Rollo May and Meursault

A startling picture of the loss of the sense of self in our society is given in a short novel, The Stranger, by the French author Albert Camus. It is the story of a Frenchman who is extraordinary in no respect—indeed, he might well be called an “average” modern man. He experiences the death of his mother, goes to work and about the ordinary things of life, has an affair and sexual experiences, all without any clear decision or awareness on his part. He later shoots a man, and it is vague even in his own mind whether he shot by accident or in self-defense.

He goes through a murder trial and is executed, all with a horrible sense of unreality, as though everything happened to him: he never acted himself. The book is pervaded by a vagueness and haze which is frustrating and shocking. Everything seems to take place in a dream, with the man never really related to the world or anything he does or to himself. He is a man without courage or despair, despite the outwardly tragic events, because he has no awareness of himself. At the end when he is awaiting execution he almost gets a glimmer of the realization, almost, but not quite; there is not enough sense of himself for even that to break through.The novel is a haunting and subtly terrifying picture of the modem man who is truly a “stranger” to himself.

This work considers how Meurasult is an unhealthy person based on Rollo May`s theory. Meursault is the non-believer in Camus’s The Stranger, who is ‘guilty of a criminal offence’ (May 1972, 10). He is, indeed, a murderer, whose attempt to live authentically leads to the guillotine. In Meursault’s strictly immanent world there is no God, no supernatural agency, no universal reason to keep one from becoming a criminal, a moral ‘outsider’.

This hero illustrates the dilemmas and critical questions in May`s theory: is there no middle ground between the ‘inhuman monster wholly without moral sense’, as the prosecutor calls Meursault, and the religious knight of faith? Can authenticity be a viable ethical norm? Can its ‘heroes’ find a place in a community? Or is it a romantic ideal, an immature protest against the leveling processes of the unidimensional objectivity that dominates our modern, excessively technological civilization? If the latter is indeed the case, why bother at all?What is the point of the enormous effort made by so many serious European thinkers to provoke us into embracing authenticity, if there seems to be little chance that it can be realized? Must we be content with postulating authenticity as an ideal to aspire to rather than a viable social norm—an ideal that is nevertheless necessary if we are to become what we are given a cultural and social context that undermines this authentic selfhood? “There is no denying that the massive unreality and fear exists”, says May (May 1972, 102).In our day we tend to live out the state of mind that Camus predicted in his early novel, The Stranger, in which: Meursault, the anti-hero, exists in a general state of semiconsciousness. He makes love to a girl as though both were half-asleep, and he finally shoots an Arab in the sun on the desert in a condition of semiawareness that leaves us, as no doubt it left him, wondering whether he had really shot the Arab or not. He is tried for murder.

His crime is actually the murder of himself (May 1972, 204).Our survival depends on whether human consciousness can be asserted, and with sufficient strength, to stand against the stultifying pressures of technological progress. People must push on in the endeavor to understand the psychological uses of innocence and murder. Ontological anxiety confronts each with a major challenge. This unpleasant emotion intensifies whenever we strive to fulfill our innate potentials, for emphatically affirming that we exist also brings a reminder that someday we will not.

It is all too tempting to repress or intellectualize our understanding of death and opt for the apparent safety of social conformity and apathy. That is, we may try to deprive nonbeing of its sting by (consciously or unconsciously) treating our being-in-the-world as meaningless. “The awareness of death is widely repressed in our day. . .

. [In fact,] the ways we repress death and its symbolism are amazingly like the ways the Victorians repressed sex” (May 1969, 106). Nevertheless, the healthy course is to accept nonbeing as an inseparable part of being:To grasp what it means to exist, one needs to grasp the fact that he might not exist, that he treads at every moment on the sharp edge of possible annihilation and can never escape the fact that death will arrive at some unknown moment in the future. .

. . Without this awareness of nonbeing . .

. existence is vapid [and] unreal. . . .

But with the confrontation of nonbeing, existence takes on vitality and immediacy, and the individual experiences a heightened consciousness of himself, his world, and others around him. . . . [Thus] the confronting of death gives the most positive reality to life itself. May 1969, 30).

Meursault, in the litany of self-justification that he recites to us and the prison chaplain, says that nothing has the least importance to him: What difference could they make to me, the deaths of others, or a mother's love, or his [the priest's] God; or the way man decides to live, the fate he thinks he chooses, since one and the same fate was bound to 'choose' not only me but thousands of millions of privileged people who, like him, called themselves my brothers. Surely, surely he must see that? (Camus 152). Alienated from his own feelings, Meursault reads alienation as the universal condition.His case is as baffling as it is tragic. He is so acute in his observations, so scrupulous in recording minute-by-minute data, and noting his restlessness, drowsiness, or boredom, that we are convinced of his superior vision.

After his catharsis we are all the more ready to be convinced, but we are fooled; even after catharsis he is tangled, tragically, in his signifiers. A man who insists on his right to kill, with reflex action and coincidence as his defense, is, in a curious and tragic way, enlightened and unenlightened at the same time.Like the heroes of myth, Meursault is blinded by the narrow slit of his personal consciousness, which he equates with universal vision. In contrast to Freud, May attributes considerable importance to both psychic determinism and teleology. We are all to some extent impelled by forces from infancy and childhood, especially those of us who are more neurotic. Yet we also have the freedom, and the responsibility, to strive toward those goals that we select.

Psychologically healthy people can readily imagine some desirable future state and then prepare to move in this direction, a capacity May refers to as will or intentionality (May 1969).To May, the loss of intentionality represents the major psychopathology of time. “The central core of modern man's 'neurosis' . .

. is the undermining of his experience of himself as responsible, the sapping of his will and ability to make decisions” (May1969, 184). May also concludes that the related feelings of intense powerlessness are likely to result in violence, a last-ditch attempt to prove that the sufferer can still affect someone significantly. Meursault's universe is neither indifferent nor benign, and to kill a man is by no means a neutral act.Meursault creates his drama both to confirm and to engender his anger. He will be heartless to prove the universe heartless.

He makes himself into a murderer to reveal the murderous intent at the heart of the universe; he has himself placed behind bars to signify his quarantine; he is remorseless, to himself no less than to others, to take his revenge on a universe without remorse. Meursault is doomed in all his relations with the world. Though the drama places him at the center of attention, he is still only object, not healthy person, since he refuses to acknowledge his intention.Significance must exist only for others, not for Meursault, who had removed himself to some hallowed ground beyond the reach of significance, and the significance our hero dies for is itself canceled.

Meursault is a vortex of contradiction. Contemptuous of all ideas, he prides himself on his own. Absenting himself from human relations, he accuses society of investing his life with a significance he refuses to accept, while registering his complaint against society for treating him as a nonperson: objectivity cancels itself.Indifferent to death, he permits in his consciousness almost no space for any thoughts except of his own death. In his contradictions Meursault conforms exactly to May's portrait of the unhealthy person. Consciousness lights on one impression after another in this novel, with no consciousness to mediate between them, since the protagonist, while proud of his superior consciousness, uses consciousness to deny consciousness.

This flickering consciousness is mystified at the traces of a more extended consciousness in others, as Meursault is nonplussed at anyone's expression of grief or love.