444
PARTISAN REVIEW
A similar defense was offered for crucial contributions to the Nazi
enterprise by a cultured architect with an immense talent for industrial
organization. In
Inside the Third Reich,
Albert Speer argues passionately yet
contritely that he was simply carried along by the demands made on his
capacities. "Completely under the sway of Hitler, I was henceforth pos–
sessed by my work. Nothing else mattered." This highly-placed
Meursault never looked directly at the abominations he was helping to
commit. And he too carried many readers along with him because of his
seemingly candid style.
I am proposing that the students who saw Meursault as "honest" and
"misunderstood by a judgmental French society" fell into a serious error
partially illuminated by the proverb, "to understand is to forgive." G.
K.
Chesterton called this attitude "the devil's sentimentality." Under care–
fully controlled conditions, as in listening to the "sincere" and seductive
narrative voice of
The Stranger,
our empathy for another person can be
stretched very far. We can venture too close and lose our perspective on
humanity. Once we understand another life by entering it, by seeing it
from inside, we may both pardon and forgive a criminal action. We may
not even recognize it as criminal. We are all guilty in some way. How
can we ever judge anyone else, punish anyone else?
That line of thinking leads to an unacceptable dilemma. Either justice
is impossible and escapes us; or justice itself, if we do attempt to establish
it, is inhuman. The action of
Billy Budd
confronts and blocks such slack
thinking. Captain Vere in his fanatic resolve to maintain strict discipline
aboard ship remains fully human, and tragic. But a failure of humanity
and of judgment afflicts the reader who overlooks Meursault's obscurely
motivated murder of an Arab and who finds that Meursault's flat account
of the details of his everyday life redeems the rest of his conduct. How
could such an ordinary and unassuming person be a murderer?
For a time Camus himself became one of those misguided readers.
He seems to have forgotten what the Greek Oresteian trilogy, a set of
tumultuous plays clearly related to
Billy Budd
and
The Stranger,
sets before
us: that we cannot survive without a system ofjustice. We have a duty to
judge and to punish crimes. (The death penalty is another question.) Or–
estes is not
pardoned.
He is finally
forgiven
the blood-guilt of matricide, but
only after lengthy suffering at the hands of the Furies, genuine penance,
and ritual cleansing. Justice is done, and a precedent is set. Two millennia
later Benjamin Constant, a contemporary of Mary Shelley, expressed a
proper scorn for explanations, analyses, and excuses for reprehensible ac–
tions: "I hate that fatuousness of a mind that excuses what it explains ...
and that analyzes itself instead of repenting." Constant favored repen–
tance.
