A Note To A Friend On The Ending Of Camus’s The Stranger

Camus’s Afterward:

...A long time ago, I summed up The Outsider in a sentence I realise is extremely paradoxical: `In our society any man who doesn’t cry at his mother’s funeral is liable to be condemned to death.’ I simply meant that the hero of the book is condemned because he doesn’t play the game. In this sense, he is an outsider to the society in which he lives, wandering on the fringe, on the outskirts of life, solitary and sensual. And for that reason, some readers have been tempted to regard him as a reject. But to get a more accurate picture of his character, or rather one which conforms more closely to his author’s intentions, you must ask yourself in what way Meursault doesn’t play the game. The answer is simple: he refuses to lie. Lying is not saying what isn’t true. It is also, in fact, especially saying more than is true and, in case of the human heart, saying more than one feels. We all do it, every day, to make life simpler. But, contrary to appearances, Meursault doesn’t want to make life simpler. He says what he is, he refuses to hide his feelings and society immediately feels threatened. For example, he is asked to say that he regrets his crime, in time-honoured fashion. He replies that he feels more annoyance about it than true regret. And it is this nuance that condemns him.

So for me Meursault is not a reject, but a poor and naked man, in love with a sun which leaves no shadows. Far from lacking all sensibility, he is driven by a tenacious and therefore profound passion, the passion for an absolute and for truth. The truth is as yet a negative one, a truth born of living and feeling, but without which no triumph over the self or over the world will ever be possible.

So one wouldn’t be far wrong in seeing The Outsider as the story of a man who, without any heroic pretensions, agrees to die for the truth. I also once said, and again paradoxically, that I tried to make my character represent the only Christ that we deserve. It will be understood, after these explanations, that I said it without any intention of blasphemy but simply with the somewhat ironic affection that an artist has a right to feel towards the characters he has created....

The last two paragraphs:

....I had been shouting so much that I’d lost my breath, and just then the jailers rushed in and started trying to release the chaplain from my grip. One of them made as if to strike me. The chaplain quietened them down, then gazed at me for a moment without speaking. I could see tears in his eyes. Then he turned and left the cell.

Once he’d gone, I felt calm again. But all this excitement had exhausted me and I dropped heavily on to my sleeping plank. I must have had a longish sleep, for, when I woke, the stars were shining down on my face. Sounds of the countryside came faintly in, and the cool night air, veined with smells’ of earth and salt, fanned my cheeks. The marvelous peace of the sleepbound summer night flooded through me like a tide. Then, just on the edge of daybreak, I heard a steamer’s siren. People were starting on a voyage to a world which had ceased to concern me forever. Almost for the first time in many months I thought of my mother. And now, it seemed to me, I understood why at her life’s end she had taken on a “fiancé”; why she’d played at making a fresh start. There, too, in that Home where lives were flickering out, the dusk came as a mournful solace. With death so near, Mother must have felt like someone on the brink of freedom, ready to start life all over again. No one, no one in the world had any right to weep for her. And I, too, felt ready to start life all over again. It was as if that great rush of anger had washed me clean, emptied me of hope, and, gazing up at the dark sky spangled with its signs and stars, for the first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe. To feel it so like myself, indeed, so brotherly, made me realize that I’d been happy, and that I was happy still. For all to be accomplished, for me to feel less lonely, all that remained to hope was that on the day of my execution there should be a huge crowd of spectators and that they should greet me with howls of execration...

Me:

You made the point, if I have it right, that in the end Mersault after abject alienation, after his  characteristic“flat affect,” at last exults in being able to feel emotion, feel something, and perhaps (this is me now interpreting you) there’s some kind of personal redemption/vindication for him in that. 

But at the end he says he’s happy, his long sleep cleansing him of his previous anger toward the chaplain. So as I read this, he’s not incapable of emotion or sharp reaction to things. He assaults the chaplain. His assaultive anger seems purgative. Calm descends;  a long sleep follows;  and, as just noted, after it, he’s happy and calm. He has what might be called a parodic, even ironic, epiphany, an anti epiphany. Instead of being in a state of mystical union with God or with the symmetry of the universe, with the oneness of all things, he assimilates himself to the universe’s “benign indifference.” It flows through him, opens his heart, and makes him feel “so brotherly.” But it’s really an anti brotherliness because he feels kinship with no one else but himself:

...To feel it so like myself, indeed, so brotherly, made me realize that I’d been happy, and that I was happy still...

Completing this solipsistic brotherly anti brotherliness, all that remains to perfect it is to have attend at his execution  ...a huge crowd of spectators and that they should greet me with howls of execration...

He has been reborn into sheer negativity:

...And I, too, felt ready to start life all over again. It was as if that great rush of anger had washed me clean, emptied me of hope, and, gazing up at the dark sky spangled with its signs and stars, for the first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe...

His beckoning death is the apotheosis or the heights or the capper of the universe’s benign indifference. His death, death itself, vouches his, our, meaninglessness, the truth that nothing matters. The realization of, his experiencing of, the truth of meaninglessness, is liberating for him. As quoted, he exults in it. 

So why then at the end does he want to feel less lonely—...For all to be accomplished, for me to feel less lonely..—and what exactly is the “all to be accomplished”? Why aren’t his realization—his insight into indifference, and his calmness and joy in that sufficient? Why does his fulfillment require his hope that an execrating crowd will attend his execution? 

My reading of that “hope” is it goes to him wanting to gain vindictive satisfaction in trumping the crowd, in triumphing over it, by being born alive, fulfilled, in death, the opposite of the execrating crowd having its hatred fulfilled by his death:

....With death so near, Mother must have felt like someone on the brink of freedom, ready to start life all over again. No one, no one in the world had any right to weep for her. And I, too, felt ready to start life all over again..

On my reading of his hope, and of these last two paragraphs of the book, what comes primarily forward, at least for me, is not so much Mersault’s finally feeling some emotion, something more than his flat affect—after all, his combative fury with the chaplain is hardly flat affect or emotional deadness—but rather his triumph in understanding meaninglessness, his anti epiphany. 

If so, my previous point remains for me: 

why with that insight does Mersault, as I just noted, need or want to feel less lonely: after all, he is, he says, so happy with his insight into meaninglessness; and 

why does he need the seemingly vindictive pleasure of triumphing over his hoped for execrating crowd; after all, he is at one with the benign indifference of the universe?

The following occur to me as possibilities:

1. These last two paragraphs collapse into incoherence.

2. The ironies are so relentless that  they circle back on themselves. So, Camus intentionally subverts what he seems to describe of Mersault’s triumphant realization.

3. I’m misreading the ending and either missing something important or erroneously overcomplicating things. 

4. Something else. 

From Camus’s after-note he seems not to have meant to be so ironic as I suggest in 2, though he does say at its end:

.... I tried to make my character represent the only Christ that we deserve. It will be understood, after these explanations, that I said it without any intention of blasphemy but simply with the somewhat *ironic* affection that an artist has a right to feel towards the characters he has created...(the asterisk are mine)

I interpret that to mean that Mersault, Christ like, sacrifices his life to be true to the truth:   

...he refuses to lie. Lying is not saying what isn’t true. It is also, in fact, especially saying more than is true and, in case of the human heart, saying more than one feels. We all do it, every day, to make life simpler. But, contrary to appearances, Meursault doesn’t want to make life simpler. He says what he is, he refuses to hide his feelings and society immediately feels threatened. For example, he is asked to say that he regrets his crime, in time-honoured fashion. He replies that he feels more annoyance about it than true regret. And it is this nuance that condemns him...

....So one wouldn’t be far wrong in seeing The Outsider as the story of a man who, without any heroic pretensions, agrees to die for the truth....

But, finally, these comments, as I read them and the last two paragraphs of the book, belie Mersault’s final need to feel less lonely and to want to triumph vindictively and with self-vindication over the hateful crowd. Camus’s after-note  confers dignity and integrity on Mersault. And yet, it’s reasonably inferable that he reciprocally hates the haters. So at the very end there exists in him some degree of spiteful pettiness. And at the end that degree of spiteful pettiness is unlovely and all too human. It is inconsistent with his calm, happy, brotherly, unifying  feeling derived by him from his anti epiphany. 

To A Movie Reviewer Who Shall Go Nameless, A Note On Wicks

Dear ....

Honestly, I don’t get it.

You’re a smart, educated, enlightened guy; how can you expend any energy on this crap, unless it’s simply a job necessity?

Not being paid to review anything, I’m free to swing wilder.

I saw 1 and thought it was terrible, just a blood soaked, violent flick with an attempt to hip it itself up by winking at itself—a massive cop out—and saying in effect, “It’s only make believe,” as Conway Twitty sang. With nothing redeeming about 1, it’s basically porn, just fetishizing something different than sex. 

So I watched 2 out of curiosity and in the thought that maybe I missed something in 1. I didn’t: as the old Jewish joke, adapted, has it, “I can say one thing good about 1: 2 is worse.” Even what story there is 1, essentially pretext for the violence, as in all porn, is diminished to virtually a 0 in 2. And the violence-caused-blood soaked-running water filling the cinematic bath tub spills over the tub’s walls and splays and splashes everywhere leaving only a bloody mess.

I won’t watch 3 unless my curiosity kills the cat of my resistance. 

But even if I do, 1, 2 and 3 contribute to our increasing moronism, desensitization, vulgarity and steeply declining seriousness. You’re none of these and have none of any these in you, which, apart from job demands, makes your expending better-spent-elsewhere energy on this all the more puzzling.

Sincerely, 

Two Tweets On The Awful Movie Long Shot

Actually just saw it.

Story is so contrived so as to be a cartoon. 

1 1/2 out of 5 is generous.

And Rogen is awful in it.

It’s an unconvincing stinker. 1/2

______

No believable chemistry, though the premise is conceivable. 

Rogen, who is always mostly irritating, noisy bluster, and Theron, who acted here by rote, had no heat and conveyed no sense of reality as opposed to high concepts dressed up in human bodies.

A waste of 2 hours. 2/2

_____________________

Pulling The Pin Out Of Intersectionality, Whiteness, White Fragility Etc.

On pulling the idea of “systemic” aka “structural” out of the foundational premises of intersectionality, whiteness, white fragility, the social justice of the SJWs, and all other like theories, their entire edifices, the whole of their analyses, fall to being at best partial insights.

More Notes On Notes On A Draft Paper On The New Criticism

More further to the immediately below post: my friend’s response and my reply:

Friend:

Thanks.

Yes, I do expand and should make that clear.  My general category is deep interpretation, ie that there is something deeper than the story or emotional/though progression/development in the poem.  

Dead right about the final bit.  It should be "the illusion of a unified beauty, truth and goodness."

Third:  We disagree.  I think the dramatic moment and movement usually disappears is the pattern.  It was common to read in reviews of books that offered interpretations that the big thesis or theses were no big deal, but along the way there were very good accounts of lines or scenes.  And I found that too.  I said that in one draft, it may have gone in this one.  

The great accounts of poems just go from beginning to end tracing the drama.  No theme.  Of course the poems deal with common occasions, eg the death of a child, the murder of a loved on out of jealousy, but those are not themes which are more or less hidden from non-trained readers.  

We disagree on Abrams, perhaps the best scholar-critic of his time.  It is a brilliant brief account of a common procedure.  In every "analysis" The Well-Wrought Urn the poem boils down to two opposed attitudes being in ironic tension, again and again and again.  The vast dramatic differences, a man responding to an urn or a London dawn, are submerged in that ironic tension which is the organizing principle from start to finish.  

Kernan is also a very fine critic and did much better but when writing for students in an intro he fell back on the binary order beneath the temporal drama.  Take a look at Abrams' essay "Five Types of Lycidas" (i'll give you the ref if you want to bother) for a developed form of his critique.  

You are right when it comes to short stretches of reading, then the interpreters often attend to the moment and what's going on, but when they tackle the whole poem and want to have a summary statement they fall into allegory.  

By the way, Hegel did this first with Antigone by saying it was really a conflict between two equally valid moral principles.  One can re-tell a story or poem vividly, thus capturing the drama, but it is very hard to do at any length.  I know of very few examples.  There are good insights strewn all over but what made new criticism, or deep interpretation, successful in an academic context was its claim to reveal things (deep themes) that earlier commentators did not see.  Abrams in Five Types shows that in fact readers have always understood the poems.  The example I give with the In  Memoriam quote is the clincher for me.  We all know just what it means (or is, a lament that move from despair to hope)  so we have to talk about other things.  New critics claimed other had missed the meaning.  

Very fine criticisms and much appreciated and they will lead to changes.  

Thanks a heap, 

Me: 

I’m not going to get into it all with you since we’ve been back and forth any number of times. So, I’ll say that while the notion of NC (New Criticism) as complex unity via theme is wonderfully paradoxical, all to the good, pointedly succinct yet explosively expansive to take the NC past lyric poetry, it’s off kilter, like a side wind, to say it goes to “something deeper” than the story or the emotional progression through it. 

As argued these are the necessary conditions for what constitutes theme and it would be well if you gave theme in your paper a fighting chance and didn’t reduce what it is as a NC critical apogee to the silliness of Kerman calling Othello a morality play or to Abrams’s distorted version of what NC does with plays. 

If you can give the best arguments for and version of theme and then try to attack them with better arguments, then that would be a boon to your paper. 

For example, to try to specify what a longer work is about, to try to arrive at a general statement that captures its essence is hardly allegorizing, any more than the effort to sum up the historical evidence, or any hypothesis that seeks to account for a set of data, by way of a theory as to cause(s) is allegorizing. That way of describing these academic efforts are both unjust to them and misshape the idea of allegory. These theses don’t symbolize or stand for something else, free standing and discrete in themselves yet one to one symbolic, a crawling king snake as evil or as penis. Rather they have an existence only in relation in trying to explain what they sum up.

And one thing to heed in your paper are the first few words of your first quote from Frye when he speaks “academic criticism.” Your attack on the NC might want to distinguish between reviews and formal literary criticism and you might want more concretely to wrestle with the implications in saying you’ve used an approach to literature that falsifies and distorts it’s nature. There’s an implication of bad faith in that admission. Insofar as it’s not set aside by a persuasive justification, you let yourself off the hook of that implication too easily. 

That’s to me why the three crude examples of responding to the poem, mid paper, which you surprisingly say—perhaps to shock or be contrarian for its own sake—are “perfectly reasonable” seem adduced and commented upon by you in a vacuum. 

You’d, I think, want to specify the context of those reactions: they’d be laughed out of any *academically* meaningful discussion of poetry—say what goes in most college or even high school classrooms. 

So again, taking stock of “academic criticism,” its whys and wherefores, would shore up the structure of your paper, the context of “perfectly reasonable,” and could provide the beginning of an answer to the *apparent* bad faith implications of teaching by a critical method that, on your argument, wounds literature rather severely. 

Some Notes On A Draft Essay Titled Two And Half Cheers For The New Criticism

What follows are some notes given to my friend who authored the above referred to essay. As it’s in draft form, I can’t reproduce it, but I’m confident that my comments will make fairly clear what I’m responding to.

Here it is:

I just read your paper. I assume it’s a draft to be edited. I have so many marginal notes that they needed their own margins for notes on notes.

I don’t know what you want me to say about it, if anything. But I’ll make a few broad points.

I liked the history of ideas part of your paper, what set of considerations and pressures led to the New Criticism (NC) as a temporary academic mainstay.

I made an initial note about distinguishing among genres and noting that the NC typically applies to poetry. But part way through it struck me that really you have a trans-genre conception of it, which you most concisely state at the outset: “unified complexity” via “theme.” That definition takes the NC beyond its usual range of shorter poems and expands it to apply to all literature. That, if I’m right about it, might be made more clear. 

Overall, I find the argument of your paper somewhat confusing. “Two and a half cheers” suggests to me, with the resonance of the phrase “two cheers for democracy”—you give NC an extra half cheer—slightly muted enthusiasm for it, slightly since we’re only half a cheer away from muting the muting. I understand the paradox forming the spine of your argument: NC distorts, even falsifies, the nature of literature but it’s an invaluable pedagogical tool. But this paradox belies your titular fraction of two and a half. For even as NC is quite handy for teaching literature, can its distortion and falsification earn a score of 83.333%?

Of course this is only a playful quibble. More seriously, the NC in its distortion and falsification of the nature of literature comes in for quite a drubbing throughout the bulk of your paper. But on the last page, in the last few paragraphs you give it an encomium that drives against, and is hard to put together with, that drubbing. You write, “Futher, new criticism not only gives us the deep truth about works of art, but cognitive meaning, and finally beauty.” That startles me given what comes before knocking the NC. I thought to myself and noted, “Where does this come from. It subverts, or at least cuts against, the preceding argument.” If there’s some resolution of this tension, I’m not seeing it.

Overall, as well, I find the critique of the NC unsatisfying and unpersuasive. For example, you quote Alvin Kerman confessing his allegorical interpretation of Othello: his view of it descends to it being,

...a conflict between barbarism and civilization: "In some ways I have schematized Othello as just such a morality play, offering an allegorical journey between heaven and hell on a stage filled with purely symbolic figures."...

Who reasonably intelligent, besides someone caught in a reductive notion of the NC, would speak about Othello this way in interpreting it? To do so is both bad criticism and isn’t compelled by the NC.

Another example that gets closer to heart of things and impales you, I’d argue, on a contradiction is this by Meyer Abrams:

...The usual strategy of the imagist critic is to pull out a selection of such items and to set them up in an order which is largely independent of who utters them, on what occasion, and for what dramatic purpose. Freed from the control imposed by their specific verbal and dramatic contexts, the selected images readily send out shoots and tendrils of significance, which can be twined into a symbolic pattern---and if the critic is sensitive, learned, and adroit, often a very interesting pattern. The danger is, that the pattern may be largely an artifact of the implicit scheme governing the critical analysis...

Briefly, who’s to say that that’s “the usual strategy”? Asking roughly the same question just put to Kerman, why would anyone extract quotes denuded of dramatic context, independent of who says them, of their dramatic occasion and of their dramatic purpose? It’s utter foolishness to do so and the NC needn’t compel it. 

In that, here’s the contradiction: if, as you define it, the NC is the elucidation of complex unity via theme such that it’s trans-genre and ranges past shorter poetry to apply to all literary genres, then why can’t that unity be in part comprised by analyzing the selected quotes in their dramatic context, by who says them, by why they’re said, which is to say, what occasions them, and by their dramatic purpose? Your expansive notion of the NC would be missing vital literary components if critics didn’t attend to what Abrams dismisses out of hand. 

Given your paper, I could multiply the examples of what I see as inadequately dealing with the NC, but I’ve just given you the flavor of what they’d taste like.

Finally, for these few notes, I have a big problem with the/your conception of interpretation by way of the NC, or perhaps necessarily in the nature of literary criticism, being allegorical. I understand the point of a necessary tension in reading old works with current eyes. The characterization of interpretation as allegorical seems misconceived. 

Allegory is a symbolic structure wherein X throughout means or stands for Y, pretty well one on one. While an interpretation might conclude X stands for Y if that reading emerges from the text, the first step in interpretation is to understand what X means, and what it means may or may not be referable to Y. 

So if we say Othello is marked by jealousy, or that indeterminacy is of Hamlet’s essence, or that Huck is one kind of morally discerning kid about race on the raft but more conventional about it off the raft, then we are starting to come to critical and, so, interpretive, terms with who they are. And regardless of the distance between the time of those works and now, allegorizing is a severe misnomer for what we’re doing.

Anyway, I could go on but enough is enough I’m sure. As I have to run to an appointment, I’m sending you this as just written and not reread. So please excuse what doubtless are many errors grammatical, typographical, substantive and otherwise.

No Real Difference Between Sympathy And Empathy

First, this  on empathy.

Next:  Don:

This stuff re empathy is bullshit. 

Hume got it right.

Some say the word 'empathy' entered the language in the 20thC, and one linguist says it was in 1850. In any case Hume's word was 'sympathy'.  Hume declared, absolutely correctly, that the greater the distance of one person or group of persons from another, the weaker the sympathies. 

There are three kind of "distance" according to Hume, temporal distance, spatial distance, and a complex of differences Hume does not give a name to which can be called ethno-cultural differences. 

Hume says that sympathy is a lively impression, not tepid. Nobody today feels sympathy with the tens of millions massacred by the hordes of Genghis Khaen. Most of us think that what happened was terrible, and let go at that. The combination of distances in this case prevents the rise of the lively impression of sympathy, and no degree of tub-thumping hustling by psychologists can change that.

Today, the most important kind of distance between people is ethno-cultural distance, and I don't care how many woo woo compulsory brain washing sessions on 'inclusivness' are inflicted on people, it won’t wash.

Ethno-cultural distances are intractable. Something else is needed and I haven't a clue as to what it might be, and neither do the empathy peddlers.The distances are too great.

Last: Me:

Don, I understand how sympathy and empathy are typically differentiated, the first caring, concern and sadness for a bad thing that has happened to someone, the latter putting one’s self in the place or shoes of that other person such that “you feel their pain.” But I’ve always thought that really, drilled down, there is no difference and what we have rather is varying degrees of sympathy. 

For at least two reasons:

1. How can we be sympathetic unless we understand what the other person is going through and in that understanding register to some degree how that bad experience might affect us, which is the definition of empathy? 

2. And add to that this: we are all discrete individuals; we can never become, so to speak, “one” with another, never get past the boundary of our own subjectivity. So empathy’s feeling what another feels is in principle, I would think, misplaced concreteness, a kind of reification, a metaphor for close feelings or strong sympathy, taken mistakenly as something factually so.