Bellow And Camus: Different Paths To Surrender

Saul Bellow’s Dangling Man (1944) and Albert Camus’s The Stranger (1942) are novels exemplary in their grappling with modern man’s inner search for truth, meaning, and self-worth. In their respective works, both Bellow and Camus create main characters who similarly receive numerous opportunities to live correctly and yet are still unable to live properly; as a result, both surrender in the end, giving up and throwing away the self. But the similarity ends there, with each author bringing his character to the point of surrender in a distinctly different way: Bellow’s Joseph discovers the proper way to live early in the novel but struggles to reach this place while aware of his failures along the way. Unable to continue this struggle, he surrenders himself a “chopped and shredded man,” giving himself back to society and accepting extrinsic guidance of man-made design (Bellow 164). On the other hand, Meursault, Camus’s protagonist, lives life on the surface, in one dimension only, unaware and unappreciative of the joy life brings him. Meursault, through chance, does come to realize the proper way to live later in the novel; however now too late, he surrenders himself by accepting his death sentence as simply another part of man’s absurd existence.

Joseph, Bellow’s rational thinking-man, leaves his respectable job at the Inter-American Travel Bureau in Chicago to answer the Army’s call for induction. An unexpected holdup, centered around his Canadian citizenship, forces him to spend time at home without work. Anticipating a short delay, he looks forward to this idle time as an opportunity to continue his studies: several essays on the philosophers of the Enlightenment. But soon discovering an inability to read and work, a result of his self-confessed failure to use his freedom, Joseph begins to dangle and deteriorate, “storing bitterness and spite which eat like acids at [his] . . . good will” (12). Here Joseph’s drift into unyielding introspection and self-analysis begins, when he searches within himself for the strength, knowledge, and ability to live properly.

“How should a good man live; what ought he to do?” (Bellow 39). In the past, Joseph asked himself this question often; always unable to answer, he now, for the first time, can see why: he had always been a “creature of plans” (39). These plans of old had fenced him in and prevented him from seeing the truth; “unfortunately, most of [these plans] were foolish . . . They led him to be untrue to himself. He made mistakes of the sort people make who see things as they wish to see them or, for the sake of their plans, must see them . . . . They could not give him what he wanted” (39).

What he desired was a “colony of the spirit,” a group or construct which forbade “spite, bloodiness, cruelty, and crudity” (39). Joseph’s insight, even without clear, specific conclusions, has him on his way to discovering for himself the proper way a good man should live. Bellow now creates many important scenes that make the correct way to live increasingly clear to Joseph while, at the same time, providing him with opportunities to put what he has learned into practice. Three such significant scenes are, first, the Servatius party; second, the music room scene at brother Amos’s home; and third, Myron Adler’s visit.

First, at Harry and Minna Servatius’s party, Joseph finds exactly what he expected, what he knew he could not avoid: mischief, strain, and distortion among friends. After the obligatory mingling, those at the party begin to slow down. Minna, despite many objections, coerces Morris Abt into hypnotizing her. Lying on the couch in the study, Minna displays, at least to Joseph, complete vulnerability: “She looked less specifically like a woman than a more generalized human being — and a sad one at that. This view of her affected me greatly” (Bellow 52). When Abt tells Minna she will feel no pain and then proceeds to pinch her hand so violently that the skin remains white long afterward, Joseph becomes impatient and angry with his friend. He knew beforehand that Abt held a “history of injured feelings” against Minna, that he “looked and sounded exceptionally unhappy,” but he never imagined revenge and cruelty emanating from Abt in this way (47). Thoroughly disenchanted with events taken place, Joseph calls a cab which allows Iva and him to quickly escape the party. As they travel through the dark streets toward home, a light falls upon Iva’s face. Joseph, noticing a vein near the surface of her skin, responds “almost as I had to Minna on the couch” (55). Observing the vulnerability of his drunk, sleeping wife, Joseph has a sudden, powerful urge to “pinch” her; she, of course, had disobeyed and angered him at the party by drinking punch against his wishes. Appalled and disheartened with Abt’s earlier behavior, Joseph, none the better, now falls victim to the same enemy:

“With one leap ‘nasty, brutish, and short’ had landed in our midst . . . . Let us admit the truth. One was constantly threatened, shouldered, and, sometimes invaded by ‘nasty, brutish, and short’, lost fights to it in unexpected corners. In the colony? Even in oneself.” (56)

Joseph’s first realization of failure, and the frustration that goes with it, foreshadows the ultimate failure yet to come: “I . . . knew I had hit upon the truth and could not dispel it tomorrow or any other day” (57).

Again, in a second scene, Bellow accents this disparity between Joseph’s ideals and reality. After an unsettling conversation with Amos after dinner, Joseph flees to his brother’s music room to clear his head and gather his thoughts. While listening to a Haydn divertimento, absorbing the music as though spoken to directly, Joseph quickly reaches a significant realization:

“I was still an apprentice in suffering and humiliation . . . . I had, furthermore, no right to expect to avoid them . . . . that was not a human privilege . . . How to meet them, was answered in the second declaration: with grace, without meanness.” (67)

Joseph knows now what he did not know earlier at the Servatius party: he must exercise kindness, understanding, and patience as he confronts and interacts with others in the world around him, especially those who may not agree or understand the way in which he tries to live. Bellow gives Joseph an opportunity to apply this newfound knowledge, a chance to exercise grace and kindness under fire. Suddenly entering the music room, Etta, Amos’s daughter, selects from the shelf a record of her own and waits to take possession of her phonograph. Joseph, failing to sidestep this ploy to provoke conflict, immediately plays into her hands by refusing to let her listen to her record. With the patience and understanding Haydn recommended far from his mind, Joseph involves himself in a petty, childlike shouting match with Etta. Joseph knows in the midst of the argument that “this is absurd, quarreling with a stupid child,” but he cannot let it go; it does not occur to him that simply walking away puts an end to the situation in a manner graceful and adultlike (70). When Etta utters the inevitable “beggars can’t be choosers,” an obvious reference to his ever-lengthening unemployment and lack of income, Joseph loses control: “You’re a little animal . . . As rotten and spoiled as they come. What you need is a whipping” (70). Failing now to rise above spite and cruelty, as if any resistance to these evils remained within, Joseph gives in to final temptation: “Seizing her by the hair fiercely, I snapped her head back; her outcry never left her throat . . . her eyes shut tightly in horror . . . . I hurried my task, determined that she should be punished” (70–71). In this second opportunity, Joseph has again forgotten all he has learned and later confesses failure: “I seem to be unable to stay out of trouble. Disgraced myself at my brother’s house last night” (59).

As Joseph continues his so-far unsuccessful struggle to live as he clearly perceives he should, he is visited by the Spirit of Alternatives or Tu As Raison Aussi, his alternate self. Acknowledging his current place in the “gap” between an ideal construction and the reality of the world around him, Joseph also expresses concern about his inability to pull together and find a balance between these two “worlds.” Later, when contemplating this discussion which then provided no real answers, Joseph reaches further conclusions possibly still more relevant:

“The quest is one and the same . . . We are all drawn toward the same craters of the spirit — to know what we are and what we are here for, to know our purpose, to seek grace. And, if the quest is the same, the differences in our personal histories, which hitherto meant so much to us, become of minor importance . . . . What we really want is to stop living so exclusively and vainly for our own sake, impure and unknowing, turning inward and self-fastened . . . . If I had Tu As Raison Aussi with me today, I could tell him that the highest ‘ideal construction’ is one that unlocks the imprisoning self.” (Bellow 154, 153)

Now holding all the pieces to his puzzle, Joseph has succeeded where others have failed: he has discovered, on his own and within himself, the correct way to live. All that remains is to simply observe and obey the guidelines he has established. Past events, however, as set forth in these two representative scenes, have shown that he has failed miserably and does not possess the self-discipline to do what he knows is right. Critic Helen Weinberg, author of The New Novel In America, says, “The new Joseph, though he sees the fallacies of his old optimism, still relies primarily on reason to show him the way to authenticity. Through reason, however, he finds only his old guilt and creates new frustrations, irritabilities, and guilts [sic] for himself” (59). But Bellow gives Joseph another chance to put this additional insight and experience of past failure to good use. In Bellow’s third significant scene, Myron Adler’s visit, Joseph again has an opportunity to live properly.

Myron’s unexpected visit, intended as a pleasant afternoon of talk between close friends, should surprise and please Joseph because he is in much need of human contact and companionship; instead, Joseph focuses immediately on Myron’s clothing: “Adler was very spruce, in a wide shouldered coat and tweed suit, new style, without cuffs . . . . His hat with its blunt crown was new also” (Bellow 155). Feeling somewhat ashamed of the modest room, his living quarters for the past nine months, Joseph notices that “Iva’s shoes under the bed showed a crooked line of heels” (155–56). Joseph quickly concludes that Myron’s new clothing, especially when compared to Iva’s worn shoes, indicates an inequality between them, a dichotomy based on “personal histories.” If the quest is really one and the same for all, why do the differences between Myron and himself matter so much? And they do matter to Joseph: “We’re temporarily in different social classes, and it has an effect on us . . . . For instance, the way you took in this room, the way you looked around . . . . We are in different classes. The very difference in our clothing shows it” (157–58). Despite his collected conclusions and increased self-awareness, Joseph continues to fail: he fails to rid himself of spite and cruelty; he fails to exercise grace, kindness, and understanding; and he fails to let personal histories and social conventions assume minor importance. More disturbing still, Joseph knows he fails while he fails but cannot practice the new ideals he has worked so hard to uncover. “Only the disavowal of the past, a leap of faith, and the quest for the spiritual self, his and all men’s,” says Weinberg, “can purify and free. The new Joseph of Dangling Man sees this but does not do this” (59). This is Joseph’s inner struggle: the inability to rid himself of the man-made conventions inherent in the society in which he must live. He cannot bridge the “gap” between an “ideal construction” and reality.

The failure to live properly, so clearly demonstrated by Bellow’s Joseph in the three scenes above, is also manifest in Camus’s Meursault; Meursault’s failure to live properly follows a path quite different from Joseph’s, however. Meursault works as a clerk in an Algerian shipping office. A common working man, comfortable with his life of habit and routine, he lives what many would consider a life outside the “norm.” He does not concern himself with social conventions or worldly pursuits such as love, ambition, or self-awareness; neither is he affected emotionally by events as serious as the recent death of his mother, Raymond’s beating of a girlfriend, or the killing of an Arab by his own hand. Meursault lives simply “to be,” experiencing and enjoying the world only through his senses; through this physical pleasure, life’s value and worth are communicated to him. Unlike Bellow’s Joseph, who discovers his correct way to live early on after deep introspection, Camus’s Meursault does not know his proper way to live; he does not recognize his failures. But Camus, much like Bellow, has provided his character many opportunities to discover the correct way to live. Meursault fails to live properly not because he fails to achieve an ideal or a construct, but because he does not see the important role physical gratification plays in his life; he has not made the most of past opportunities; he has not lived life to its fullest. Meursault’s failure to recognize and appreciate the pleasure the physical, external world makes available to him can be seen in three areas: first, his surrounding environment; second, his relationship with Marie; and third, his interaction with people.

First, the environment holds a significant place in the life of Meursault. After the overnight vigil for his mother, Meursault steps outside the mortuary following an uncomfortable evening of sleep. In the midst of a superficial mourning for his mother’s death, Meursault is easily pulled away and captured by the beauty of the landscape around him: “The sun was up. Above the hills that separate Marengo from the sea, the sky was streaked with red. And the wind coming over the hills brought the smell of salt with it. It was going to be a beautiful day” (Camus 12). And later, as the forty-five-minute march to the church gets underway, Meursault observes still more: “I was looking at the countryside around me . . . the rows of cypress trees leading up to the hills next to the sky, and the houses standing out here and there against that red and green earth” (15). The beauty of the terrain clearly captures his attentions more than his mother’s funeral, yet there is not the slightest perception by Meursault of an intense love for nature or a thirst to experience more. Where Joseph at the Servatius party recognizes his failure, here Meursault does not see his own; he does not realize that the beauty of the land, even when weighed against the death of his mother, takes precedence.

Another meaningful part of Meursault’s surrounding environment is water; his sensual reactions to the sea are very apparent and rendered in sharp detail:

“As you swam you had to skim off the foam from the crest of the waves with your mouth, hold it there, then roll over on your back and spout it out toward the sky. This made a delicate froth which disappeared into the air or fell back in a warm spray over my face.” (Camus 34)

Camus’s minute detail makes quite clear the pleasure Meursault receives from water. And while Meursault enjoys the sea in the state of the present, he fails to grasp its larger significance: the “life-enhancing” quality it possesses for him. Again, Meursault expresses no conscious love of nature nor does he display an awareness of his intimate interaction with it.

Second, in Meursault’s relationship with Marie, Camus provides his protagonist many opportunities to realize the immense pleasure received from intimate physical contact:

“I hoisted myself up next to her. It was nice, and, sort of joking around, I let my head fall back and rest on her stomach. She didn’t say anything so I left it there. I had the whole sun in my eyes and it was blue and gold. On the back of my neck I could feel Marie’s heart beating softly.” (Camus 20)

These moments, these experiences, touch Meursault most deeply. But because of his unaware and unknowing nature, he cannot savor and cherish these experiences; they are swept from his mind as quickly as they flood in. Critic David Richter points out that Meursault gives his “attentions to nothing save the immediate present. Here is a world in which Meursault is truly at home: the pleasures and pains of the moment” (85).

It is also with Marie that Meursault receives his clearest and perhaps most obvious opportunity to discover the proper way to live: “I rolled over,” says Meursault, “and tried to find the salty smell Marie’s hair left on the pillow” (Camus 21). If Meursault cannot come to recognize his great want, need, and desperation in trying to recreate and recapture the sensual aura of the previous evening, one cannot help but sense he never will. Where Bellow keeps one wondering when Joseph will overcome failure, Camus keeps one hoping for Meursault’s recognition of failure. Shortly after his arrest and incarceration, this sense of Meursault’s “eternal unknowing” surfaces again. When Marie visits him at the prison, Meursault says, “I was looking at her . . . and I wanted to squeeze her shoulders through her dress . . . I didn’t really know what else I had to hope for other than that” (75). He later remembers waiting “patiently until Saturday to hold Marie’s body in my arms” (77). In his “Alienation, Reification, and the Novel” essay, Alan Swingewood accurately describes Meursault’s general approach to life:

“Meursault is committed only to the physical moments of existence. In his relationship with Marie it is her body which communicates with him, her physical presence . . . she is the brine left by her head on Meursault’s pillow. In his human relations Meursault is outside the world, for he lives more or less according to his animal, not to his fully human, functions.” (245)

Third, Meursault’s interaction with the people around him could also be considered outside the “norm” and again makes evident his failure to take notice of the proper way to live. Lacking an emotional, human quality, he reacts and responds to others much as he would to objects or things. One such scene that makes apparent the stimulation Meursault receives visually takes place as he watches from his balcony the townspeople moving through the street:

“First it was the families out for a walk: two little boys in sailor suits, with trousers below the knees, looking a little cramped in their stiff clothes, and a little girl with a big pink bow and black patent leather shoes. Behind them, and enormous mother, in a brown silk dress, and the father . . . He had on a straw hat and a bow tie and was carrying a walking stick . . . . A little later the local boys went by, hair greased back, red ties, tight fitting jackets, with embroidered pocket handkerchiefs and square toed shoes.” (Camus 21–22)

Flowing past Meursault, the colors, patterns, and textures are a feast for the eyes, coming together as an endless parade of kaleidoscopic motion.

Another scene that makes Meursault’s fascination with people as objects obvious occurs at Celeste’s. While eating his dinner, Meursault finds himself gripped by the strange little woman sitting across from him:

“While she was waiting for her first course, she opened her bag, took out a slip of paper and a pencil, added up the bill in advance, then took the exact amount, plus tip, out of a vest pocket and set it down on the table in front of her. At that point the waiter brought her first course and she gulped it down. While waiting for the next course, she again took out of her bag a blue pencil and a magazine that listed the radio programs for the week. One by one, with great care, she checked off almost every program. Since the magazine was about a dozen pages long, she meticulously continued this task throughout the meal. I had already finished and she was still checking away with the same zeal. Then she stood up, put her jacket back on with the same robot like movements, and left.” (Camus 43)

Meursault “lives through his senses,” says critic David Grossvogel. “[L]ocked in an embrace with the world, he knows it only as an unmediated immediacy — he cannot think it” (87). Here again, we see more of Camus’s detail inherent in all things dear to Meursault. But these “things,” these people, do not touch him emotionally, nor do they exert any profound influence over him; at best they are highly stimulating curiosities. Meursault fails to properly value the pleasure these people, these “curiosities,” provide him visually just as he has failed to recognize and appreciate the joys of physical intimacy and the beauty of the physical world. This is Meursault’s failure to live properly; like Joseph, Meursault will also become aware of his failures, but not until he has no choice to do otherwise.

The inability to take advantage of the numerous opportunities to live correctly leads Joseph and Meursault to different ends. Bellow’s surrender of Joseph does not arrive entirely unexpectedly. In Joseph’s first conversation with the Spirit of Alternatives, Tu As Raison Aussi asks him: “If you’re not alienated, why do you quarrel with so many people? . . . Is it because they force you to recognize that you belong to their world?” (Bellow 138). And Joseph later admits, “If I were a little less obstinate I would confess failure and say that I do not know what to do with my freedom” (151). Joseph’s sudden request for immediate transfer into the army allows him an escape, a surrender. In an interview with critic Matthew Roudane, Bellow said, “A variety of powers arrive whose aim is to alter, to educate, to condition us. If man gives himself over to total alteration I consider him to have lost his soul” (276). Joseph indeed has been broken spiritually, so thoroughly defeated, so chopped and shredded, that his surrender is “not painful in the least. Not even when I tested myself, whispering ‘the leash’, reproachfully, did I feel pained or humiliated” (Bellow 183). Having tried his best to exercise grace, kindness, and understanding and rid himself of spite and cruelty, Joseph has failed while fully acknowledging his own shortcomings. These shortcomings, however, are not inherent in all men; they are only present in Joseph. Where he cannot achieve success, others may possibly succeed. Joseph’s quest is not to live outside society, but to find a way to live properly within society. In his “Dangling Man” essay, critic Denis Donoghue says, “The search for value is not so much a search for the truth, a message, or a revelation; it is an attempt to respond to the experiences of life by producing a man adequate to its challenge” (196). No longer adequate to life’s challenge, Joseph, sadly, is content to forfeit accountability for himself. He has truly thrown himself away.

On the other hand, Meursault’s inability to live properly takes him to a fate quite different from Joseph’s. Camus’s arrest and confinement of Meursault for the killing of the Arab sets in motion his move toward surrender. Far from a quick and easy process, Meursault’s path to surrender is long, drawn-out, and somewhat difficult. Unlike Joseph, who in Bellow’s Dangling Man fails while continually aware of the proper way to live, Meursault, when finally discovering and coming to terms with the proper way to live, experiences a taste of success as he takes advantage of his few remaining opportunities living them as he knows he should. One such opportunity occurs as Meursault returns to his prison cell after an adjournment of the trial. For the first time he sees the world in which he has lived as a world filled with wonder, value, and tangible experience:

“As I was leaving the courthouse on my way back to the van, I recognized for a brief moment the smell and color of the summer evening. In the darkness of my mobile prison I could make out one by one, as if from the depths of my exhaustion, all the familiar sounds of a town I loved and of a certain time of day when I used to feel happy. The cries of the newspaper vendors in the already languid air, the last few birds in the square, the shouts of the sandwich sellers, the screech of the streetcars turning sharply through the upper town, and that hum in the sky before night engulfs the port.” (Camus 97)

Meursault knows now, unlike Joseph who has known his proper way to live all along, what he once had and what he has now lost. But this experience is not frivolously cast aside and wasted; he does not fail to enjoy and treasure the precious moment at hand: Absorbing the sights, sounds, and smells of the town, closely examining and savoring every detail in ways he had never done in the past, Meursault experiences intense physical stimulation and emotion, truly living the moment to the fullest. Later, as he awakens from sleep in his prison cell, Meursault encounters a final triumph: “Sounds of the countryside were drifting in. Smells of the night, earth, and salt air were cooling my temples. The wondrous peace of that sleeping summer flowed through me like a tide” (122). Once again taking notice of a precious moment, he lives it to the fullest, thereby living properly. Meursault’s proper way to live is not, like Joseph’s, an attempt to live within society, nor is it an attempt to exist outside society. For Meursault, his is a society of one; to live properly one must live for the self, true to the self. In the two scenes above, Meursault has clearly done this; Joseph, conversely, has not once succeeded at living correctly, failing from beginning to end.

The evidence of Meursault’s ability to live properly complicates his world for a time as the now powerful, desperate desire to continue living makes the acceptance of death most difficult: Meursault dreams of escape, ponders the incomprehensible moment his heart will cease to function, and experiences exhilaration with each additional twenty-four hours granted him. But his will to live and thirst for life are made most apparent when attempting to convince himself that man’s inevitable death makes life meaningless: “At that point, what would disturb my train of thought was the terrifying leap I would feel my heart take at the idea of having twenty more years of life ahead of me” (Camus 114). Eventually pushing past these very natural, human emotions, Meursault allows himself to accept life on earth as predestined, meaningless, and absurd: “I had been right, I was still right, I was always right. I had lived my life one way and I could just as well have lived it another . . . . Nothing mattered . . . . Throughout the whole absurd life I’d lived, a dark wind had been rising toward me from somewhere deep in my future” (121). Herein lies Meursault’s surrender: his unwillingness to fight for more life. By accepting his life as absurd and his fate as predestined, Meursault, like Joseph, throws himself away. And in assuming that although “about to die, he has well understood what it was to have lived,” Meursault denies his failure to appreciate the rich experience of life in the past that has deprived him of life in the future (Richter 91).

In Dangling Man and The Stranger, both Bellow and Camus wrestle with modern man’s difficult existence in contemporary society. Bellow and Camus effectively underscore the strength, self-awareness, and self-discipline required by man to live correctly in this world and the arduous nature of this task which continually keeps failure one step away. Bellow’s Joseph and Camus’s Meursault receive numerous opportunities to live properly yet fail, both ultimately throwing away the self: Joseph fails to mesh reality with his ideal construction and gives himself back to society; Meursault fails to live life true to himself and finally comes to view man’s existence as absurd. This failure to live as one knows he should is often the outcome of other twentieth century literature — Franz Kafka’s The Trial (1925) and Paul Bowles’s The Sheltering Sky (1949) are two examples — that explore man’s complicated existence in the contemporary world. The end result of the failure shared by the main protagonists of these novels, be it surrender, death, suicide, or madness, serves to further emphasize the tremendous odds modern man must overcome to live properly in the artificial world he has created for himself.