‘The
Guest’ is a short story by Nobel laureate, Albert Camus. It tells the story of Daru, a schoolteacher,
who lives in his “schoolhouse” on a remote hillside “almost like a monk”. One day a gendarme brings an Arab who killed
his cousin in a family squabble to Daru’s schoolhouse. Since it is wartime Daru is asked to take the
murderer the next day to the police headquarters which is 20 km away.
Daru
thinks it is a dishonourable job handing over any person to the police. He hates the Arab for committing the
crime. He tells the gendarme that he
will disobey the order in spite of the latter’s warning about the
consequences. And disobey he does.
The
Arab is left untied in the night. When
he gets up and goes outside Daru hopes that he will run away. But he returns to bed soon. Daru takes him the next day having given him
enough food to last for two days, instructs him about the way through the mountains
to the police headquarters, tells him where he can find a resting place in the
night, and then he returns to his schoolhouse.
On the blackboard is written a warning: “You have handed over our
brother. You’ll pay for this.”
Daru
had come to see the Arab as a guest and not as a criminal. He had served him dinner. He had experienced an “imposing” feeling of “brotherhood”
while he spent the night with the Arab in the same room. But he hated the Arab as well as other human
beings for “their rotten spite, their tireless hates, their blood lust.”
Daru
hated humanity on the one hand for its essential viciousness, while on the
other hand he felt an essential brotherhood with all human beings. The gendarme calls Daru “crazy,” “cracked,”
and “a fool.”
What
Daru hates is the evil side of humanity.
And that side is predominant too.
When Daru tells us that the region where he lived was “cruel to live in,
even without men,” what he implies is that men are more cruel than the
nature. Daru would rather live far away
from men, “like a monk.” But that is not
possible either. There is much goodness
or refinement in his heart that connects him with the human race. How blessed life would have been if man were
not so filled with spite, hate and lust!
But
man is vile and there is no escape from that truth. Daru can stay like a monk on his isolated mountainside,
making his own laws, creating his own values, and finding his self-fulfilment
with the choices he makes at every step – even with the sword of Damocles
hovering just behind his neck.
That
is precisely the predicament of the perceptive intellectual like Camus. Either you jump into the quagmire and make
compromises with the spite, hate and lust, or stay out and face the
consequences...
Well,
Albert Camus was no more a pessimist than the other Existentialist writers like
Sartre. The human situation is not a
happy one, but each one of us can (should) make our own choices and forge our
own meaning in life. This is what they
all said.
If
they were to be alive today would Camus and Sartre say the same thing? Or would they laugh at the ridiculous
shallowness that has overtaken the human civilisation? I think they would have laughed much and most
of us wouldn’t ever see the pain they were trying to hide beneath the laughter.
"How blessed life would have been if man were not so filled with spite, hate and lust!" - I wonder how that world would have been. Spite, hate and lust are but a subset of all the human emotions. I wonder if a few emotions could exist without the other. Good gives rise to the bad too :( The world is so complicated, relationships exist and become complicated but then if not for emotions, would we become emotionaless robots living a mere existence? I wonder. But yes, cannot help but hope for a world where there's no spite, hate and lust even though it's like asking for the unknown!
ReplyDeleteThat's precisely the predicament of the "intellectually honest" philosophers like Camus - that the purity of life which they can understand intellectually cannot be got in actual situations. Hence the simultaneous contempt for life and the love!
DeleteMatheikal,
ReplyDeleteAnother one of your literary posts, but one which did not leave me groping, at least not in complete darkness.
You say, "The human situation is not a happy one, but each one of us can (should) make our own choices and forge our own meaning in life. This is what they all said."
I am aware of Sartre's and Kierkegaard's philosophical positions and it is likely that I have misunderstood them. I beleieve they say that there is no generic "human condition". That is, human condition, per se, cannot be sad or happy. Every human becomes a human only through his condition. That condition is his choice, his essence that comes subsequent to his existence that actually choses.
I would sincerely like you to puncture holes in my understanding. I will listen carefully and silently. No arguments. Please do oblige.
RE
Raghuram, you are discussing the basic tenets of Existentialism as such. I'm discussing the way that philosophy found an expression in a particular work of literature. Your understanding of Kierkegaard and Sartre as well as other philosophers of the school is right - the human condition is not a given, it is constantly in the making through the decisions taken by each individual. But in this post I'm looking at a particular character (human being) who is faced with his own condition and he too has to make decisions. He decides to disobey his government's order. He sets the criminal free although he cannot accept the crime... It is that dilemma I chose to focus on.
Delete