Cosmos and Camus. Shai Tubali
which does not even provide relief. Then it takes it upon itself to enter the cosmic cell to confront its limits. In a sincere act of sober humility, it enters an intense process of negation and renunciation – rejecting all hope, all human answers, any release from the tension between longing and fulfillment, and even worldly pleasures. It constantly shifts between acceptance and revolt, until it attains a climax of revolt, which eliminates hope. Finally, this integrated consciousness enters a profound acceptance of limits, realizing that this acceptance liberates it. Now it experiences itself as both imprisoned and liberated, separate and unified, alienated and intimate, longing and content. Merging into the paradoxical nature of the universe itself, it glimpses an absurdist union, a sharing of the unknowable with the cosmos that illumines life from within.
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1 Why this subject sparked in him interest in absurdism is a matter of speculation. No doubt, his awareness of it was ignited by his supervisor, the French philosopher Jean Grenier, who encouraged him to read existentialists such as Kierkegaard, Chestov, and Berdyaev (Srigley 2007: 4). We also know that apart from his teachers, the one who stirred Camus’ thought the most was Nieztsche: his name repeatedly appears in Camus’ early Notebooks and Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy is often referenced in his Master’s thesis (ibid., 5). McBride (1992) devoted his study to demonstrating the influence of Saint Augustine and Nietzcshe as well as Camus’ dissertation as a whole on his later development of absurdist notions. His principal argument is that Camus’ absurdism derived from his ambiguous relationship with Christianity and from his unfulfilled longing for unity with God. And Walker argues that the Plotinian conception of one’s desire for a homeland and the existential unease due to its loss, or absence, re-emerged in its absurdist form in The Myth of Sisyphus (Srigley 2007: 16).
2 In terms of the realization of the three projects, Caligula came last: It was first performed in 1945.
3 I have borrowed the term from Bombert’s 1948 article title “Camus and the Novel of the ‘Absurd.’ ”
4 Sisyphus was meant to be followed by the myth of Prometheus and the myth of Nemesis. An even broader plan consisted of five stages: absurd, revolt, judgment, love, and “creation corrected,” each expressed in the form of a novel, a play, and an essay (Sharpe 2015: 41). Roberts (2008: 875–876) notes that Camus’ 1956 novel, The Fall, was his only deviation from these carefully-planned cycles: though in some respects it is a complement to The Stranger, it “came into being more by accident.”
5 Here I mention once again a suggestion I made in the introduction: such a relationship between feeling and concept could easily be applied to film and Camus’ philosophy of the absurd. Films, probably even more than novels, engage not only our intellectual, but also our imaginative and emotional faculties in ways that engender a phenomenological and visceral, as well as a more straightforwardly conceptual, grasp of the issue, hence their superior capacity to capture and explore this almost pre-reflexive absurd feeling.
6 See, for example, Foley’s interpretation (2008: 14–22), which starts with Sisyphus and, from there, delves into the novel as a demonstration of the essay’s concepts of “wild courage and rebellious scorn.”
7 See, for instance, Camus’ claim in his preface to Nicolas Chamfort works: “[O];ur greatest moralists are not makers of maxims – they are novelists” (quoted in Sharpe 2015: 45–46).
8 See, for example, the psychological analyses of Stamm 1969; Slochower 1969, Ohayon 1983, and Scherr 2014. See also O’Brien’s overtly political reading from 1970; Dunwoodie’s cultural interpretation from 2007, and philosophical readings, such as Golomb 2005 and Foley 2008, which place the novel within the context of individual/society relations, as the absurd individual’s struggle for integrity.
9 This is Brombert’s central criticism (1948: 121–123): the novel’s literary weakness is that Camus breathes into the main character’s nostrils the “life of his own mind,” forcing him to express the author’s ideas.
10 For the most part, I will use in this chapter, and in Part I as a whole, the term “consciousness” in a way that does not deviate from Husserl’s and Sartre’s conception of it; that is, that consciousness is always consciousness of something (Sartre 2003: 650). However, on occasion, I use the term as, simply, the equivalent of “mind.”
11 Ohayon (1983: 190–198) devotes his entire article to the contrary argument that The Stranger’s sun is the metaphor of “patriarchal absolutism” (ibid., 193), acting as the negative image of the father-God. Accordingly, Meursault is the rebellious son. This is disputable: first, the father-God is sufficiently represented in the novel by the magistrate and the chaplain, and second, it does not make sense that God, who is represented by moralists such as the magistrate and the chaplain, would urge Meursault to kill the Arab.
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