Pablo's whole life passes in front of him. It sees it was worthless.
Madrid October 1938
Standing Up Against Sartre’s Wall
Sartre's 'The Wall' is classic “existentialism.” But what is existentialism? Its modern origins are somewhat murky. A singer in a smoky jazz cellar, where Sartre and others mused after Paris was liberated by the Allies, said the philosophers were “existentialists” because they were “just existing.” Existentialists believed that individuals should be responsible for themselves in particular so asserted priority of concrete individual existence over abstract conceptions of being. Thus they endeavored to be solely responsible for their actions instead of relying on the habitual social constructs that had so obviously failed.
Existentialism includes unsystematic reflections on the ultimate absurdity, that each human is born to die, that life is, in effect, a death sentence, at least in regards to existence on this planet. Some thinkers were deemed existentialists posthumously because so-called “Existentialism” did not exist when they were alive. Once the term was invented, an individualist identified as an existentialist might deny he was one until it behooved him to do so when existentialism became popular.
Sartre's comrade Albert Camus was one of the truest existentialists considering his persistent repudiation of systematic philosophical reasoning with all its artificial beings. He was not about to admit the existence of the Supreme Being or Being of beings, although he did disclose in a novel that devout atheists tend to pray to God when death is imminent. Existentialism had to at least seem to be reasonable, that is, logical, for absurdity would be a hard sell when competing with the Logos of the most popular religion, so to just exist Camus had to just say no to its theology. Having taken the Resistance to heart, he was not a rebel for nothing. He denied he was an existentialist unto his death in a car accident, running off a straight, dry road in 1960 with no evidence of speeding, a mode of death he had previously said was absurd. He had found meaning in the Absurd, that is, in the reality of the meaningless of life, as he must have noticed as the editor of a war journal. A world at war with itself is illogical unless the dialectical argument rolling it forward is logical, but dialectics is no more logical than the Logos. It is absurd in fact. A good joke expresses some truth, and the truth of the Absurd with its fatal punch line may give a condemned man cause to laugh at the joke on him if he has a good sense of humor. When the mass murder ended, Camus enjoyed the Absurd while just existing or watching games played on a sunny beach. He intended to fly home on his fatal day but decided to go in an automobile driven by a friend. A flat-tire conspiracy theory entitled The Death of Camus by Giovanni Catelli would be published sixty years later, without confirmation from Camus' surviving daughter, Catherine, who was a passenger in the car, arguing the accident was staged by the KGB because Camus had criticized the USSR. But we suspect this ending was pre-ordained by a greater power.
In 'The Wall,' the reader meets four innocent condemned men: Pablo, the protagonist, and Pedro, Juan, and Tom. Their innocence did not matter to their captors; they exist, terrified, in an “almost pathological” cold sweat, locked in a frigid room in a hospital basement awaiting execution by firing squad. If only they could press themselves so far into the wall the bullets could not reach them! Pallid they are to the extreme, mere “bloodless shadows” of themselves. A medical doctor is present to comfort their bodies, offering tobacco, taking the pulse of one, stroking another's neck until the patient tries to bite his hand. His offer to call a priest is greeted with silence by all, so no priest appears to salvage their souls. “Jesus Christ” is pronounced colloquially, in non-religious context: “Good Jesus Christ, I'm cold.” A man pisses his pants, but none pray. God is obviously dead. There is nothing on the other side of the wall. Objects on this side now have a weird appearance to the condemned, as if tainted by death.
Pablo's whole life passes in front of him. It sees it was worthless. He remembers the woman he loved for a year, but he finally has no desire to see her and hold her body, for mortal bodies disgust him now. Disenchanted by his imminent death, he realizes his life was all a “damned lie,” that he understood nothing, had counterfeited eternity. Several hours or several years of waiting for death is all the same when disillusioned, he thought. So he “clung to nothing” and was horribly calm. He has no sympathy for the others or for himself.
One might weep at the prospect of execution, pitying himself, but not thinking of death since there is nothing afterwards and nothing is meaningless including nothing unless it is capitalized as Nothing in contrast to Being, just as there would be no things in space without space, so space, the negation of all things, is somehow something.
The conduct of the Falangist officers in charge was a laughable burlesque to him. After all, they were all destined to die too. “They busied themselves looking for names in their crumpled papers, they ran after other men to imprison or suppress them; they had opinions on the future of Spain and on other subjects.”
Pedro, Juan, and Tom are eventually taken from the room and shot. Pablo could save his own life if only he would reveal to the officials a man they are seeking, but he refuses to be a rat although he could care less about that man anymore. Why? Obstinacy, stubbornness, he thinks. To spite his captors and make fools of them he gives them, says the man is hiding in a cemetery. He is amused by his deception; the very idea of the officers looking for the man in the cemetery is irresistibly funny. It so happens his intended lie proved true. The man was found hiding in the cemetery and executed, Pablo is freed, and he laughs so hard he cried. Such are the ambiguities of the absurd.
Was Pablo's survival was an accident or fated? That is, was Pablo saved by God although his character was created by Sartre, an atheist? And, in reality, was the accident that killed Camus not an accident but caused by the First Cause? Were these hard-drinking existentialists profoundly religious atheists in fact? Did they dare not name the Unknown One or define Nothing lest their faith be lost in insanity? Was Nothing their Being, in the sense that Nothing is eternal, whereas the individual just existing is virtually nonexistent in the context of eternity no matter how outstanding it may be for an infinitesimal moment.
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