The Weekly, February 12, 2024
Hi all,
I've always been struck by an odd trajectory in the novels of Albert Camus. I started reading Camus in high school and have been coming back to him off and on ever since. I've always loved him. What sets him apart, I think, is that there's a visceral struggling with the moral life and the apparent absurdity of 20th century life that has always felt far more genuine to me than that of any other French existentialist. Sartre, in the words of an old professor of mine, was really just "such a little shit." He did enough drugs to kill a horse, as Robin Williams's Good Will Hunting character would say. He quite possibly lifted a number of ideas from his longtime partner Simone de Beauvoir without giving her credit (that the noted feminist de Beauvoir let him do that is itself an interesting little puzzle), and he and Beauvoir made something of a game of seducing the young students who threw themselves at them. He was a fairly awful man. Camus was something different.
Anyway: Camus begins as a young man with The Stranger. He's in his late 20s when he writes that one, still finding his way in life really (he had dreamt of being a footballer prior to some health issues derailed that pursuit), and the novel has a certain raw and jaded quality about it that doesn't really feel like a thing that anyone can live with for too long. Everything is bleak and meaningless and it's all just one big abyss, basically. There's more to it than just this, but as a summary you could do worse than this song from The Cure:
(In itself it is perhaps telling of the novel's themes and relative lack of depth that it can be so easily picked up by a band like The Cure.)
Next comes The Plague, which experienced a mini revival of sorts during the pandemic. What elevates The Plague is that Camus recognizes that one can't live purely as if the world is absurd and meaningless and life is little more than all of us just negotiating our relationship with nothingness. There is still suffering in the world, and humans can still choose to live in ways that reduce suffering. Is there hope of final triumph? Not really. But that doesn't matter. As Camus famously says in one of his essays, "we must picture Sisyphus smiling." The task of doing good in the world might be absurd and offer no hope of enduring success. But we should still do good anyway.
His least known novel is his final one, The Fall. And yet it's always been my favorite: Some of my fondness for it is its unique quality as a novel written in the second person. That's a hard literary task to pull off but Camus does it. But there's also an honesty to the book. The narrator is a "judge-penitent" by which he means that he meets strangers in bars, confesses his sins to them (the penitent part) but that he does it in a way that implicates everyone (thus the judge bit). Significantly, because he confesses in this way, he effectively establishes himself as a power over others because in his confessions he already implicates himself, but he also implicates his listeners—who do not yet themselves have the honesty to do as he does. So it is precisely in his confession of his own faults that Camus's narrator lifts himself up over others.
You can see a striking trajectory in the works, beginning with the nihilism of The Stranger and culminating in attempt to actually deal with interior moral dynamics in The Fall. Even so, Camus's relationship to sin and confession in his final novel is still quite a ways off from Christianity. And it is off in ways that I suspect make the world even more unlivable and bleak than the world of The Stranger.
I'm likely going to be coming back to Camus for the foreseeable future. I'm prepping some notes on Christian leadership in a therapeutic age ahead of my DC trip in a few weeks and I suspect some of those notes are likely to make their way into the book I'm doing now for IVP. And at the center of these notes, I expect, will be that marvelous Franco-Algerian writer who has been on my mind to varying degrees for 20 years now.
Reading
Books
I got an advance copy of David Bahnsen's book on work, which I'm excited to dip into. I'm also going through some Christopher Lasch ahead of my DC trip. I'm also re-reading Camus, as mentioned above.
Articles
Tyler Austin Harper on polyamory
John Ehrett on Christendom after Comcast
John Caramanica on the end of Tiktok
Andrew Wilson on courageous pastors
Michael Sacasas on Vision Pro
Adam Kotsko on how his students can't read anymore
Derek Rishmawy on rights and reality
Elsewhere
I'm getting this scheduled late, so no further notes this week. Thanks for reading!
Under the Mercy,
~Jake