The Age of Suspicion (2 page)

Thus, by way of analysis, and of the psychological explanations that, up till the last moment, Camus took such pains to avoid, the contradictions and improbabilities of his book are explained and the emotion to which we yield at last, unreservedly, is justified.

Camus's situation recalls somewhat that of King Lear, taken in charge by the least favoured of his daughters. For, in the end, it is to the 'psychological,' which he had tried so carefully to root out, but which came up again everywhere like weeds, that he owes his salvation.

But however relieved we may feel, when we have closed the book, we cannot help harbouring a certain resentment against the author: we begrudge him the fact of having led us too long astray. His behaviour towards his character reminds us a bit too much of certain mothers who persist in dressing their buxom and already adult daughters in skirts that are too short. In this unequal struggle, 'the psychological,' like nature, came out on top.

But perhaps, on the contrary, Camus was trying to demonstrate a wager on the impossibility, in our climes, of doing without psychology. If this was his purpose, he more than succeeded.

But, people will say, what about Kafka? Who would maintain that his
homo absurdus
was nothing but a mirage? There is no wilfulness in his attitude, no concern for didactics, no prejudice. He doesn't need to go in for impossible labours of weeding: on the bare lands to which he leads us, no blade of grass can grow.

Yet nothing is more arbitrary than to compare him, as is often done today, with the writer who was, if not his teacher, at least his precursor, as he was for nearly all the European writers in our time, whether they realise it or not.

Across the immense territories opened up by Dostoievsky Kafka drew a path, a single, long, narrow path; he advanced in a single direction, and followed it to the end. To be assured of this, we must rise above our reluctance, turn backwards a moment and plunge into the very thick of the tumult. In the presence of a numerous gathering, the elder Karamazov enters the highly respected Father Zossima's cell and introduces himself: 'You see before you a buffoon, a real buffoon! That's how I present myself ... an old habit, alas!' and he starts to writhe, makes faces, a sort of St. Vitus dance dislocates all his movements, he assumes ludicrous poses, describes with savage, bitter lucidity how he has put himself in humiliating situations, using, in speaking, those humble and, at the same time, aggressive diminutives, those little saccharine corrosive words that so many of Dostoievski's characters affect; he lies brazenly, and when caught in the act, falls on his feet
again
...
he can never be taken off his guard, he knows himself: 'I knew it, imagine, and do you know, I even sensed it as soon as I started talking, and I also even sensed (because he has strange premonitions) that you would be the first to point it out to me,' he is lowering himself even more, as though he knew that, in this way, he lowers and abases the others too, he sneers, begins to confess his sins: 'it was just now, at this very instant, while I was talking, that I invented everything ... to make it sound pithier,' because, like an ill person who is constantly on the alert for symptoms of his illness, his eyes turned on himself, he is examining, watching himself: it is to coax them, to win them ever, to disarm them that he carries on this way, 'I make faces to be more agreeable, in fact sometimes I don't know myself why.' As he continues to go round and round, he makes us think of certain clowns who, without stopping their pirouetting, take off their clothes, one garment after another: 'In fact, I don't know, there may also be an evil spirit in me', and he starts crawling again: 'oh, a little one, to be sure, if he were bigger he would have chosen another home,' then immediately pulls himself up and snarls, 'not yours, you too are a sorry home.' The Staretz tries to lay a calming hand on him . . . 'Let me urge you not to feel uncomfortable or ill at ease, make yourself quite
at home
...
And above all (for he too is examining closely, without a shadow of indignation or loathing, this turgid matter that is boiling up and overflowing), and above all, don't be so ashamed of yourself, because it all comes only from that.'—'Quite at home, really? That is to say, perfectly natural? Oh, that's too much, far too much, I myself would not go that far.' He makes an obscene school-boy joke and immediately grows serious again: the Staretz has understood him, he contorts himself like that to conform to the idea they have of him, to outbid them, 'because it seems to me, when I approach people ... that everybody takes me for a buffoon. So I say to myself: why not act the buffoon,
then
...
because all of you, to the very last one, you are lower than I am, and that's why I am a buffoon ... it is out of shame, Father; out of shame...' A moment later, he falls on his knees, and 'it is hard, even then, to know whether he is joking or deeply moved: "Master, what must I do to gain eternal life?" The Staretz comes a little nearer: "Above all, do not lie to yourself ... he who lies to himself ... is the first to be offended ... he knows that no one has offended him . . . and yet he is offended to the point of feeling satisfaction, immense pleasure". . .' Being an experienced connoisseur, Karamazov weighs this statement. 'Exactly, exactly, I have felt offended all my life, to the point of enjoyment, for its aesthetic value, because it is not only agreeable, but sometimes it is exquisite to be offended ... you forget that, Father: it is exquisite!'. . . He leaps up, gives another pirouette and casts off another harlequin's costume: 'You think that I always lie like this and act the buffoon? I want you to know that it was on purpose, to test you, that I indulged in this play-acting. I was trying you
out
...
is there room for my humility beside your pride? ..

Emerging from this whirlwind, we are obliged to admire the credit that adherents of the method that consists in being content to skirt prudently around the object from the outside, must grant the reader (thus conceding to him what, by a curious contradiction, they refuse their characters) when they imagine that, even after reading a long novel, he can possibly perceive, through some sort of magic intuition, so much as a part of what the six pages of which we have just given a very rough summary, have shown him.

All of these strange contortions—and we should reproach ourselves for pointing this out, if there were not still those today who, like Paul Léautaud, allow themselves to speak seriously of 'that lunatic Dostoievski'—all of these disordered leapings and grimacings, are the absolutely precise outward manifestation, reproduced without indulgence or desire to please, the way the magnetic needle of a galvanometer gives amplified tracings of the minutest variations of a current, of those subtle, barely perceptible, fleeting, contradictory, evanescent movements, faint tremblings, ghosts of timid appeals and recoilings, pale shadows that flit by, whose unceasing play constitutes the invisible woof of all human relationships and the very substance of our lives.

Of course the methods that Dostoievski used to reproduce these subjacent movements were primitive ones, ff he had lived in our time, the more delicate instruments of investigation at the disposal of modern techniques would have doubtless permitted him to seize these movements at their source, thus avoiding all these incredible gesticulations. But by using our techniques, he might also have lost more than he gained. They would have inclined him towards greater realism and finer minutiae, but he would have lost his originality and ingenuous boldness of line; he would have sacrificed something of his poetic force of evocation as well as of his tragic power.

And it should be said immediately that what is revealed by these starts and sudden changes, these pirouettings, premonitions and confessions, has absolutely no relation to the disappointing, abstract exposure of motives to which our methods of analysis are accused of leading today. These subjacent movements, this incessant swirl, similar to the movement of atoms, that all of these grimaces bring to light, are themselves nothing else but action, and they only differ by their delicacy, their complexity and their 'underground' nature—to use one of Dostoievski's favourite words —from the larger, close-up actions we are shown in a Dos Passos novel, or in a film.

We find these same movements again in different degrees of intensity, and with infinite variations, in all of Dostoievski's characters: in the hero of
Notes
from Underground,
in Hippolite or Lebedieff, in Grouchenka or Rogojine, and above all, only more precise, more complicated, more delicate and broader than elsewhere, in the Eternal Husband. Here, it will be recalled, we have the same furtive starts, the same skilful thrusts, the same feints, the same mock quarrels, the same attempts at rapprochment, the same extraordianry presentiments, the same provocations, the same subtle, mysterious game in which hatred mingles with tenderness, revolt and fury with child-like docility, abjectness with the most authentic pride, cunning with ingenuousness, extreme delicacy with extreme rudeness, familiarity with deference; Pavlovitch teases, provokes, attacks, crawls, lies in wait, flees when sought, remains when driven out, tries to touch people's hearts, then immediately bites, weeps and shows his love, dedicates himself, sacrifices himself, and, a few seconds later, leans over, razor in hand, to kill; he speaks in the same saccharine, slightly mocking and obsequious manner, a speech that is larded with crawling, aggressive diminutives, with words servilely prolonged by those hissing suffixes that, in the Russian language of the time, denoted a sort of acrid, sweetish deference; then, occasionally drawing himself up to all his manly height, he dominates, bestows, generously pardons, overwhelms.

These attitudes are repeated so often in countless different situations, throughout Dostoievski's works, that we might almost reproach him with a certain monotony. In fact, at times, we have the impression of being in the presence of a veritable obsession.

'All of these characters,' wrote Gide,
{4}
'are cut from the same cloth. Pride and humility remain the secret motives of everything they do, although differences of dosage give varied reactions.' But it appears that humility and pride are also mere modalities, mere shadings, and that underneath them there is another, still more secret motive, a movement of which pride and humility are but repercussions. It is doubtless to this initial movement, which lends impulse to all the others, to this spot at which all the trunk lines that traverse this tumultuous mass converge, that Dostoievski alluded when he spoke of his 'source,' 'my eternal source,' from which he derived, as he said, 'the material for each one of my works, even though their form be different.' This meeting-place, this 'source' is rather hard to define. We might perhaps convey an idea of it by saying that, when all is said and done, it is nothing but what Katherine Mansfield called, with some fear and, perhaps, slight distaste: 'this terrible desire to establish contact.'

It is this continual, almost maniacal need for contact, for an impossible, soothing embrace, that attracts all of these characters like dizziness and incites them on all occasions to try, by any means whatsoever, to clear a path to the 'other,' to penetrate him as deeply as possible and make him lose his disturbing, unbearable opaqueness; in their turn, it impels them to confide in him and show him their own innermost recesses. Their momentary dissimulations, their furtive leaps, their secretiveness, their contradictions, the inconsistencies of their conduct, which, at times, they appear to multiply for the mere pleasure of it and dangle before the eyes of the other, are, in their case, nothing but coy, flirtatious attempts to arouse his curiosity and oblige him to draw nearer. Nor is their humility anything but a timid, round-about appeal, a way of showing that they are quite near, accessible, disarmed, open, acquiescent, in complete surrender, completely abandoned to the understanding, the generosity, of the other: all the barriers erected by dignity, by vanity, have been torn down, anyone can approach them, no one need fear to come in, entrance is free. And their sudden starts of pride are merely painful attempts, in the face of an intolerable refusal, a rejection of their appeal, when the path their humility had tried to follow is closed, to quickly back away and, by choosing other means of access, through hatred, contempt, inflicted suffering, or through some brilliant feat, some bold, generous gesture that astounds and dumbfounds people, succeed in re-establishing contact, in re-assuming possession of the other.

This incapacity to take their place to one side, at a distance, to stand 'on their dignity,' in a state of opposition, or of just plain indifference, is the source of their strange malleability, of that curious docility with which, constantly, as though they were trying to wheedle and win people over, they take as their model the image of themselves that others reflect back to them. This is also the source of that strange impulse that constantly impels those who feel debased to debase themselves even further and force others to wallow in the same debasement. And if, as André Gide observes,
{5}
'they would not know how, they are incapable of being jealous' and 'all they know about jealousy is suffering,' it is because the rivalry implied by jealousy produces the unbearable antagonism, the break that they seek to avoid at all cost; in consequence, this rivalry, in their case, is continually being destroyed, submerged under a curious kind of tenderness, or under that very special sentiment that can hardly be called hatred, which, with them, is simply a way of approaching one's rival, of grasping, of clasping him to oneself by means of the object of their love.

This refusal to consider their claim, this 'wise don't understand' that Rilke speaks of, and concerning which he adds that it means 'accepting to be alone, (whereas) struggle and contempt are ways of participating,' in their case, are rarely met with. Contact is inevitably established, the appeal is always heard. Nor does the reply ever fail to come, whether it be in the form of an impulse towards tenderness and forgiveness, or towards struggle and contempt.