"Camus can do..."

The Fall: Just read this one again after a friend gave it to me as a birthday gift. (Camus and birthdays are always a great match). This is one of my favourites by Camus, although choosing a favourite can be tough. I particularly like how it ends on a very uneasy note, with Clamence as "judge-penitent", pointing his finger at the reader in accusation, his confession no longer a personal narrative, but including all of us.

A great passage comes when Clamence describes how the memory of a drowning woman has haunted him, an event that encapsulates his feelings of regret and personal hypocrisy and sparked his descent into confronting the absurdity of life:

Then I realized, as calmly as you resign yourself to an idea the truth of which you have long known, that that cry which had sounded over the Seine behind me years before had never ceased, carried by the river to the waters of the Channel, to travel throughout the world, across the limitless expanses of the ocean, and that it had waited for me there until the day I had encountered it. I realized likewise that it would continue to await me on seas and rivers, everywhere, in short, where lies the bitter water of my baptism.

The next time you're out with some friends, why not try out this zinger from Clamence: "The more I accuse myself, the more I have a right to judge you."

I also recently finished Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus, a collection of essays that help define his existential philosophies, though, to be accurate, he never really considered himself an existentialist, referring more to the Absurd. The essay "An Absurd Reasoning" best explains the dialectical balance of living in awareness of the Absurd, a state defined by two certainties that cannot be reconciled: "my appetite for the absolute and for unity and the impossibility of reducing this world to a rational and reasonable principle."

Arguing against suicide even when faced with the absurd, (in response to what seems like a natural conclusion given the bleakness of an existential outlook) Camus makes, what seems to me, an equivalence between faith in god and suicide, as both are unjustified escapes from the only authentic way to live, in full realization of the true nature of life. Hence Sisyphus as Camus' poster-boy for how to live: Sisyphus has no hope of ever being free of his rock, yet he perseveres in his pointless action, fully aware of his life and its absurdity. The point is that he is conscious of his state, and therefore, Camus argues, "stronger than his rock."

The final essay on Kafka is quite interesting, if for no other reason than that there are not many writers who criticize Kafka for being too hopeful.

A couple of months back, I read Camus' The Plague, and while it was his most popular novel during his lifetime, I don't think it his best work. Sometimes criticized as being overly allegorical, i.e. a plague as a symbol for fascist occupation, I think the failing of the novel is more to do with Camus' characters and their lack of depth (maybe that isn't so far removed from the criticisms of allegory). If anything, the allegory becomes less obvious as readers are more removed from World War II (if one had no knowledge of when it was written, a fascist analogy wouldn't be that apparent). My main objection is that the three main characters, who are all most likely extensions of Camus' experiences living in an occupied city, are too indistinguishable, and perhaps would have been more believable and compelling if they were combined into one person.

My favourite character in the book is the unassuming civil servant who spends all of his free time trying to craft the perfect opening sentence to his novel. He dreams that one day, when an editor reads his perfect sentence, the editor will be so moved he will announce to his staff of writers, "Hats off, gentlemen!" Mostly I like this idea because it assumes that all writers wear hats while they work.

As I'm sure you all guessed, the title for this post was inspired by Jay Sherman's witty quip on The Simpsons, which is followed by Homer's equally witty riposte of "Well, Scooby-Doo can doo-doo, but Jimmy Carter is smarter." The awkward silence that follows is relieved by a tumble-weed that blows through the living room.