Today my mother died, maybe yesterday I don't know, I received a telegram from the nursing home saying, mother died, tomorrow buried, special notice. This doesn't mean anything, it could have died yesterday.
As one of the beginnings of the novel's classics, the first sentence of "The Outsider" shocked all readers, laid the soul of the whole book, and was even basically recognized as the concentrated embodiment of Camus's spirit.
This seemingly indifferent sentence is incompatible with the accepted morality, but it is the "absurdity" that Camus has always meant and emphasized: when people survive in the face of difficult and mechanical reality, they have to survive according to a rhythm and mode of life every day, which inevitably produces the absurdity of why I live this way, why I can't live in other ways, but people can't live in other ways, and they must also live in the way people live now.
This is where Camus's sense of absurdity comes from. To understand Camus's absurdity, let's first look at his most representative absurd novel, The Outsider.
The outsider's protagonist, Mermolso, an unmarried man in his 30s, works as a clerk in a small company, the only mother of relatives, and lives in a nursing home.
One day, Meursault received a telegram from a nursing home informing him that his mother had died. He went to the funeral, but while he was guarding the spirit, he smoked, drank coffee, talked to people, and fell asleep.
He did not know his mother's specific age, and he rejected the offer to see her last time. Throughout the funeral, he did not cry and did not show any sad emotion on his face.
The day after the funeral, Meursault went swimming with his new girlfriend and watched comedy movies, and the two of them looked at me as if nothing had happened.
The girlfriend offered to marry him, and he felt that it was okay to tie the knot or not, and if the girlfriend wanted to get married, then get married. The girlfriend asked him if he loved himself, and he said very sincerely "no love".
An neighbor invited Meursault to his house for a drink, and he gladly went. The neighbor wants to make friends with him, and he thinks it doesn't matter if he makes friends or not, whatever. The neighbor clashed with someone else and asked Meursault to be a witness, and he agreed.
At the seaside, neighbors and several Arabs met, and the two sides fought. Meursault, feeling that the Arabs were going to attack him, took the lead in shooting and killing the other side.
Stills from The Outsider
In court, Meursault was accused of being ruthless and planning a premeditated murder.
The reason is that he did not cry at his mother's funeral and did not show any sad emotions.
Meursault's defense lawyer wanted him to give a reasonable explanation for his indifference at his mother's funeral in order to get his sentence commuted.
Unexpectedly, Meursault refused completely, saying that if he explained, he would be telling a lie.
The lawyer was so angry that he tried to make him repent in the name of God, but Meursault again refused, he refused to be inspired by God.
While the lawyer and the presiding judge argued over Meursault's actions, Meursault seemed to be the one who was out of his place, watching it all as if he had nothing to do, and didn't bother to defend himself.
In the end, Meursault calmly walked to the guillotine and ended his life as an outsider.
Is it that Meursault can't understand the universal laws of this society? Not really. Meursault was simply fulfilling his view of life: life is alive and should never be acted off.
Meursault did not love his mother, he did not cry at the funeral because he was tired and sleepy that day, he felt that everyone was going to die sooner or later, the death of his mother was already a fact, life still had to go on, formal condolences did not have any substantial comfort.
Meursault has always treated family affection, love and life and death with an absolutely true attitude, and he insists on not succumbing to social norms, and has his own absolute and pure rules of doing things.
However, in the eyes of judges and others, Meursault's performance was contrary to human morality. The absence of crying at his mother's funeral became the basis for Meursault's crime. When Meursault's lawyer asked the judge, "Is he accusing him of burying his mother, or is he accusing him of killing someone?" At that time, the judge said, "I accuse this man of burying his mother with the mentality of a murderer." ”
This sounds ridiculous and absurd, the judge's conviction is not based on the facts of the crime, but on the moral motive, satisfying people's desire for moral judgment, but ignoring the real existence.
Wang Xiaobo wrote in "Controversy and Morality": "If you don't feel good after watching a good movie, you are not good enough." If you don't feel bad after watching a bad movie, you become a bad guy. ”
When you insist on your true opinion and contradict the public perception at the time, you are the one who does not fit in. When you face the moral judgment of the masses, will you still insist on your own truth?
Speaking of which, we have to mention another of Camus's works, The Myth of Sisyphus.
Sisyphus was a half-man, half-god who had sinned against the gods by revealing the truth to mankind. The gods punished him by pushing the boulder to the top of the mountain.
However, every time he pushes the boulder to the top of the mountain with all his strength, the boulder will quickly slide off the top of the mountain and roll back to the bottom. Sisyphus had to go back down, pushing the boulder towards the top of the mountain again. In this way, he fell into a never-ending cycle, doing the same thing all his life - pushing stones.
Sisyphus was doing something absurd, but he didn't give up, and he spent his whole life fighting against his fate. In a way, Meursault and Sisyver among outsiders are the same kind of people, and Meursault, although very ordinary, is still a "hero".
At the end of The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus writes:
"I left Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain, and we always saw the burden on him, and Sisyphus told us that the highest piety was to deny the gods and remove the stones, and he also thought he was happy. The world that has not been dominated since then is neither desert nor fertile land for him. Every particle on this boulder, every ore on this black and oily mountain, formed a world only for Sisyphus. The struggle he had to fight to climb to the top of the mountain was in itself enough to fill a man's heart. Sisyphus should be considered happy. ”
People laugh at me for being crazy, and I laugh at others who can't see through it. In a crowd of people, Meursault was the most sober one, refusing to put on all kinds of false masks and live uniquely in real emotions.
Camus
Camus's works mostly present a sense of absurdity, which is to oppose reality with absurdity, so he is also known as the representative writer of absurdism.
But Camus's work, though absurd, always reveals a sense of hope that the overall tone is positive.
Camus himself was born into poverty, his father died early, and his brother dropped out of school early to work. Thanks to the help of his elementary school teachers, he was able to complete his studies until he graduated from university.
Camus was clear but not sad about the poverty of his family. On the contrary, the joy of his childhood was not affected by poverty.
He once said:
"First of all, poverty has never been a pain for me. To correct the insensitivity that nature produces, I place myself between poverty and sunshine, which makes me compelled to believe that under the sun, in the long river of history, everything is good, and that history is not everything. ”
Precisely because he could see the sun in poverty, Camus could always detect the flickering points in this absurd world. He pays attention to human nature and fights against the irrationality of the world, always trying to break through something and save people from fire and destruction. As the Nobel Prize in Literature in October 1957 said to him, "Because of his outstanding literary works, he has elucidated the questions that the present age poses to the conscience of mankind."
Camus spent most of his life fighting against the absurd side of the world, and even his death can be called an absurdity. Perhaps this is his mission in this world, as he himself said: the nobility of the writer's profession is forever rooted in two difficult interventions, rejecting lies and resisting persecution.
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