quinta-feira, julho 24, 2003
O Caderno Vermelho de Paul Auster
Terminei ontem, dia 28 de Dezembro de 2002, a leitura, que iniciei no mesmo dia, do Caderno Vermelho de Paul Auster. Trata-se de uma obra muito curta, com cerca de uma dezena de pequenas histórias que não chegam a ser contos. O autor afirma ter um caderno vermelho, aliás, somos avisados na orelha, ou melhor, na contracapa, desse facto, onde regista as histórias, que são pretensos acontecimentos pessoais onde o acaso ocupa o papel principal.
Foi o meu primeiro contacto com o chamado mundo "austeriano", que me pareceu "borgiano", devo dizer. Agradou-me particularmente uma dessas histórias, em que um amigo de Auster procura um livro por toda a parte e acaba por encontrá-lo nas mãos de uma jovem, num local inesperado. O final de uma outra história pareceu-me brilhante, ou pelo menos muito ao meu gosto. Trata-se do terceiro capítulo, em que Auster conta a vida incrível de um ex-partisan. Culmina à maneira da grande literatura, com um anti-climax genial. Algo como, não sei como sobreviveu, mas sei que agora é um angariador de seguros em Chicago.
Com a leitura deste livro não me julgo ainda capaz de tecer considerações sérias sobre o autor. Sei, no entanto, que é um escritor muitíssimo conhecido, que vende exorbitantemente e que é aclamado por parte da crítica. Um rapaz que sei também afastado dos horizontes suecos do Nobel, mas que não se trata de nenhum Stephen King.
Temo que para lá caminhe. Gostei da leitura, apesar de tudo. O estilo é directo, de contador de histórias, sem elaborações literárias de maior. Nada de figuras de estilo, nada disso. Linguagem quase jornalística, na primeira pessoa. À maneira de Graham Greene e de outra rapaziada anglo-saxónica.
Em suma, escreve bem, sem floreados nem erudição, nem sequer da pretensa, e conta histórias interessantes. Não será tempo perdido lê-lo.
Terminei ontem, dia 28 de Dezembro de 2002, a leitura, que iniciei no mesmo dia, do Caderno Vermelho de Paul Auster. Trata-se de uma obra muito curta, com cerca de uma dezena de pequenas histórias que não chegam a ser contos. O autor afirma ter um caderno vermelho, aliás, somos avisados na orelha, ou melhor, na contracapa, desse facto, onde regista as histórias, que são pretensos acontecimentos pessoais onde o acaso ocupa o papel principal.
Foi o meu primeiro contacto com o chamado mundo "austeriano", que me pareceu "borgiano", devo dizer. Agradou-me particularmente uma dessas histórias, em que um amigo de Auster procura um livro por toda a parte e acaba por encontrá-lo nas mãos de uma jovem, num local inesperado. O final de uma outra história pareceu-me brilhante, ou pelo menos muito ao meu gosto. Trata-se do terceiro capítulo, em que Auster conta a vida incrível de um ex-partisan. Culmina à maneira da grande literatura, com um anti-climax genial. Algo como, não sei como sobreviveu, mas sei que agora é um angariador de seguros em Chicago.
Com a leitura deste livro não me julgo ainda capaz de tecer considerações sérias sobre o autor. Sei, no entanto, que é um escritor muitíssimo conhecido, que vende exorbitantemente e que é aclamado por parte da crítica. Um rapaz que sei também afastado dos horizontes suecos do Nobel, mas que não se trata de nenhum Stephen King.
Temo que para lá caminhe. Gostei da leitura, apesar de tudo. O estilo é directo, de contador de histórias, sem elaborações literárias de maior. Nada de figuras de estilo, nada disso. Linguagem quase jornalística, na primeira pessoa. À maneira de Graham Greene e de outra rapaziada anglo-saxónica.
Em suma, escreve bem, sem floreados nem erudição, nem sequer da pretensa, e conta histórias interessantes. Não será tempo perdido lê-lo.
Sysnopsis of The Stranger (L'Etranger)By David Mairowitz
Book: Introducing Camus
Protagonist: Meursault
ATTENTION: For those seeking shortcut with the book reports, please consider reading The Stranger. It is only 123 pages long and I promise you, it will be the most rewarding experience of your life. As one of the visitors to my site has kindly reminded me, do get Matthew Ward's version of the The Stranger. Remember, this synopsis is not enough. This should be used as a supplement to the book.
Now to the summary and analysis. . . .
"The title of Camus' classic novel is difficult to render into English because the French word bears the connotations of both 'stranger' and 'foreigner' at the same time, and each of these concepts is at play in the novel. Still, The Stranger is, by far, the only coherent translation. That generations of English (as opposed to American) readers have known this book by the unfortunate title 'The Outsider' is yet another example of misleading translation.
Meursault, the novel's hero, a 'stranger' to the system of Christian morality insofar as he cannot comprehend it, is certainly not an 'outsider', neither consciously choosing to remain 'outside' society nor being rejected by it. On the contrary, Meursault is the perfect model of a young lower-middle-class pied-noir, with an ordinary desk job, and with the ordinary insider's simple taste for watching a banal film, having a drink at the local bar, going to the beach, lying in the sun (his original name, Mersault, is a pun on the French words mer and soleil, sea and sun). He is very much inside the French Algerian colonial scene, living the most ordinary of lives, not at all a social reject and in no way a rebel . . . at least not yet.
After the embarrassment of having to ask his boss for a day off to attend his mother's funeral, Meursault takes the bus to Marengo, about eighty kilometres from Algiers.
At the old-age home ...
Meursault drinks a cup of coffee and smokes a cigarette by the coffin, two innocent gestures which, later, will aid in his downfall. After an all-night vigil in the presence of Maman's 'friends' from the old-age home, Meursault greets the day of hismother's burial with typical Camusian delight at the beauty of Algeria.
'Above the hills separating Marengo from the sea, the sky was bright red. And the wind which came over the hills brought with it the smell of salt.'
Meursault would prefer to go for a walk in this landscape, yet he has little choice but to attend the funeral. Exceptionally, one of the old people is allowed to come to the burial. This is Thomas Perez, a close friend of Madame Meursault, called by the others her 'fiance'. At this point, the punishing sunlight of the countryside begins to make its impact on him.
The return journey to Algiers seems almost a relief to him. Back in Algiers, Meursault decides to go for a swim and runs into an old office acquaintance, Marie Cardona. They go to the beach together . . . . then, in the evening, to see a Fernandel comedy film . . . . and then to bed. The next day, Meursault watches a typical Algiers Sunday roll by from his balcony: trams, moviegoers, football supporters, a scene seemingly full of everyday banality but, in Camus' personal universe, pure delight.
Meursault's thought: another Sunday gone, Maman buried, tomorrow back to work and, really, nothing at all has changed.'
Nothing has changed, nothing will change, as far as Meursault is concerned. His refrain is: 'cela m'est egal." His boss offers him advancement to an office in Paris, but it's all the same to him. In any case:
Meursault: 'You can never change your life, one's as good as another, and anyway, I'm not at all unsatisfied with mine.'
To Marie's suggestion of marriage . . . .
Marie: 'Do you love me?'
Meursault: 'Probably not.'
Marie: 'So why marry me, then?'
Meursault: 'It doesn't make any difference to me.'
Meursault meets his neighbour on the stairs, a banal, chance encounter which will ultimately cost him his life. This is Raymond Sintes, local thug and pimp who asks Meursault to draft a letter for him to his 'girlfriend'. This simple gesture will involve Meursault in a spiral of events over which he has no control, in which he is the leading player and yet a total 'stranger'.
This simple gesture will involve Meursault in a spiral of events over which he has no control, in which he is the leading player and yet a total 'stranger'. Raymond is known for beating up the 'girlfriend' and has already had a scrap with her brother.
Raymond invites Meursault and Marie to spend a day at the seaside with some of his friends. They decide to take the bus. But just in front of a tobacconist's shop, Raymond motioned Meursault to look at a group of Arabs.
Camus, who fought all his life for a just society in which the two communities could live in harmony, was never able to make an Arab come alive in his fiction. Here, the scene is typical: 'They watched us silently, but in their special way, no more or no less than if we were stoned or dead trees." The brother of Raymond's girlfriend' is amongst them.
They take the bus through the suburbs of Algiers . . . . and arrive at the beach-house of Raymond's friend, Masson. Here, Camus makes use of a real incident in his life, which marked him enough to reproduce it as one of the key scenes in L'Etranger. On the strand at Bouisseville near Oran, where the beaches were segregated by mutual unspoken consent, one of Camus' friends had a run-in with a group of Arabs which eventually involved a knife, a cut, a revolver, but no one dead. Camus himself was involved in this macho scene, although not in the fight itself.
Now bandaged up and itching for revenge, Raymond goes back to the beach, followed by Meursault. Only this time, there is a new factor: Raymond's revolver. They find the two Arabs again, one playing a flute, at a small spring behind a huge rock. Raymond thinks of shooting his man (his girlfriend's brother), but Meursault tells him he can only shoot in self-defense if the Arab pulls his knife. Then he takes Raymond's gun, which the sunlight catches, and goes back with him to the beach house.
But now the incredible heat and sunlight becomes major players in the story. Meursault does not re-enter the cabin, but turns back to the beach, although 'to stay or to go it was all the same thing'.
The inexorable logic of the Algerian sun takes over. The sun was starting to burn my cheeks, and I could feel drops of sweat gathering in my eyebrows. It was this burning, which I couldn't stand anymore, that made me move forward. Meursault encounters Raymond's man who pulls a knife in front of Meursault. 'It seemed to me as if the sky split open from one end to the other to rain down fire.' Meursault pulls the trigger. 'Then he fired four more times at the motionless body where the bullets lodged without leaving a trace.'
The second part of L'Etranger is completely taken up with Meursault's arrest, arraignment, incarceration, trial and punishment. The world of justice, the courts, the typical two-facedness of lawyers is one to which the hero of Camus' novel is as much a 'stranger' as is Josef K. in Kafka's The Trial, whose influence is felt here.
Except that, unlike Kafka's K., Meursault doesn't try to understand the meaning of what happens to him. An absurd universe is, above all else, incomprehensible. In Le Mythe de Sisyphe Camus would write: 'A world which can be explained, even through bad reasoning, is a familiar one. On the other had, in a world suddenly devoid of illusion and light, man feels like a stranger.'
Not having chosen a lawyer, Meursault is assigned one by the court. Meursault is informed that his behavior at his mother's funeral has been judged 'insensitive', and that this will undoubtedly count against him at the trial. The lawyer wants to argue that he was upset and held back his natural feelings, but Meursault refuses this line of defense because it isn't true.
Then, with the examining magistrate . . . . Magistrate asks, 'Why did you fire at the body on the ground?' 'Why did you pause between he first and second shot?' Meursault didn't know how to answer so he didn't say anything. He could see the red sand and feel the burning of the sun on his forehead.
He asked if Meursault believed in God. He said no. Magistrate said it was impossible. He said, 'All men believe in God! Do you want my life to be void of meaning?'
With time, Meursault begins to have 'the thoughts of a prisoner'. 'I often thought then that if I had been made to live in the trunk of a dead tree, with nothing else to do but watch the flowering of the sky above my head, I would have grown used to it little by little.' Meursault is even a spectator/stranger at his own trial. He watches the proceedings with great interest, and is amazed at the way the prosecution twists its case, but always as if someone else--and not he--were on trial. During the trial, the prosecutor announces, 'He didn't want to see his mother's corpse. He smoked in the mortuary. He fell asleep. He drank a cafe au lait. Gentlemen of the jury, on the day after his mother's death, this man went for a swim, began an irregular liaison, and laughed at a comic film. I've nothing more to say.' People in the courtroom gasped. Other witnesses stated, 'He didn't cry at his mother's funeral. He didn't know his mother's age. We saw a film with Fernandel.'
Meursault thought, 'For the first time I realized that I was guilty. I rediscovered, one after the other: the cries of the newspaper vendors, the last birds in the park, the call of the sandwich merchants, the screech of the trams, and that buzzing in the air before the night envelops the port . . . . Yes, it was the hour when, a long time ago, I had felt contentment.'
Now begins Meursault's full realization of what has happened to him, the complete objectification of his person through accusation and judgement, which is, after all, the prelude to his execution. Meursault: 'In a certain way, my case was being dealth with as if it didn't concern me. Everything happened without my participation. My fate was being decided without anybody asking my opinion.' The notion of judgement and retribution are foreign to Meursault. When he is asked if he regrets his action, he realized that he never 'regrets' anything. 'I was always busy with what was happening next, today or tomorrow.'
The presiding judge asked me if I had anything to say. I thought about it. I said, 'No.' Meursault is condemned to death by the guillotine, and once again Camus' life-long horror of the death penalty and, in particular, this barbaric French blade from the 18th century, is brought into play. Meursault recounts the author's key trauma of his father witnessing a public execution and being sickened by the sight. Yet his revulsion is not one of outraged non-violence. Meursault thought, 'If I ever get out of this prison, I'll go and watch all public executions.'
He imagines a new penal code in which the condemned man would be killed by a mixture of chemicals, but in which he would still have a minuscule chance of survival. Whereas, with the guillotine, there is not chance whatsoever. If the blade happened to fail, it would just be sharpened and the execution would begin all over again. In this way, the condemned is forced to hope that it works the first time around, a hope which makes him a moral accomplice to his own murder. Which is precisely what is wanted of him: that he consent to his own condemnation, thereby justifying society's need to eliminate him.
Meursault is also fascinated by the sadistic precision of the guillotine, especially the positioning. He is willing to accept the idea of mounting a scaffold, going up towards the sky only to plunge again. But this is not the case.
Meursault is on the road to becoming the Absurd Hero, one who will accept the non-sense of the world which has condemned him not passively, but as a full participant in the brief time left to him. While waiting for his appeal, Meursault begins an 'absurd reasoning' and starts to consider his death. He knows there is not so much difference between dying at thirty or seventy. It's still death and there's nothing afterwards, therefore, he has to --logically--reject his own appeal. At the same time, there is a typical Camusian clinging to life: 'At this point my chain of thought was shaken by the terrible leap I felt in me at the idea of having twenty more years to live.' Suddenly the prison chaplain, whom Meursault has so far refused to see, arrives . . . .
'God will help you.'
'I don't have time to waste on God. I'm guilty. I'm paying for it, nobody can ask any more of me.'
'Your heart is blind I will pray for you.'
'So sure of yourself, are you? None of your certainties is worth one hair of a woman's head!'
Meursault: 'From somewhere deep in my future, throughout the whole of this absurd life I'd lived, a dark wind was moving towards me across the years still to come.'
The calm which comes after this storm of abuse is unlike any other in modern literature. In the final paragraph of L'Etranger, Camus does not 'sum up' his hero's fate, but leads him into a breathtaking vision of new life in the face of death.
'Just at that moment, and at the far end of the night, sirens began to wail. They announced departures for a world which now meant nothing to me.' For the first time in ages, he thinks about Maman and understands why she took on a 'fiance' in her last years and played at beginning all over again. 'Nobody, nobody has the right to cry over her.' And then, purged of his rage and, especially, of all hope . . . .
'I opened myself for the first time to the tender indifference of the world. Finding it so much like myself--so like a brother, really--I felt that I had been happy and that I was happy again. For everything to be consummated, for me to feel less alone, I had only to wish that there be a large crowd of spectators the day of my execution and that they greet me with cries of hate.'
Book: Introducing Camus
Protagonist: Meursault
ATTENTION: For those seeking shortcut with the book reports, please consider reading The Stranger. It is only 123 pages long and I promise you, it will be the most rewarding experience of your life. As one of the visitors to my site has kindly reminded me, do get Matthew Ward's version of the The Stranger. Remember, this synopsis is not enough. This should be used as a supplement to the book.
Now to the summary and analysis. . . .
"The title of Camus' classic novel is difficult to render into English because the French word bears the connotations of both 'stranger' and 'foreigner' at the same time, and each of these concepts is at play in the novel. Still, The Stranger is, by far, the only coherent translation. That generations of English (as opposed to American) readers have known this book by the unfortunate title 'The Outsider' is yet another example of misleading translation.
Meursault, the novel's hero, a 'stranger' to the system of Christian morality insofar as he cannot comprehend it, is certainly not an 'outsider', neither consciously choosing to remain 'outside' society nor being rejected by it. On the contrary, Meursault is the perfect model of a young lower-middle-class pied-noir, with an ordinary desk job, and with the ordinary insider's simple taste for watching a banal film, having a drink at the local bar, going to the beach, lying in the sun (his original name, Mersault, is a pun on the French words mer and soleil, sea and sun). He is very much inside the French Algerian colonial scene, living the most ordinary of lives, not at all a social reject and in no way a rebel . . . at least not yet.
After the embarrassment of having to ask his boss for a day off to attend his mother's funeral, Meursault takes the bus to Marengo, about eighty kilometres from Algiers.
At the old-age home ...
Meursault drinks a cup of coffee and smokes a cigarette by the coffin, two innocent gestures which, later, will aid in his downfall. After an all-night vigil in the presence of Maman's 'friends' from the old-age home, Meursault greets the day of hismother's burial with typical Camusian delight at the beauty of Algeria.
'Above the hills separating Marengo from the sea, the sky was bright red. And the wind which came over the hills brought with it the smell of salt.'
Meursault would prefer to go for a walk in this landscape, yet he has little choice but to attend the funeral. Exceptionally, one of the old people is allowed to come to the burial. This is Thomas Perez, a close friend of Madame Meursault, called by the others her 'fiance'. At this point, the punishing sunlight of the countryside begins to make its impact on him.
The return journey to Algiers seems almost a relief to him. Back in Algiers, Meursault decides to go for a swim and runs into an old office acquaintance, Marie Cardona. They go to the beach together . . . . then, in the evening, to see a Fernandel comedy film . . . . and then to bed. The next day, Meursault watches a typical Algiers Sunday roll by from his balcony: trams, moviegoers, football supporters, a scene seemingly full of everyday banality but, in Camus' personal universe, pure delight.
Meursault's thought: another Sunday gone, Maman buried, tomorrow back to work and, really, nothing at all has changed.'
Nothing has changed, nothing will change, as far as Meursault is concerned. His refrain is: 'cela m'est egal." His boss offers him advancement to an office in Paris, but it's all the same to him. In any case:
Meursault: 'You can never change your life, one's as good as another, and anyway, I'm not at all unsatisfied with mine.'
To Marie's suggestion of marriage . . . .
Marie: 'Do you love me?'
Meursault: 'Probably not.'
Marie: 'So why marry me, then?'
Meursault: 'It doesn't make any difference to me.'
Meursault meets his neighbour on the stairs, a banal, chance encounter which will ultimately cost him his life. This is Raymond Sintes, local thug and pimp who asks Meursault to draft a letter for him to his 'girlfriend'. This simple gesture will involve Meursault in a spiral of events over which he has no control, in which he is the leading player and yet a total 'stranger'.
This simple gesture will involve Meursault in a spiral of events over which he has no control, in which he is the leading player and yet a total 'stranger'. Raymond is known for beating up the 'girlfriend' and has already had a scrap with her brother.
Raymond invites Meursault and Marie to spend a day at the seaside with some of his friends. They decide to take the bus. But just in front of a tobacconist's shop, Raymond motioned Meursault to look at a group of Arabs.
Camus, who fought all his life for a just society in which the two communities could live in harmony, was never able to make an Arab come alive in his fiction. Here, the scene is typical: 'They watched us silently, but in their special way, no more or no less than if we were stoned or dead trees." The brother of Raymond's girlfriend' is amongst them.
They take the bus through the suburbs of Algiers . . . . and arrive at the beach-house of Raymond's friend, Masson. Here, Camus makes use of a real incident in his life, which marked him enough to reproduce it as one of the key scenes in L'Etranger. On the strand at Bouisseville near Oran, where the beaches were segregated by mutual unspoken consent, one of Camus' friends had a run-in with a group of Arabs which eventually involved a knife, a cut, a revolver, but no one dead. Camus himself was involved in this macho scene, although not in the fight itself.
Now bandaged up and itching for revenge, Raymond goes back to the beach, followed by Meursault. Only this time, there is a new factor: Raymond's revolver. They find the two Arabs again, one playing a flute, at a small spring behind a huge rock. Raymond thinks of shooting his man (his girlfriend's brother), but Meursault tells him he can only shoot in self-defense if the Arab pulls his knife. Then he takes Raymond's gun, which the sunlight catches, and goes back with him to the beach house.
But now the incredible heat and sunlight becomes major players in the story. Meursault does not re-enter the cabin, but turns back to the beach, although 'to stay or to go it was all the same thing'.
The inexorable logic of the Algerian sun takes over. The sun was starting to burn my cheeks, and I could feel drops of sweat gathering in my eyebrows. It was this burning, which I couldn't stand anymore, that made me move forward. Meursault encounters Raymond's man who pulls a knife in front of Meursault. 'It seemed to me as if the sky split open from one end to the other to rain down fire.' Meursault pulls the trigger. 'Then he fired four more times at the motionless body where the bullets lodged without leaving a trace.'
The second part of L'Etranger is completely taken up with Meursault's arrest, arraignment, incarceration, trial and punishment. The world of justice, the courts, the typical two-facedness of lawyers is one to which the hero of Camus' novel is as much a 'stranger' as is Josef K. in Kafka's The Trial, whose influence is felt here.
Except that, unlike Kafka's K., Meursault doesn't try to understand the meaning of what happens to him. An absurd universe is, above all else, incomprehensible. In Le Mythe de Sisyphe Camus would write: 'A world which can be explained, even through bad reasoning, is a familiar one. On the other had, in a world suddenly devoid of illusion and light, man feels like a stranger.'
Not having chosen a lawyer, Meursault is assigned one by the court. Meursault is informed that his behavior at his mother's funeral has been judged 'insensitive', and that this will undoubtedly count against him at the trial. The lawyer wants to argue that he was upset and held back his natural feelings, but Meursault refuses this line of defense because it isn't true.
Then, with the examining magistrate . . . . Magistrate asks, 'Why did you fire at the body on the ground?' 'Why did you pause between he first and second shot?' Meursault didn't know how to answer so he didn't say anything. He could see the red sand and feel the burning of the sun on his forehead.
He asked if Meursault believed in God. He said no. Magistrate said it was impossible. He said, 'All men believe in God! Do you want my life to be void of meaning?'
With time, Meursault begins to have 'the thoughts of a prisoner'. 'I often thought then that if I had been made to live in the trunk of a dead tree, with nothing else to do but watch the flowering of the sky above my head, I would have grown used to it little by little.' Meursault is even a spectator/stranger at his own trial. He watches the proceedings with great interest, and is amazed at the way the prosecution twists its case, but always as if someone else--and not he--were on trial. During the trial, the prosecutor announces, 'He didn't want to see his mother's corpse. He smoked in the mortuary. He fell asleep. He drank a cafe au lait. Gentlemen of the jury, on the day after his mother's death, this man went for a swim, began an irregular liaison, and laughed at a comic film. I've nothing more to say.' People in the courtroom gasped. Other witnesses stated, 'He didn't cry at his mother's funeral. He didn't know his mother's age. We saw a film with Fernandel.'
Meursault thought, 'For the first time I realized that I was guilty. I rediscovered, one after the other: the cries of the newspaper vendors, the last birds in the park, the call of the sandwich merchants, the screech of the trams, and that buzzing in the air before the night envelops the port . . . . Yes, it was the hour when, a long time ago, I had felt contentment.'
Now begins Meursault's full realization of what has happened to him, the complete objectification of his person through accusation and judgement, which is, after all, the prelude to his execution. Meursault: 'In a certain way, my case was being dealth with as if it didn't concern me. Everything happened without my participation. My fate was being decided without anybody asking my opinion.' The notion of judgement and retribution are foreign to Meursault. When he is asked if he regrets his action, he realized that he never 'regrets' anything. 'I was always busy with what was happening next, today or tomorrow.'
The presiding judge asked me if I had anything to say. I thought about it. I said, 'No.' Meursault is condemned to death by the guillotine, and once again Camus' life-long horror of the death penalty and, in particular, this barbaric French blade from the 18th century, is brought into play. Meursault recounts the author's key trauma of his father witnessing a public execution and being sickened by the sight. Yet his revulsion is not one of outraged non-violence. Meursault thought, 'If I ever get out of this prison, I'll go and watch all public executions.'
He imagines a new penal code in which the condemned man would be killed by a mixture of chemicals, but in which he would still have a minuscule chance of survival. Whereas, with the guillotine, there is not chance whatsoever. If the blade happened to fail, it would just be sharpened and the execution would begin all over again. In this way, the condemned is forced to hope that it works the first time around, a hope which makes him a moral accomplice to his own murder. Which is precisely what is wanted of him: that he consent to his own condemnation, thereby justifying society's need to eliminate him.
Meursault is also fascinated by the sadistic precision of the guillotine, especially the positioning. He is willing to accept the idea of mounting a scaffold, going up towards the sky only to plunge again. But this is not the case.
Meursault is on the road to becoming the Absurd Hero, one who will accept the non-sense of the world which has condemned him not passively, but as a full participant in the brief time left to him. While waiting for his appeal, Meursault begins an 'absurd reasoning' and starts to consider his death. He knows there is not so much difference between dying at thirty or seventy. It's still death and there's nothing afterwards, therefore, he has to --logically--reject his own appeal. At the same time, there is a typical Camusian clinging to life: 'At this point my chain of thought was shaken by the terrible leap I felt in me at the idea of having twenty more years to live.' Suddenly the prison chaplain, whom Meursault has so far refused to see, arrives . . . .
'God will help you.'
'I don't have time to waste on God. I'm guilty. I'm paying for it, nobody can ask any more of me.'
'Your heart is blind I will pray for you.'
'So sure of yourself, are you? None of your certainties is worth one hair of a woman's head!'
Meursault: 'From somewhere deep in my future, throughout the whole of this absurd life I'd lived, a dark wind was moving towards me across the years still to come.'
The calm which comes after this storm of abuse is unlike any other in modern literature. In the final paragraph of L'Etranger, Camus does not 'sum up' his hero's fate, but leads him into a breathtaking vision of new life in the face of death.
'Just at that moment, and at the far end of the night, sirens began to wail. They announced departures for a world which now meant nothing to me.' For the first time in ages, he thinks about Maman and understands why she took on a 'fiance' in her last years and played at beginning all over again. 'Nobody, nobody has the right to cry over her.' And then, purged of his rage and, especially, of all hope . . . .
'I opened myself for the first time to the tender indifference of the world. Finding it so much like myself--so like a brother, really--I felt that I had been happy and that I was happy again. For everything to be consummated, for me to feel less alone, I had only to wish that there be a large crowd of spectators the day of my execution and that they greet me with cries of hate.'
domingo, julho 20, 2003
“A Morte de Ivan Ilitch” de Leon Tolstoi
É de doença, degeneração e decadência que fala esta novela de Tolstoi. É uma obra assustadora e, até quase ao final, assaz deprimente. Ao assistirmos à decadência de um homem, arrastamo-nos com ele, padecemos dos seus males, tal é a técnica do mestre.
No final dá-se uma transformação do tom, uma nova moral nasce, a redenção daquela alma, a visita do padre que lhe traz o último sacramento, acabam por iluminar finalmente a existência até então postiça e pálida de Ivan.
Afinal, Ivan vivia uma vida insignificante, sem ter conhecido o amor, sem ter conhecido nada sem ser o seu trabalho de funcionário, de pequeno juiz, dono de ainda mais pequeno poder, da sua medíocre jactância, enfim, só com a doença e a avançada degeneração se apercebeu que, talvez fosse a morte a sua maior bênção. O outro Ivan, no entanto, manteve as suas aparições, em alternância, com o apego animal à vida.
No fim sobreveio a revolta, patente na sua afirmação, já moribundo, em que diz à sua família que finalmente se vão ver livres dele. Aqui se desenha o fracasso da sua existência que nem à sua família soube agradar, nem mesmo aos amigos do whist, com quem jogava, salvo o erro, às quintas-feiras. Não lhe sentiram muito a falta. Um deles avantajava-se já na busca pelo seu lugar profissional, aos outros tanto lhes fazia. Só um deles se dignou a interromper a partida para dar um salto ao velório de Ivan Ilitch.
Trata-se de uma obra notável pela intensidade da narrativa, pela riqueza da única personagem trabalhada, o próprio Ivan, riqueza que afinal se revela mediocridade e medo. Um ser humano vulnerável e frágil, um ser humano como tantos outros, como quase todos os outros. Um texto rico porque abrangente, porque representativo, porque muito real.
É de doença, degeneração e decadência que fala esta novela de Tolstoi. É uma obra assustadora e, até quase ao final, assaz deprimente. Ao assistirmos à decadência de um homem, arrastamo-nos com ele, padecemos dos seus males, tal é a técnica do mestre.
No final dá-se uma transformação do tom, uma nova moral nasce, a redenção daquela alma, a visita do padre que lhe traz o último sacramento, acabam por iluminar finalmente a existência até então postiça e pálida de Ivan.
Afinal, Ivan vivia uma vida insignificante, sem ter conhecido o amor, sem ter conhecido nada sem ser o seu trabalho de funcionário, de pequeno juiz, dono de ainda mais pequeno poder, da sua medíocre jactância, enfim, só com a doença e a avançada degeneração se apercebeu que, talvez fosse a morte a sua maior bênção. O outro Ivan, no entanto, manteve as suas aparições, em alternância, com o apego animal à vida.
No fim sobreveio a revolta, patente na sua afirmação, já moribundo, em que diz à sua família que finalmente se vão ver livres dele. Aqui se desenha o fracasso da sua existência que nem à sua família soube agradar, nem mesmo aos amigos do whist, com quem jogava, salvo o erro, às quintas-feiras. Não lhe sentiram muito a falta. Um deles avantajava-se já na busca pelo seu lugar profissional, aos outros tanto lhes fazia. Só um deles se dignou a interromper a partida para dar um salto ao velório de Ivan Ilitch.
Trata-se de uma obra notável pela intensidade da narrativa, pela riqueza da única personagem trabalhada, o próprio Ivan, riqueza que afinal se revela mediocridade e medo. Um ser humano vulnerável e frágil, um ser humano como tantos outros, como quase todos os outros. Um texto rico porque abrangente, porque representativo, porque muito real.
