Stranger than Fiction? Indeed, Absurd!

Harbouring the Stranger (circa 1649) by Michiel Sweerts. Public Domain via Wikimedia.

The Stranger by Albert Camus

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Upon finishing this book, I found it difficult to shake the images it left behind. Coupled with Guy de Maupassant's powerfully class conscious Bel Ami, I felt like the chips on my own shoulders now had Maupassant and Camus sitting on them, haunting me like spectres and no way to shake them off. Not as if the books had been absorbed into my identity, which most good books seem to do, but as if they were somehow added on and would require surgery to be removed. One sleep after finishing the book, I feel like John Nash's character in A Beautiful Mind, I know they are there, but they do not bother me too much if I don't engage with them. I have had the urge, since reading The Myth of Sisyphus, to read all of Camus' work, as I did with Hemingway and Fitzgerald. I had purchased The Plague and The Outsider to read, not realising at the time that The Outsider is actually a different translation of L’Étranger, the latter translated by Sandra Smith. I was annoyed that I had purchased the same book, but a quick perusal of Smith's translation shows some differences that will be worth exploring. Nonetheless, with these two spectres haunting enough as it is, I was not ready to read the same story again - it is much too vivid still. On the back cover of Sandra Smith's translation, a quote by William Boyd says it more eloquently than I:

One of those books that marks a reader's life indelibly.

I'll say. When I went in search of William Boyd, I discovered a review in The Guardian that seemed to be somewhat sour grapes. In a review entitled "Bamboozled", Adam Mars-Jones says:

It's a mystery how some of William Boyd's journalism was published the first time, let alone reprinted in Bamboo.

Very clever! But maybe not as clever as the New York Times review by David Haglund:

It’s difficult, in fact, to argue with any of Boyd’s conclusions. But if one can’t argue with a review, why bother with it at all? One would rather — at least, I would rather — read a striking if ultimately dubious argument about a book or a movie than the level-headed evaluations provided in these pages. It is more important for a critic to be interesting than to be right.

The artist as critic. But Boyd says what I felt about Camus:

...one remembers vividly the actual reading of the book itself, the sense of unfolding revelation afforded, however modest, of doors being opened, the power of one writer's imagination impinging irrevocably on your own... the urge to consume the entire oeuvre was a vital part of this writer's allure.

Camus died at age 46. For some reason his James Dean-like cover photo and his candid discussion of suicide in The Myth of Sisyphus had me thinking he had suffered the same fate as other literary greats. But it wasn't the case, he was killed in a car crash while holding a train ticket - he had caught a lift rather than catch the train. And in this example of life imitating art, we find Camus' idea of the absurd (apparently he didn't like being called an existentialist) neatly captured in The Stranger:

Since existence itself has no meaning, we must learn to bear an irresolvable emptiness. This paradoxical situation, then, between our impulse to ask ultimate questions and the impossibility of achieving any adequate answer, is what Camus calls the absurd. Camus’s philosophy of the absurd explores the consequences arising from this basic paradox.

When Meursault, the protagonist, is attempting to accept "the machine" (I couldn't help thinking of the term "machinery of government"), the idea of the system and indeed the guillotine all occupy one's imagination in a swirling confusion of "absurdity". I was perplexed by the idea of the guillotine in a novel written in 1942, so I did a little research. The last use of the guillotine in France, and the last official "beheading" in the West was in Paris in 1977, when I was seven years old. In my lifetime. Just over forty years ago, in France. I am still flabbergasted. Yet the last public execution by guillotine was in 1939, only three years before Camus published the novel, so the terror of that machine was very much still in the public memory. (It makes me shudder to think of the guillotine simulation at Questacon - I don't think I could put my head in there nowadays.) Marcel Chevalier was the last Chief Executioner (the position was informally known as Monsieur de Paris) of France - can you imagine a public service position with that title in Australia? And yet, there it was in France in my own lifetime. Now that is absurd! The bottom line is that I don't know what to think, and Camus' absurd philosophy suggests that there is no point anyway. Having said that, the second part of Camus' philosophy deals with rebellion, and so the absurd and the rebel provide some understanding of the "why". I will have to reserve judgement for now, but if I do find I am actually in The Matrix, at this point I would be wishing I had told Morpheus to shove that red pill up his butt! For Aristotle, the root of education may be bitter and the fruit may be sweet, but he never said that once you were planted, you would grow until you die and you could never cut off those nasty philosophical roots, no matter what you did, ever again. How absurd!

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On Naturalism: Guy de Maupassant and literary cloning of humans

Christ Walking on the Water (circa 1880) by Julius Sergius Von Klever. Public Domain via Wikimedia. In Bel Ami (1885), a similar painting by the fictitious Hungarian painter, Karl Markovitch, plays an important metaphor. 

Bel-Ami by Guy de Maupassant

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


In his review of the 2012 movie version of this novel, New York Times reviewer Stephen Holden refers to Georges Duroy as:

...the coldblooded social climber who seduces his way to the top of Gallic society in Guy de Maupassant’s 1885 novel, Bel Ami, is one of the nastiest pieces of work in French literature.

Sure, Holden says this so he can point out how lame Robert Pattinson (of Twilight fame, apparently - I wouldn't know, I can't stand teeny-bopper nonsense. Besides, Georges had a moustache, maybe Pattinson was too young to grown one) plays the part of this cold-blooded social climber. Yet Georges reminds me of almost everyone I work with, and everyone around me, including myself. Or at least how everyone wants to be. For he has a major chip on his shoulder, one borne by being of a peasant family. But Guy de Maupassant is regarded as a "naturalist", in that he tried to depict human nature as it really was, rather than an idealised or "Disney-fied" version that late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century humans have plastered over their collective vision. I got the feeling that Duroy was not as bad as all that. He was parts of me and parts of those around me. His depictions of envy and the "chip on the shoulder" talented peasant boy who was wrenched out of his comfort zone by the army resonates deeply. And those around Duroy remind me of how I see many others. Maybe my empathy for Duroy holds up a crystal-clear mirror to me. Not something to celebrate, but certainly a reflection to reflect upon. And I think that is why this novel is so very good - it really does depict human nature. The good guy doesn't win in the end, the bad guy doesn't win either, but the scheming Duroy, self-made not through hard work but purely through social climbing, and climbing on the social climbers around him - it was like watching real life, but not where one could sit in judgement (as we tend to do), because deep down, we know that we are one of these very characters, too. This is only the second book I have read by Guy de Maupassant, and my earlier discussion of the collection of short stories in A Parisian Affair had me thinking of Hemingway. It is interesting that I am presently half-way through Albert Camus' The Stranger, and the translator's introduction mentions the similarities between Camus' style and Hemingway, and how his "American" translation brings back some of what Gilbert's "English" translation lost. How much have we lost in the translation of Bel Ami? It would seem like not a thing. How would it be possible for this novel to be any better? I am pleased novels like this are few and far between, or I would quickly become tired of reading. And the biggest lesson I have learnt from this novel? Nietzsche's idea of "beyond". Beyond morality. Nietzsche, I think, meant what Guy de Maupassant does: strip away the veneer of morality and tell the story like it is - no embellishing the facts with morals, no pointing out vices and virtues. Only then, it would seem, can we truly reflect upon ourselves, can we truly see ourselves as we are, without the bias of morality. As Nietzsche suggested, many so-called virtues are weaknesses. Not because he was the "Antichrist", but because if we look at ourselves in the mirror of life, we can only see the vices and virtues we choose to see: "Oh, OK, I get it, I eat too much, but at least I am not a liar..." [never mind that we are disgustingly jealous but can't see this while it is in the very act of taking out our own eye]. This is how I interpret Nietzsche's meaning, and Guy de Maupassant, the great naturaliste, makes this clear to me in this wonderful story.

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Wilde's World: Bringing Order to Chaos, one critic at a time

Apollo and Tityos, Lower tier, side A of an Attic red-figure calyx-krater. Metropolitan Museum of Art [CC BY 2.5] via Wikimedia.

The Critic as Artist: With Some Remarks Upon the Importance of Doing Nothing by Oscar Wilde

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Oscar Wilde's aesthetic philosophy is set out as a dialogue between Ernest (isn't it always?) and Gilbert (didn't Gilbert and Sullivan fund his lecture tour of the United States?). Of course, Plato used this method to convey his philosophical teachings. Here, Wilde uses the dialogue format to convey his aesthetic philosophy but touches on ethics, virtues, pedagogy, and spirituality. However, with Plato, I expect a dialogue. With Wilde, I couldn't help but think of the poor actors who had to remember all of lines! But of course, this was not meant to be a play. Wilde's interlocutors encompass many of the great thinkers, poets, and critics of the late 1800s, including Darwin, Matthew Arnold, Walter Pater, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Robert Browning, and many other of his contemporaries, almost all of whom I had to look up. Dante, "Lionardo", numerous great French and Italian Renaissance and Ancient Greek and Roman all feature in the work. I was pleased to find that my reading is holding me in good stead, but there is still so much to catch up on. Wilde's own reading must have been vast, yet why wouldn't it? He studied the classics at Trinity College, and later won a scholarship to Magdalen College at Oxford. Regrettable me, poor sod, with a large chip on my shoulder, have to wait until death is in my region before I get my act together! Would I be so bold as to recall that "the dullness of tutors and professors matter very little when one can loiter in the grey cloisters of Magdalen, and listen to some flute-like voice singing in Waynfleete's chapel"? Oh, poor Oscar! That he was a genius is obvious, and there are many lessons to draw from this work. For instance, I am learning to "draw" at the moment, and it is a truism that "in every sphere of life Form is the beginning of things... Start with the worship of form, and there is no secret in art that will not be revealed to you". Based on my own reading, and avoiding the myriad things written by others, there is an element of tongue-in-cheek-edness about the role of the critic. For instance, "without the critical faculty, there is no artistic creation at all, worthy of the name" and "criticism demands infinitely more cultivation than creation does", culminating in:

Each new school, as it appears, cries out against criticism, but it is the critical faculty in man that owes its origin. The mere creative instinct does not innovate, but reproduces.

In effect, criticism leads to change. And critics do not need to read or view everything to criticise, for:

To know the vintage and quality of a wine it is not necessary to drink the whole cask.

In the other extreme, the artist's finished work then takes on:

...an independent life of its own, and may deliver a message far other than that which was put into its lips to say.

That is not to say that "the critic" is anybody who opens their mouth to pour scorn on the creative spirit. Indeed, the critic is not:

...the nuisance of the intellectual sphere... the man who is so occupied in trying to educate others , that he has never had any time to educate himself... [Indeed,] self-culture is the true ideal man.

There is likely much packed into Wilde's philosophy that is not explicitly stated, and I can hear echoes of Nietzsche in Wilde's statement that all art is "immoral". Most of Nietzsche's work pre-dates Wilde's Critic as Artist, so it is not improbable that there was some influence there. And finally, criticism will allow (drawing on Goethe) a cosmopolitan society, free of racial prejudice. From what I have read of others' interpretations of Wilde, he seems to propose the very opposite of Nietzsche (with God in absentia): That Apollo (order/criticism) must triumph over Dionysus (chaos/creating).

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