Discursive and Unproductive

The Stranger is not so much a novel as a philosophy textbook. Early on, it seems to have plot and narrative structure, but by the second part, Camus drops all pretense of that, shifts the tone radically, and asks over and over again, in the most unsubtle way he can, the same tired questions about judgment, purpose, morality, etc. Quite frankly, I'm not interested. The book and the criticism surrounding the book embody everything I hate about "philosophy" as such; the book, short as it is, takes very simple questions and attaches an awkward plot to them, and then the critics whip each other up into new heights of pretention, acting as if the book has thousands of pages' worth of hidden meanings in it and as if it took twelve years of useless study to understand what Camus was saying, and making up new words for the half-baked "philosophies" they invent while they're at it.

 Here's what the Stranger says:

1) Absolute morality does not exist

2) Judging the actions of those on a different moral "plane" than us/those with a different system of values is futile and not fundamentally just

3) Life is absurd/purposeless/whatever

4) There's no reason to follow or not follow societal mores

There we go. I just summarized a good two weeks of class discussion. If I missed any significant points, I apologize. A quick anecdote for each of those points would be more than sufficient to communicate the point; after all, these are all questions that a good chunk of the population has asked themselves already and considered in the necessary depth by the age of 15. They've been done. No one discusses these things except stoners and pseudo-intellectual middle schoolers, because we've all been there. The only context in which we see these questions these days is

A) In jokes (the sled or wagon rides in Calvin and Hobbes)

B) From idiots determined to "blow your mind, man"

Camus wrote this in '42. Existentialism/Absurdism, to the best of my understanding, was in its infancy. The idea that there was no purpose to life and that everything was ridiculous was probably new and shiny (although it must have been considered in private by any number of intelligent people who didn't label themselves "philosophers" or whatever). Perhaps it was worth a book to drive the point home. But I don't think that I gained a single thing from reading The Stranger, other than a new source to quote when I want to do pretentious arguments.

A good example of the type of people who "get" this book-

Listen to that. The guy is literally just recounting the scene from Chapter 6 in his best angsty voice while some OK music plays in the background.

He literally says "I'm The Stranger... Killing an arab" like 4 times. But oh, if you were a Cure fan who'd read Camus, wouldn't you be thrilled that you got it? If you didn't get it at first and then went and read The Stranger, wouldn't you appreciate how intellectual the cure was? I mean, look at all the hidden meanings in that song! See, when he says

I can turn
And walk away
Or I can fire the gun
Staring at the sky
Staring at the sun
Whichever I chose
It amounts to the same
Absolutely nothing

He's recounting what was explained to us in The Stranger, which is that life being absurd and all, the path you take makes no difference in the grand scheme of things, or even to you, since you don't care about how you live or when you die. How complex! That really did need its own song.

Kafka's dreamlike qualities

We talked in class about the "dreamlike" nature of Kafka's prose. The similarity, as we discussed, comes from the fact that in The Metamorphoses, at least, everything seems realistic except for one bizarre change, which everyone accepts unquestioningly. This occurs in dreams as well. Now, the transposition of dreams into waking life is what interests me, because Gregor "awakes FROM troubled dreams to find himself transformed in his bed into a giant cockroach." It's made very clear that this is no dream, and yet, the connection between this... incident and the troubled dreams that he had been having during its occurrence is unmistakable. Was he dreaming about becoming a cockroach and being late to work because of it? Sounds like a dream I'd have. So is The Metamorphoses simply a tale about waking up to find that your dream has crossed into the waking world? I think so. Really, the only thing separating this from being a dream, at this point, is the fact that it's stated (not by Gregor, but by the omniscient narrator) that it is not a dream. What makes it not-a-dream? It's an unheimlich doppelganger of reality in which the fantastic is accepted as the ordinary; the only difference is that it's not occurring in someone's head. Of necessity, then, Gregor should be able to interact with the other humans. But the involvement of others, and their cooperation with dream-logic, means that either they're either figments of his imagination (i.e. dream creations) or else possibly fellow not-dreamers or some such. We're told very clearly that this is not a dream, so even when daddy issues come up in a big way (another sign that one is dreaming) we have to assume that the minds of his compatriots have been changed somehow from normal alert human thought processes to reflect a state of mind identical to that of projections of others that we see in dreams.

Food for thought, I guess.

Why Gregor is totally and inarguably definitely a cockroach

First off, let's throw this talk of entomologists right out. Kafka was an insurance clerk, not an entomologist. He did not study bugs for a living or as a hobby. This talk of domed stomachs is all very sketchy anyways, given the lack of detail in the text and the presumed inability of Gregor to view his stomach with any sort of clarity, being, you know, a freaking cockroach with compound eyes and a neck that doesn't bend and good stuff like that.

Now, put yourself in Kafka's place. He was a city boy, life-long. What arthropod lives in urban areas? That's right, cockroaches. Kafka would have had mucho contact with the buggers, but very little with other kinds of beetle-things. Furthermore, cockroaches belong in Kafkaesque narratives because they're mundane and everyday. A giant cockroach fills us with unease and other Kafkaey emotions, but a big shiny beetle with wings and stuff would actually be kind of cool, and at least a little awe-inspiring. Only a cockroach yields the correct vibe of ridiculousness and bleakness. Cockroaches are repulsive and uninspiring, and beetles aren't either.

Gregor the insect, while he's alienated, is also alienated in a very particular way; everyone accepts him as part of their society, even if he doesn't quite fit in. There's nothing of the exotic or extraordinary here.

That Whirring Sound

What's that? Coming from over there? Oh, that's right! It's Hemingway turning over in his grave. Repeatedly. At great speed.

First they label the man a repressed homosexual. True or not, he can't be happy about that one. Then they go and ban bullfighting in Catalonia. I get it, Catalans, you don't like Spain or Spanish culture. You've got a major stick up your collective ass about the whole occupation thing, and that's cool. But did you really have to do a thing like that- and supposedly for the sake of "animal rights" or whatever? Oh, it's fine to castrate them and raise them in factories by their de-balled thousands so that we can process their flanks into steaks and their anuses into Big Macs, but God forbid that we kill them in a spectacle of monumental cultural significance and awe-inspiring grandeur and dignity. I see it, fundamentally, as a triumph of the feminine over the masculine. Those uxorious Catalans have finally made "civilized" the be-all and end-all. Well, to hell with them, and to hell with the rest of the whiny PETA bastards out to sanitize and civilize and feminize every grand and barbaric triumph of humanity. Now if you'll excuse me, I've got about three hours of youtube bullfighting queued up and an excess of aficion.