Tolstoy, Camus and Death by Irina Jauhiainen

TOLSTOY, CAMUS AND DEATH

by Irina Jauhiainen

Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Albert Camus’ The Outsider have many narrative similarities: both have as their protagonist a man who gets on with life without really reflecting on it; without any particular attempt to live to the fullest or awareness that it will not last forever. And both stories end with the protagonist having to face their inevitable death. Ivan Ilyich has been ill for a long time and the realisation that his illness is lethal has dawned on him after endless attempts at denial. Camus’ protagonist, Meursault, is on trial for shooting a man and after a long wait at the prison he understands that he is going to be executed. As soon as the understanding of the inevitability of having to die is expressed, the story ends. Each is, then, a story about coming to the realisation and acceptance of the fact that all human existence ends eventually, and that every individual must face their own death as their final experience in the world. The fact of inevitable death which each individual must face alone is a major concern in existentialist philosophy. According to Martin Heidegger, human life is a beingtowards-death: “Holding death for true does not demand just one definite kind of behaviour in Dasein,” he writes, “but demands Dasein itself in the full authenticity of its existence.” As Gaitanidis explains: “The very power which enables man to understand his death is, for Heidegger, the same power which makes it possible for him to gain understanding of his life. Man therefore ‘sees’ his life in the light of his death.” The defining quality of life, then, is temporality. Neither of these stories’ protagonists is fully aware of temporality during their lives, and therefore each story – as it narrates a life of someone unaware of their inevitable death – illustrates ways in which people avoid existential responsibility and fail to gain full understanding of their existence. Camus sees the source of existential anguish as the tension between the human need for meaning and recognition and the indifference of the universe towards human needs. The only way to overcome the anguish is to deny either side of the tension – admit that one has

needs as a human being and make believe that the universe is meaningful, or accept that the universe is meaningless and commit inner (or actual) suicide by succumbing to meaninglessness. The Death of Ivan Ilyich narrates, with impressive intensity considering its short word count, the life of an aristocratic man in mid-nineteenth century Russia. Ivan Ilyich is concerned with his place in society and does everything for the sake of status and propriety, giving little thought to what he really wants or what he could give to other people. He does not love his wife whom he married for money; he hardly notices his children. He does seemingly relax and enjoy drinking and playing cards with his friends but this is a way to pass time rather than a meaningful, pleasurable pursuit. Ivan is in bad faith, as the existentialist philosophers would call it less than a century later; he lives as others expect him to, not as he genuinely wants to live. Ivan is decorating his new living room to fit the fashions of the day when he falls and fatally injures himself. The effects of the injury are not immediately visible but after a couple of days he begins to experience internal pains and a bad taste in his mouth, and as the symptoms keep getting worse he gradually realises that the injury is slowly killing him. The realisation of his oncoming death is a terrifying and lonely experience. The realisation is only superficial at this stage, however; on the level of words, Ivan repeats “I am going to die”, but each time he does so he almost immediately negates the realisation with the phrase “It cannot be.” When Ivan actually accepts reality and sees his life in the light of his death, he feels as though he has lived ‘wrong’ and wasted his life.

Although Camus rejected the term existentialist, The Outsider remains one of the best-known and most canonical existentialist texts. The protagonist, Meursault, is condemned to death for what the court claims is the random murder he commits, but the narrative in fact suggests that the court judges Meursault’s character rather than his actions. Meursault is a very different character from Ivan Ilyich; he does not care at all what others think. He lives in the moment and drifts along with whatever life brings him. When his girlfriend, Marie, suggests they get married, Meursault agrees half-heartedly, saying “it doesn’t matter” and that he “naturally” would have accepted a proposal from any other woman as well. He adapts to any situation he faces and even in prison he begins to think “like a prisoner”, “I’d look forward to my daily walk in the courtyard or to my lawyer’s visits. And I managed quite well the rest of the time.” Despite his radically

changed conditions, Meursault retains his mild indifference towards the world until the last few pages of the novel.

Both Ivan Ilyich and Meursault accept the reality of death only during their last moments. They are different examples of a person living in bad faith, for up until the approach of their respective deaths neither reflects on their mortality or attempts to value the quality of their life in the light of it. In both cases the revelation of death is the climax of the story, and perhaps it would be pointless to write an existentialist novel whose protagonist was already aware of their inevitable death; it is quite effective to portray the realisation in juxtaposition to a life lived unaware or in denial. Tolstoy, however, contrasts Ivan Ilyich’s life of bad faith with another character, the peasant Gerasim, who looks after Ivan in his final days.

Both stories’ protagonists have a hard time accepting that their existence will come to an end, but a major concern also seems to be that other people will continue living once they die. “‘Well, then I’ll die.’ Sooner than other people, obviously. But everybody knows that life isn’t worth living […] it doesn’t matter very much whether you die at thirty or seventy since, in either case, other men and women will naturally go on living,” Camus’ protagonist muses. When Ivan Ilyich first realises (but does not fully accept) that he is dying, he feels great resentment towards the fact that his family members are still alive and well, and even daring to enjoy themselves while he is lying on his deathbed. He hears music and singing from another room and thinks, “They don’t care, but they’re going to die too. Fools! Me first, then them.” Perhaps this is a prominent part of coming to realise one’s personal death: everyone is used to others dying, in which they remain as a subject that goes on living when the object, the other person, ceases to exist; the observer experiences loss but not the actual death. One’s own death, however, is a reversal of this subject/object relation and the individual has to become the object of this common phenomenon, before the final extinction of their subjectivity. “The ‘dying’ of Others is something that one experiences daily,” Heidegger writes: each individual subject experiences the existence of the world as conditional on their own perception; to realise that other centres of consciousness will continue to exist after one’s own death dissolves the ego and renders utterly meaningless the subjective self. In the afterword to The Outsider, Camus describes his novel as a “story of a man who, without any heroic pretensions, agrees to die for the truth.” Similarly to Sartre, Camus seems to be suggesting that the manner of a

person’s death is central to understanding the quality of their existence. If understanding life requires understanding death, the living a life in denial of, or refusing to think about, death would be quite tragic, or an incomplete life. Gaitanidis (1999) discusses two possible ways of relating to death once its inevitability has been accepted: regulative and constitutive. Tolstoy’s story illustrates the regulative way, the way “fear of death […] regulates the way that man acts or lives in relation to his coming to an end.” The authenticity gained from accepting death guides Gerasim’s choices in life but Ivan adopts this attitude too late. However, there is a sense that had he become aware of the inevitability of his own death sooner, it would have significantly changed the way he lived his life. Camus shows a more constitutive approach, which Gaitanidis explains as “Not only is man […] free from the fear of death, but, in accepting death, he even regards it as the most necessary ingredient in appropriating the kind of life that he leads.” Even though Meursault gains awareness of his own coming death only when facing execution, his last moments are significantly eased by the lack of fear and the complete acceptance that he is going to die, and this seems like a perfectly natural end.

Close to his execution Meursault perceives how meaningless he is in relation to the vastness of the universe but is comforted by rather than frightened by it: “I looked up at the mass of signs and stars in the night sky and laid myself open for the first time to the benign indifference of the world.” Camus, then, seems to be suggesting that death is nothing to be afraid of in any case. Life itself is of value and to be cherished but everyone dies eventually no matter what lives they have led. At whatever age a person dies there will always be other people who go on living, and therefore it “does not matter very much whether you die at thirty or seventy.” Tolstoy’s story conveys more of a moral perspective: if one has lived authentically, death is nothing to fear. Everyone and everything has to face death, which makes it a perfectly natural part of life, rather than a horrifying injustice or misfortune, which is how Ivan initially reacts to the fact of his imminent death. Whilst acceptance does eventually occur for Ivan, he goes through moments when he feels it has been in vain to have lived at all since living does not last.

Loy discusses the opposing arguments in Heidegger’s Being and Time and Sartre’s Being and Nothingness: in Sartre’s view “Death is never that which gives life its meaning, but […] that which in principle removes all

meaning from life.” What meaning could existence have if it is going to end, and especially since nothing that one does during that existence can stop it from ending? “It’s not possible that life could have been as senseless and sickening as this,” Ivan frets on his deathbed. “And if it really has been as senseless and sickening as this why do I have to die, and die in agony? There’s something wrong.” It seems as though the natural order of the whole life and death dynamic is flawed by design, and that this really is not how it should be. The need for meaning and the sense of self one develops during one’s existence feels too important for this existence to end so quickly and prosaically. The discord between our individual feeling of importance and the way death’s inevitability renders this meaningless is, at least in Camus’ definition of the word, the source of the absurdity of life. One possible way to avoid this constant discord of the individual sense of importance and the nature of existence is to take control of the situation by actively ending one’s own existence. According to Fairfield “suicide, for Camus, is at least in many cases an expression of the conviction that life has become absurd.”

The acceptance of life’s absurdity often leads to a nihilist attitude: that this world cannot be there for people to live in, but because God is dead and there is no afterlife, there is no alternative world where one would feel any less estranged. Existence itself is then meaningless and wrong. In the words of Emil Cioran, “since there is no salvation in either existence or nothingness, let this world […] be smashed to pieces!” This is not far from existentialism, which also does not pretend that humans belong to this world or that there is an alternative world that is more welcoming; however, the existentialist attitude is more accepting of the tensions characteristic of human consciousness in an unwelcoming world. Nietzsche’s solution to being able to “endure to live in a meaningless world” was the “will to power,” a forceful resolution to continue to exist; its polar opposite would be to completely end one’s existence by committing suicide. Loy suggests an alternative, which is to go on living while surrendering to the despair of meaninglessness, since “When we despair in the right way…[a] bandoning the hope that we will eventually become something, we yield to our nothingness and discover that […] we have always been everything.” The existentialists would, of course, consider Loy’s yogic approach as bad faith, but a deeper consideration shows that this approach is not, in practice, too far from Heidegger’s.

Although the novels do not spell out any particular attitude towards individual death, they are successful in capturing the intensity of a person’s conflicted feelings when faced with the realisation that they are, indeed, going to die soon. The novels illustrate the state of denial or indifference rather than the state of mind after realisation or acceptance; the fact that each story ends soon after the acceptance of death takes place in the character’s mind suggests that the story has reached its resolution and there is no more story to tell. Neither story demonstrates a clear attitude of what should be the existentialist’s relationship with death; the reader has a chance to wonder and reflect alongside the characters. The most important message of these works of fiction is thus present through negation: the reader can get a sense of how much more authentic and significant the lives of Meursault and Ivan Ilyich might have been had they accepted death and lived their lives authentically much earlier on.