Ronald E. Santoni

As did so many others, I’m sure, I broke out in laughter when informed that George W. had included Camus’ The Stranger on his last summer’s reading list. Was this another Karl Rove production, specifically designed to impress an academic population totally disenchanted with our misguided, deceptive, and double-speaking president?

Surely, I quickly concluded, even a distressingly conniving political strategist like Rove would recognize that such a pretense would be transparent and soon become another episode of the tragic make-believe of the Bush administration. Or maybe, I continued, George the Lesser wanted to extend a small conciliatory gesture to the French, on whom—after they dared to disagree with his murderous and counterproductive incursion into Iraq—he had poured scorn and ridicule, going so far as to encourage the imposition of new freedom-loving labels on some of France’s gustatory delights ("freedom fries," anyone?). So perhaps the inclusion of a work by Camus was intended as a "salute" to France by way of honoring one of its Noble laureates in literature? Noblesse oblige!

But then, perhaps because of my long-time immersion in the thought of Sartre and Camus, I turned to other more anguished possibilities. Might it be that, feeling estranged in his fantasy world because of the growing rebuke he had been receiving from people in the real world—which included some of his faithful who were beginning to enter it—our weary president identified with the title of that "Existentialist" novella? "Wow! An ‘existential’ stranger! That’s me! Even forsaken high school students will dig that!" Or might it be that our would-be emperor, having been told that the story’s hero, Meursault, irrationally kills an Arab, blames it on the sun, and responds with his characteristic indifference, foresaw in this suggested "read" striking parallels to his own situation? Maybe he could blame his situation on another natural force—inner rather than outer—that overcame him, causing his "grip to close on the revolver [of preemptive war]" and bring on the killing of a half-million Arabs? Or yet another possibility: Might it be that the self-pitying Mr. President had been told that The Stranger exhibits a way of responding to the "absurd", and, in total ignorance of Camus’ definition of the "absurd" in The Myth of Sisyphus, he readily inferred that reading The Stranger might provide insight into his own "absurd" situation—one in which a democracy-talking, I’m the boss, "stay the course", I know God’s truth, president could be so badly misunderstood and even abandoned by some of his "kind." ["The trigger gave… And each successive shot was another loud fateful rap on the door of my undoing."] Prexy concluded that he was being undone by the rasp of the undemocratic Democrats’ criticism of his type of democracy-building in Arab land! And perhaps, too—on the remote chance that he did proceed to read this engaging book—he cottoned on to Meursault’s feeling that "there seemed to be a conspiracy to exclude me from the proceedings… My fate was to be decided out of hand."

But, in fairness, I should perhaps stop offering suspicious hypotheses and motives for the President’s possible reading of an absurdist story, and turn to how Camus himself viewed Meursault. In his 1955 revised "Preface" to The Stranger, Camus says: "The hero of my book is condemned because he does not play the game… he refuses to lie." He goes on: "[Meursault] is animated by a passion for the absolute and for the truth…One would…not be much mistaken to read The Stranger as the story of a man who, without any heroics, agrees to die for the truth." If our truth-proof president had heard these words before he received his reading assignment, he surely would have struck it from his list. But had he, let us imagine, gone on with his reading, Meursault’s honesty, not to mention, views, might well have scared him away from existentialist literature forever. But, hold on! Self-deception has no bounds. It is not inconceivable that our vanishing president believes that he is dying for the truth. Stay posted!

(Ronald E. Santoni, Maria Theresa Barney Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Denison University and Life Member of Clare Hall, Cambridge University, is author of Bad Faith, Good Faith and Authenticity in Sartre’s Early Philosophy and Sartre on Violence-Curiously Ambivalent, among other works.)