Cosmos and Camus. Shai Tubali
amoral world. The sun is the uninvited “awareness of the immanent nature of the world,” which rises as soon as the ethic that was our beacon has lost its power over us (Golomb 2005: 132).
As the bright light of the phenomenal world, the sun, when it shines moderately, illumines life’s objects of pleasure and the sensual earth – like Camus’ life-affirming sun in the Noces (Dunwoodie 2007: 152–154). When it grows in strength and becomes achingly dazzling, however, it lays bare the reality of the earth’s emptiness and oppressive inhumanity (TS, 15) and compels the consciousness to actually see the “Nada that could only have originated in a country crushed by the sun” (Dunwoodie 2007: 155–156). In this intense state, the sun is undefeatable and all-pervasive: “If you go slowly, you risk getting sunstroke. But if you go too fast, you work up a sweat and then catch a chill inside the church” (TS, 17). There is no way ←23 | 24→out: Wherever one goes, whether in the atheistic direction or the theistic direction, one would be confronted by the “inevitability of death,” which renders one’s life “absurd and unfulfilled” (Scherr 2014: 179).
Indeed, the awakened mind, which had formerly been protected by unselfconsciousness and apathy, might not find a way out, but it would at least seek relief in an absurd rebellion. Here, the paths of Meursault and Camus’ other major absurd hero, Caligula, momentarily converge. Both characters conclude erroneously – Caligula in a far more deliberate tone – that an unbridled and destructive nihilistic outburst would be the proper response to the sun that blinds them. Both leave the funerals of loved ones with an “alarmed new consciousness of human mortality” (Scherr 2014: 186) and find themselves disorientedly driven to murder as a protest against death. Incapable of embracing it, it is as if they attempt to “murder” death itself,12 and thereby initiate a seemingly predetermined chain of events that will inevitably lead to their deaths; in a way, they substitute suicide for murder.
Like Dostoevsky’s Kirilov, who postulated that killing God means becoming a god yourself, but was unable to handle the freedom he granted himself (MS, 104–105), Meursault and Caligula infer that now “everything is unconditionally permitted,” and assume the role of gods on earth by amorally “determining the fate of others” (Golomb 2005: 133–134). They think that they go all the way with the illogical logic of the absurd, yet the novel and the play alike demonstrate that such a rebellion does not have a liberating effect; what it does lead to is the disillusionment of realizing that this is the wrong type of freedom (C, 63). While one might be tempted to blame the sun, the sun does not in itself necessarily push one to nihilism; its role is only to show and to stimulate realization.
On the fateful day on which Meursault enacts the wrong type of freedom, two other symbols – which later become established in The Myth as concepts – are at play. The first is the sea, also represented by Meursault’s lover Marie,13 which momentarily enables the fulfillment of the longing for ←24 | 25→unity: “We felt a closeness as we moved in unison and were happy” (TS, 50). But since, in an absurd universe, one could never fully achieve unity with oneself, others, and the world as a whole, Meursault must be torn away from the experience to lucidly confront his reality – in the same way that Sisyphus, who enjoyed the smiling earth and the “sparkling sea” too much, would be snatched “from his joys” by the gods and dragged to his rock (MS, 116). Accordingly, the sea grows weaker and is finally replaced by the sun’s “sea of molten lead” (TS, 57–58). The sun, which inflicts the same inescapable pain as on the day of the funeral, soon introduces the second symbol which completes it: silence (TS, 55). In this climate, where there is nothing besides awareness and emptiness, and everything closes in around him, Meursault vainly attempts to overpower and break the silence of the indifferent universe (TS, 59). Although the setting seems to evoke hopeless action, it is Meursault who finally disrupts the unity and happiness and chooses to place himself in the persistent tension between the longing for harmony and the impossibility of ever resting in its fulfillment.
Part II: Prison as home
The Stranger’s second part is characterized by a distinct shift of consciousness, which is made immediately perceptible by its significantly more complex and sophisticated literary style. A language of “assessment and reason,” “cogitation and memory,” takes the place of the raw and immediate language of “physicality, need and desire” (Dunwoodie 2007: 157–159). This shift heralds Meursault’s gradual evolution from an unthinking, transparent mind to a “self-reflexive consciousness” (ibid., 159–160). We are plunged into a rich subjective world of contradictory “feelings, motives and world outlook” (Golomb 2005: 131–132). Yet we are somewhat prepared, since Meursault’s declaration at the end of Part I that he had shattered the “exceptional silence of a beach where I’d been happy” (TS, 59) gives away a newfound awareness of an internal mood.
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But why does Meursault grow in “self-awareness once he is imprisoned” (Zaretsky 2013: 45)?14 Slochower (1969: 294) and Ohayon (1983: 198–200) argue that shooting the Arab causes Meursault’s consciousness to come alive and to consolidate a self. This “original sin,” writes Ohayon, “cracked Sisyphus’ rock” and extricated fossilized thoughts and feelings, thus activating an “intrapsychic life.” However, this does not accord with Camus’ line of thought, especially in the form it takes in Caligula. Both the play and the novel are pronounced statements against nihilism, and their acts of murder represent the mind’s failed attempt to overcome absurd reality. If anything, it is Meursault’s sobering up, his realization that that freedom was not the right one, that guided him toward a more mature way of handling the absurd – a way that ultimately enabled the crystallization of an authentic and reflective selfhood in him.15 Rather than shattering the limits imposed on human consciousness, residing wholeheartedly within these confines allows one’s existence to find its noblest fulfillment. Indeed, in a godless world, what awakens and delivers the individual is not the apparent freedom achieved by God’s absence, but the intense limits one voluntarily forces upon oneself.16
With the disappearance of hope – represented by the cessation of Marie’s visits – Meursault can finally feel “at home” in his cell (TS, 72). He is content to gaze at the sea through the small window, and to grip the bars with his face “straining toward the light,” and he favors his quiet and dark cell over the dizzying visiting room with its “harsh light pouring out of the sky” (ibid., 73) – again rejecting the fulfillment of his longing for unity, while keeping this longing aflame. He renounces fantasies of freedom and accepts the identity of a prisoner, likening himself to one who lives ←26 | 27→in the “trunk of a dead tree,” from which he can only “look up at the sky” (ibid., 76–77).
There are good reasons to suspect that Meursault unconsciously drives himself into his cell and eventual death sentence, which implies that in order to achieve authenticity, one’s consciousness directs itself toward the recognition of its limits. It is plausible that after his mother’s death, Meursault felt compelled to demonstrate that indeed “there was no way out” (TS, 17) by simulating a seemingly deterministic act. Scherr (2014: 179–180) suggests that the Arab was Meursault’s “surrogate for his own death,” a way of intimately experiencing death “without dying himself.” Ohayon (1983: 190–201) sides with this view from a different angle, pointing out that Meursault does not repent since he wants to be sentenced to death.17 Grounding himself in Camus’ own words, that Meursault is the “only Christ we deserved,” Ohayon outlines the ways in which Meursault imitates Jesus’ refusal to escape his fate by remaining silent, as well as Jesus’ self-image as a sacrificial offering to the world (ibid., 190–201). Yet, just like Caligula, Meursault’s wish for death cannot take the form of suicide, since the opposite of suicide is the “man condemned to death” (MS, 53) – and being condemned to death is the reality that the absurd hero must authentically confront.
While the sun was the great awakener of the first part, Part II introduces the reader to the second catalyst of lucidity: the confinement of the prison cell – the difference being that the sun is an aggressive cosmic intervention, whereas the cell is a conscious choice of the absurd hero. Such a hero determines to “make his rock, or his prison walls, everything that he has” (Skrimshire 2006: 296), since by realizing that this prison cell is “all we