The Claremont Institute is apparently posting some “classic” essays from its archives, beginning with Harry Jaffa’s “Macbeth and the Moral Universe.” As a prelude to his argument about the Scottish Play, Jaffa offers up a modern point of contrast:
Macbeth is a moral play par excellence. In this, it stands in stark contrast to two more recent well-known tales of murder, Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and Camus’s The Stranger. In Macbeth Shakespeare presented the moral phenomena in such a way that those who respond to his art must, in some way or another, become better human beings. In Dostoevsky’s and Camus’s heroic criminals we see the corruption of moral consciousness characteristic of modern literature.
By the art of Camus we are led to admire his hero, Meursault; young people especially tend to identify with him. What kind of hero is Meursault? He is utterly indifferent to morality and cannot understand what others mean when they say they love other human beings. In the story, he kills a man and is sentenced to be executed, in part because he did not weep at his mother’s funeral. Meursault becomes passionate in the end: but the only passion he ever experiences is the passionate revulsion against the idea of human attachment. He thinks no one had a right to expect him to weep at his mother’s funeral, or for anyone else to weep at her funeral. By Camus’s hero we are taught to be repelled by those who (he believes) falsely teach us that there is any foundation for human attachments, or that there is anything in the universe that is lovable. The benign indifference to the universe is the only form of the benign, of goodness itself, in the universe. To imitate the indifference of the universe to good and evil is to live life at its highest level.
What this primarily establishes is that Harry Jaffa is hopeless as a literary intepreter. To regard Camus’ Meursault as some kind of hero or model for the reader—which I’m a little disturbed to note is the line taken by the book’s Wikipedia entry—is to misunderstand The Stranger just about as completely as is possible, short of reading it as a sequel to Anne of Green Gables. If the character Jaffa describe sounds repugnant and unattractive… it’s because he is supposed to be, even if his inhuman detachment also makes him a convenient vehicle for social criticism. A competent reader should pick that up from the text alone, but if there were any doubt, even a cursory look at the essays in which Camus explicitly lays out his own moral views should make it painfully obvious that his personal ideal could not be this amoral sociopath.
The bulk of the essay, as the title suggests, focuses on Macbeth, and I’ve got nothing to offer at the moment about his reading there. But Jaffa is writing about Shakespeare, in part, to make a now quite familiar point about the degeneration of modern culture and the collapse of the novelist as moralist. I think it’s telling that he appears to have failed to grasp the modern half of the equation.
5 responses so far ↓
1 David // Mar 5, 2008 at 1:45 pm
From Camus’ preface:
” I summarized The Stranger a long time ago, with a remark I admit was highly paradoxical: ‘In our society any man who does not weep at his mother’s funeral runs the risk of being sentenced to death.’ I only meant that the hero of my book is condemmed [sic] because he does not play the game. In this respect, he is foreign to the society in which he lives; he wanders, on the fringe, in the suburbs of private, solitary, sensual life. And this is why some readers have been tempted to look upon him as a piece of social wreckage. A much more accurate idea of the character, or, at least one much closer to the author’s intentions, will emerge if one asks just how Meursault doesn’t play the game. The reply is a simple one; he refuses to lie. To lie is not only to say what isn’t true. It is also and above all, to say more than is true, and, as far as the human heart is concerned, to express more than one feels. This is what we all do, every day, to simplify life. He says what he is, he refuses to hide his feelings, and immediately society feels threatened. He is asked, for example, to say that he regrets his crime, in the approved manner. He replies that what he feels is annoyance rather than real regret. And this shade of meaning condems [sic] him.
For me, therefore, Meursault is not a piece of social wreckage, but a poor and naked man enamored of a sun that leaves no shadows. Far from being bereft of all feeling, he is animated by a passion that is deep because it is stubborn, a passion for the absolute and for truth. This truth is still a negative one, the truth of what we are and what we feel, but without it no conquest of ourselves or of the world will ever be possible.
One would therefore not be much mistaken to read The Stranger as the story of a man who, without any heroics, agrees to die for the truth. I also happen to say, again paradoxically, that I had tried to draw in my character the only Christ we deserve. It will be understood, after my explanations, that I said this with no blasphemous intent, and only with the slightly ironic affection an artist has the right to feel for the characters he has created.”
http://www3.baylor.edu/~Scott_Moore/Contemp_Philosophy/Stranger_Preface.html
2 David // Mar 5, 2008 at 2:07 pm
So, wouldn’t it be safe to say that Camus sees something to admire in Meursault–his passion for truthfulness and the absolute?
However, I think you’re right that Camus’s own values and ethics go well beyond (in a positive direction) those of his character.
3 Julian Sanchez // Mar 5, 2008 at 2:19 pm
Right, look, there are obviously ways in which Meursault’s detachment imbues him with a certain sort of authenticity — given what he is, he is honest about it. In that sense, in particular in the second half of the book, Meurseault serves as a vehicle for a critique of social hypocrisy. But Camus’ preface has to be understood as a response to a particular species of misreading of the character–as though the problem with him were just poor socialization. I think the preface has to be read in that fairly limited context. To regard him as an admirable figure *on the whole* really requires both torturing the text and ignoring everything else we know about how Camus thought.
4 Julian Sanchez // Mar 5, 2008 at 2:24 pm
But yes, re: your second post, I think it’s surely accurate to say that, by building a character who’s more the articulation of a particular concept than a fully fleshed-out human being, Camus was trying to show us something “admirable” in one fairly narrow way. I just think it’s an error–and a big one–to extrapolate from this and infer that Meurseault is just some kind of free-spirited heroic figure.
5 Franklin Harris // Mar 6, 2008 at 1:04 am
OK, maybe it’s just my latent paleo knee jerking, but I had a hard time just getting over my compulsive snickering at the thought of Claremont having any “classic” essays to publish.
Oh, and I’m very happy to see you have a working RSS feed now. I don’t see anything unless it comes through my LiveJournal friends page. (Yes, this is probably very lame.)