Farfetched is Always Better

This is subtle.  This is refreshing.  And this is original.  One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest is a story about what happens in a mental institute; but it represents so much more, says so much more, and symbolizes so much more.  Take, for example, the fog that appears only once, and can seem confusing and misleading, but can be interpreted to fit different molds of the context in which the novel was written. 

Chief Bromden is a Chronic. He is “in there for good.”  As such he pretends that he is deaf, he hallucinates constantly and suffers from constant anguish and paranoia.  Granted, that paranoia can take root in the shock treatments that he has received and the way that he has been treated in times past, but he narrates mundane events to an extent that makes them seem extraordinary.  When he is being shaved he starts saying that a dense white of fog that doesn’t let him see six inches in front of him is covering his face.  At first, I thought that that may have been the shaving cream, you know, maybe it had dripped into his eyes.  But after further reading, I think that nothing actually happened during his shave, Bromden was hallucinating.  If I were to base my interpretation solely on the time period that the book was written in I would say that Ken Kesey was trying to instill a subtle point about control of the masses on behalf of the government— the masses being the inmates and the government being the nurses and doctors— like some sort of political or civil rights point.  In this case, the fog is a sort of shaded lens that the control puts over the oppressed even in the most common events, thus it was displayed when he was being shaved.  Another possibility is that the fog is simply a hallucination with no backbone to the nature of it and that it was just a part of his flawed and frenetic mental state.  Here you take this short portion of the book at face value and understand that there is no way that an insane man could add any value to such a weird occurrence and the author is simply writing a novel with that included excerpt like any other.  I’d rather convince myself that the former is true and eliminate the latter as a possibility.  It seems more interesting.  More original.  And it makes what I am yet to read more engrossing. 

Book v. Movie

When reading, it is inevitable to picture the scene that is being described.  When I read Waiting for Godot, I imagined a tall tree and men that spoke with American accents, when you read the book, you may have pictured something else entirely.  A film based on a book literally depicts every part of the book that a director thought necessary to include.  There is much less room for interpretation and any parts that you carefully built an image of are instantly replaced with someone else’s analysis and cinematographic expertise. 

In Michael Lindsay Hogg’s Waiting for Godot, everyone is dressed very poorly and have old ragged clothes.  Also, there is never any real sunshine, or any object that can be said to symbolize even the slightest glimmer of hope or happiness.  Not that I was expecting Estragon’s boots to be made of Italian leather, but, I also thought that the reader/viewer had to infer the symbolisms so that the characters and the setting were neutral and the message of the book/movie was derived from sheer inference and interpretation. 

Having said this, the characters were bland.  The book transmits energy through inactivity, nothing happens.  In the movie, the actors try very hard to interpret the text and add emotion and drama to the alleged nothingness that made the play famous.  For example, in the movie, when Pozzo wants to leave and demands that Lucky help him, he gets angry and flustered.  The feeling that I got from the book was, to be redundant, that noting happened.  Lucky didn’t really care if they left or about the way that Pozzo treated him.  That is why he is lucky.  He doesn’t worry or hurry, because he is dumb.  He is an example of the saying that ignorance is bliss. 

In my criticism of the movie’s misinterpretation of Beckett’s intentions I have to say that the movie is more interesting than the book.  The book is better— I hope I am not confusing you too much— because it is absurdly meaningless, but that is the point and that is what gives it a glimpse of meaning.  The movie, on the other hand, is a scanty hybrid between something happening, and nothing happening.  In this way it accomplishes two things: 1) to bore the viewer into a comatose state, and 2) to insult Beckett’s original (faulty) idea of Waiting for Godot.

An Absurd Read

This play, I do not like.  This plot, I do not like.  Waste my time, I have not.  Waiting for Godot is an absurdist play about, well, nothing much.  Why then, is it not a waste of time?  The writing reminds me of the power of imagination and— sort of like Don Quixote— the curious nature of man. 

In Don Quixote, the adventures and travails of a mad man that thinks he is a knight are described; in Beckett’s play, insanity.  They are also both very similar to The Stranger.  In all of these novels, the accepted way of thinking is that life is what you make of it and there are no obligations.  Whether it is the mourning process or the waiting process, the suicidal thoughts or the valiant thoughts, all of the authors play with the idea that it really doesn’t make a difference.  Through the plot and beneath the phrasing lies this paradigm.  Rarely in this play is anything of value discussed, or even hinted at.  Nevertheless, precisely this is what makes one feel that the lack of meaning gives meaning.  In The Stranger and Don Quixote, I found myself thinking about the meaning of the use of certain words, I looked for symbols.  In Waiting or Godot, I knew from the very beginning that the alleged absurdist play was famous for its lack of meaning, so I didn’t look or find any interesting aspect.

I don’t enjoy reading absurdist text.  I feel that it doesn’t apply to my life.  At least for now, I plan on aligning myself to many societal customs, such as, for instance, actually doing something!  Beckett’s play attempts to propose a harsh idea about life as a theme: absurdity.  In truth, throughout the writing of this blog, I have convinced myself, reading that play was a waste of time.  

Mankind has free will: Odd

Many times during The Stranger one feels that Meursault is odd.  Simply odd.  He has lived his life in a way that no one else that is assumed to be normal ever has.  If it is true that this novel holds a certain value because of its questioning nature, one must link the questions that it poses to different characteristics of mankind.  

During recent history, mankind has dedicated itself to making life interesting, be it war, technology, or home furnishing, the human race is no longer talked about as precisely that, a race.  All our basic necessities are covered, food, water, shelter and so on— I am not neglecting the several situations where this isn’t true, but the human race that The Stranger refers to is not one that is worried about starvation.  So Meursault is free, he can existentialize himself all he wants, but that won’t change the restrictions that society has to impose to maintain order.  Mankind is free to investigate science, literature, mourning-process-psychology, sports or education; but the freedom of an individual end where those of another begin.  I am obviously not the first to say this, but given the elevated and abstract nature of the novel at hand, it is worth mentioning.  This right is not questionable, and Camus has not respected it.  He questioned the legitimacy and importance of murder.  That is not right.  This, reader, is why you felt that Meursault is odd.  Simply odd.  That fact that he doesn’t mourn after his precious Maman’s death is not what makes him odd.  It is that he approaches death with an attitude that no adjective can describe.  It is wrong and it is odd.  

A Strange Stranger

Philosophical questions have no answer.  People have answered many of them many times, yet they remain unsettled.  Famous thinkers in literature have many times driven themselves to perdition pondering these questions.  They have resorted to leaving them unanswered, and simply leaving a blank for the reader to interpret.  In Camus’ novel, this technique is used often. 

The most obvious and blatant example of this technique being used would be the title.  The Stranger.  Someone, somewhere, is a stranger to something or someone.  Of course that can be narrowed down to fit the character traits of Meursault in Algiers.  But what is he a stranger to?  Camus is careful to not include an adjective in the title, which he leaves open-ended.  He never tells us what makes Meursault so strange, yet in most analytical pieces written about the book, it is rare to find references to the most integral part.  My twisted understanding is that Camus wants the reader to assume that the “strange” part is that Meursault feels no remorse for murder, or sadness for death.  Yet the real underpinning of the title lies in the author’s own identity.  Albert Camus wants to hide in the semblance of a lack of feeling.  In truth, the strange part about both him and the main character is that they are authentic.  Yes that is the proper word.  Authentic.  They are existential beings.  They judge themselves and allow no outside feeling to penetrate their layered belief system.  Is it acceptable to kill an Arab in a beach?  But not to mourn the death of your mother?  Camus/Meursault will decide for himself.  One could say that they are odd in that sense…or strange.

A minor example from the text could be found in the hundredth page.  “’Not once during the preliminary hearings did this man show emotion over his heinous offense.’ At that point he turned in my direction, pointed his finger at me, and went on attacking me without my ever really understanding why.”  Here the reader is missing a why.  Why don’t you understand that shooting a person that you don’t know four times at point blank should evoke some kind of reaction?  It is understood that Meursault thinks that he is to judge himself.  And he is perplexed by the notion of a stranger accusing him and a jury judging him.  The lack of information is to the reader what the lack of feeling from Meursault is to society.