Stoic Week #7

Note: This is the last post in observance of Stoic Week 2023. I observed Stoic Week in 2015. Yesterday's post was about Trollopian characters that were laughably unStoic. Today's post is about a less comic approach to wretchedness. Simenon's mid-20th century novels were cautionary tales. They typically star middle-aged men that find themselves in a crisis because they have been too busy pursuing the preferred indifferents. They have rejected responsibility to identify their own preferences and aversions and renounced living according to nature and reason. Simenon offers no prescriptions, but Stoic readers will have no trouble drawing their own conclusions.  

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The Accomplices - Georges Simenon 

Simenon tells the same story in his many psychological thrillers but it is always riveting to read tales of ordinary successful people that think they got a really good bead on things. Then they realize that they have been sleepwalking through life. 

In this short novel from 1955, after a horrendous traffic accident, a hit and run driver spends the next couple of days contemplating his previously unexamined life. He finds guilt and bad faith in his whole manner of living. It is not so much that he simply gives in to the empty materialism and mindless consumerism of society. Cynically, he has adopted false values as a mask and disowns his innate freedom to use his rationality to live as an unhindered human being.

As a child, he tapped into the inner joy that runs like a river in us. But as he grew older he just lost sight of our default settings of joy and rationality. He became a lout, coward, and sneak. With no close connections, he has no sense of belonging and feels adrift in the world. His wife refuses to sleep with him after he goes around with sex workers. His friends get nervous about his belligerence and hostility whenever he drinks. He forces an affair on his secretary and they barely exchange a word. 

He is, in short, a typical Simenon protagonist. Simenon's romans durs (hard novels) sometimes begin or end with a crime but are not mysteries. They more often begin with an ordinary change, like a new lodger, a death, a family crisis, a demolition, a move, a poor decision. They are concise novellas, clinical examinations of human beings who've become the polar opposites of the Stoic Sage.

In the 1980s, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich released a boatload of romans durs in English. But USA culture was into moonwalking, Magnum PI, neon, Chariots of Fire, big hair, designer drugs, Wake Me Up (Before You Go Go), to name only a few. In the Eighties sleepwalking through life seemed a sound strategy because the Seventies were so nuts (trust me: I was there). Simenon's novels were quickly remaindered, ending up in discount stores like Edward R. Hamilton (where I bought them at prices a poor grad student could afford). Now that we are all post-pandemic veterans, with more experience contemplating the ends of our tethers, maybe we are more prepared for the romans durs. 

"A person is smart," said K in Men in Black. "People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals. And you know it." It's really easy, even fun, to be dumb and panicky and thank heaven it takes more energy than most people have to be dangerous. But Stoics are willing to do the work that becoming a smart person demands.