Leaf Season

Reading from an actual book on a September Saturday for no other reason than that my electric co-op decided to be uncooperative and deprived every person on my Philippine island of electricity for 12 hours (which turned into 13), I was attracted to the story "Leaf Season" in my hardback copy of John Updike's Collected Later Stories - because the following day was the beginning of Fall, and because that season (like the others) doesn't exist here in the tropics. This inescapable fact has never prevented me from observing, in the quietest of ways, the passing of the missing seasons from one to the next to the next, as the years of my prolonged sojourn here have gone by. So, in a mood of tender nostalgia, I turned to the story, first published in The New Yorker on October 13, 1986.

T. S Eliot, an American poet who so wanted to be an Englishman that he tried to out-English them,(1) wrote: "A people without history/Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern/Of timeless moments. So, while the light fails/On a winter's afternoon, in a secluded chapel/History is now and England." ("Little Gidding V"). One of the things that have always attracted me to Updike's stories was his poetic power to lift almost every part of life, every anecdotal detail, from childhood to young manhood to old manhood, into shimmering language. The most salient aspect of art lies in finding beauty in the unlikliest places. Even if it is only the transformation of a sow's ear into a silk purse, you cannot have one without the other - the mundanest object can be made into a thing of beauty and value by an artist. And John Updike had always, or much of the time, expended his talents in immortalizing moments, even the most trivial, with the power of his words.

In the story, "Leaf Season," the narrator (who doesn't identify himself and seems to float around the action he describes like a revenant) tells us of a long weekend excursion from Boston across New Hampshire to Vermont: "Off we go! Saturday morning, into our cars, children and dogs and all, driving north to Vermont in leaf season to the Tremayne's house on the Columbus Day weekend. It's become a custom, one of the things we all do, the four or five families, a process that can't be stopped without running the risk of breaking a spell." Strangely, the storyteller is a member of the group, he observes the characters, the husbands and wives (and children and dogs) but he takes no part in the action.

He gives specific driving directions, the highways and byways all the way to the Tremaynes' house, until they enter Vermont where, "At once, there is a difference: things look cleaner, sparser than in New Hampshire. . . . And the leaves, whole valleys and mountains of them - the the strident pinks and scarlets of the maples, the clangorous gold of the hickories, the accompanying brasses of birch and beech, on both sides of the road, rise aftet rise, a heavenly tumult tied to our dull earth only by broad bands of evergreen and outcroppings of granite."

It's described like something out of The Enchanted Cottage - a quasi-magical realm that has a geographic location but which is slightly other-worldly, where everything takes on a kind of patina that is doesn't have elsewhere. Everyone arrives, and we meet them one by one. The storyteller continues to describe the enchantment of the place where they have gathered. "How old are we? Scarcely into our forties.(2) Lots of life left to live. the air here is delicious, crisper and drier than air around Boston. We start to breathe it now, and to take in where we are. The sounds are fewer, and those few are different - individual noises: a single car passing on the road, a lone crow scolding above the stubbled side field, a single window sash clicking back and forth in the gentle wind we hadn't noticed when outside unpacking the cars. The smells of the house are country smells - linoleum, ashes, split wood, plaster, a primeval cellar damp that rises through the floorboards and follows us up the steep, wear-rounded stairs to the second floor . . ."

The eating, drinking and the party games commence, they play softball until dark, then bridge indoors. Some stay up late and others adjourn upstairs to their segregated bunks. People awake, still hesitant to let the night before fade entirely fom their memories, and Sunday commences. It's what Updike intended to be a tour-de-force. And as so often in Updike, there are things that remind the reader of the single American writer most beloved by Updike, John Cheever.

Updike's life in letters often mirrored Cheever's, one has the feeling, at certain moments, intentionally. Cheever was twenty years older than Updike, started writing, precociously in more than one sense, when he was a boy. He did not, like Updike, distinguish himself in school, leaving (or being expelled) before he is 18. Heeding e e cummings' advice to get out of Boston, Cheever moved to New York City when he was 22. He published the first of what would eventually amount to 121 stories in The New Yorker in 1935, hired an agent, and never looked back.(3)

Updike, with a much more stable home life, became fascinated from the age of 11 with New York City and The New Yorker magazine, to which his mother had subscribed. He rose steadily and brilliantly through the academic ranks, eventually landing at Harvard. The first things he published were poems, but The New Yorker began to accept his first stories in 1955. Updike said of Cheever: "John Cheever was often labelled as a writer about suburbia; but many people have written about suburbia. Only Cheever was able to make an archetypal place out of it." Updike wrote about much the same subject, except his suburbanites lived and married and threw cocktail parties outside Boston.

"Leaf Season" is reminiscent of the Cheever stories, "The Common Day" and "The Day the Pig Fell in the Well." Both stories concentrate on people who come from the city (New York) for a few days or weeks in the country. Here is Cheever in "The Common Day": "He was so accustomed to the noise and congestion of the city that after six days in New Hampshire he still found the beauty of the country morning violent and alien." In Updike's telling, the differences that he notices between city and country are great but they don't strike him the way they strike Cheever's character Jim. Cheever has a story to tell about the people he relocates to the country, and the story isn't pleasant. So, when Jim goes downstairs in his mother-in-law's house and goes out onto the terrace, "The light there was like a blow, and the air smelled as if many wonderful girls had just wandered across the lawn." Jim is bewildered by the light and the smell in the air, but also enthralled. For Cheever, the world isn't there to reassure us; it doesn't conform to our efforts of measure. He is moved by its beauty, and his language rises to its celebration, but it's just as terrifying and it is glorious.

In Updike, with notable exceptions, all of creation bears the stamp of its creator. As Jonathan Yardley wrote in his review of Trust Me, the short story collection that contains "Leaf Season," "what most strongly unites these stories is Updike himself, with all his considerable strengths and his no less considerable weaknesses; for better and for worse one is constantly aware in these stories that Updike is at the controls, creating the world in his own terms."

A good illustration of how Updike controls the universe can be found at the end of "Leaf Season." Two of the couples gathered at the Tremayne's house in Vermont have left at the end of the Columbus Day weekend, but one woman, Linda Taylor, "announces she is going on another leaf walk. Do any of the littles want to go with her?" Three of the children, "all girls," go with her, along with the Tremayne's old dog, Wolf (Updike writes about the dogs with the same attention he gives to the people).

Linda takes them into the woods and holds up every different leaf for them to identify: the maple, beech, oak, and ash. Then she says, "'Girls, look up and around you. Those who went walking with me Saturday, do you notice any difference?'

'More sky,' says Aubrey, her own daughter, who knows what answer she wants.

'That's right,' Linda says, intensely grateful. 'And yet, standing here, who can see a leaf fall?'

No one speaks. A minute passes. No leaf falls.

'Oh, if we stood here long enough,' Linda concedes, 'or if there were a wind, or a hard rain like we had last night; but normally it happens unobserved, the moment when the root of the stem, where the bud once was, decides the time has come to let go. But it happens.' She looks upward and lifts her arms. The widened light falls upon her face and palms, and the little girls grow still, feeling threatened by something within the woman that she is pulling from the air, from the reds and golds trembling around them. 'Nobody sees it happen, but it does. For suddenly, it seems, the woods are bare.'"

A perfectly lovely moment, made perfectly lovely by Updike. But I don't believe it. Updike's use of the word upon is a dead giveaway. It signals that something poetic is happening. But, based on my experience of watching falling leaves, like the Quaking Aspens in the mountains of Colorado, when the wind makes the trees seem as if they're trembling, it happens often enough to make nonsense of Updike's claim. I've seen blossoms fall in spring and seen and heard fruit falling in summer, even in the absence of wind or rain. One particularly long fall season in Iowa, I sat and watched oak leaves, which (according to Updike) are the last leaves to fall, let go and drop fifty feet to the ground around me.

But I should concentrate on the beauty of Updike's prose, which is, as usual, considerable. The evocation of October in Vermont is seductive, especially to someone (like me), a transplanted temperate climate native who is stranded in the tropics where no one has heard of - let alone seen - autumn. But James Wood was right when he reviewed Updike's late novel In the Beauty of the Lilies: "Updike is a prose writer of great beauty, but that prose confronts one with the question of whether beauty is enough. At times, his fondness for an expensive phrase obscures, because it marks the moment at which he inserts himself oppressively."

Keats famously wrote: "Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know." It's certainly a beautiful thought, and probably all the more beautiful for being so untrue. I suppose that Keats's passionately wanting it to be so made it so for the duration of his short life. But it isn't so. As Vernon Young put it, "Beauty is to protect us from the truth." Updike's beautiful prose, the beauty of which is by now banal, weaves a spell that sometimes illuminated the truth of a moment in time or a particular situation among his characters, but it was the beauty that drew him there and that continues to allure his readers. It is the beauty of a well-turned sentence or a pithily-expressed observation. They rarely provide enough light to illuminate the human soul. It is the beauty that moves us, not the exposed nerve, not the truth of the matter at hand.

All of Cheever's formidable talent as a writer was in the service of something other than beauty, and that something other was the truth about people, which was often dispiriting. His heroes, from the Manhattan elevator operator to the numberless salarymen and women who ride the commuter trains to and from Shady Hill, were somehow always confronted with the truth about themselves and their lives.  

Happy Columbus Day.


(1) Virginia Woolf joked that Eliot wore a "four-piece suit."
(2) Updike was 53 when the story was submitted to The New Yorker.
(2) Updike had Cheever beat - he published 134 stories in The New Yorker.

Then He Shot Her

"His whole life was sitting there in front of him. Day after  day from dawn till dark until he was dead. All of it cooked down into forty pounds of paper in a satchel."


I came across a digital version of Cormac McCarthy's novel No Country for Old Men and, with the movie fresh in my mind (it's aired on one or another cable movie channel routinely), I decided to read it.

First of all, the widely celebrated Coen Brothers film, though it possesses a few virtues (mostly from its brilliant cinematographer Roger Deakins), is crippled by what I would call a conflict of intent. It has elements of a thriller, with a quite monstrous antagonist, what I called in my review of the film, "a kind of serial killer for hire," and the elements of a chase, with the hero trying to get away clean with a satchel full of money. There are gun battles and plenty of graphic violence.

McCarthy has had more than one brush with Hollywood. His Border Trilogy started its life as a movie script. Billy Bob Thornton, with every good intention, tried to make a decent adaptation of All the Pretty Horses and failed, presumably because of interference from the film's producers. Having seen the film, it would've been hard, even without interference, to make a creditable film out of the material. What you find in McCarthy is an exclusively male ethos. So whatever conviction the individual novels have relies on the relationships among their male characters. I agree with James Wood that while he is capable of writing beautiful prose, especially in his descriptions of nature, McCarthy has a tendency toward grandiose - and often theatrical - flights of language. Within a page of No Country, for instance, the philosophical murderer Anton Chigurh steals a sheriff's cruiser and pulls over another vehicle. Asking the driver to step out of the car, Chigurh kills him with a pneumatic gun used to kill steers in a slaughter house. "The man slid soundlessly to the ground, a round hole in his forehead from which the blood bubbled and ran down into his eyes carrying with it his slowly uncoupling world visible to see." I don't imagine the "uncoupling" happened slowly. And "visible to see" is not only redundant but meaningless.

Quoting James Wood, "The danger is not just melodrama but imprecision and, occasionally, something close to nonsense." And although he called McCarthy's No Country for Old Men "an unimportant, stripped-down thriller," the Coen Brothers' movie adaptation leaves far too many loose ends dangling, as if they were trying to improve on McCarthy with an artiness the book scrupulously avoids. "Everything is tight, reduced, simple, and very violent. McCarthy’s idea for the Border Trilogy (which comprises All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, and Cities of the Plain) began life as a film script, and No Country for Old Men has already been sold to the producer Scott Rudin, so perhaps it is easier to think of it as a script than as a novel. That is to say, the book gestures not toward any recognizable reality but merely toward the narrative codes already established by pulp thrillers and action films. The story is itself cinematically familiar."(1) But what the Coen Brothers ended up with, despite it winning accolades including an Oscar for Best Picture of 2008, is a flawed film, crying out for clarity as it hurtles toward a muddy conclusion. There are at least three places in the last ten minutes of the film that could've been made a lot clearer if the Coens had wanted to be more honest and more faithful to McCarthy's novel.

In the movie, when Moss checks into his last motel, a woman by the pool flirts with him and offers him a beer. Next we see them after a shootout and they're both dead. We never learn the circumstances of either's death, which is one of the glaring loose ends the Coens just leave dangling. In the book Moss picks up a 15-year-old girl hitchhiking. In a lengthy exchange between them, Moss tries to set her on the straight and narrow and even gives her some money. Then a Mexican in a black Barracuda shows up, takes the girl hostage, and Moss comes out of his room with a machine gun. Seeing the Mexican's gun at her head, Moss puts his gun down, prompting the Mexican to shoot them both dead. But not before Moss shoots down the Mexican. I suppose the Coens believed all this was unnecessary, so they cut it. What they forgot is that the audience that has followed Moss with great interest for the length of the film might want to know the circumstances of his death.

The Coens' next big misstep occurs when Sheriff Bell returns to the motel where Moss was killed. In the movie, Chigurh is still in the room when the sheriff returns. I watched the scene several times trying to figure out where Chigurh was hiding but I could never figure it out. A friend who admires the movie a lot more than I do told me Chigurh was hiding in the closet. But what closet?  If there was a closet in that room, I'm going blind betimes. In the book, Chigurh, having already retrieved the case of money from the airduct (another detail omitted from the movie), is sitting in his truck when Bell returns. Bell realizes this and calls for backup. But Chigurh gets away again.

The third dangling loose end in the movie comes when Carla Jean finds Chigurh waiting for her in her house. He's there to kill her in fulfillment of a promise he made to her husband. But he gives her the option of a coin toss. She loses. Next we see Chigurh driving away before his truck is t-boned by a car running a stop sign. What became of Carla Jean? The Coens doubtless believed her fate could be inferred. In the novel there is no such deliberate vagueness, or what you might also call pussyfooting:

"She looked at him a final time. You dont have to, she said. You dont. You dont.

He shook his head. You're asking that I make myself vulnerable and that I can never do. I have only one way to live. It doesnt allow for special cases. A coin toss perhaps. In this case to small purpose. Most people dont believe that there can be such a person. You can see what a problem that must be for them. How to prevail over that which you refuse to acknowledge the existence of. Do you understand? When I came into your life your life was over. It had a beginning, a middle, and an end. This is the end. You can say that things could have turned out differently. That they could have been some other way. But what does that mean? They are not some other way. They are this way. You're asking that I second say  the world. Do  you see?

Yes, she said, sobbing. I do. I truly do.

Good, he said. That's good. Then he shot her."

At least you could say that McCarthy, like Chigurh, had the courage of his convictions. The Coens had not.

The Coens' discretion at choosing not to show us how Moss and Carla Jean die is not as admirable as they perhaps thought it would be. It is utterly inconsistent with every other detail they chose to show us. And it is certainly far from Cormac McCarthy's cruel intentions.

There are other differences between the book and the movie that are minor, but that sacrifice realism for the picturesque. Moss finds the "ultima hombre" from the Mexican shootout dead among some rocks, not under a completely incongruous shady tree. When Moss returns to the scene of the shootout, Mexicans pursue him. In the movie, they set a dog on him and Moss shoots it just as it is lunging at him. There's no dog in McCarthy's account. And, inexplicably, in the movie Chigurh kills the business executive in his office. In the book he simply delivers the satchel of money and departs. Chigurh is a man of his word, for what it's worth.

Worse than all these little objections to the film's violation of the novel is the obvious pains the Coens took to replicate the violence, down to the smallest detail. This sort of thing is relatively easy for any decent filmmaker. It goes back to what James Wood wrote about how "the book gestures not toward any recognizable reality but merely toward the narrative codes already established by pulp thrillers and action films." But just thinking of the care with which the filmmakers planned and staged Chigurh's killing of the three Mexicans in the motel, with the different calibured guns, the squibs - exploding pockets of blood attached to the actors who get shot - the careful sound effects, points to a grisly kind of pedantry. And all McCarthy did was write down a few hundred words.

So I suppose that James Wood's opinion that the book was ready-made for a screen adaptation was incorrect. Even as attenuated and discreet as the novel is, compared to McCarthy's other work, his pen can go where a camera cannot always follow - even when it's the camera of Roger Deakins. Despite his obvious efforts at a stripped-down style, like the best - or the worst - of Hemingway, there is evidently no such thing as a text that is "ready-made" for the screen. I wasn't surprised when the movie got so much praise and won some awards.  For the first time in their careers (always with the exception of Fargo), the Coens were depicting people who were more than caricatures and events that weren't whopping contrivances. McCarthy's novel is emphatic about fate, even as Sheriff Bell awaits his inevitable meeting with Chigurh, who seems to be Fate personified, at the story's end. Everything that happens was bound to happen, which is the opposite of the Coens' usual philosophy. But their faithful adaptation could've been more faithful if they had disregarded the presumed sensitivities of their audience. Their movie would've impressed them more, and would've been worthier of all it's awards.

(1) James Wood, "Red Planet," The New Yorker, July 25, 2005.

Beware of God

[If road accidents occur more often in a certain place along Philippine highways, instead of erecting a sign warning drivers of a Dangerous Curve or Populated Area, they put up a sign that explains their entire philosophy of life and their relationship with an unforgiving God: Accident Prone Area. Given the number and variety of natural disasters - or "acts of God" - that the Philippines is prone to, I was reminded of an article on the subject by James Wood, former literary editor at The New Republic and author of the novel The Book Against God. When Cebu City's very own Cardinal Vidal (no relation to our own Gore Vidal, apparently) was asked to comment on the A(H1N1) scare, he said with a smile, "God is reminding us that He's still there."]


Twister
By James Wood


In April, two people, one in Northern Ireland and one in Alabama, professed a familiarity with the devil. In Northern Ireland, the Rev. Paul Symonds, a Catholic priest, admitted that the new peace agreement might falter because, "Where the spirit of God is at work, the spirit of evil will try to destroy. Satan is still at work in the hearts of some people." Meanwhile, in Alabama, Rick Cooper, a pastor in Tuscaloosa, surveyed the spoliation wrought by a powerful tornado: houses razed, several killed. He told his congregation that their survival was an act of God: "We're not here because we're better.... We're here because he's great. God poured out his grace on us Wednesday night, his kindness and his goodness. When people look around and said, `Well, is God responsible for this?'--by no means, by no means."

Both responses offer awkward and moving testimony to the unpliability of the ancient question: Why does God permit evil and suffering to exist? Both men could hardly avoid falling into the illogicalities and near-heresies that are inherent in what is called theodicy, or the justification of God's relation to human and natural evil. Thus the Rev. Symonds posits a Satan, a force of evil apparently equivalent to God's force of good. And Pastor Cooper verges on the same explanation. After all, if, as Pastor Cooper suggests, God has saved the worshipers of his church, then either God must have decided to abandon those who died when the twister came through, or God simply could not do battle with the superior force of the twister.

Though neither Cooper nor Symonds would admit it, this is close to Manicheanism, named after a third century heretical sect that believed that the force of good is opposed by a force of evil that good cannot control but can merely fight. This idea of two rival principles--God, as it were, resembling a decent but somewhat ineffectual firefighter--predates Christianity and perhaps has its roots in Egyptian paganism. Plato essentially believed in the two principles, as did Zoroaster, Plutarch, and (more complicatedly) the Gnostics.

All these people were struggling, like the Reverends Symonds and Cooper, with the question of why we suffer. The existence of pain and suffering seems either to limit God's power or to qualify his goodness. Either he cannot control this evil (and then he is not all-powerful), or, in some way, he wants it to exist (and then he is not good). David Hume puts it tartly in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion: "Is he willing to prevent evil, but not able? then is he impotent. Is he able, but not willing? then is he malevolent. Is he both able and willing? whence then is evil?"

I was raised in a formidably Christian household. An antique evangelical language (more Matthew Arnold than Billy Graham) sternly governed my childhood: activities were "edifying" or "worthy" (or their opposites). A breach was perhaps inevitable. When it came, at the age of 15 or so, it arose out of the problem of God and evil. Though doubtless philosophically naive, I could find no satisfactory answer to David Hume's negative algebra: it all added up to nothing, to no God. Even then, I could see that Manicheanism was only plausible at the cost of so reducing God's status that "belief" in him would be meaningless.

But, if we cannot be Manicheans, and posit a satanic force at work, then how do we explain a fatal tornado, or fatal terrorists in Northern Ireland? Theology has few responses. The most enduring is that God's ways are incomprehensible. This is Job's lesson. To any thinking person, this answer is an affront and also smacks of a certain pagan stoicism. Another is that we will be rewarded in heaven for our suffering on earth. But most people find this idea unacceptable, if not repulsive, because it is not clear why happiness must be only approached belatedly by the path of suffering rather than tasted originally.

The most sophisticated defense of God's relation to evil is that a world in which we could do no harm to one another would have to be a world without free will and that this would be intolerable. For us to act as moral agents at all, we must have the choice to act immorally. A mindless utopia watched over by an absolutely controlling God would be a repulsive and pointless world. Thus God awarded us free will, knowing that we might misuse it as a very necessity of human life.

Augustine abandoned Manicheanism for the free will argument and developed it into the most powerful of theodicy's weapons. But it crumbles as soon as you squeeze it. First, as the seventeenth-century skeptic Pierre Bayle has put it, why would God bestow a gift that he knows in advance will be abused in such a manner that it will only serve to bring about the ruin of the person to whom it is given? Bayle is very penetrating, but one can go further. All free will arguments rest on the assumption that free will is the greatest good we can possibly have. The best example of this assumption is to be seen in the work of Richard Swinburne, an especially monstrous theologian at Oxford, who argues that physical pain exists to offer the sufferer the great good of choice--"Whether to endure it with patience, or to bemoan his lot."

All free will arguments posit that a world without free will would be a more awful place than the world as we know it, which is merely full of pain. But how can we possibly know this? Suppose that for all of recorded history humans had never known pain or evil, that we had always lived in precisely the utopian prison that the free will arguers fear. If we had only ever lived in such a place, would it seem pointless and colorless to us? Naturally, we would not experience it as such because we would never have known its opposite (a world full of pain, suffering, and free will). Likewise, if no human being had ever been born with hands, we would all have very developed legs, and we could not miss something we had never had. God, presumably, could have created such a world, and it would be the ideal laboratory to observe Jesus's first two commandments: "Love thy God, and love thy neighbor." In other words, free will is clearly important for humans, but why is it important for God?

So, if we are not Manicheans, then we have few available responses to the Alabama tornado or to Ulster terrorism: Either God omnipotently presides over these happenings in some way, or there is no God. But if God omnipotently presides over them, then he presides over our suffering. He watches us drown in our own incomprehension. I'm afraid that I must choose the latter explanation, even if it is not very "edifying."

Camus and the Necessity of Unbelief

"Le monde est beau, et hors de lui, point de salut." ("The world is beautiful, and beyond it there is no salvation.") Albert Camus, L'Ete

I was first attracted to the writings of Albert Camus in my late teens. The qualities I found there were an intellectual fearlessness and a love of sensuality for its own sake. James Wood is a literary critic and the author of a novel, The Book Against God. The following essay was first published in The New Republic in its November 8, 1999 issue.

Camus and twentieth-century clarity

The Sickness Unto Life
By JAMES WOOD

I.

The tradition of atheism and agnosticism has been somewhat shallow, philosophically speaking. It has had a tendency to harden into hob-nailed anti-clericalism, or to soften into rationalist serenity. There is a veering between a rather charming optimism and a rather petty naughtiness. One thinks of the calm ironies of Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary, in which the heaven of the ancients is likened to no more than "the little fluff" that surrounds the cocoon of the silkworm, or of Hume mocking the idea that heaven could be large enough to contain millions of souls. For many unbelievers, it seems self-evident that religion is not our salvation, and thus hardly worth the argument. For Stendhal, to judge from his fiction, the priests are all hypocrites, and therefore religion is all hypocrisy and nonsense.

The deepest struggle with Christianity may well be bloodily intramural. Thus the fiercest objectors to Christianity are often themselves believers; their belief is doubt-intoxicated, while by contrast the atheists are merely drunk on certainty. Perhaps the most formidably skeptical book in the history of theology, Pierre Bayle's Historical and Skeptical Dictionary, appears to have been written by a Christian. It logically devastates one orthodox position after another, only to return, at the end of each entry, to its own thinly orthodox position--that Christianity is not rational, that if we were rationalists we could not possibly believe in it, and that therefore we cannot be rationalists and should simply cleave all the more strongly to our thoroughly irrational faith. One understands why there has been argument since the publication of this book in the seventeenth century over the ratio of Bayle's blasphemy to belief.

Bayle, who influenced Melville's religious torments, is hardly alone. Kierkegaard often seems to oppose the prison of Christianity with all his loathing, before masochistically deciding that one can live only within that same prison. "One must be quite literally a lunatic to become a Christian," he writes in his Journal. In Works of Love, he argues that the Christian preacher should preach "against Christianity." And that troubled believer, Dostoevsky, in the "Grand Inquisitor" section of The Brothers Karamazov, delivers a hammer-blow to the cathedral-door of orthodox faith.

To all this, Camus is a fierce exception. Although he was not of course a Christian, it is within this tradition of unstable belief that his thinking breathes its unbelief. It is in this respect that The Myth of Sisyphus constitutes an exception to the discourse of atheism and agnosticism. For Camus does not proceed as if theology can simply be killed off by philosophy or by philosophical arguments. He proceeds as if religion is best countered by a rival form of belief, the belief that one cannot, must not believe in God.

Sartre and others dismissed Camus's essay for its muddled philosophy. But The Myth of Sisyphus is not a treatise, it is a tract, a tract aimed at evacuating God, and a promise to live by the rigor of that evacuation. It is an oration, a personal statement written by a young man living in narrow exile in Paris during the bleakest early days of the Second World War. This young man offers a necessarily vulnerable summation of the little that he has so far learned: "I don't know whether this world has a meaning that transcends it. But I know that I do not know this meaning and that it is impossible for me just now to know it."

Faced with this vulnerability, we should not mark Camus as if he were sitting a metaphysical exam, but judge his essay as a work of art. That is to say, we should judge it by the dignity of its argumentation, not by the rigor of its proofs; by the beauty of its effort, not by the conclusiveness of its attainment. In this light, it is indeed a moving and impressive work, still able to stir those readers willing to waver.

II.

Camus cannot know that God does not exist; he is determined to believe that God cannot exist. Camus opposes religious faith not with rationalism but with a negative faith of his own, a faith in negation. Often he seems to invert the processes of the religious beliefs that he criticizes. In particular, his work can seem to be a reply to Dostoevsky and to Kierkegaard, and to the battered paradox whereby those two writers acknowledge the absurdity of the universe only to embrace more strongly the scandal of belief in God. While Kierkegaard insists, in The Sickness Unto Death, that Christianity "begins" with the concept of sin, Camus insists again and again that we are innocent. While Kierkegaard argues that paganism is no more than being in a state of despair but being ignorant of it, Camus delights in paganism, and in a paganism that is not ignorant of itself but self-aware and relentlessly vigilant. While Dostoevsky proposes suicide as the only logical response to an awareness that God does not exist, Camus proposes that the person without God must not kill himself, but realize instead that he is condemned to death, and live his life saturated with that terrible knowledge. Camus proposes, in place of faith, awareness itself.

As both Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky seek a world with meaning, so Camus, because of his sense that the world is "unreasonable," is thirsty for meaning. He has none of the rationalist's calm at the idea of an entirely rational universe, and none of the agnostic's serenity that it does not matter that the universe is meaningless. It matters very much to Camus, and it is the contradiction between what he calls "the human need [for meaning] and the unreasonable silence of the world" that drives him towards the position that he calls "the absurd."

He writes that Moby-Dick is a truly "absurd" novel, and like Melville he appears at times not quite able to relinquish the idea that God does not exist. At such moments, it is not so much God's absence that seems to provoke him, but God's silence. In his hunger for religious meaning, Camus sometimes resembles the Melville who complained in Pierre that "Silence is the only Voice of our God . . . how can a man get a Voice out of Silence?" And like both Dostoevsky and Kierkegaard, whom Camus criticizes for their "leap" into irrational faith, Camus is forced into his own kind of leap, which is the assertion--and it is not much more than this--that we must oppose the world's meaninglessness with our revolt, our freedom, and our passion.

Camus's own leap begins in his apprehension that the world lacks providential meaning, and that therefore human beings must be meaning's providers. This is our "absurd" task. Camus feels the meaninglessness of life because he cannot believe in God, or in transcendent design, and because he sees clearly that everything he does is menaced by death. The Myth of Sisyphus is an extraordinarily death-visited book. Indeed, throughout Camus's work, and above all in The Stranger and The Plague, the very image of the human is the man condemned to death.

In The Myth of Sisyphus, the "absurd man" is the man walking toward the hangman's noose who sees, in a burst of freedom just as he mounts the scaffold, a shoelace or some such triviality of life from the corner of his eye. It is understood throughout the book that death at every moment makes life a broken circuit. Reading Camus, we feel that death stands at the end of our lives as an enormous negation, the assassin of memory, a kind of official torturer telling the poor citizen: "You saw nothing, you did not experience the things you thought you experienced. You did not live. You are erased."

Little more strongly marks Camus's apparently anti-religious thought as secretly religious than his sense that death poses a metaphysical problem for life. For many rationalists or atheists, the fact that we die is not such a large problem: death is merely a dark continuation of the general meaninglessness--it is merely, as it were, the even smaller print to the already small print of life. Death only becomes a problem for those religious believers who see life as something more than material existence, which is why Christians must announce that death has been conquered by Christ.

Inverting this, Camus tells us that death conquers us. He believes death is a problem because he works within the essentially religious apprehension that life, if it is to have have meaning, must in some way be extended. The religionist has a solution to this, of course, and locates that extension in heaven, in eternal life. Camus's secular solution lies in an extension of life in life itself, a kind of aeration of life. Camus eventually finds the figure of this extension, for better or worse, in the idea of repetition, and especially in Sisyphus's repeated task of rolling his rock up the hill. But this is really a figurative or metaphorical extension, something a little like the idea of repeated curtain calls, or of adding extra songs to a concert; and indeed, Camus announces that the absurd person must concentrate on a greater quantity of experiences, not on a greater quality: more life, not purer life. Camus cannot evade death; instead he will (in both senses of the word) entertain death, and keep it busy.

Aware that life is futile, Camus feels himself a stranger to it. He wrote The Myth of Sisyphus and The Stranger almost simultaneously, in the late 1930s and in the first few months of 1940, finishing the essay in Paris, far from his native Algeria. Exile and estrangement, though used a little loosely by Camus, are imbued with metaphysical resonance. Camus describes himself as awakened to the absurdity of life, for "in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land. This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity."

The biographical hint--the young Frenchman from Algeria condemned to an uneasy life in Paris--is there, of course, in this language of exile. Yet Camus rings meaning from these words so that they become a metaphorical fluid in which his enquiry can swim. The stranger or the exile is absurd, painfully awake to the impossibility of reconciling himself to his situation. He cannot return to the homeland, to the Eden of consolation. Camus finds fault with the Christianity of Kierkegaard and the existentialism of Jaspers because, in ultimately deciding to find rational "a world [they] originally imagined as devoid of any guiding principle," they fall prey to "the spirit of nostalgia." Husserl, too, proposes an abstract "leap" that Camus refuses, because it m eans "forgetting just what I do not want to forget": the unreasonableness of the world.

So Camus refuses nostalgia, though he admits to living under its shadow: "It is that divorce between the mind that desires and the world that disappoints, my nostalgia for unity, this fragmented universe and the contradiction that binds them together." He admits freely enough to "my appetite for the absolute and for unity." The "contradiction" between that appetite and its disappointment constitutes the absurd. The absurd person, then, cannot leap into any kind of faith or belief, because this is a leap into forgetting; but Sisypheanism is a most vigilant remembering of exile, a permanent remembering.

Sisypheanism is refusing to forget where one is from (Eden), where one toils (exile), and where one is headed (death). The pain of the absurdity, as Camus seems to suggest, is that one can admit to the spirit of nostalgia but one cannot enact it. Camus can dream of his lost country, but he cannot return to it. In other words, he is not a nostalgic so much as an elegist; in a sense, The Myth of Sisyphus is an elegy for belief.

III.

The Myth of Sisyphus proposes to substitute a tragedy of repetition for the ordinary, unwitting comedy of repetition. The absurd person is someone who has seen through the ridiculous repetitions of daily life, the gray routine and the stifling calendar of existence: "Rising, tram, four hours in the office or factory, meal, tram, four hours of work, meal, sleep and Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday, according to the same rhythm--this path is easily followed most of the time. But one day the `why' arises [le `pourquoi' s'eleve] and everything begins in that weariness tinged with amazement." Suddenly, the absurd person sees through this routine, and "the chain of daily gestures is broken." Now everything begins to seem pointless and comical: "At certain moments of lucidity, the mechanical aspect of their gestures, their meaningless pantomime make silly everything that surrounds them. A man is talking on the telephone behind a glass partition; you cannot hear him but you see his incomprehensible dumb-show: you wonder why he is alive."

Henri Bergson, in his essay on comedy, offers one definition of the comic as watching a room full of dancers but with one's own ears stopped so that one cannot hear the music. Bergson also finds a strand of comedy in the idea of the human turned into a machine, and in the idea of repetition, of repeated meaningless actions. Both Bergson and Camus, then, find in modern industrial society an emblem of the comic. Camus, of course, is concerned not merely to laugh, but to find some kind of solution, outside the religious, to this comic-uncomic "chain of daily gestures." One cannot escape this comedy, but one can at least metaphysicalize it, and see it in its largest universal dimension, and then resist it, fight it with Pyrrhic integrity.

The first step is to turn the comic into the absurd, to convert futile daily repetition into eternal Sisyphean repetition. The comic becomes the absurd precisely when we are made to see its comedy: the absurd is, in part, the awareness that life is a comic dumbshow. Then the absurd person must begin the long, always repeated struggle against the terms of that dumb-show. This is a fight that is never over, that lasts exactly the duration of a life, that is indeed a life--which is why the absurd person cannot commit suicide. And because it is a chain of repetitions, the absurd life may be hardly discernible as different from ordinarily comic daily routine. Formally, it may not look very different. Presumably, the absurd person may go to work, and stand in the subway with everyone else. Internally, of course, the absurd life is entirely different, because the absurd person knows the difference between ignorant routine and rebellious repetition.

It is this moment at which the comedy of repetition turns into something like tragic repetition, what Rieux in The Plague calls "a never-ending defeat." The absurd person is fighting the terms of existence, the sentence handed down by non-existent gods: "If I see a man armed only with a sword attack a group of machine-guns, I shall consider his act to be absurd." (One sees why Camus considered Moby-Dick an absurd novel.) The absurd spirit might be said to be tragic stoicism: "Everything considered, a determined soul will always manage." This struggle "implies a total absence of hope (which has nothing to do with despair), a continual rejection (which must not be confused with renunciation), and a continuous dissatisfaction (which must not be compared to immature unrest) . . . The absurd has meaning only in so far as it is not agreed to." And so Camus rises to his stubborn declaration: "I do not want to found anything on the incomprehensible. I want to know whether I can live with what I know and with that alone." He continues: "the absurd is sin without God. It is a matter of living in that state of the absurd."

Why is the absurd "sin without God"? Again, we see how Camus inverts all religious categories, in the process converting them out of their baleful literalism and into the metaphorical. The absurd is like living sinfully because Camus means that, like sin, we cannot escape it: it is a kind of original sin but without the origin, which would be God. It is the sentence passed on us by life. (Here one feels the inevitable shadow of Augustine, the great proponent of original sin, on whom Camus wrote a thesis. And, indeed, throughout his life, Camus may have been "answering" Augustine more systematically than perhaps he knew. For in place of Augustine's asceticism, Camus proposed pagan sunlight, in place of Augustine's sex-recoil, Camus proposed--and enacted--the role of the seducer.) For if it were passed by God it would become a religious problem. Yet Camus is not like one of those rationalists who believes that once God is removed from the picture, metaphysical problems disappear. Quite the contrary. Camus believes that once God is removed, our religious problems end, but our metaphysical problems begin.

They begin with death. Yet Camus's answer to death is more active than the notion of stoicism perhaps suggests. There is no resignation involved; always an endless signing-on to new tasks. Obviously, says Camus, the absurd person cannot commit suicide. For suicide, "like the leap [of religious faith], is acceptance at its extreme. Everything is over and man returns to his essential history." To kill oneself is to allow both life and death to have had dominion over one. Determining to live in the absurd, on the other hand, is "simultaneously awareness and rejection of death."

So the absurd man begins the battle. What does he do? Here, Camus's argument is somewhat vulnerable. For it is here, if his proposals are to be usable, that Camus must reconvert his struggling metaphors--and what is Sispypheanism but a furious metaphor?-- into the literalism of actual struggles, as actual people might live them. It is merely metaphorical (or rhetorical) to speak of fighting the terms of the absurd with "my revolt, my freedom and my passion." But Camus--and it is part of his appeal as a writer--wants to be more local than this, more practical than the merely metaphorical. He would like to suggest a number of possible absurd roles or lives.

He proposes "the seducer," "the actor," "the conqueror" (who is always engaged in "a campaign in which he is defeated in advance"), and "the writer." These, says Camus, are examples of people who live many roles, and who, in living so much, flourish a pagan provisionality in the face of the narrow absurd. In other words, these people are rebelliously alive, and in being so, they defy the absurd. For the absurd man must substitute "the quantity of experiences for the quality . . . What counts is not the best living but the most living."

The suspicion is stirred in the reader that although Camus is writing as if he has forsaken the figurative and rhetorical for the literal and usable, he is merely applying the figurative and the rhetorical to actual lives. Indeed, what he seems to like about the roles he has chosen is that they involve acting, they involve an inhabiting of the metaphorical, a dressing-up in likenesses of various kinds. And one notices that as soon as Camus describes the strategies of these lives of rebellion, he merely repeats the large exhortations of the earlier theoretical passages. The seducer, the conqueror, the actor and the writer are symbolic figures, on which to hang symbolic possibilities of revolt. (They also seem, as models, painfully limited by their epoch: decidedly French masculine ideals in a time of war.)

Though Camus would not admit it, he can counter the terms of the absurd only with a leap of his own, a leap into negative faith. "Being aware of one's life, one's revolt, one's freedom, and to the maximum, is living, and to the maximum." Camus's leap may perhaps not at first resemble one, and this is partly because he so widens the terms of what constitutes "revolt" that his leap may involve nothing more than simply remaining alive, simply refraining from killing oneself. Where Kierkegaard demands a fierce and fateful choosing of God, where Dostoevsky demands a grotesque paradoxical decision to see the horror of the world and then to use it as what Camus scornfully calls a "tremplin d'eternite," a springboard to eternity, Camus tells us, in effect, that we cannot avoid the leap unless we kill ourselves. Camus does not quite say anything as simple as "We can only choose life," but that is the brunt of his assertion.

And in the end, this, too, is only a religious assertion, a determination, a faith. Camus proves nothing. Nor is he necessarily right, even within the terms of atheism. Perhaps Camus is right that to kill oneself would be to allow death to have dominion, and that to live rebelliously is to both be aware of and to reject death. But these are the essentially religious terms--or the shadows of religious terms--that Camus has himself inherited and adapted. One can imagine another atheistic argument for rebellion that also advocated suicide: Kirilov, in The Possessed, believes that only when we all have the courage to kill ourselves, will we be free. Or one can imagine another argument that did not involve rebellion but a certain kind of resignation: the Czech novelist Karel Capek liked to say that "a short life is better for mankind, for a long life would deprive man of his optimism." In other words, in place of Camus's mixture of tragic stoicism and pagan revolt, there might exist a more simply tragic vision (as in Sophocles and King Lear), or a more blandly stoical acceptance (as in Epicurus and Lucretius).

The difficulty of Camus's proposal for rebellion is that at times he seems merely to be describing life itself, which is tautological. And if he is only describing life itself, he is also describing it metaphorically, at a remove--as an endless campaign of defeats, a choosing between roles, a vigilance, living like the condemned man and so on. These images are powerfully worked in his fiction, and perhaps fiction is where they most happily breathe: one remembers the image of Grand in The Plague, writing again and again the first sentence of his novel. But The Myth of Sisyphus is not a novel, and there is a danger that when Camus comes to tell us how we can live with the absurd, he can do no more than tell us to do what we already do (which is live)--but tell us to live figuratively, to live as if.

Nothing is more obviously an example of this figurative tendency than his choice of Sisyphus as the ultimately absurd man. Sisyphus is condemned to roll his rock up a hill, so that it can roll back down. Then Sisyphus's task begins again. Here is the emblem of the absurd, says Camus, of our repeated struggle against the obscure terms of our existence. But, adds Camus, there may be a moment when Sisyphus is walking back down the hill when he is briefly free, when he is "superior to his fate. He is stronger than his rock." Sisyphus, then, is both prisoner and rebel.

This is moving, and Camus writes with great delicacy at the end of his essay. But it is movingly useless. What moves us, in part, is the spectacle of Camus's belief; what moves us is that Camus's emblem of the absurd is so hopelessly metaphorical, but that Camus believes in him so fiercely, and so sympathetically describes his fate and his revolt, that Sisyphus appears to be real to Camus, and becomes almost actual for us. This is the quality of Camus's thought, and it is why he is such a powerful novelist: he takes religious terms, turns them into secular metaphor, and then, by dint of his sympathetic concentration on them, appears to reconvert them back into an unmetaphorical, usable reality. What he does, in fact, is act as if they were real while using them metaphorically. We are reminded that his essay is not philosophy at all, but a kind of storytelling.

Sisyphus is not only a metaphorical answer to the terms of the absurd, but also a religious one. Camus had perhaps read Kierkegaard's essay Repetition, in which Kierkegaard describes the various ways in which the pleasure we take in life is menaced by repetition. We fall in love, for instance, but then repetition takes over, and kills the originality and novelty of our experience. Characteristically, Kierkegaard concludes, somewhat arbitrarily, by asserting that the only way to outwit ordinary repetition is by making it religious, and by seeing repetition as the truly religious way of life. Repetition, writes Kierkegaard, is "a religious movement by virtue of the absurd." The final repetition, of course, is eternity itself, in which heavenly existence repeats itself endlessly. Kierkegaard's proposal is the absolute opposite of Camus's.

Camus makes no mention of Kierkegaard's essay, but he was of course familiar with the notion of eternity as a kind of repetition-without-repetition. The Christian wants religiously to extend life, and finds this extension, as I mentioned earlier, in heaven, in its repetition without end. Camus wants to extend life on earth, and can do this really only by inflating a metaphor, an emblem. This is not necessarily a weak inversion if, as the atheist thinks, the Christian heaven has only ever been a metaphorical emblem anyway. Seen in this light, Camus offers his secular metaphorical extension for the Christian metaphorical extension, his secular repetition for Kierkegaard's eternal repetition. He offers Sisyphus's hell for the believer's heaven. Earlier in his essay he writes that "the present and the succession of presents before a constantly conscious soul is the ideal of the absurd man." This is Camus's eternity: an endless repetition of presents. And since, unlike the literalist Christian vision, we die and are cancelled--since heaven does not exist--Camus can make this repetition endless (or eternal) only with the help of the flexibility of artistic metaphor. For life is short, but art is long, especially the art of metaphor.

So is Camus's rebellion only metaphorical and not actual? Perhaps not. His own conduct in the war suggests otherwise. And four years after Camus finished his essay, Primo Levi faced an intolerable temptation in a concentration camp. It was a temptation to pray, and Levi, vigilant and lucid as perhaps Camus could not have imagined or feared, resisted the temptation. He gives an account of the episode in The Drowned and the Saved. Instinct with Camus's language of lucidity and absurdity, it is an extraordinarily "rebellious" passage of secular writing:

I too entered the Lager as a non-believer, and as a non-believer I was liberated
and have lived to this day; actually, the experience of the Lager with its
frightful iniquity has confirmed me in my laity. It has prevented me, and still
prevents me, from conceiving of any form of providence or transcendent justice .
. . I must nevertheless admit that I experienced (and again only once) the
temptation to yield, to seek refuge in prayer. This happened in the October of
1944, in the one moment in which I lucidly perceived the imminence of death.
Naked and compressed among my naked companions with my index card in hand, I was waiting to file past the "commission" that with one glance would decide whether I should immediately go into the gas chamber or was instead strong enough to go on working. For one instant I felt the need to ask for help and asylum; then, despite my anguish, equanimity prevailed: you do not change the rules of the game at the end of the match, nor when you are losing. A prayer under these conditions would have been not only absurd (what rights could I claim? and from whom?) but blasphemous, obscene, laden with the greatest impiety of which a non-believer is capable. I rejected the temptation: I knew that otherwise were I to survive, I would have to be ashamed of it.