Camus's "The Silent Men" and "The Guest": Depictions of Absurd Awareness - Critical Essay

Studies in Short Fiction, Summer, 1997 by Rob Roy McGregor

In Le Mythe de Sisyphe,(1) Camus commends the profundity of Kierkegaard's perception regarding despair: "[There is] nothing more profound than Kierkegaard's view that despair is not an act but a state: the very state of sin. For sin is what separates from God. The absurd is the metaphysical state of the conscious man.... Perhaps this notion will become clear if I hazard this outrageous remark: the absurd is sin without God" (127-28).(2)

Both Kierkegaard's and Camus's emphasis here, of course, is that despair is not an act but a state of being in the same way sin is not an act but a state of being. The state of despair, along with its consequent anguish, results from separation. For Kierkegaard, it results from separation from God; for Camus, from separation from the universe, the condition that characterizes the exile of absurd solitude.(3) In short, for Camus, the state of despair, like the state of sin, is the human condition.

The intent of this essay is to show that "The Silent Men" ("Les Muets") and "The Guest" ("L'Hote") are companion pieces that symbolically depict unawareness and awareness, respectively, of the distressing state of the absurd human condition as articulated in Le Mythe de Sisyphe. Although critics recognize that "The Silent Men" and "The Guest" are replete with symbolism associated with the absurd, they restrict their valid and insightful interpretations to the current yet undying problems symptomatic of occidental, i.e., nonabsurd, existential culture. They do not, consequently, treat these stories as symbolic depictions of aspects of the philosophy of absurdity.

In "The Silent Men,"(4) Yvars's failure to recognize and respond to the evidences of the absurd that touch his life within the personal context of home, work, and meaning/meaninglessness, finds a philosophical echo in Le Mythe de Sisyphe, much as an allegory echoes or parallels its source. By the age of 40, Yvars has ceased to enjoy looking at the sea during his morning bicycle ride to work. His dejection stems predominantly from youthful memories of virile swims in the sea and happy walks on the beach, of the vibrant sun, the girls, and the vigor of the body ("Muets" 1597-98), memories of a time before his acute awareness of approaching old age. Experiencing the small pleasures of life, he has, in contrast with the absurd man, a sense of harmony ("d'accord") with existence in general--his terrace, a clean shirt, a glass of anisette, a pleasant evening, his wife and son, work, conversation with friends, awareness of past youth and advancing age--but does not know whether he is happy or wants to cry (1598).

Yvars is living the routine of "Rising, tramway, four hours at the office or plant, meal, tramway, four hours of work, meal, sleep ..."(Mythe 106).(5) His listlessness and purposelessness are compounded by the dehumanization brought on by the failure of the workers' strike. He is, like his comrades, humiliated by the take-it-or-leave-it attitude and behavior of his superior, by his inability to control his own destiny. As if it were not enough for Yvars and the other mutes to endure the indignity, humiliation, and powerlessness imposed by one's fellow beings and by institutions, Camus introduces illness, an implicit reminder, along with advancing age, of the inevitable and ultimate indignity and humiliation visited upon humankind: death, which is, for Camus, "the ultimate abuse.... [that] exalts injustice" (Mythe 168).(6)

Despite the gratuitous suffering and possible death of Lassalle's daughter and Yvars's empathy for the father, and despite the rapid accumulation of evidence of human powerlessness when confronted by one's superiors, by institutions, aging, suffering and death, Yvars's feeling of "malheur" (brooding "unhappiness") never crystallizes into a conceptual awareness ("Muets" 1607), and evasion never advances beyond the realizable and daily wish to be home with wife and son (1606), the existential ontological "monde familier" ("familiar world") of Le Mythe de Sisyphe (101). At the end of "The Silent Men," Yvars is intent upon blaming Lassalle for some vague reason: "Ah, c'est de sa faute!" ("Ah, it's his fault!" [1608]). Is the blame for the general collapse of interpersonal relationships? For his own daughter's illness, a kind of retribution for his treatment of the workers? For establishing a personal barrier that prevented Yvars from expressing concern for Lassalle's daughter? Or is the placing of blame a self-serving exculpation for his failure to call out in sympathy to Lassalle? For the purpose of the story, the reason is simultaneously immaterial and functional. When Yvars places blame on someone or something for any situation or condition related to human existence, he shows that he remains within the traditional escapist mentality of his Western culture, an existential mentality inclusive of all theistic and atheistic philosophies, which are much disparaged by Camus in Le Mythe de Sisyphe (122). By placing blame, he derails the conclusion to be drawn from evaluating his (human) condition of unhappiness, helplessness, interpersonal isolation, aging, and eventual death, all of which are consciously and progressively in evidence in his experiences of the day. In other words, Yvars is not preoccupied with the significance of his personal despair and dehumanization among and by his fellow men, nor is he preoccupied with the sense of broken community (solidarity) and the resultant distress of the human condition. Although surrounded by evidences of the absurd, he does not arrive at a profound sense of the meaningless of his life. At the end, his wishing to be young again with his wife and departing for the other side of the sea ("Muets" 1608) do not constitute the requisite "awareness" ("conscience") of the absurd. Camus brings his protagonist to the brink of awareness and discovery, but leaves him experiencing only an impulse to get away from it all, an impulse that will pass with the night. For Yvars, the moment never comes when "the 'why' looms up and everything has its beginning in this despondency tinged with astonishment" (Mythe 107).(7) He never enters into that "mood ... in which the chain of daily motions is broken" (106).(8) He never experiences "the despondency [that] is at the end of the acts of a mechanical life, but [that] simultaneously initiates the movement of awareness."(9) Despondency does not awaken him, as it does the absurd man, and provoke "the definitive awakening";(10) his lot is "the unconscious return to the chain" (107).(11) Consequently, Yvars does not attain to "despair" (distress, affliction, despondency),(12) the absurd equivalent of "the very state of sin[,] ... the metaphysical state of the conscious man" (128).(13)