, his book The First Third & Other Writings will probably be worth at least one good read.
The First Third is Neal Cassady’s attempt at writing an autobiographical novel. In the Prologue, he gives accounts of his family history, both from his father’s and mother’s sides. The story of his father’s life and ancestry are detailed, possibly inaccurate, and sometimes you might wonder why Cassady thought to say as much as he did. A similar comment could be made about his mother’s life story and family tree with the addition that it is hard to tell what he meant to say until the mention of his mother’s birth. These passages have their moments but it often reads like Neal Cassady was more concerned with getting the stories on paper than he was in making them interesting. The writing is adequately good and clear in some spots but in other places it is more like lists of information than actual literature.
The main passages of The First Third are all about Cassady’s childhood. Some parts of it are vivid and even exciting. The story takes place during the Great Depression. His father, also named Neal, was a barber and an alcoholic. They spend a lot of time in the streets of Denver and sleeping in skid row hotels while his father gets too drunk to function in any meaningful way. Cassady writes about his wanderings through the city and his exploratory adventures in junkyards and other industrial wastelands. He also goes on a hitchhiking trip across the country with his father. Later in the autobiography, he goes to live with his mother; his older step-brothers are bullies and little Neal watches as they beat the hell out of his father for being drunk. Neal Cassady also begins sexual experimentation with other kids in his neighborhood at a precocious age; a child psychologist would probably attribute this to parental neglect, something that appears to have been a big factor in the childhood of the author. But Neal Cassady never writes as though he feels sorry for himself; this is not victim literature and he often writes as if his obviously painful life were fun and a never-ending adventure.
Some of the most clearly written passages are also the most grotesque. In one instance, six year old Neal enters a hotel room where a drunken bum with no legs is masturbating. This, in itself, does not surprise him but what he does find shocking is that a man in his 40s is able to get a hard-on. The kid had a lot to learn. Another time, his sadistic older brothers torture a cat to death by stomping on its head until its brains pop out. They throw the dead cat down an alley and Neal goes to look at it. He finds, by coincidence, that the corpse landed on a book that had been stolen from him a long time ago. His descriptions of playing doctor with little girls aren’t exactly pretty either.
There are some badly written passages too, in fact, there are lots of them. Cassady often tried to write marathon sentences, going on for as long as he could without using a period. There are many parts that degenerate into nonsense and babbling. There are also several passages where he introduces a character or a plot line then goes off on tangents that lead to further tangents without him ever returning to the original point. Or if he does return to where he started, it doesn’t make sense because the sidetrack went on for so long you forget what it was it was originally meant to be about. Supposedly Neal Cassady wrote this with the intention of writing like his favorite author, Marcel Proust. But writing under such an influence with a mind moving at warp-speed did not do Cassady justice. His writing is too self-conscious to ever really take off and fly for prolonged periods of time. A lot of the times the narrative is like climbing a hill while dragging a bag full of bricks behind you.
But when Neal Cassady wrote at his best, there is something genuine and stylistically American so that it winds up being tragic that he did not try harder to pursue a literary career. There is something reminiscent of great American authors like Thomas Wolfe, William Faulkner, Saul Bellow, and John Steinbeck in the way he writes about his family and the American experience.
The sections of story fragments and letters at the end of this volume are some of the better narratives. The story about Cherry Mary is hilarious. There is a lot of stuff about stealing cars and some crude sex talk that sounds like male locker room conversations. One chapter is the beginning of a story about a great race car driver that is obviously modeled on Neal Cassady himself. The race car driver always wins in competitions because his mind works 500 times faster than everybody else’s. These passages are more true to the character and personality of Neal Cassady himself. When he doesn’t try too hard to be a great writer, his inhibitions come down, his self-consciousness disappears, and he writes the way he thinks. This still isn’t great literature but it is more interesting and true to life than what Cassady wrote in The First Third.
This book is not going to have wide appeal. The writing is not great and it will not speak to most readers. It definitely is an item of interest for those who are in love with the Neal Cassady mythology. Despite the rough pacing and confusing descriptions, this still comes across clearly as his own genuine voice rather than a version of the man as portrayed by other great writers. There is just enough good writing here to make you wish he had tried harder as an author. Neal Cassady was probably too manic, too energetic, too scatter-brained to really sit down for long periods in order to concentrate on writing in earnest. Then again, we are fortunate that he lived the way he did because the whirlwind of his life stirred up so much interesting culture and controversy in his wake. We are fortunate that he chose the life of a wild role model rather than a writer, even if he was a bad role model.
Cassady, Neal. The First Third & Other Writings. City Lights, San Francisco: 1992.
Writing Wrongs: Why Academics Write So Badly and How That Hurts Them
Exploratory Hypotheses on Discursive Non-Transparency in Research and Critical Praxis Situated Within Hegemonic, Institutional, Socio-Ideational Processes, With Implications
Saturday, July 4, 2020
The Last Beat
A murder in Riverside Park changed the lives of a group of Columbia undergrads. Did it change literature as well?
Wednesday, July 1, 2020
Book Review
Book Review
The Stranger by Albert Camus
Existentialism, in the modernist sense, is the idea that we live in an absurd world. God is either silent or non-existent so our lives are inherently meaningless. Without the voice and judgment of God what becomes most important in our lives is what we think and what we do. This all comes down to what we choose. Albert Camus hated to be associated with the term “existentialism” but his short novel The Stranger has become a central work in the canon of that theme. His depiction of Meursault as a man who goes through life making the least amount of choices possible could be why it is regarded as the quintessential work of existentialism despite Camus’ disapproval of what that means.
Reading Camus’ theoretical work The Rebel can help to provide a lot of insight into what he intended with The Stranger. In The Rebel, Camus gives a clear and precise interpretation of the philosophy of G.W.F. Hegel. He argues that humans differ from animals because we have language, awareness of our own death, and the ability to engage in self-reflection. Animals, without language orient themselves in the world through instinct and physical sensations only. A human who self-reflects in isolation never realizes their full potential as a human, therefore the judgments of other people are necessary for the validation of one’s existence. What people judge an individual on is what they say, what they think, and what they do. Therefore, an individual’s choices become the primary factor in who or what a person actually is. The central character in The Stranger, Meursault, is barely more than an animal because he is largely devoid of the qualities that make humans human.
Meursault is an office worker in Algiers. As the story starts, his mother dies in a nursing home and he has to go to her funeral. He had previously lived with his mother but he chose to put her in the home, one of the only choices he makes in the entire book. At the funeral, he never cries and admits that he rarely spoke to his mother. A lot is made of this later at his murder trial. Meursault’s strongest feelings are physical sensations. At the funeral, in the passage where he murders an Arab boy, and during his trial, the presence of heat and light become so intense that he is unable to think about what is happening around him. Notice also that these strong sensations occur during the key events of the novel and the most significant turning points of his life, the times when he should be doing the most thinking.
The day after the funeral he starts a relationship with a woman named Marie. He meets her at a public swimming pool where they mostly do not talk but he touches her a lot. Marie is just as shallow as Meursault. She wants to marry him and he agrees but when asked, he says he does not love her. In fact, he takes more interest in the dresses she wears than he does in her personality which is almost minimal anyhow. He is indifferent to who he marries or if he even marries at all. Getting married is the same as not getting married. Anybody who would agree with that statement has obviously never had a psychotic girlfriend. He only agrees to marry her because he lives in the here and now without thinking about his past or future; the question of marriage is what he confronts in the present and he willing submit to it because he avoids making decisions. Meursault has no values and no plans because he has never engaged in any kind of self-reflection.
Later, a pimp named Raymond asks Meursault to be complicit in an act of violence against an Algerian woman. He asks Meursault to write a letter in order to lure her to Raymond’s apartment so he can spit in her face and beat her up. Meursault, without thinking, agrees to comply. He does not actually agree with the scheme but he does not disagree with it either. He just goes with it without thinking about the consequences. Later when the neighbor Raymond actually does beat up the woman, Meursault watches, without any empathy, and stands there as if he were watching a tv show. He lacks empathy because he lacks values, judgment, and morality. All of these qualities are what makes a person fully human. Without self-reflection, Meursault can never begin to reach for his full moral potential.
As Meursault continues to remain a tabula rasa, he visits the beach with Raymond and another friend. They encounter two Arab boys, one of which is the brother of the woman Raymond physically assaulted. A fight begins and Raymond gets stabbed but doesn’t die. Muersault later takes a gun and shoots the Arab brother five times. The boy dies and Meursault gets arrested. During the incident, he never thinks about what he is doing or why he does it. He is an automaton feeling nothing but the heat on the Algerian sun. Later when the examining magistrate asks him why he paused between the first and second shots, Meursault can not answer the question. He is so lacking in self-awareness that he can not answer even that. He doesn’t even begin to acknowledge his own guilt until his trial when he sees the dirty looks other people are giving him.
Murdering someone is the same as not murdering someone. That is the logic of a psychopath, a person incapable of empathizing with the pain of others. What if someone were to say that murdering six-million Jews is the same as not murdering six-million Jews? After the Holocaust there would not be one Jewish person who could find this statement acceptable. It is likely that most fascists would not find it agreeable either. While Hitler orchestrated the Holocaust, his deeds were carried about by people just like Meursault. They were people who followed orders, who never asked questions, and living only in the moment while engaging in almost no self-reflection. They were ordinary people just waiting to be led around by the nose like a bunch of domestic animals. Meursault is a symbol of modern humanity, a mass of unthinking, unfeeling, shallow creatures who shuffle through life without asking why, without pursuing higher goals or higher values. They are faceless, bland, simple, mechanized, blowing without direction like leaves in the wind never taking charge of their own life situation. Meursault ends up in prison because the modern world is a prison and one that society makes for itself by refusing to actively engage in making choices.
If you want to know where Camus is coming from in this account, take this into consideration: during Algeria’s War of Independence, he took sides with the Arabs against the French colonialists. From this we can deduce that he would sympathize with the Arab woman Raymond beat up and her brother who fights him to avenge that act of violence. He would sympathize with them over the white people that Meursault associates with. Meursault’s friends are emblematic of the rapes and atrocities that the French nation committed against the North Africans during colonialism. Meursault and his ilk are the exact opposite of everything Camus believes a human should be.
Meursault’s trial does not go in his favor. There is no question of his guilt so the affair is entirely about what kind of person he is. It is his life that is being judged. Since his actions were so insignificant, the court has to fall back on nothing but his values and his choices to determine what kind of person he is. The prosecution lies to convict him and the defending attorney lies to declare his innocence. Meursault makes almost no effort to assert himself, speaking only once during the whole procedure. The prosecuting lawyer even makes an emotional appeal to the jury by saying that Meursault’s act of murder inspired someone to commit parricide in a completely unrelated case. The charge is absurd and illogical; the lawyer makes no effort to defend his claim. Yet Meursault refuses to contest it. He just accepts what happens no matter what it is.
In the end he is sentenced to death. While waiting on death row, Meursault has a conversation with a priest. He rejects religion and says that he is happy without it. When he comes closer to the day of his execution at the age of 30, it is only then that he begins to reflect on the meaning and the value of his life. But by then it is too late. He wasted his life by not thinking, not feeling, not choosing.
Meursault is happy with his life. He is probably the happiest person in the novel but he is happy because he is an idiot. In The Rebel, Albert Camus states that creating a meaningful life in an absurd world is more important than happiness. Meursault’s life means nothing because he never created meaning in his life. He has no values because his self-reflection is minimal. His life means nothing because his most important choice was to avoid making choices. In Camus’ terms, he is an absolute nihilist, a man who negates all human values. Murder is the same as not murdering. Marriage is the same as not marrying. The is deconstruction, the dismantling of all hierarchies. Without a hierarchy of values, we are left with nothing but the self-cancellation of nihilism. Camus buried the deconstructionists long before the tenets of poststructuralism were ever articulated. Meursault is happy but he doesn’t deserve his happiness; he made no effort to earn it. His unwillingness to engage in making effective choices led him straight to death row. He never took control over his own life, even at the critical moment when he murdered an Arab boy, someone who would have had nothing against Meursault if he had never been an accomplice in the violent assault against his sister. Meursault gets everything he deserves.
So in the end Meursault is happy. Do we have the right to judge him? The answer is a resounding Yes. We have every right to judge him. When people get angry and shout “aren’t you being awfully judgmental of others?” they are in effect saying “i don’t like you because your judgments of others aren’t the same as my judgments of others.” Judging others is a necessity because we need others to validate ourselves; without them we exist in a void without any reference points. If we don’t judge others than we don’t think. Not judging others would mean that murder is the same as not murdering because we have no opinion on the matter. If I see a mutilated body on the sidewalk, I form the judgment that murder is horrible and unnecessary. By judging the testimony of the person who committed the homicide, I judge that sadism and violence are wrong. If the murderer ends their testimony by saying they are happy I am justifying in making the judgment that he has no right to his happiness and deserves severe punishment for the crime. If I refuse to engage making judgments I can form no network of ideas, no hierarchy of values, no consistent system of morals, and I can never grow as a human being. I am left with nothing but physical sensation and animal instinct, a state of nihilism in which inability to choose and inaction become very realistic and dangerous possibilities. By judging the happiness of a murderer I can learn that murder is wrong without having to commit the crime myself and I can conclude that I have no right to my own happiness if it is contingent on the torture of innocent people. It is our DUTY to judge others if we are to reach our full potential as humans.
So who is the titular stranger? At first, you wouldn’t think it is Meursault. He has a group of friends. He is also known by others in his community, some of which do not particularly like him. The general public knows about him because his case has been written about in the papers. He is validated by others and, socially speaking, he is definitely not a stranger. But Meursault is a stranger to himself. Without self-reflection he does not know who he is, what is motivations are, or what his values are. From Camus’ point of view that is what the masses of modern humans are, strangers to themselves. Submissive, underdeveloped people who do not understand themselves well enough to make choices that will lead to their fulfillment of human potential.
The Stranger is a good book about the modern dilemma because the negation of human qualities in the character of Meursault makes us immediately aware of what our human qualities actually are. Camus engages in nihilism but he was not an absolute nihilist. His purpose in writing this story was not to attack, condemn, and destroy Meursault. By negating the humanity of him, Camus calls us to action. He wanted us to do more self-reflection. He wanted us to think deeper and inquire into our values. He wanted us to use our imagination and thrive as a species of individual human beings rather than a faceless mass of blank people who do nothing but what other people want them to do. He wanted us to build a better society, one where the atrocities of murder, colonialism, injustice, and future Holocausts are impossible.
Camus, Albert. The Stranger. Vintage Books, New York: 1954.
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