The Stranger (L'Étranger)
The Stranger (1942)
Translated from the French by Matthew Ward (1988)
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I have started with the behemoth of Camus’s work: his celebrated The Stranger (L’Étranger). So famous, and yet so short. It is a novella published in 1942 during the Nazi occupation of France, and did not sell well. It was translated into English in the UK in 1946 then made its way to the US. It has become a classic of 20th-century literature.
Since entire university courses are taught on Camus, I’m absolutely writing from the heart, coming at this project from the standpoint of how this writing affects me at an emotional level, and then trying to muse on it a bit. I’m not too interested in making any very intelligent commentary, and I may well have all of this wrong as compared to the scholars. Oh well.
I read this quickly. I had a curious feeling as I went back and reviewed all of my annotated passages. They’re so stark: There are stark colours (the shiny black of the hearse; the blood-red earth; the blue and gold of the sky), there are stark sensations (the sun is so hot), there is stark violence. I can sense a passion beneath all of those vivid descriptions, but I felt disquieted. The narrative is a bit chilling because Meursault is dispassionate. He’s not a guy that I’d like to meet. I’d be as sure of him treating me fairly as I would be of him shooting me with a gun if the circumstances felt right to him. Like if the sun got in his eyes and he felt bothered.
It feels like Meursault is some mix of sociopath and fragile narcissist. He’s hyper aware of others’ negative evaluations of him to the point that he misrepresents others’ motivations. He’s sure his boss will think negatively about him for missing work for his mother’s funeral. He thinks the retirement home director is blaming him for institutionalising his mother. At her wake, the other residents watch him and, “For a second I had the ridiculous feeling that they were there to judge me.” Perhaps they are? Yet Meursault lacks empathy. After his friend Raymond beats his partner until she bleeds, Meursault spends an evening out with him. “So we took our time getting back, him telling me how glad he was he’d been able to give the woman what she deserved. I found him very friendly with me and I thought it was a nice moment.”
Nothing really changes, nothing has much value over how it is in the moment that is right now. “It occurred to me anyway one more Sunday was over, that Maman was buried now, that I was going back to work, and that, really, nothing had changed.” His girlfriend Marnie asks him if he’ll marry her and he says, though he doesn’t love her, “I explained to her that it didn’t really matter, and that if she wanted to we could get married.”
When he shoots the Arab man on the beach in the pivotal moment of the novel, it’s the outcome of his earlier thought: You can shoot or not shoot. Chilling.
In Part One, the language is simple, with short sentences, and Meursault’s thinking appears superficial, which is what leads to this sense of the dis-ease in my own way of relating to his character. I think this is deliberate on Camus’ part, because it sets up a very different Part Two.
Part Two describes the trial and then Meursault waiting, imprisoned, for his execution. While he is jailed, awaiting trial for murder, he wrestles with the transition from being a free man to an imprisoned one. He is on trial for the murder of the man on the beach, but he is mostly on trial for not caring enough about life. He is on trial for not believing in God, and for not crying at his mother’s funeral. Sentenced to death, he contemplates fantasies of escape from prison, or supposes some way to give the condemned a chance to escape being killed. Perhaps an appeal or a pardon.
He upsets the chaplain by steadfastly rejecting the idea of God. In one scene near the end of the book, the chaplain insists that Meursault must believe in God despite his protestations, and prepares to leave, saying “I shall pray for you.” Meursault snaps:
“...I was sure about me, about everything, surer than he could ever be, sure of my life and sure of the death I had waiting for me. Yes, that was all I had. But at least I had as much of a hold on it as it had on me. I had been right. I was still right, I was always right. I had lived my life one way and I could just as well have lived it another. I had done this and I hadn’t done that. I hadn’t done this thing but I had done another. And so? It was as if I had waited all this time for this moment and for the first light of this dawn to be vindicated. Nothing, nothing mattered, and I knew why. So did he. Throughout the whole absurd life I’d lived, a dark wind had been rising toward me from somewheres deep in my future, across years that were still to come, and as it passes, this wind levelled whatever was offered to me at the time, in year no more real than the ones I was living. What did other people’s deaths or a mother’s love matter to me; what did his God or the lives people choose of the fate they think they elect matter to me when we’re all elected by the same fate, me and billions of privileged people like him who also called themselves my brothers? Couldn't he see, couldn't he see that? Everybody was privileged. There were only privileged people. The others would all be condemned one day. And he would be condemned, too. What would it matter if he were accused of murder and then executed because he didn’t cry at his mother’s funeral?”
And finally he accepts his fate with ultimate equanimity–because it should not matter. To die or not to die, it’s all the same. He says, “As if that blind rage had washed me clean, rid me of hope; for the first time, in that night alive with signs and stars, I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world. Finding it so much like myself–so like a brother, really–I felt that I had been happy and that I was happy again. For everything to be consummated, for me to feel less alone, I had only to wish that there be a large crowd of spectators the day of my execution and that they greet me with cries of hate.”
Part Two is deep, philosophical and satisfying, and Meursault is more complex. Camus’ writing style changes, using longer sentences and richer descriptive language. Even so, I feel like The Stranger is a novel that poses a question…but then ends. A gauntlet thrown down. I suppose Meursault reconciles his angst, his “pointless quest for meaning,” by finally accepting that his original way of being, before being challenged by imminent death, was correct. Nothing matters, and that’s peace. I’m still interested in what a human can make of this, how we can play with the idea and make something more of life than Meursault did.
As supplementary reading, I reviewed Jean Paul Sartre’s An Explication of The Stranger, published in 1947. It is excellent, and gave me some reassurance that my emotional response to The Stranger, and the questions it raised for me, make sense. Here is a rather long quote that gets to the heart of things:
“Since God does not exist and man dies, everything is permissible. One experience is as good as another; the important thing is simply to acquire as many as possible. “The ideal of the absurd man is the present and the succession of present moments before an ever-conscious spirit” (Sisyphus). Confronted with this “quantitative ethic” all values collapse; thrown into this world, the absurd man, rebellious and irresponsible, has “nothing to justify.” He is innocent, innocent as Somerset Maugham’s savages before the arrival of clergyman who teaches them Good and Evil, what is lawful and what is forbidden. For this man, everything is lawful. He is as innocent as Prince Mishkin, who “lives in an everlasting present, lightly tinged with smiles and indifference.” Innocent in every sense of the word, he, too, is, if you like, an “Idiot.”
And now we fully understand the title of Camus’s novel. The stranger he wants to portray is precisely one of those terrible innocents who shock society by not accepting the rules of its game. He lives among outsiders, but to them, too, he is a stranger. That is why some people like him—for example, his mistress, Marie, who is fond of him “because he’s odd.” Others, like the courtroom crowd whose hatred he suddenly feels mounting towards him, hate him for the same reason. And we ourselves, who, on opening the book are not yet familiar with the feeling of the absurd, vainly try to judge him according to our usual standards. For us, too, he is a stranger.
Thus, the shock you felt when you opened the book and read, “I thought that here was another Sunday over with, that Mama was buried now, that I would go back to work again and that, on the whole, nothing had changed,” was deliberate. It was the result of your first encounter with the absurd. But you probably hoped that as you progressed your uneasiness would fade, that everything would be slowly clarified, would be given a reasonable justification and explained. Your hopes were disappointed. The Stranger is not an explanatory book. The absurd man does not explain; he describes. Nor is it a book which proves anything.
Camus is simply presenting something and is not concerned with a justification of what is fundamentally unjustifiable, The Myth of Sisyphus teaches us how to accept our author’s novel. In it, we find the theory of the novel of absurdity. Although the absurdity of the human condition is its sole theme, it is not a novel with a message; it does not come out of a “satisfied” kind of thinking, intent on furnishing formal proofs. It is rather the product of a thinking which is “limited, rebellious, and mortal.” It is a proof in itself of the futility of abstract reasoning. “The fact that certain great novelists have chosen to write in terms of images rather than of arguments reveals a great deal about a certain kind of thinking common to them all, a conviction of the futility of all explanatory principles, and of the instructive message of sensory impressions" (The Myth of Sisyphus).”
As I’d mentioned in my background reading for this project with Introducing Camus, Absurdism is Camus' most famous contribution to philosophical thought. He rejected the label of existentialism. From that book:
“We are simply thrown into this world and the outcome is death, pure and simple. There is only life before and nothing beyond. And yet, this absence of explanation is not, in itself, the idea of the Absurd. ‘What is absurd is the confrontation between the sense of the irrational and the overwhelming desire for clarity which resounds in the depths of man.’
The Absurd is thus a pointless quest for meaning in a universe devoid of purpose. It is a totally human foible and, once again, only defines the beginning of the questioning of existence. Coming to terms with the Absurd is what essentially concerns Camus, because this accounts for the terrible ‘weight and strangeness’ of the world as experienced by every human being.” [bold and italics the author’s]
Where to from here? Camus explores the Absurd in his earlier work: The Stranger, The Myth of Sisyphus, and Caligula. From what Sartre discusses in his article, I think The Myth of Sisyphus will be next.
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