the other - in sex and in daily life

There have been interesting pairings in my reading this week.   Driving from Boston to Washington on Tuesday, I listened to the audio-book Mating in Captivity by Esther Perel.   Meanwhile, in my book clubs I read Albert Camus's The Stranger and  Kamel Daoud's  extraordinary re-imagining of that novel The Meursault Investigation.   All three books are about navigating proximity to the other.

Esther Perel is a sex therapist. In her terms, the other is the lover.  Her book explores the difficult balance between domestic harmony and sexual desire.  In The Stranger Camus gives us an absurdist novel about a man who cannot connect to the other - whose lack of empathy renders connection impossible.  The Meursault Investigation, Kamel Daoud's 2013 retelling of The Stranger - gives us the perspective of the family of the unnamed man who is murdered on the beach.

But who is the other? How separate from us are they? Esther Perel writes that in order to maintain frisson in our romantic relationships it is imperative to see our beloved as other - as a separate person with their own thoughts and erotic imagination, as one who is free to stop loving us, to fantasize about others and even to transform themselves into a different person from the one we fell in love with.    We  cannot expect to own our beloved. And yet, married couples take a vow to become as one.  Good marriages, we tend to believe, rest on a couple's ability to make a comfortable and secure nest - each partner as one half of a whole. Perel's book offers examples of how various couples reconcile the seemingly irreconcilable: sexual frisson and domestic felicity.

In a very different way,  the encounter with the other drives the narrative of The Stranger.   The main character, Meursault is an island. He doesn't care to connect - and his existential passage from one physical experience to the next renders him a stranger to us.  His mother's dies and he responds without emotion. A neighbor beats his dog, and he does nothing.  Raymond beats up his girl and instead of taking her side, Meursault goes to the beach with the intention of punishing her brother. Then he kills a nameless "Arab" - firing his gun four times. "like giving four sharp knocks at the door of unhappiness" (Joseph Laredo translation).

This unnamed "Arab" is unacknowledged as human in The Stranger even though their encounter drives the narrative.  In a chilling twist, Meursault's conviction rests not on the murder per se, but on the evidence that he showed no feeling at his mother's death.

In  The Meursault Investigation Kamel Daoud  treats The Stranger as if it is Meursault's own story - a manifesto called The Other.  Since the murdered man is unnamed in The Stranger, his humanity has been negated.  There is no encounter between two humans here. The sun is blinding and we aren't even sure Meursault is fully aware of what he's doing.  The murdered man has no humanity, since he is just the Arab.  "Arab," writes Daoud." I never felt Arab, you know.  Arab-ness is like Negro-ness, which only exists in the white man's eyes.  In our neighborhood, in our world, we were Muslims, we had given names, faces and habits. Period."

Reading this, I was reminded of Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Only when her protagonist comes from Nigeria to America does she understand that she is seen as "black".  Black is an American construct.  I  remembered too Ta Nehisi Coates' in Between the World and Me where he writes about Saul Bellow's embarrassing quip, wondering who the Shakespeare of the Hottentots is.

Well, Coates responds - the Shakespeare of the Hottentots is of course, Shakespeare.

In order to be fully human, we must recognize the humanity of the others we encounter, while also honoring their otherness - be they lovers, neighbors, or strangers.  As Orhan Pamuk observed in his Nobel Lecture "The writer who shuts himself up in a room and first goes on a journey inside himself will, over the years, discover literature's eternal rule: he must have the artistry to tell his own stories as if they were other people's stories, and to tell other people's stories as if they were his own, for this is what literature is."

But wait! Pamuk's final step is crucial: "We must first travel through other people's stories and books and the writer who writes the stories of other people must not and should not negate them by folding their identities into something about ourselves."

Honor the other and you honor yourself.