Terror and Tragic optimism as sustaining constructs in Camus’s the plaque and Soyinka’s season of Anomy.
CHAPTER ONE
Purpose of Study
The fundamental aim of the study is to analyse The Plague and Season of Anomy using formalist-oriented literary criticism, and to examine how the characters’ affirmation of struggle relates to the concept of the universal instinct which underlies Nietzsche’s Overman theory. The central objectives of this study are to investigate the spiritual endowment that enables the heroic individuals in these texts to fight on in the face of the more than man; to examine the origin of terror in The Plague and Season of Anomy in order to understand the form of narrative to which they belong; and to show that terror and tragic optimism are sustaining constructs in the novels. Our study will approach its questions from textual analysis with focus on terror and tragic optimism in order to understand the characters’ mode of being, their experiences and their struggling and infallible spirits in the face of terror.
CHAPTER TWO
LITERATURE REVIEW
Many critical attentions have been drawn to Albert Camus’s The Plague and Wole Soyinka’s Season of Anomy but none has attempted a comparative analysis of the texts. Most of these efforts dwell fundamentally on the authors’ personal life, influences, and sensitivities to the political events that they had witnessed. While some have read The Plague as an allegory of Nazi terror in France, some others have read it as a depiction of Camus’s absurdist philosophy. Similarly, many have read Season of Anomy from allegorical point of view, in which terror is seen as a political weapon. This attention paid to the texts’ engagement with the resistance to terror raises the question of a comparative study to examine terror and tragic optimism as sustaining constructs in the novels. And this examination, which the current study undertakes, distances itself from allegorical mode of reading which searches for meaning outside the texts. The aim of this review therefore is to examine some of these scholarly works that have been done in order to foreground the need for this research.
Aristotle looks at terror as “a sort of pain or agitation derived from imagination of a future destructive or painful evil” (Rhetoric 1382:1). This evil, Aristotle further indicates, is near at hand, and not far off, and we are the persons threatened. He further argues that “terror does not make us irrational; rather, it makes people inclined to deliberation” (Rhetoric 1383:14). For the tragic man, terror and suffering constitute an experience against which he struggles. According to Schopenhauer who captures this vividly, The life of an individual is a constant struggle and not merely a metaphysical one against want or boredom, but also an eternal struggle against other people. He discovers adversaries everywhere, lives in continual conflict and dies with sword in hand (3).
The absurd man lives as if he were already doomed to die because he lives a life that is saturated with the terror of death. But in his defiant struggle, he is propelled by the instinct not to give up in the face of adversity. This sense of defiance before a tragic experience is what we conceive in this study as tragic optimism.
Remarkably, Albert Camus shows great concern for tragic suffering and man’s intolerable anxiety towards death. He admits that “metaphysical rebellion arises as a claim motivated by the concept of a complete unity against terror, against the suffering of life and death, and a protest against the terrible human condition” (The Rebel 24). And then again, writing near the end of his life, Camus proclaims: “Let us rejoice” for being able to endure tyranny, oppression, and suffering in their many forms. He also cheers up individuals alike who had seen the destitutions, prisons and bloodshed of their times and are willing to keep up the struggle in patient defiance of their situations (Lyrical and Critical Essays 109-133). He believes in “yea saying” to rebellion and “nay saying” to surrender to tragic situation and challenges the tragic man to the darkness, to stand within it, in the thick of it, inviting him to bear witness to the justice and beauty of this world that guides him into that unknown future. Through the rough working class streets of Algeria and through the crisis of World War II, he witnesses that friendships deepen through common struggle and asserts that “guarding each other’s freedom builds community, engendering relationships founded on shared experience” (Lyrical and Critical Essays 90). Camus explores this concept of solidarity in the face of communal terror in his novel The Plague, where the deadly force of the mysterious illness presents the characters with the options of facing death alone or facing it together. In 1957, just a week after the announcement of his Nobel Prize for Literature, Camus was interviewed by the Parisian magazine Demain about how an artist engages in public life. Camus was already a well-known novelist, journalist, and intellectual superstar who was called on frequently to give comment on the brutal war of independence raging in his home country of Algeria. Aggrieved by the bloodbath taking place in the name of justice and freedom, he feels compelled to offer a grim assessment: an artist is “groping his way in the dark, just like the man in the street–incapable of separating himself from the world’s misfortune and passionately longing for solitude and silence; dreaming of justice, yet being himself a source of injustice; dragged–even though he thinks he is driving it-behind a chariot that is bigger than he” (Camus, Resistance, Rebellion, and Death 238-9). Thus Camus perceives darkness around him. He has witnessed his country under siege and has feared that his own mother would be among the innocent targets of terrorism against French colonials.
CHAPTER THREE
CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK
Terror, a word from the Latin root “terrere” – to frighten – is construed as extreme fear, hence it refers to the mental state associated with fear. Aristotle defines it as “a sort of pain or agitation derived from imagination of a future destructive or painful evil,” and that “this evil is near at hand, and not far off, and that the persons threatened are ourselves” (Rhetoric 1382:1). Hans-Georg Gadamer argues that Aristotle’s terror “is not just a state of mind but a cold shudder that makes one’s blood run cold; that makes one shiver” (131). Literary studies grapples with the idea of terror and how individuals threatened confront it. Terror is more than simply a mental state that most seek to avoid, or to experience only through artworks in an act of catharsis. It is hypostatized into something that exists in the literary world; something with which characters are at war. While theorists, critics, and philosophers may have been trying to understand its nature, it continues to resist illumination. The ambiguity of terror in a way is located in “its presence at the heart of human civilization and this presence incidentally is also what is profoundly antithetical to it” (14). Thus terror sometimes implies a life-threatening situation. In its enigmatic origin, it may involve awe or reverence before a universe whose many mysteries have never been fully grasped.
Edmund Burke, in his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, sees terror as an elevating, thrilling sensation, which derives from the “sublime” and accompanying the observation of soaring, stupendous scenery. Often, the inevitability of death in a tragic universe or the monstrous acts perpetrated by those seeking to oppose annihilating political structures inspire terror among those who encounter them. In the Duino Elegies by the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke, the poetspeaker perceives “beauty” as “nothing but the beginning of terror” (lines 3-8), implying that, in the act of emotional surrender or identification, man lays himself open to a force over which he can exercise little control. In the preface to the first edition of The Castle of Otranto, Horace Walpole defends his writing by informing the reader that he keeps up the narrative force of the story by the contrasting emotions of terror and pity. Terror for him is “the author’s principal engine by which the mind is kept in a constant vicissitude of interesting passions” (34). Edmund Burke makes terror the centrepiece of all feelings and contrary to Aristotle, he holds that “no passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as terror” (Burke, “Terror” n.p.). For him, the two qualities that evoke terror are size and obscurity, with the latter being more important. Although Burke’s focus is on actual visual obscurity, he is clearly also mindful of knowledge or awareness: “When we know the full extent of any danger, when we can accustom our eyes to it, a great deal of the apprehension vanishes” (Burke, “Obscurity” n.p.). Knowing that danger is imminent but not knowing its severity or the time or manner of its realization produces a variety of responses. Burke’s concern has been with the power of raw nature to strike its victim with terror, awe and astonishment. And in an attempt to extend this Burkean idea, we observe that over the course of the twentieth century, eruptions of human violence show that man has come to compete with nature in the engineering of terror. The catastrophic violence which men inflict on other men is sometimes more terrible than the wrath of raw nature. In an era of pestilence, terror, ‘terrorism’ and ‘counter terrorism, the individual faces the dilemma of how to cope with an awareness of the precariousness of existence, or terror’s enigmatic origin and its unthinkable ambivalences.
CHAPTER FOUR
FACING UP TO WHAT HAD TO BE DONE
The situation that gives urgency to the services of Dr Rieux in The Plague has a crucial connection with the speech of the spokesperson of the Theban suppliants of Oedipus in Oedipus the King, who in the Prologue explains to Oedipus himself:
If we come to you now, sir, as your suppliants,
I and these children, it is not as holding you
The equal of the gods, but as the first of men,
Whether in the ordinary business of mortal life,
Or in the encounters of man with more than man (lines 27-31).
There is an important reason why the Thebans run to Oedipus in their moment of distress .It is for him to take action on behalf of the community because the calamity in the land is, to them, more than man. They are seemingly ignorant of the mode of action in the midst of this trouble. The task of finding a solution to the trouble in the land belongs to Oedipus, for he is the first of men. Similarly, most of the townspeople of Oran, especially the family members of plague victims, like the Thebans, accept the plague as more than man and beckon on the doctor to take action. As soon as her daughter takes ill, Mme. Loret expresses the fear that grips everyone whose illness differs from the common ones they recognize: “Oh, I do hope it’s not the fever everyone’s talking about” (85). Her reaction once her daughter’s case is confirmed as a case of the dreaded bacillus is the same reaction of all mothers who find themselves in that situation:
After one glance the mother broke into shrill, uncontrollable cries of grief. And every evening mothers wailed thus, with a distraught abstraction, as their eyes fell on those fatal stigmata on limbs and bellies; every evening hands gripped Rieux’s arms, there was a rush of useless words, promises, and tears; every evening the nearing tocsin of the ambulance provoked scenes as vain as every form of grief. Rieux had nothing to look forward to but a long sequence of such scenes, renewed again and again (85-6).
For Dr. Rieux, the plague event is not a question of the more than man. The plague is a disease that requires a cure and finding that cure is what had to be done. In Season of Anomy, Pa Ahime also displays the instinct that proves that he is capable of facing whatever forces that confront him. He towers above every other character in the environment where he finds himself by his capacity to recognize and face necessity without giving up. The Aiyero people rely on him as the priest who must perform the ritual that brings about renewal and building the force for life in the land. As he walks around the pen during the funeral ceremony of the late Custodian of the Grain, anxious hands reach out to touch him and those hands touch other hands and faces, transmitting the essence of the sacrifice to the furthest in the gathering. Indeed, he is
[A] reed of life in the white stillness of a memorial ground, a flicker of motion among marble tombstones. An intuitive priest, he knew better than to disturb the laden altar until his followers had drunk their fill of it, he let the ponderous mass for the dead emit vibrations of abundance, potency and renewal, binding the pulses in his own person, “building a force for life… (16).
CHAPTER FIVE
THE CONFRONTATION OF MAN WITH MORE THAN MAN
The hero in tragedy will end up caged by the movement of necessity but he will also be seen to have put up a fight against it with all his strength. As Bygrave argues, the futility of the contest with the powers ranged against the character notwithstanding, the facts of resistance is what counts; it “ennobles him and through the suffering it generates, he gains an emotional resonance which is quite different from that of the merely passive victim” (Bygrave 4; Akwanya, Discourse Analysis 64). The connectedness of tragedy to the mythic ideation of the vegetation cycle also means that it is accessible in the mythic environment. The cyclical process of this mythic movement follows the movement of necessity and its pattern makes it impossible for the tragic individual to be able to change its laws. In Greek tragedy, for instance, “the choral odes at the entrance of the chorus and in-between the episodes reflect on the action, connecting it to the founding laws of the universe and human society, and bringing out the factor of human limitation both in not fully understanding these laws and the inability to change them or escape the consequences of breaching them” (Akwanya, Discourse Analysis 19). This is what tragedy is and what it must always be. The tragic action is therefore, structured in a way that it includes reversals, recognitions, and calamity, all of which arouse terror and pity and their catharsis.
In The Plague, reversals, recognitions and calamity arise from the mystery of the dying rats as the fore-bearers of the plague microbe in the community, which Father Paneloux connects to the more than man. This position is vehemently opposed by Dr. Rieux who refuses to accept that the situation is more than man. In Season of Anomy, reversals and calamity arise from the desire of the super-human structure to crush all opposition and impose its will on the people at all cost. While some Aiyero people view this cabal as a divine form, Pa Ahime, the underground hero insists that this situation must be resisted despite the overwhelming power of the Cartel. Thus while the impersonal forces initiate calamity in The Plague, constraints in Season of Anomy originate from human cussedness.
CHAPTER SIX
THE PARADOX OF SUFFERING
Nietzsche’s response to the paradox of tragic suffering is radically different from Aristotle’s and Schopenhauer’s. For the latter, “the viewer’s pleasure always followed indirectly from the negative, by negation of the negative” (Robert Vandemeulebroecke 153). Nietzsche develops the idea that suffering itself can in some circumstances be the direct source of joy. The Dionysian heritage that underlies the historic roots of Greek tragedy is an element of chaos and terror; of unbridled violence and destruction smashing sedated lives out of their hinges; but in fact, it is not a negative element at all. It shows that death is an inalienable part of becoming; it is the destruction that reveals creation at work. The tragic experience becomes “a celebration of the over abundance of life, of its inexhaustibility and its supreme indifference to loss” (153-4). As we discover in the battle against the invincible plague, while characters like Father Paneloux believe that the battle in The Plague is waged against the more than man, Tarrou also thinks that defeat seems inevitable. In this sense, to resist is to dwell on “a bold, existential declaration, a selfaffirmation in the face of emptiness” (182). But Dr. Rieux, propelled by tragic optimism does not give up the fight that others take to be a fruitless endeavour. This is one of the fundamental tragic idioms not only in The Plague but also in Season of Anomy. In The Plague, Rieux resolves to compile a chronicle that shows what is learnt in a time of pestilence: “that there are more things to admire in men than to despise” (271). For him, acting as if life had meaning despite the terror that it does not is the meaning to be culled from an absurd existence. He who truly cares for patients epitomizes “all who, while unable to be saints but refusing to bow down to pestilences, strive their utmost to be healers” (271). He distinguishes himself from the nameless bureaucrats who evade responsibility, and the dogmatic zealots who are blinded by their unerring faith. In time of suffering, these distinctions become apparent.
CHAPTER SEVEN
CONCLUSION
The focus of this thesis has been the examination of terror and tragic optimism as sustaining constructs in Camus’s The Plague and Soyinka’s Season of Anomy. Rather than retracing the paths of allegorical, sociological and philosophical reading of terror and its resistance which previous studies on the texts have taken, our study has distanced itself by providing a reflection on terror and tragic optimism as constructs within the texts. The study, while adopting a formalist oriented critical approach thus does not make inferences outside the texts in its search for the meaning of experience but limits itself within the margins of the texts. Through this approach, the literariness of these texts, and of the study itself, stands out. The method of analysis used in the study is a comparative examination of these two novels that centers its reflection on the spirit that evolves often encountered in heroic tragedy.
In tragedy, the hero may face an experience that follows the movement of necessity but he will be seen to have put up a fight against that experience with all his strength. Although Aristotle provides a background for grasping the hero as an individual who is better than men nowadays, Nietzsche’s figure seems to be more radicalized in that he often finds it compelling to shatter the rules of rationality that are often built on mediocrity and sets up new ones out of the super-abundance of his life and power. He looks ahead beyond all constraints and passes over all the encumbrances of his existence. Thus, Nietzsche’s theory of the universal instinct which forms the bedrock of his concept of The Ubermensch or The Overman provides the conceptual framework on which the analysis is based. In The Plague and Season of Anomy, the heroes’ mode of experience and their defiant will to struggle that comes from the universal instinct link them to the figure of the Overman and establish the idea of tragic optimism in the texts. It is this universal instinct, the unsurrenderable will to struggle, in short, the tragic optimism, that enables the hero to struggle in the face of the inexorable. And this provides an answer to one of the research questions of this study.
