More frequently than I’d like to admit, I find myself completely overlooking the (or a) meaning of something – a book I’ve read, a movie or drawing I’ve seen – until someone explicitly points it out to me,
The Stranger by Camus and The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry are two such books, both of which I think highly of, both of which I thought I knew well, and both of which, a few years after I read them, and only when someone explicitly pointed it out, I learnt were about something I hadn’t realized.
The Little Prince
The Little Prince is, in some ways, quite a cheesy book, perhaps a reason for its popularity. Cheesy in the sense of revolving around themes that, while pleasing, are arguably hackneyed. The supposedly nostalgic innocence of childhood, the allegedly corrupt superficiality of adulthood and loss of the former innocence. To say that that is all it’s about though, I think, would be a superficial reading.
I’d written about The Little Prince once, although that was an idiosyncratic reading of the book – but then you might say that about any reading. What it is also about, although not mentioned explicitly, is abstraction. And though it seems at first glance strange to connect what is apparently a children’s book to a topic like abstraction, a beautiful essay by Adam Gopnik in the New Yorker describes the relation, linking, in fact, both these authors, Camus and Saint-Exupéry.
The “Petit Prince” is a war story in a very literal sense, too… Saint-Exupéry’s sense of shame and confusion at the devastation (France’s defeat in WW2) led him to make a fable of abstract ideas set against specific loves… In this enterprise, he sang in unconscious harmony with the other great poets of the war’s loss… Albert Camus, who also took from the war the need to engage in a perpetual battle “between each man’s happiness and the illness of abstraction,” meaning the act of distancing real emotion from normal life.
The illness of abstraction, the tendency – I can’t speak for others, but I’m sure I’m not nearly unique – to generalize away specific details of the actual thing, into pretty theoretical models, is, without doubt, useful for thinking, but comes with its costs.
Searching for the causes of that collapse, the most honest honorable minds—Marc Bloch and Camus among them—thought that the real fault lay in the French habit of abstraction. The French tradition that moved, and still moves, pragmatic questions about specific instances into a parallel paper universe in which the general theoretical question—the model—is what matters most had failed its makers… a more humane response was to engage in a ceaseless battle against all those abstractions that keep us from life as it is.
Abstraction brings the “distancing of emotion from normal life”, which “keeps us from life as it is”, for it turns what is – the territory – into the model, that is the map. But the map is not the territory, and yet “the map appears to us more real than the land”.
From an experience that was so dehumanizing and overwhelming—an experience that turns an entire human being with a complicated life history and destiny first into a cipher and then into a casualty—Saint-Exupéry wanted to rescue the person, not the statistic. The statistics could be any of those the men on the planets are obsessed with, the ‘counting’ fetish that might take in stars if one is an astronomer or profits for businessmen…The men the Prince meets on his journey to Earth are all men who have, in Bloch’s sense, been reduced to functions. The Businessman, the Astronomer, even the poor Lamplighter, have become their occupations, and gone blind to the stars.
In this reading, it is not simply greed or desire that Saint-Exupéry illustrates, but the ‘accumulation’ fetish, which, though closely related to and probably comprising greed, is, I think, also different. It is the fetish of abstraction, of targets and numbers and statistics, the fetish where an astrologer sees only a number instead of a star, a businessman only a statistic instead of notes, a performer only the size of the crowd instead of a viewer, a lamplighter only duty instead of his lamp’s light. In this reading, there is nothing disdainful about making money in business, or lighting lamps, or mapping worlds, or performing for crowds – all activities which provide value to people. There is, only, the very real possibility, that a person forgets what is real and lives in, and for, an abstraction.
For all of the Prince’s journey is a journey of exile, like Saint-Exupéry’s, away from generic experience towards the eroticism of the particular flower. To be responsible for his rose, the Prince learns, is to see it as it really is, in all its fragility and vanity—indeed, in all its utter commonness!—without loving it less for being so fragile.
When he moves from the generic to the particular, the Prince lets go of abstractions in their entirety. Not simply the abstraction of accumulation, for he doesn’t collect flowers, but only cares for his. But also the abstraction of comparison – the most beautiful flower, or the brightest, or the strongest – abstractions for they exist only in relation to an accumulation. To say that I like my particular rose, I wouldn’t need to invoke any other roses, benchmarking mine against the crowd in terms of my chosen metrics.
The richest way to see “Le Petit Prince” is as an extended parable of the kinds and follies of abstraction—and the special intensity and poignance of the story is that Saint-Exupéry dramatizes the struggle against abstraction not as a philosophical subject but as a life-and-death story. The book moves from asteroid to desert, from fable and comedy to enigmatic tragedy, in order to make one recurrent point: You can’t love roses. You can only love a rose.
The Stranger
I summarized The Stranger a long time ago, with a remark I admit was highly paradoxical: “In our society any man who does not weep at his mother’s funeral runs the risk of being sentenced to death.” I only meant that the hero of my book is condemned because he does not play the game. In this respect, he is foreign to the society in which he lives; he wanders, on the fringe, in the suburbs of private, solitary, sensual life. And this is why some readers have been tempted to look upon him as a piece of social wreckage.
I had always thought of Meursault’s heroics – and heroics I would consider them – in a negative sense, a push against something, rather than for anything. Perhaps unduly influenced by the line in the summary above – part of the full preface which I only much later came across – that “the hero of my book is condemned because he does not play the game”. I would guess I’m not the only one, and this is a common reading of The Stranger.
This is, I realize, a limited understanding, for every push against something is also a pull for something, since, as Camus asks, “Why rebel if there is nothing permanent in oneself worth preserving?”
What is a rebel? A man who says no, but whose refusal does not imply a renunciation. He is also a man who says yes, from the moment he makes his first gesture of rebellion… Rebellion cannot exist without the feeling that, somewhere and somehow, one is right… The rebel … says yes and no simultaneously…
Rebellion, though apparently negative, since it creates nothing, is profoundly positive in that it reveals the part of man which must always be defended.
Perhaps what made this elusive and harder to grasp in the case of The Stranger is Meursault’s seemingly utter indifference to everything – his mother’s death, the idea of marriage, shifting cities, helping a neighbour, or killing someone – excluding physical sensations, to which he seems extraordinarily attuned. A figure like that is not one you’d easily associate with passionately standing for something. Nevertheless, as Camus writes in his preface, that is what Meursault is.
A much more accurate idea of the character, or, at least one much closer to the author’s intentions, will emerge if one asks just how Meursault doesn’t play the game. The reply is a simple one; he refuses to lie. To lie is not only to say what isn’t true. It is also and above all, to say more than is true, and, as far as the human heart is concerned, to express more than one feels. This is what we all do, every day, to simplify life. He says what he is, he refuses to hide his feelings, and immediately society feels threatened. He is asked, for example, to say that he regrets his crime, in the approved manner. He replies that what he feels is annoyance rather than real regret. And this shade of meaning condemns him.
Not every lie is about uttering an untruth. Some are the simple lies of convenience – no one, for instance, really wants to know how you’re doing, so ‘fine’ is the easiest lie for all parties. Though these are secondary, even here Meursault doesn’t take the easy way out – for instance, not responding positively when asked by a girl if he loves her, or even if he regrets his crime – both questions with a particular response that would obviously make his life easier. His refusal to play the game is total, even in its most minute forms.
But Meursault doesn’t play when the stage is bigger either. He refuses to express what he doesn’t feel, or even ‘more than one feels’. “To lie is not only to say what isn’t true. It is also and above all, to say more than is true, and, as far as the human heart is concerned, to express more than one feels.”
To say more than is true is not just pardonable, it’s even ‘the done thing’, to the extent that one who won’t play is a ‘stranger’, someone you might be ‘tempted to look upon as a piece of social wreckage’. It is, for instance, a ‘done thing’ to (often publicly) wish people you don’t know – perhaps don’t even like – on their birthday or marriage or anniversary, whether for show or formality or to satisfy one’s sense of something called propriety. Or to work up one’s feelings to ‘celebrate’ an arbitrarily assigned day supposedly dedicated to a particular group or theme.
And it is, even more so, ‘the done thing’ to offer condolences over the death of someone you don’t know, to feign sorrow, to pretend to be ‘affected’, before you can get shrug it off and get on with your life. And how much more so when it isn’t a stranger – to the point that “in our society any man who does not weep at his mother’s funeral runs the risk of being sentenced to death”.
To express more than you feel is the raison d’être of and the driving force behind much of social media. If you don’t express sorrow, anger, disappointment, or even, occasionally, joy, is there anything to say? And if you don’t happen to be able to bring yourself to feel any of these for events remote and insignificant, you can try to express more than you feel. As Paul Graham writes, One aspect of social media that surprised almost everyone at first was the popularity of outrage. Users seemed to like being outraged… And above all, they want to share it… our users were about three times more likely to upvote something if it outraged them.
Though it’s the same for media in general, whether print or online or television – feeling sells. Advertisements don’t tell you why a product is good, why you ought to buy it instead of the competitors. But they do tell you a story, even if it’s irrelevant to the point of delusion if not insanity, like associating cold drinks with courage, rings with marriage, chocolate with love, cigarettes with coolness. One invokes bravery to sell carbonated beverages, the conjugal bond to sell carbon, and ardour to sell cocoa and sugar. It’s too tame to associate cold drinks or chocolate with taste; you have to feel something.
What makes the game ever more ubiquitous is that it’s harder to be be a good ‘leader’, or a good speaker, if you don’t express sufficient feeling. If you don’t feel sufficient feeling – and I imagine that not everyone happens to feel strongly about every single thing – you might feel the need to ‘express more than you feel’. All too often, you wonder just how someone above you can bring themselves to care so much about something so utterly trivial – until, that is, you find yourself wondering how to make those below care just enough.
Which is not to portray playing the game as a kind of hypocrisy or deceit of which some of us are guilty. For in the first place, as Camus says, everyone plays, every day. This is what we all do, every day, to simplify life. And not all playing need be hypocrisy or even deceit – while it is, if scrutinized in its most minute aspect under a microscope, a lie, perhaps not every lie need be traced to those two vices.
The extreme image of Meursault – the epitome of not playing the game – is a case for defence, rather than a case for prosecution that attacks anyone or anything. It is the defence of a truth – not a universal one since it needn’t be the same for everyone, but a personal one – of not caring, at least not about everything, and not wanting to or bothering to pretend to either. This truth is still a negative one, the truth of what we are and what we feel. A truth of indifference, bordering on solipsism, that refuses to hide or even dress itself up – “enamored of a sun that leaves no shadows” – and therefore doesn’t play the game.
For me, therefore, Meursault is not a piece of social wreckage, but a poor and naked man enamored of a sun that leaves no shadows. Far from being bereft of all feeling, he is animated by a passion that is deep because it is stubborn, a passion for the absolute and for truth. This truth is still a negative one, the truth of what we are and what we feel, but without it no conquest of ourselves or of the world will ever be possible.