Camus's brief first novel: still being argued about 64 years later

Albert Camus died (in an automobile accident) a year and a half before fellow Nobel Prize-winner Ernest Hemingway. A few years later (the mid-1960s) when I was reading their fiction, Hemingway seemed much "longer ago" than Camus did. In part this is because Hemingway did not write anything of importance after the 1930s and Camus did not start publishing (outside Algeria) until the 1940s. (Camus was 14 years younger than Hemingway, BTW.) Also Camus was still productive (if somewhat out of fashion) at the time he died and Hemingway had been running on empty (augmented by heavy alcohol fumes) for a long time.

By the late 1960s, both of them seemed remote and disengaged. Novels by each of them have been edited and published during the decades since their death, most of which I have read and not been very impressed by (though there is some autobiographical interest in The First Man and Islands in the Stream, and both have some impressive set pieces). I reread La Peste (The Plague in an AIDS-focused frame of mind (and found it helpful) and saw the dull movie made from it in a South American setting starring William Hurt (yawn!). Earlier this year, I read Catherine Savage Brosman's book on Camus (for Barbara's French-find writeoff, though I never got around to writing about it).

Camus's novel L'étranger (The Stranger), first published in 1942, was influenced by Hemingway and other "hard-boiled" American writers such as James Cain (The Postman Always Rings Twice). Especially the first half has the clipped, declamatory sentences of "hard-boiled" American writers. The second half is more lyrical and introspective, though not as florid as many noir films with doomed narrators recalling how they got to death row or waiting for those they know are coming to kill them.

The narrator, a clerk named Meursault, registers very little affect. He is not even bemused by what befalls him. He watched at all and recalls/relates it with sympathy and an attempt to understand the viewpoints of others, but feels little other than tiredness.

The novel begins with the death of his mother, a woman of 60-something (he doesn't recall exactly what) worn-down by life and living in a state-supported nursing home after ceasing to be able to care for herself. Meursault could not afford to hire a caretaker for her, and he and his mother had exhausted anything they had to say to each other. At the nursing home, she made friends and even had a suitor.

Meursault did not show any emotion at the vigil for his dead mother or at the funeral, and returned to Algiers for a weekend of normal pleasures (swimming in the Mediterranean, going to a movie, starting a sexual liaison). All these matters and the fury of Raymond, a neighbor, that the woman he has been supporting (seemingly) has been seeing someone else during the days seem trivial, but become important at Meursault's trial.

An Arab man in overalls, whom the Raymond identifies as the brother of the woman he expelled (and beat up) and two other Arabs attack Raymond, Meursault, and a third pied noir (Algerian of French descent, like Camus himself), knifing Raymond.

Later in the searing African sun, Meursault sees the Arab alone on the beach. The latter takes out his knife and Meursault shoots him (five times).

The second half relates interrogations and a trial. It is puzzling that the investigation took eleven months and seems to have done nothing to clarify the identity of the dead man and that an Arab who has pulled a knife--one he has already used on another of the Europeans--does not give rise to consideration of self-defense. The pompous defense attorney does not raise self-defense.

Meursault's life, trial, and execution are absurdities, but the absurdity of the case against him seems too easy. It is difficult for me to believe that in colonial-era Algeria the deck was stacked against a "Frenchman" killing an armed Arab who had already injured another "Frenchman." Also, the case (prosecution and the defense that is attempted with little cooperation from Meursault) is primarily about Meursault's failure to cry at the vigil and funeral for his mother and then seeking pleasures during the weekend following the funeral.

It is plausible to me that such matters might be brought up in tandem with the lack of remorse about having killed someone, though I would think that a capital murder case should be about premeditation. Did he go gunning for the man who had wounded Raymond? The answer to that, according to Meursault's recollection, is negative, but there is some appearance of that. No one asks those with whom Meursault had been at the beach what he said before going for a walk. Even though Meursault showed no grief about his mother's death, no one accused him of having killed her, of being a remorseless matricide before stalking and gunning down a man who had done nothing...

OK, trials may get into side-issues and "bad attitudes" often annoy judges and juries, but I find the trial unbelievable (as does Meursault). His attorney does not attempt to coach him (for instance, to say that he was grieving for his mother inside and trying to distract himself, to stress that the production of the knife which had already been used on Raymond made Meursault fear for his life, etc.).

After losing his temper at a priest trying to prepare him for his execution, Meursault regains a calm and readiness to be reviled en route to his execution (like someone carrying a cross through Jerusalem, methinks, except that this execution has no redemptive purpose, only annihilation of one affectless consciousness).

Although I did not remember some of the subsidiary characters or the flourishing of a crucifix (by the magistrate, not by the prison chaplain, though both are horrified that Meursault proclaims he does not believe in the Christian God), I remembered the largely meaningless killing of an Arab leading to the completely meaningless execution of justice and the terseness of the style.

I think that The Plague is a more interesting book, with more credible absurdity (even if the bubonic plague is supposed to be a metaphor for the Nazi occupation). The 1988 American translation ofThe Stranger (by Matthew Ward) is blunter (more American) than the English translation (by Stuart Gilbert) that I first read decades ago. (I also struggled through the first part in French, and reread the second part in Gilbert's translation during the mid-1970s when my French was better than it is now).

With simple, declarative sentences, the book can be read in a sitting (at least in a language in which the reader is fluent). Even our president managed to get through its 117 pages (it and a biography of Roberto Clemente were the two books he is supposed to have read this summer).

End of review, beginning of speculations on two others' reading

Having reread The Stranger after W's publicized reading of it, I have to wonder whether he identified with Meursault's preventive fatal attack on an Arab. Meursault never reveals any feelings for Arabs and the ethnic (colonist/colonized) difference goes unmentioned at the trial. So I'd guess that W did not dwell on this parallel.

I imagine he also managed to avoid thinking of all the people who were executed in Texas during his two terms as governor (more than in any state, and in most other nations except the PRC). Did he get even a glimmering that some of the people executed in Texas had similar inept defenses and that prejudices (race in Texas, atheism in the case of Meursault) had any effects on the sentences?

Did he feel affinity with Meursault because many of us consider him a remorseless killer on a scale far more vast? Or satisfaction that an atheist was executed despite not having been guilty of the crime for which he was executed? W seems even less introspective as Meursault--and as lacking in remorse for bad decisions (and worse things). Meursault does not deign to explain. In contrast, W issues multiple, mutually incompatible explanations... and lacks Meursault's lucidity.

Jean-Paul Sartre (before his break with Camus) wrote a famous analysis of The Stranger, which he did not consider a novel ("Voltairean tale" was Sartre's designation for it). Sartre (reading The Stranger through the lens of The Myth of Sisyphus wrote that its subject is "the absurdity of the human condition," specifying that absurdity is "simultaneously a state of facts and the lucid consciousness of that state."

As a philosophical reading of a book filled with images (as Sartre himself stressed), this is reasonable. In the book (which purports to be the inside of Meursault's consciousness) Meursault does explain himself. According to Sartre, Meursault refused to deign to explain himself to others, though in my reading he tried. Meursault felt that both the prosecutor and his lawyer "seemed to be arguing the case as if it had nothing to do with me. Everything was happening without my participation." Many of those being ground through the mill of court systems feel this. Meursault was not entirely passive: "I felt like intervening every now and then, but my lawyer kept telling me, 'Just keep quite--it won't do your case any good.'"

Where Sartre really (IMHO) goes off on his own is in seeing Meursault as "affirming himself in revolt." In my reading, Meursault does not revolt at anything that happens to him or around him. He is slow to realize that his case is going badly. He is not unaware of what people expect of him, but is unwilling to provide it. He says what he thinks, rather than what people expect to hear. Not just about God and feeling guilt and remorse, but much earlier, when his boss offers him a chance to be transferred to a new Paris office. "He asked me if I wasn't interested in a change of life. I said that people never change their lives, that in any case one life was as good as another and that I wasn't dissatisfied with mine here at all. He looked upset... and told me that I had no ambition." As Sartre put it, "Meursault is one of those terrible innocents who create scandal in society because they do not accept the rules of the game"; that Meursault's mind is "transparent to things and opaque to meaning," however, is an overstatement. He recognizes what others expect and how failure to meet those expectations brands him. He doesn't care enough to put on an act for them, even for those deciding whether to imprison or to execute him.

The lack of any Arab consciousness went unremarked by Sartre during the 1940s, though it has been remarked upon since then (also in regard to The Plague, which is also set in Algeria.

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And, entirely BTW, I couldn't resist including Meursault's perspective on Paris (where he'd lived before) for Barbara: "It's dirty. Lots of pigeons and dark courtyards. Everybody's pale."


© 2006, Stephen O. Murray