Agamemnon's Kiss by Inga Clendinnen

Author:Inga Clendinnen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIO026000, LAN008000, HIS000000
ISBN: 9781921776502
Publisher: The Text Publishing Company
Published: 2007-06-04T00:00:00+00:00

BERNHARD SCHLINK’S THE READER

In 1942 Albert Camus published his first novel. A decade later, despite the disruptions of war and its aftermath, The Outsider had been recognised as one of those books we cannot do without, celebrated for its moral force, its philosophical passion, the elegance of its structure and the marvellous simplicity of its prose. Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader appeared in his native Germany in 1988. Ten years later it too was translated into the major European languages. In my view it equals Camus’ work in moral force, and excels it in moral acuity and literary élan.

The two books are cousins in style, mode and structure, and in both the life situation of the male narrator approximates that of the author. The Outsider inserts us to the mind-flow of Meursault, a young Algerian-born Frenchman. He gives us an account of a few days in his life: he goes to his mother’s funeral, he meets a girl, they go swimming, they go to a comic film, they go to bed. Listening to the voice we get to know him. This is a very private man, a sensualist living happily within his narrow milieu with no desire for adventure or for intimacy. Socially he exhibits the casual tolerance of one who cares nothing for the dramas of others. We recognise his core characteristic: while he will lie about some things, he will not lie about his feelings. Now there is a word for this very modern hero as there was not then. Meursault is the epitome of ‘cool’.

Meursault’s refusal to play society’s games will cost him his life. Caught in the fringe of a friend’s drama, in a strange, dissociated moment he shoots an Arab. Earlier the Arab had wounded the friend; he drew a knife; Meursault did not ‘form an intention’ to kill him, and shooting an Arab was not much of an offence in French Algeria anyway. We expect him to get off. Instead he is sentenced to be guillotined, not because he shot the Arab but because his behaviour over those few days comes to the court’s attention and enrages opinion against him: he went swimming, picked up a girl, watched a Fernandel film—and he had not wept at his mother’s funeral. The Prosecuting Counsel sums up the offence: ‘I accuse this man of burying his mother like a heartless criminal.’

After the sentence we wait with Meursault in his condemned cell, and through that long wait learn the obscenity of a state’s scheduled doing to death of a young man who loves the sea, the sun, his girl’s mouth and breasts. Nonetheless, the second half of The Outsider steadily loses the electric intensity of the first because Camus’ voice progressively displaces Meursault’s as he manoeuvres his character’s acceptance of the ‘benign indifference of the universe’ which lies at the heart of Camus’ absurdist philosophy. What begins as a novel transforms into a philosophical tract. Unwillingly, we begin to notice how very contrived the story is, for all the plangency of the narrating voice, and that it is enacted within a white space, a political void.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.