July 15th, 2006
Zidane and Albert Camus
First it’s the musicians-and-writers overlap, now it’s writers and footballers. This article by Roger Cohen compares Zinedane Zidane to the protagonist of
Albert Camus’ 1942 novel The Stranger. It’s worth a read and Cohen kicks things off by saying:
“In The Stranger, the existentialist novel by Albert Camus, an alienated French-Algerian man, Meursault, kills an Arab on the beach in the glare of the sunlight. It is a senseless act, as senseless as the way he fires one deadly shot, and then four more into the prone body.
Zinédine Zidane, a Frenchman born to Algerian parents in Marseille, did not kill anyone in the glare of the floodlights of Berlin’s Olympic Stadium. His senseless act, beneath the gaze of a billion people, merely knocked an Italian off his feet. All that Zidane killed was a certain narrative of his life.”
July 15th, 2006 at 12:53 am
Aw shucks, more French post-war existentialism. It was the buzzword during my time at UCD in the mid-1960s. If you didn’t understand a film directed by Vittorio da Sica or Michael Antonioni (like 8 1/2 or Il Deserto Rosso) you could put it down to existentialist alienation and Angst. Simone de Beauvoir in one of her memoirs says that during the 1930s she and Sartre spent many desultory afternoons in the Paris cinemas watching American movies. He must have got some philosophical ideas from the cowboy and gangster films? I’m sad that Zidane ended his football career with a headbutt. Millions of Maghrebian underclass citizens in France desperately need a good role model at the moment.