THE MALENTENDU
The Malentendu is the tragedy of lack of communication, it was said. And this statement is undoubtedly correct. But then, you must also ask: who is unable to communicate? What is ill-informed, ill-understood? And most importantly, why?
The tragic chain of events portrayed in the drama (which is inspired by a true story really happened) would seem to authorize a pretty obvious answer to all three questions: a young man returns to his family (consisting of a mother and a sister) who had abandoned twenty years earlier. He wants to compensate the women for the sacrifices they have endured all these years partly because of its abandonment. Instead of immediately reveal his identity, comes to their hotel as an occasional guest, trusting that the affection will raise them in his memory. But in all those years, women have made to the crime: killing the lone travelers who lodge with them to rob them. Despite attempts to persuade the young man does in the mother and sister in his memory, they do not recognize him and kill him. Only after he accidentally discovers the true identity of their victim. His mother, overwhelmed by remorse, kills himself. The sister, after a bitter fight with his sister in law who came to seek her missing husband, it also takes away life.
So, it seems that everything is clear: not to communicate, giving rise to the tragic misunderstanding that Martha (sister) attributes the death of Jan (brother) [see Act III, Scene III: Mary: "sa mère et sa Soer étaient donc des criminelles? "Martha:" Oui. "Mary:" Apprise Aviez-vous déjà qu'il étatit votre frère? "Martha:" Voulez vous is the savoir, ya eu malentendu. "] are the men and women involved in this claustrophobic drama. The cause of failure or faulty communication is the aim of silencing his son's identity, and the different intent with which everyone speaks and listens. And the misunderstanding is nothing but the identity of Jan, mistaken for a stranger.
Yet, too many clues in the text, in addition to the overall character of the work of Camus and his existentialist influences, indicate the presence of a key to different and more profound, such as to give this drama a character for so-called "metaphysical ". Let's list these
evidence and then analyze them separately.
1.Il first thing you should consider is made up by its existential torment that characterizes all the characters - with the sole exception of his wife (Maria) and the old servant, we will return later -. The Mother, Jan and Martha, in fact, are shaken by an inner torment is not reducible to or remorse to the anxieties generated by their conduct. Jan, for example, in its plan to return to his family to regain her affections is accompanied by a deep feeling of existence, in part, perhaps, is the source of his strange decision not to reveal their identity. This state of mind manifests itself dramatically in the Scene II and III of Act II. Among many others, I will bring the most significant statements of the inner drama of Jan: "Yes, this room is that everything will be defined (...) it is cold, though! I do not recognize anything, it was to put everything back again. Now it looks like one of those hotel rooms of foreign cities where people come every night alone. I met them too. Then it seemed that there was to find an answer. Maybe I'll know here. (Looks out) The sky is covered. Here again my old anxiety here, in the hollow of my body, like an old wound that irritates each movement. I know his name. It is the fear of perpetual loneliness, fear that the answer is not. And who would respond in a hotel room? "(It is directed towards the bell." She hesitates and then ring. You do not hear any noise. A moment of silence, footsteps. Knock. The door opens. In the old box appears home. It is still and quiet). Jan: "It's nothing. Excuse me. I just wanted to see if anyone answered, and if the alarm worked. "(The old man looks at him and then closes the door. I will walk away) Jan SCENE III:" The alarm works, but he does not speak. It does not give an answer. "(Look at the sky. What to do? Beat shots.'s Sister Log in with a tray) [emphasis added]
What is the meaning we attribute to these words of Jan? What, in Specifically, the eternal solitude of which he speaks? What is the answer that Jan tries and looks? Who should give?
is sufficient to note that this time the tone, even bombastic in places, can only indicate a far more existential anguish and tortured in its radicality of what could be the state of mind of a child, returned to the house of his family, later to be recognized. There is another, as on the other hand clearly says that adjective, eternal, which must clearly irrefutable condition of Solitude Jan.
2.Anche Martha is shaken by tremendous anxiety and dark at the same time. Martha is perhaps the most complex and important drama, one in which we anticipate to some extent the traits of the rebel Sisyphus, where Camus in a later work will entrust the role of the representative of humanity who turns against his condition. Determined to criminal conduct in its ferocity with which desires to obtain his release, Martha has a few moments of tenderness and abandon. The rest is angry and resentful: he wants with all his strength to escape from their plight, represented by the horizon of the earth closed and claustrophobic when she was sentenced to life and unleashes his anger against those who implicitly or explicitly, and remember the reproach with their "humanity" that she has become. Why in the goodness she performed so naively sees the reflection of his face twisted and turned upside down had to do his cruel and at the same time, the most insidious threat to his dream of escape and salvation. She knows that if answering the call of the heart, if he yields to feelings of humanity and compassion, could no longer implement its purpose, it would be ordered to surrender and submission. For this he rails against violence with the mother when it hesitates in front of the nth crime they must do. That is insulting and rejects with contempt the pain and despair in-law curses her mother and brother were found dead in and embrace those caresses which she has had and still rejects with disgust (Act III, Scene III). It kills: soul rebel, and not reconciled, rejects this gesture made that defeat wants to impose. However, only in stage I of II that the character of Martha reveals his torment, in a rare sincerity and confidence, which significantly follows, however, ruthless and implacable, the decision to kill the host unknown. To Jan, in fact, the suggestive power is fatal at his own words, which, describing "the land of deserted beaches" comes from, revive the dream that chases Martha and at the same time, evoke feelings of humanity and emotion which are the main obstacle to its realization. So they wake up in her awareness of the risks they run when they hesitate to implement his plan, along with the wild force of desire that can only be done if she will persevere in its ruthless crime. [Act II, Scene I] Jan: "I understand. The spring takes over there in the throat, the flowers bloom in their thousands on white walls. If you walked for an hour on the hills surrounding my town, would gather in the guise of the smell of honey yellow roses. "(Martha sits) Martha:" It 's wonderful. That which we call spring here is a rose and two buds that bloom in the garden of the cloister. (With contempt) But just to upset the people of my country. A blast more powerful than them would blush. They have the spring they deserve. "Jan:" You're not happy. You also have the autumn. "Martha:" What is autumn? "Jan:" A second spring. All the leaves are flowers. (Looks at her insistence) so too may understand the anime. You would see the flower, if they were meeting, if the patient. "These words of Jan's ear sound like a Martha inappropriate invitation to find the beauty in the autumn of life, to resign from the rare and pale flowers that inhospitable to waive his desire. Martha, in fact, leave the dreamy tone and responded harshly: "I have no more patience for this Europe." But it is Jan points out that when the first humans were spoken in tones that Martha feels the risk is located in steep and reacts reaffirming its determination: Jan ... I think that, for the first time, you will be directed to me with a human language. "Martha (with violence)" You are mistaken, I think. And even if this were so, would have no reason to rejoice. My humanity is not what I have better. What I have is that of human desire, and to get what I want, I think that overwhelms everything in my path. "And a little later confessed that she had come to speak with the intention to invite him to go (to save), but 'appeal that he had done this that it has had to change the human subject. It is the announcement, with mocking words, the final decision to kill him. Then summarize the data emerging: Martha desperately wants to escape, find a way of salvation (not used that word misused, as shown by decisive evidence in the text) to be an intolerable condition. Let us ask ourselves: what is this land which wants to escape at all costs? And what is that other which yearns, in which, instead, you can "run away, get rid, shake your body to another, mixing in order to ... defend that country from the sea where the gods do not come? It seems clear that Camus hints here, in a metaphorical way, the contrast between the actuality of human existence and aspiration to a condition relieved from the burden of pain and loneliness. Martha longs to a form of transcendence ground ("where the gods do not come"), to a promised land of happiness and freedom. If we say here in anticipation of some conclusions, and Jan ask a question of meaning to existence, Martha wants a way of salvation from the pain of life (this is actually two very similar questions, as we shall see. Martha seeks his salvation turning against life itself, if it is true, as she says (Act III, Scene VIII) that the world is not made for man, but it did so only because we die. Champion of the heroic and desperate humanity, doomed to failure and that indomitable will celebrate the myth of Sisyphus, Camus, Martha turns against life in the name (and here the contradiction is apparent that the tearing apart) of a lust for life and happiness is all the more furious because the more desperate.
3.La Mother, then, is Nature. Everything about her visceral mentions the vital forces that create and destroy at once. She is the womb where everything is born and dies: the desires, dreams, sorrows, feelings, children. She also grows (it would be more correct to say that cultivating) a design to escape, together with his daughter. But for opposite reasons: the daughter wants a better life and full, she wants to rest and oblivion. In one of the decisive dialogues, the mother begs her daughter not to kill the host. So maybe we can save us, he says. And the daughter refuses to use the word salvation: "All we can hope for is, working tonight, you can sleep later." And the Mother answers: "What I call save: sleep." Her mother is also oppressed by existential anxiety, which is identified with the life force that goes out, which ends: "The heart is consumed, sir." His existential disorientation is expressed by members of tiredness, exhaustion of that womb which has contain all the pangs of life and death and is now exhausted and does not crave of nothing but rest. If your daughter likes the wild life and is shaken by a violent desire for liberation and salvation from pain and loneliness, but the mother is the personification of the life force that shrinks, folds, tends to immobility of death. Uncomplicated intellectuals, it is all in the physicality of his living body in contact with other bodies. Like when the son finds himself in the embrace of death and caresses at the bottom of the river, and those that embrace and caress evoked cursed by Martha ("Je les laisse à leur retrouvée tendresse, caresses a leur obscures"). 4.A
another important indication of the existence of a plan "metaphysical" in Malentendu is the figure of the old servant. It has been rightly noted that the servant of God is most likely reasons for this assumption are too numerous and obvious why it is necessary to dwell on a detailed demonstration. I am less convinced, however, the hypothesis that the servant would be the personification of destiny. Unless you intend to identify God with the fate and destiny with God, namely, the absolute necessity which, ultimately, you identify the very reality of all things, and their relationship. But I shall come back later. It remains, however, gained God's presence on the scene, and with it confirmation that the text requires an effort analysis of a speculative nature and that its purpose, the inability to communicate and the inevitability of the "misunderstanding", should be reported to a more profound and decisive than that, all things considered trivial, the mechanics of errors and misunderstandings at home.
5.Si reproduce, therefore, the initial questions: "Who does not communicate? What is mal-comunicato/mal-inteso? And most importantly, why?
begin to consider the first: those who do not communicate? ie who malintende, who is misunderstanding? The scene of Act V Jan, after meeting the old servant who entered and left the scene without answering the question addressed to Martha who came to receive: "Est-il Muet?" Martha: "C'est nes pas lies." Jan "on parle donc?" Martha, "the moins possible et seulement pour l'essentiel." Jan: "En tout cas, n ' a pas l'air d'entender ce qu'on dit him. "Martha: On ne peut pas qu'il say n'entendre pas. C'est seulement qu'il entend mal. "(Emphasis mine) Exactly, will hurt! Because there are various synonyms of the verb entender (one of them is ouir, hear) it would be naive to believe that the choice of Camus is random. So the old servant (God) is the one who malintende. Indeed, he is qualified as such since the beginning of the play, before the chain of misunderstandings unfold. Everything gives the old servant this feature so we could say prominent than the other characters, so it is not rash to say that he is the malintenditore par excellence. Furthermore, the other characters speak and answer, and then, as we shall see, malintendono and misunderstandings. God is the only character rather not talk about (when he does, his response will not allow replicas and on it will drop the final curtain) and therefore is the only one not to be misunderstood, but the only one to be exclusively malintendente.
This singularity of the servant-God requires new questions: Why God does not hear (or maybe do not listen, or better yet misunderstood?) Is a bad god? Or indifferent? They are creatures who can not communicate with him? Or are the questions to be posed the wrong way?
That does not feel excluded. And not only because Martha tells us (On ne peut pas qu'il say n'entendre pas.), But also because in other circumstances show to hear (Act II, Scene II, Act III, Scene IV). In both cases demonstrates the old servant to hear. And in both cases, his conduct is implicitly or explicitly, a denial. In both cases, the two creatures who in-vocano/con-vocano implore God's help. This of course confirms the identity of the old servant. But it shows that it is useless to pray to God, he appears but does not intervene, or even worse, opposed an explicit rejection that "no" which does not allow, which states that you can not definitely no communication between God and creatures. That the explicit rejection is just the opposite with cold indifference to the most innocent creature - the bride who has committed no wrong and that he only lived his love - is certainly not without reason. How well is perhaps not a coincidence that her name was Mary. Perhaps Camus wanted to emphasize, with this call because of the Catholic symbol of purity and effective intercession of every sin, the impossibility of any illusion about it. But maybe it's just a coincidence. The fact is that anyone, much less the innocent, can expect pity. Their prayer will be dismissed without acrimony, without excess, with icy coldness, "no."
other hand, the old servant always appears without showing any involvement a silent witness and enigmatic. But even an operator who, apparently without a will of its own, merely to indulge the unfolding of events, working with the creatures to achieve their goals. A servant, indeed. And, paradoxically, it does so even when - indeed, especially when - makes an omission. In scene VIII of Act II, in fact, the servant collects the passport, which collapsed in Jan while the two women are carrying the force of arms into the stream. The picks and withdraw, "without women circumspect". What is the meaning of this gesture? The only plausible explanation is that God has the wisdom of the world, but lies to his creatures, so that they, blind, to fulfill the destiny of suffering and cruelty that is the truth of existence. Only when everything is done beyond repair, he will return to show what was hidden. God, therefore, is not the servant of the creatures (for they do not respond), but the servant of the order imperative and cruel (that order provides for precisely that Martha finally restored at the end of the play: "Why only now everything is in order. If persuade them. "Maria," what order? " Martha: "The one where no one has ever found." (Act III, Scene III).
So, concluding this part, God is the malintenditore and men are misunderstandings. In turn, men do not recognize (Martha) and this order is imperative that rules the world.
6.Ma what is misunderstood? What is the question that is not understood? Or questions? The misunderstanding, of course, also applies to questions that men facing each other. But are the same pose to God? In a sense you could answer this question in the affirmative is that in a negative way. In a sense, in fact, they are the same questions, because what the human actors exchange are each other for help and direction.
Only Jan and Maria go directly to God a question. The first look for the answer to the fear of perpetual loneliness: his is a demand for respect. The second asks for help. That is to also seek a sense of pain. Both cases the answer is negative. Camus, again anticipating the positions expressed in The Myth of Sisyphus and The man in revolt, tells us that the search for salvation through faith is doomed to failure. How well is no hope for the salvation that Martha tries in the revolt. But salvation from what? From life, of course, from the absurdity of life.
The etymology of the word "absurd" to refer a sound that is undesirable because it removed the ear (that sounds bad, ungrateful to the ear, that voice, sound '). Life is regarded as absurd as that is not audible, unpleasant to the hearer. That is something that is ill-intended. And then you do not understand. That you can not understand. Its truth, if it has one, is incomprehensible, incommunicable, because repugnant to those who must listen, understand. This life, which is hard to accept (from Accipite, receive) because they appear uncomfortable, ill-will intended, arouses in Jan (and Martha and her mother) the desire for salvation (find another land) and sense (look for the answer you Jan). The answer to what? The answer to the question of Jan. But what is this question? In reality we do not know, because at any moment of the drama Jan formula explicitly. In fact, he refers only to find an answer, or an answer that is not. But he never says what is the question. So we must try to understand and interpret these references in their context. Jan
is alone in his room and starts talking to himself, noting first the place where it is and that should be familiar, while it is cold and alien, "Then [when he attended anonymous hotel rooms where people come every night only] seemed to me that there was to find an answer. "and immediately he added doubtfully: Maybe I'll find here. "The answer to that question? We do not know and Jan does not say. But we know that Jan is just in a hotel room that looks similar to many others in which he stayed in the past. Jan feels that the answer thus seems to stem from having to check the condition of those who are alone in a foreign place. But, still reflects a moment, in that sense it's just Jan? He is not one of those single men who come at night in a hotel. He is married to a woman who adores him and anxiously awaits a short distance from there. If now we are separated only because he wanted it that way, forcing Mary to leave against his will. At any time you may decide to put an end to the comedy and back to her. It found in one's arms around his love. So his current loneliness is only temporary, and most voluntary. This can not be a need solitude to create such an ancient and frightening for a response. Unless this is a metaphor for daily solitude a condition far more profound. The confirmation of what we find in the words with which Jan continues his soliloquy: "The sky is covered. And here again my old anxiety here, in the hollow of my body, like an old wound that irritates each movement. I know his name. It is the fear of perpetual loneliness. That is not the answer. "Jan brings with it an anguish so old, that has become a sentence hidden (in the hollow of my body, an old wound that every movement irritates). And this anxiety, and pain have a regular name: eternal loneliness. That is, lack of response (which is not the answer). In other words, the eternal loneliness that coincides with the lack of response, and therefore we can say that the lack of response that generates the eternal solitude. What we're saying Jan? Of course, tells us that the loneliness that afflicts him (but we already knew) is not the trivial condition of those for a while is not in the company of someone. The loneliness that haunts him, in fact, is eternal. But in what sense can be threatened by Jan eternal solitude? And what are we to understand Jan says that when the eternal loneliness is the lack of response?
7.Vi is only one way to make sense of these words, and is to report to the plane of transcendence, or rather, of its impossibility. The anguish of Jan, in fact, is nothing but the fear that there is nothing but an ephemeral episode in the eternal flow of things, an insignificant event between the infinite nothingness that precedes it (and from which transfers pro- ) and the infinite nothingness that awaits him to swallow itself, which remains without a trace. O, which is the same, that there is nothing but a Being of infinite configurations, to be erased to make way for others in turn for to disappear in an endless succession where only the birth and perish is conserved. This is the eternal loneliness and anguish Jan aroused in him the quest for an answer that is nothing, in fact, that the desperate cry of meaning (and therefore salvation) placed in front of the human consciousness to the reality of their own annihilation . It might sound something like this: "existence has a meaning" other "than the cruel fate that seems to govern all things, which, coming to life, are therefore forced himself to death, annihilation?" Hannah Arendt argues
greek man who is born from the idea of \u200b\u200bimmortality of nature immortal (And the immortal gods) which together surround the lives of the only mortals, men. Indeed, "the individual life is different from all the others in the course of its linear movement, which, as it were, cut the circular of biological life. Mortality is this: to move along a straight line in a universe where everything moves with movement in a cyclic order. "(Vita Activa). If they have a basis in theories of the birth and death (heat) of the universe, today we should replace the vision of the cyclical nature of life and biological dynamics of linear (only apparently similar to the linear trajectory of human life), even in nature. But even in this case would not be less the uniqueness of the human condition. In fact, mortality would be a move in a straight line from one end of the line, with the awareness of this initiative and to this end. This is why men are, even in the universe that no longer moves in a cyclic order, the only mortal, because they are the only ones about to die, that is the only conscious of their fate. And this is the solitude of the living human. And it stems from the invocation of a sense that transcends what otherwise appears senseless. And this question can only be addressed to God, if by God we mean that which gives a sense of being that transcends the mere existence, to the extent that being, otherwise, does not in itself Another way that its mere facticity. But God, we know, does not answer: "The door opens. In the box is the old home. Stay still and quiet). Jan: "It's nothing. Excuse me. I just wanted to see if anyone answered, and if the alarm worked. "(The old man looks at him and then closes the door. I will walk away) Jan SCENE III:" The alarm works, but he does not speak. It does not give an answer. "
But if it is true that the answer is no, it is also true that even the question is formulated. To Jan, in fact, an invocation is silent, without words. How quiet is his call to his mother and sister, which hopes to be recognized for the strength of and blood, without having to pronounce his name without having to declare. In short, it's like to exist for Jan was in itself already eloquently expressed that, by the very fact of the form, the question of meaning and love. Indeed, as if the existence of consciousness of its own end, puzzling and paradoxical reality in a universe indifferent and unaware of the deaf because immortal and then die, if only the absurd question, that is not audible. In this sense, the misunderstanding is inevitable. In any way the application is made can never be understood: who needs to embrace, in fact, can never do that because it is meaningless for him, just as Calls for a meaning, is based on a meaning. In this sense, the living human being is condemned to the loneliness of those who speak a language which nobody understands, and he is an alien sentenced to live in a world that is not his home, but only the place where he died. As Martha says, "This house is not his, in fact. Why is not anyone. And no one will ever find warmth and abandon "the world is made" because we die. "The house in which Jan, like every human being is a stranger, where the living is accepted that, living and perishing, all is preserved, and the cycle of perpetual generation-destruction. Being here, around us and in us, in each of us living-dying. It is present but also absent from the infinitely distant and inaccessible, because it so close, intimate. Human existence is in fact the very being, which is a fragment. There is no difference, there is no salvation and transcendence. Because there is no salvation in life. There is no salvation to eternal loneliness that is life. Jan and Martha seeking an answer, build a plan of escape. Unnecessarily. Because nobody can understand their language. They are the misunderstandings, and questions of salvation and have no sense of the listener. For this there is no answer. If there were a response to the absurd of life would no longer such. But life is absurd because it simply is, and that his being is founded in itself, without a reason that transcends it. Life (ie being of what is at each of them, but also infinitely far from each in their individuality) can not make account of his existence, because each application seeks to establish a sense where there is no other way than that of 'be. The creatures, those strange creatures that are mortal, they ask questions that are intended to fall on deaf ears because they ask you to draw a direction, a direction, where there are all the senses, and then there is not anyone in particular. And most importantly, none exists other than that of the whole. In the sense of being, in fact, contains all the senses of the living, but these are not their senses, but those of being. According to Camus, in which there is no escape. We are doomed to defeat.
But perhaps this is not the only way to experience the tragic condition in which we stand. It is not necessary that awareness of this condition from becoming lucid in a vision so desperate and despairing. But that is another matter which requires leaving the task we set ourselves to comment on malentendu.
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