The Brilliance of Albert Camus
THE STRANGER
Albert Camus
Essay 1. Balancing the Books
It’s time to talk about Meursault, the enigmatic character who tells his own story in Camus’ perfect, in fact I think you can say that it’s word-perfect, novel, The Stranger (L’Etranger). First published in France in 1942(the first English translation had to wait until after the War, in 1946) it keeps us in unfaltering contact with Meursault, arguably the world’s first modern anti-hero (unlike Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov he doesn’t convert and redeem himself- once he crosses the line between standard ways of living in the social world and becoming an Outsider he stays on the Far Side) Mind you, one could say that this Archetype is taken on and set up for all subsequent generations by Oedipus, who never comes back but roams the world as a blind Stranger until his death. Oedipus of course is under the curse of the gods and although he is the Agent of his own disaster he is also the Victim of a pre-ordained Fate. Sophocles’ play is about the Convergence between individual choice or Agency and Predetermination, or the Will of the Gods, and asks the question What IS Man? Is he Free or Captive?
(You could say, thinking about this question, that the only works you need to know in order to answer it, or to decide that it is Unanswerable, are OEDIPUS REX, HAMLET and THE STRANGER –which was, by the way, Camus’ first or debut novel!! So he got into pretty distinguished company right away.)
So I’m going for Meursault as a major modern Anti-Hero. It could even be argued that he is the onlyperson of Heroic Scale that modern literature can come up with. If so, we need to go further and consider what sortof Hero he is. Well, to start with, he’s not cast in the ancient Tragic mode. No gods force his hand or block his path. Then is he the Agent of his own Fate? To call him thatis to contradict the extreme passivity and detachment of the way in which he moves through the world. The society that judges him in the courtroom scenes sees him as a monster of indifference – I mean the society presented in the novel. And in the thousands of essays written across the world by students submitting themselves to the various forms of exam that will pop them into a university place of their choice… it seems as if the larger society of readers thinks so too. EVERYBODY Starts on Page one. Some actually more or less stop there too, with Meursault’s reaction to the telegram announcing his mother’s death. Here it is in the version most people use…the most commonly quoted translation:
Maman died today. Or yesterday, maybe, I don’t know. I got a telegram from the home: “Mother deceased. Funeral tomorrow. Faithfully yours.” That doesn’t mean anything. Maybe it was yesterday.
The standard reaction is that this shows a fantastic, almost improbable detachment. Sure it does. Its terseness matches the terseness of the telegram. Obviously the authorities feel no need to protect the bereaved from shock or sorrow. But because Meursault’s own tone is emotionless and his way of registering the journey he makes to the funeral and his observations of the funeral itself do not declare any conventional feelings it’s not much of a step from this to his being executed for his refusal to pretend to Feelthe way the other characters declare that they do and that all should do.
Meursault doesn’t share their Conventions of feeling, his vernacular is different; he is amazingly self-centred. But he is not the kind of Monster the court wants to make him out to be. In fact he is more like us, his readers, than he is like them, the variegated bunch who make up the population of the court room and who in this way are a microcosm of conventional society. Just as we readers watch him, he watches himself.
Here he is, looking round the courtroom on the first morning of his trial and catching the gaze of the youngest reporter, the one wearing gray flannels and a blue tie (who) had left his pen lying in front of him and (who) was looking at me. All I could see in his slightly lopsided face were his two very bright eyes, which were examining me closely without betraying any definable emotion. And I had the odd impression of being watched by myself. (Underlining mine.)
He is looking at a twin. Someone who observes closely but without expression, either facial or verbal, of his responses. His ‘twin’ is a man who, in practising this kind of scrutiny, doesn’t arouse the wrath of anyone or find himself accused of detachment as if it were a crime. He’s very deliberately placed here, by Camus, to make this point.
And what we are being reminded of here is something that is crucial to the way we balance our accounts of what Meursault is: he is the Narrator of the whole novel. Everything we think and feel, everything in this evocative and vivid work comes through him, and is, (we are required to register this at every moment in the text) the product of Meursault’s lonely consciousness. His are the observations and descriptions that attract us to the world of the book; he is the focalising character and Camus makes us feel that he is the only truly alive character, the only one who lives an attractive life in this Algerian town.
Let’s look, for example, at the passage where he emerges from the courtroom on his way back to his prison cell (and ultimately to the guillotine) at the end of the first day of his trial. As he comes out into the world we are shown his powers of observation and feeling, their calibre and their attractiveness.
I recognized, for a brief moment, the smell and colour of the summer evening…all the familiar sounds of a town I loved and of a certain time of day when I used to feel happy. The cries of the newspaper vendors already in the languid air, the last few birds in the square, the shouts of the sandwich sellers, the screech of the streetcars turning sharply through the upper town, and that hum in the sky before night engulfs the port…
These details are not presented as poetry. But the perception is poetic. To put it another way, they are not poetically presentedbut they are poetically observed.What Camus is showing us here is how close an ordinary man can be to an evocation of life itself, a man on trial as the perpetrator of a monstrous crime, whom prosecutor and examining magistrate (and later the Chaplain) want to present and genuinely feel, as a monster of secular depravity. Eleven months in prison have not brutalised him. He goes on:
…Yes, it was the hour when a long time ago, I was perfectly content. What awaited me back then was always a night of easy, dreamless sleep. And yet something had changed, since it was back to my cell that I went to wait for the next day…as if familiar paths traced in summer skies could lead as easily to prison as to the sleep of the innocent. (Underlining mine)
Now, he’s no visionary. His sleep is easy and dreamless; the Unconscious, which Jung describes as a violent and dangerous force, doesn’t attack Meursault in dreams. But he is something other than the man the other characters perceive. Here is a Meursault that no one in the novel ever sees. This is the reader’s Meursault and here he moves from that evocation of the town at evening to a thought in which moral beauty (the sleep of the innocentand the notion of innocence itself) occurs along with an idea about how meanings occur in the world (familiar paths traced in summer skies)which is worthy of the Romantic poets. It reminds me of the lines in Keats’ ode To Autumnwhen, while thinking about encountering the beautiful figure of Autumn herself, Keats makes it clear that you don’t have to be a signed-up Poet to be capable of moments of vision:
Who hast not seen thee oft amidst thy store, he asks, speaking to Autumn herself. It is a rhetorical question, that is one to which, while he is asking it, he knows his answer – it’s a great way of emphasising a truth, by the way. And also by the way it asksthe question, it doesn’t begit. (to begthe question is to make a statement about something that is highly questionable as if there were no question about it…I make no apology about being pedantic here – for example, the statement that “The Prime Minister of Australia is the Greatest Man History has ever known begs the question: ‘IS he??’
Anyway, back to the Keats:
Who hast not seen thee oft amidst thy store?he asks, and answers with this:
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find thee sitting careless on a granary floor…thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind….
Whoever seeks abroad…that’s the key phrase. Not just poets, any of us – we are all included in that ‘whoever seeks’ – all of us capable of spellbinding vision of the world of our inhabitation. But in Camus’ novel, only Meursault has this.
Now of course Meursault’s language is not nearly so marvellous as the rich visionary poetry of Keats, and his perception is milder; and he’s certainly, by his own admission, far too lazy and motiveless to seek abroad…the most he does is go out with friends in an unthinking fairly mindless sort of way, swimming with Marie, going to a Fernandel movie the day after his mother’s funeral – he’s just a dude of the more hopeless kind….
BUT
And NEVERTHELESS
what he is thinking and feeling here at the end of the first day of trial IS in the league of poetry, and it is because of this ( and this is a fairly mild example of some of his imaginative responses) that we have to make more of the fact that he is the narrator of the novel and that everything we register and think and feel and are poetically attracted by as we read this work comes through his consciousness and comes from him. (We need to think about the same kind of effect in Kafka’s Metamorphosis).
His is the engaging and arresting presence in the work; much more than any of the characters in the novel could ever be aware of. AND, sad to say, much more than many of the candidates who write about this novel (and it is one of the most popular choices) seem to feel is relevant.
So when the prosecutor rants about ‘the dim light cast by the mind of this criminal soul’ we shake our heads and say Nuh, got that one wrong, right there, babe. We know this mind. But we don’t often write about it in our essays. Much too often we write about him as if we agree with the examining magistrate, the prosecutor and the chaplain. For them he’s tough from the beginning, an indifferent, passive, detached and neutral man. (So who, you could ask his judges, is telling the story, in all its subtlety and moments of grace – whose are those qualities?)
It’s a fascinating issue, and it’s so easy to write about because Camus has done such work! And what this work amounts to is that Meursault is a more various and open and transparent character than conventional accounts allow for. Even though he says of himself (and Camus is being ironic here, but Meursault isn’t) “I’ve never had much imagination” he is a character who is the prism of the novel, letting all the great effects of the natural world and the strangeness of social life and those sharp little oddities of character he observes in the streets and cafes of the town and the evocation of happiness and sensual ease come through.
And over and above that, and contacting the novel’s largest theme, the strangeness of the world represented in the climactic scene in Part One, the shooting of the Arab in the blinding heat of the beach is something that only Meursault is capable of experiencing.
When he tries to explain it, for instance, close to the end, after the prosecutor, urging the death penalty, has told the court of
the horror I feel when I look into a man’s face and all I see is a monster
Meursault is incapable of transmitting what WE READERS have already experienced at the end of Part One. But he tries:
Fumbling a little with my words and realizing how ridiculous I sounded, I blurted out that it was because of the sun. People laughed.
It’s a tragic moment. One in which we realise more than ever how Meursault stands alone, apart from Us who know him. He’s no good as a conscious narrator; he’s trapped inside his inability to present himself. And he’s been subjected to something stranger than the forces of nature as they are normally experienced and perceived.
What that is, and what Camus’s central vision is in this novel, and why it comes close in this to Tragedy and why, however, Meursault is not in any way like Hamlet or other tragic Heroes like Macbeth and Oedipus, will have to be talked about when we meet next time.
Said the Raven, signing off.
It was still early. Outside the Raven’s window the morning was fine and high. The summer was starting to warm up. Maybe this was the time for the first swim of the year. But where, swimming pool or beach? The beach was wilder, but cooler. But the Pool?? The pool was the social world in miniature, with its trends and fashions, its fixed lanes, its regulations and rules. Not a place for happiness. And he thought about Meursault swimming and then resting with Marie, lying on his back and on the float: I had the whole sky in my eyes and it was blue and gold. On the back of my neck I could feel Marie’s heart beating softly.
And then diving in and swimming with her again, Marie Carbona, his love.
And sighing with the sadness of it the Raven went out into the warm blue weather, and the loneliness of the beach. He wished he’d had the chance to be Meursault’s friend.
Essay 2. What Meursault Knows.
The thing about Meursault, the central character of Camus’ magnificent novel, The Stranger (often translated as The Outsider in English) is that not only is he the focus of attention he is also the man who tells the tale. And this is so significant to our understanding of the book’s meanings and effects that I want to take some time to study the way he tells the story and what that reveals about him that readers know but that the other characters in the novel are unaware of.
With this one stroke, as I’ve already shown in the previous commentary, Camus isolates his hero from the social world of the novel – French-Algerian society. He lives in it but he is not like it. Meursault, as we have already seen, unlike any of the others in this world, has some poetry in his soul.
Here he is, some two pages from his end, having attacked the chaplain, ‘pouring out on him everything that was in my heart, cries of anger and cries of joy. He seemed so certain. And yet….he was living like a dead man…’ And we realise here that this can never be said of Meursault, that for all his amorality and unresponsiveness to conventional feelings, he lives, his soul is open.
…a dark wind had been rising toward me from somewhere deep in my future…
Here, for instance, at the end of this outburst, when the river of his being is in spate, in this ‘night alive with signs and stars’ he has his final vision of the gentle indifference of the world(some of you might prefer the other translation ‘the benign indifference of the universe’… that’s Stuart Gilbert’s less accurate but more poetic rendering. See Footnote 1). ‘Throughout the whole absurd life I’d lived, he says, a dark wind had been rising toward me from somewhere deep in my future, across years that were still to come…’
This is an amazing image, a fantastic recognition, this image of a wind blowing towards us from deep in the Future, across years that were still to come! More conventional images where the first person narrator starts to exit from the world he has summoned, talk about the deep past – think of Nick Carraway’s final vision in The Great Gatsbyfor example, where he compares the world of America in the Twenties, with all its rottenness, to the first visions of the island of Manhattan as Eden, centuries before. Nick is lamenting the corruption of the American Dream. It’s gorgeous material but conventional compared to Meursault’s.
And so, having given us these aspects of Meursault, Camus presents us with a puzzle. What is he saying? That life is so Absurd that not even those who are less superficial than the others who surround them have any strength in dealing with existence? Is he saying that imagination doesn’t matter or help? Is the book in contact with this really negative view?
Let’s have a look at this by considering the idea of Tragedy and the Tragic Hero.
Meursault is not a tragic hero, Hamlet (the comparison is not so random) is.
Camus is not a Tragedian; Shakespeare, writingHamlet, Prince of Denmark, is.
So what do we mean?
Well, first of all we do not get a deep character study in the Camus if by that we mean a complex study of Motives. And we do not get a character who deeply enquires into or attempts to understand himself. And in the end we do not get a character who has experienced such a deepening of Knowledge that he can no longer inhabit the world of ordinary women and men. Meursault does not achieve the depth or complexity of self-knowledge that makes the Tragic Hero a Visionary. He is removed from life in much the same state of feeling and understanding that we find him in on the opening pages.
In contrast, in Hamletwe are constantly preoccupied with motive; we struggle to understand why Hamlet does or doesn’t do what he does or doesn’t do. He struggles to understand it himself; he struggles to understand himself
Am I a coward?…
Oh, what a rogue and peasant slave am I…
How all occasions do inform against me…What is a man
If his chief good and market of his time
Be but to sleep and feed?
In contrast Meursault constantly shrugs the question of motive off – It didn’t matter, I didn’t care…
A minute later she asked me if I loved her. I told her it didn’t mean anything but that I didn’t think so.
I said I wasn’t expecting anything…I got up and started combing my hair…
These are meaningless intonations, a casual shrugging aside of questions of what matters, a lack of interest in deeper human responses. It is this indifference that leads to the killing of the Arab and in the climacticscene on the beach (some students write climaticand it is that too) we see the culmination of this indefiniteness:
But we just stood there motionless, as if everything had closed in around us…everything came to a stop there between the sea, the sand, and the sun, and the double silence of the flute and the water. It was then that I realised that you could either shoot or not shoot…
*
It was then that I realised that you could either shoot or not shoot. Anyone thinking here of Hamlet’s ‘To be, or not to be, that is the question…’is well set up to make some valuable comparisons. The major contrast is this:
For Hamlet there is Self and there is the World. The World is made up of many strata…family, country, ‘this world’ for all that is has gone to seed, that ‘things rank and gross in nature Possess it merely, ‘this goodly frame, the earth’ – it’s like concentric and overlapping circles and at the centre of it all is Man, by which he means the species, the human race in history and Time
What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world, the paragon of animals…
Now although here in Act 2, Scene 2 he is twisted with bitter irony,( he is speaking to the king’s spies, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern), he is nevertheless uttering the powerful celebration of Renaissance Man, ‘the beauty of the world.’
And, cursed by inaction though he is ( another point of comparison and contrast with Meursault) he is at the centre of a clearly delineated cosmic and earthly order, one in which ALL believe, which gives them outline and definition. They’ve got a sense of where they stand in place and time, in history and in the cosmos, which allows them to take joy in the world – Horatio gestures at it in the opening scene, as he draws the attention of the others in the Night Watch:
But look, the morn in russet mantle clad
Walks o’er the dew of yon high eastern hill
And this matches Hamlet’s : this most excellent canopy the air, look you, this brave o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire..(Act 2), though Hamlet’s, of course, is the more princely poetry.
Now if we come back to the beach at the end of Part One of The Strangerit is clear that that balance and that definition have been lost, that whatever it is that the sun and the heat stand for and are the symbols of for Meursault throughout the whole of Part One, it is not an Idea of Order. It’s a world where
‘the sun and the thick drunkenness it was spilling over me…’so incapacitate our representative human character, our Narrator and Everyman, that he cannot think or breathe or see. It is, in summary, a world that is the enemy of morality, that weak little human structure that manages to lift up its head in the ludicrous courtroom of Part Two. But that cannot exist here out in the preternatural dimension of our planetary existence. Where in Shakespeare’s Tragedy the cosmos, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire,allows Man to take up his best height, to stand upright somewhere between the angels and the lower animals, as a paragon, here on Camus’ beach we turn into reptiles, or lesser creatures: the reptilian brain takes over as Meursault gasps and burns, as the sweat in his eyebrows dripped down over my eyelids all at once and covered them with a warm, thick film. And we are carted back to Jurassic time, and forward to Apocalypse:
The sea carried up a thick fiery breath. It seemed to me as if the sky split open from one end to the other to rain down fire.
And it is in this moment of Exudation that Meursault’s hand squeezes the trigger and fires the gun.
And this is why he can’t be seen as a Tragic Hero, because the tragic hero KNOWS what he is doing (Macbeth, Hamlet) or what he has done ( Othello, Oedipus). It is his Knowledge of actions and consequences that we can never imitate (We that are young says Kent at the end of King Lear, closing the play, sealing it over the inimitable figure of Lear, will never see so much or live so long.)that send him on to the far side, over what Conrad called The Shadow Line that separates the exceptional man from the rest of us.
The Exceptional Man, the Tragic Hero, takes full cognizance of the risks he is taking or has taken. His elevation carries him out of life as the rest of us experience it. He not only knows more than do the other characters in his world. He knows More than does the reader. And that rules Meursault out. Because although he is the source of everything we know his knowledge does not sharpen his understanding of motive and character and his awareness of himself as having left the rest of us behind. All he comes up with as a way of registering the irrevocable nature of his difference from the world is that strange and ugly image that closes the novel where he tries to find an objective correlative for his sense of isolation in the hope that there be a large crowd of spectators the day of my execution and that they greet me with cries of hate.
This is so awfully limited; it’s pathetic, really, not tragic. Readers empathise with him – we have to because Camus leaves us no other option. But because he is so limited we can never stand in awe of him – compared to the others who inhabit the landscape of tragedy he is only an anti-Hero, not a tragic Hero.
And at this point the Raven wonderedif we should try contrasting him with the idea of the Tragic Hero that ARISTOTLE presents in the POETICS:
Another time, he thought.Standing up he began to sling his things into his backpack. A great gust of hot air came in through the open window bringing with it dust, the smell of coffee and the roaring sound of the sea. For some reason he was reminded of his own mother, who loved warm weather, singing round the house, and one of the songs she used to chortle her way through, a truly dopey ditty from the Fifties? the Sixties? that went something like this:
You gotta have Hope…( da dah) sang the Raven twirling around in his backpack and looking for his bike pump,
Mustn’t sit around and mope..(dah da) then humming some other lines he’d forgotten the words for, Then bursting into glorious Crescendo:
When your luck is hittin’ Zero
Get your head up off the floor!
Mistah you could be a HERO!!! (THAT WORD AGAIN!!he carolled)
You could open every door,
There’s nothin’ to it but to do it
Fortunately, the Raven thought as the guy in the next room beat on the wall, someone, maybe it was Tom Lehrer, another of his mother’s favourites, came up with a spoof
which went, he went on, singing even more loudly, for the benefit of the entire corridor as he made his way out past variously shut and open doors (it was exam time and most people stayed on in the evenings to get through their daily quota – IF they were organised enough to have a quota- there were always some foolhardy people who saved most of their marking up for a last week of frantic lethal activity, the Walking Dead-
You gotta have SKIN
All you really need is SKIN
It keeps the Outside OUT
And the Inside IN
Yes, you gotta have SKIN
he finished, bursting through the outside door, leaping down the steps and in one elegant bound mounting his great silver bicycle and flashing off into the sunset,Yes, You gotta have skin, he sang erupting through the University gates, onto the crowded road, free as a Bird.
Meursault doesn’t have skin, he thought, pistonning along. On the beach, before and as he commits the murder, we see a man who doesn’t have a line of definition between himself and what is pressing down upon him from above. Here a mighty pair of semitrailers converged ahead of him, he hardly had time to swerve as an alternative to disappearing into their narrowing gap. He can’t keep the outside (the sun, the heat, the blinding light) OUT he thought, glaring up at the semi trailer driver above him, as he whooshed past, and the inside IN.
In fact, he thought, waiting at the intersection, He doesn’t have much of an inside in. No inner centre of moral strengthto which he can refer when he is faced with extreme or violent experiences. He hasn’t got any inner disciplinary focus. (Macbeth has it; Oedipus achieves it; Hamlet worries his thoughts around it.)
And that’spartly(some might argue completely) due to the weakness of the society he lives in and the superficiality and hypocrisy and even hysteria of the way in which this society, as represented by the judiciary, the law and the church, assesses moral values and defines right from wrong.
That just about summed it up, he thought, free-wheeling around the corner onto the main street. At which point he had to stop thinking about Meursault and start concentrating on getting himself and his bike home all in one piece, freaking off down the traffic-congested hill, in and out through stationary cars while a wind blew like a great awning backwards and forwards over the heated city. In ten minutes time he would be home.
Footnote 1. The Translation.
The first translation into English in 1946 was Stuart Gilbert’s. The ‘American’ translation, by Matthew Ward, was first published by Alfred A. Knopf in New York in 1988. For this edition Matthew Ward wrote a brief and brilliant Translator’s Note in which he pointed out what he called the ‘Britannic’ rendering of Meursault’s character in Gilbert’s translation. ( Gilbert was a much trusted friend and literary cohort of James Joyce and his account of the links between Homer’s Odysseyand Joyce’s Ulysses was the Author-ised version, receiving Joyce’s Imprimatur).
This is well worth studying, this Translator’s Note. Ward not only offers some brilliant examples of the two different translations which give you a way of thinking about all the major passages. He also says something so excellent in the opening paragraph that every student of this novel should write on a piece of paper and stick on her/his forehead while reading and thinking about the book. I’ll let you find and see that for yourselves, the Raven said, signing off.