Literary Masterpieces: The Stranger [8] 0787651281

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ITE~RY

STE·R PIECES ••

ISSN 1526-1522

LITERARY MASTERPIECES Volume

8

The Stranger

Raymond Gay-Crosier University of Florida

A MANLY, INC. BOOK

GALE GROUP

•

THOMSON LEARNING

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LITERARY MASTERPIECES

THE STRANGER Matthew]. Bruccoli and Richard Layman, Editorial Directors

While every effort has been made to ensure the reliability of the information presented in the publication, The Gale Group does not guarantee the accuracy of the data contained herein. Gale accepts no payment for listing; and inclusion of any organization, agency; institution, publication, service, or individual does not imply endorsement of the editors or publisher. Errors brought to the attention of the publisher and verified to the satisfaction of the publisher will be corrected in future editions. This publication is a creative work fully protected by all applicable copyright laws, as well as by misappropriation, trade secret, unfair competition, and other applicable laws. The authors and editors of this work have added value to the underlying factual material herein through one or more of the following: unique and original selection, coordination, expression, arrangement, and classification of the information. All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. All rights to this publication will be vigorously defended. Copyright ©2002 The Gale Group 27500 Drake Road Farmington Hills, MI 48331

ISBN 0-7876-5128-1 ISSN 1526-1522

Printed in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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ADVISORY BOARD

Matthew J. Bruccoli Jefferies Professor of English University of South Carolina Denis Donoghue Henry James Professor of English and American Letters New York University George Garrett Henry Hoyns Professor of Creative Writing University of Virginia Trudier Harris J. Carlyle Sitterson Professor of English University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Hugh Kenner Franklin Professor and Callaway Professor University of Georgia Alvin Kernan Senior Advisor in the Humanities The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Richard Layman Vice President Bruccoli Clark Layman R.WB. Lewis Neil Grey Professor, Emeritus Yale University Harrison Meserole Distinguished Professor of English, Emeritus Texas A &: M University

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.·~t ,~,,..,.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

A Note to the Reader George Garrett. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix Preface . ............................................. xi Acknowledgments . ................................... xiii

THE STRANGER ABOUT ALBERT CAMUS ............................................ 1

Introduction 1 Early Life 3 Early Writing Career 7 The War Years 14 The Postwar Years 20 Final Decade 28 ABOUT I!ETRANGER .............................................. 35

Editions and Translations 35 The Historical Context ofI.:Etranger 38 Plot Summary 41 THE EVOLUTION OF I!ETRANGER . .................................. 46

Writing the Novel 46 Publishing a First Novel: The Pia Connection 58 Camuss Views on I.:Etranger at the Time the Novel Was Published 63

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rETRANGER ANALYZED ........................................... 71

Setting: Indeterminate Time and Spaces 71 Plot 75 Characters 77

Two Themes, One Reading 88 CRITICAL RESPONSE TO rETRANGER . .............................. 99

Reception 99 Critical Survey: 1950-2000 111

Critical Excerpts 132 ADAPTATIONS OF I:ETRANGER ................................... 166

Movie Adaptation 166 Stage Adaptations 169 Radio Adaptations 169 RESOURCES FOR STUDY OF I:ETRANGER ........................... 171

Study Questions 173 Glossary of Terms 177 Bibliography 181 MASTER I:"iIDEX ................................................. 189

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Gale Study Guides to Great Literature: Literary Masterpieces

A NOTE TO THE READER

Think of it this way: you are about to embark on a journey. This book is, among other things, designed to be at once a reservation and a round-trip tickel. The purpose of the journey, the goal and destination, is for you to experience, as fully and as deeply as you can, a masterpiece of literature. Reading a great work is not a passive experience. It will be demanding and, as you will see, well rewarded.

by George Garrett, Henry Hoyns Professor of Creative Writing, the University of Virginia

What is a masterpiece? The answer is easy if you are dealing with the great works of antiquity-for example, the Iliad and Odyssey of Homer, the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides-works that have endured for millennia and even outlasted their original language. Closer in time there are the accepted monuments of our languages and culture, such as the plays of Shakespeare, the Divine Comedy of Dante, and the comedies of Moliere. But here and now we are dealing with work that is nearer to us in time, that speaks to and about persons, places, and things that we either know at first hand or at least know about. These works are accepted by critical consensus (and tested in the marketplace and in the classroom) as among the most original and influential works of their times. It remains for you to experience their power and originality. There is much to be gained from close and careful study of a great book. You will always find much more than you expected to, than you are looking for. Whether we know it and admit it or not, we are one and all constantly being changed and shaped by what we read. One definition of a literary masterpiece is that it is a great work that can touch us most deeply. It can be, is, if you are wide awake and fully engaged, a profound experience. Lighthearted or deadly serious, it is about things that matter to us. The Gale Study Guides are intended to help you to enjoy and to enlarge your understanding of literature. By an intense focus, these Guides enhance the values you discover in reading enduring works. Discovery is always an important part of the process. With guidance you will see how personal discoveries can be made and, equally important, ix

can be shared with others studying the same book. Our literary culture is, ideally, a community. This book is meant to serve as your introduction to that community. From the earliest days of our history (until the here and now), readers have looked for pleasure and meaning in whatever they read. The two are inextricable in literature. Without pleasure and enjoyment, there can be no permanent meaning. Without value and significance, there is no real pleasure. Ideally, the close study of literary masterpieces-comedy or tragedy, past and present-will increase our pleasure and our sense of understanding not only of the individual work in and of itself but also of ourselves and the world we inhabit. There is hard work involved. What you have labored to master you will value more highly. And reading is never exclusively a passive experience. You have to bring the whole of yourself to the experience. It becomes not a monologue, but a dialogue between you and the author. What you gain from the experience depends, in large part, on what you bring and can give back. But, as great voices have told us since the dawn of literature, it is well worth all the effort, indeed worth any effort. We learn how powerful words can be. The language of great voices speaking to us across time and space, yet close as a whisper, matters enormously. Sooner or later, our buildings will crumble; our most intricate and elegant machines will cough and die and become rusty junk; and our grand monuments and memorials will lose all their magic and meaning. But we know that our words, our language, will last longer than we do, speaking of and for us, over centuries and millennia. Listening to great voices, reading their words and stories in the enduring works of literature, we are given a reward of inestimable value. We earn a share in their immortality. You will meet some memorable characters, good and bad, and you are going to participate in unforgettable events. You will go to many places, among them the Africa of Chinua Achebe, the England of Virginia Woolf, the China of Maxine Hong Kingston. You can visit 1920s Paris with Ernest Hemingway, the magical Latin America of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the Mississippi of William Faulkner, the dark side of San Francisco with Dashiell Hammett. Gale Study Guides are good maps to the literary territory. Envision the journey as a kind of quest or pilgrimage, not without difficulty, that can change your understanding of life. X

Gale Study Guides to Great Literature: Literary Masterpieces

PREFACE

Many college undergraduates have read Albert Camus's rEt ranger (l942)-either in the original French or in translation as The Stranger (l946)-as a short novel that is reputedly easy to understand. This assumption is based on the fact that the text appears to adopt an oral style (that is, a style resembling ordinary speech) featuring short sentences with few subordinate clauses and limiting itself to two dominant tenses, the present and the passe compose (present perfect). From the vantage point of an intermediate student of the French language, this judgment is not wrong. Paradoxically, however, the simple sentence structure adds more depth to a complex narrative structure that conflates temporal levels and forces the reader to see everything through the prism of the main character, Meursault. But is his voice the same as the narrator's? Somehow; rEtranger becomes a page-turner once one begins to read it, because immediately the text raises fundamental questions and stirs readers' deepest feelings, whether toward themselves, their next of kin and fellow humans, or reality in general. Another reason for the sustained popularity of rEtranger is the ambiguous attractiveness of Meursault, whom some critics consider a spineless villain but others view as an antihero, if not a disenchanted hero of banality. Others have gone so far as to call him a martyr to the truth. At first sight Meursault appears to be a colorless, self-centered, ruminating weakling whose lack of human interaction makes him slide into, more than commit, a senseless murder. On the other hand, his stubborn truthfulness to himself, his determination always to tell things as he sees them, and his persistent refusal to give in to societal pressure-in short, his stubborn marginality and self-induced strangeness-elevate him to some kind of exemplar of the average man, in spite of the seeming baseness of his character. Since fftranger was published in 1942, more than forty books or monographs and many articles have been devoted to it, and new readings appear with predictable regularity. Translated into most major languages

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within a few years of its publication, the novel has long been recognized as one of the enduring masterpieces of twentieth-century world literature. If, in the beginning, readers saw in the book primarily a mirror of a certain time they lived through-whether a time of war, economic depression, or moral bankruptcy-later generations of readers have realized that the continued attraction of this text owes something to the unique tone that Camus strikes, to his inimitable style and its effects. More than fifty years after the first publication of LEtranger; readers are ready to accept that at its core lies an impenetrable mystery to which they feel compelled to return time and again. The following panoramic exploration of LEtranger in no way pretends to solve this mystery. Rather, it intends to open a few doors and present a review of some of the most pertinent readings of the novel, with all their contradictions, so as to lead readers to their own interpretations. One of the hallmarks of great literary works is their open-endedness. Clearly, LEtranger will continue to be a source of commentaries for a long time to come. The author is unable to thank the many people who, over the years, have contributed immensely to his insights on Camus. For this particular book, however, he wishes to recognize the sustained help and contributions he received from his friends and colleagues Jacqueline Levi-Valensi, Catharine Savage Brosman, and Albert B. Smith. Two University of Florida humanities librarians, Frank Di Trolio and John W. Van Hook, deserve special thanks for their sustained technical assistance. Also quite helpful was the information provided by Neil Somerville of the BBC Archives and Florence Roth of the Conservatrice de la Bibliotheque de la SACD. Once again, Madame Catherine Camus generously granted the necessary permissions to publish pictures from her archives.

-Raymond Gay-Crosier

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Gale Study Guides to Great Literature: Literary Masterpieces

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Raymond Gay-Crosier is Professor of Modern French Literature at the University of Florida. His books include Les Envers d'un echec: Etude sur Ie theatre d'Albert Camus (1967), Religious Elements in the Secular Lyrics of the Troubadours (1971), Albert Camus: Ein Forschungsbericht (1976), and Albert Camus: Paradigmes de l'ironie: revolte et negation affirmative (2000). He has published some ninety articles in national and international journals. Gay-Crosier is founding vice president of the Societe des Etudes CamusiennesiCamus Studies Association and is editor in chief (1989- ) of the Camus series published by Lettres Modernes in Paris. He is also assistant editor of The French Review.

This book was produced by Manly, Inc. R. Bland Lawson is the series editor and the in-house editor. Production manager is Philip B. Dematteis. Copyediting supervisor is Sally R. Evans. The copyediting staff includes Phyllis A. Avant, Brenda Carol Blanton, Worthy B. Evans, Melissa D. Hinton, William Tobias Mathes, Rebecca Mayo, Nancy E. Smith, and ElizabethJo Ann Sumner. The index was prepared by Alex Snead. Layout and graphiCS series team leader is Karla Corley Brown. She was assisted by Zoe R. Cook and Janet E. Hill, graphics supervisor. Photography supervisor is Paul Talbot. Photography editor is Scott Nemzek. Digital photographic copy work was performed by Joseph M. Bruccoli. Systems manager is Marie L. Parker. Typesetting supervisor is Kathleen M. Flanagan. The typesetting staff includes Jaime All, Patricia Marie Flanagan, Mark J. McEwan, and Pamela D. Norton. xiii

Following is a list of the copyright holders who have granted us permission to reproduce material in this volume of Gale Study Guides to Great Literature. Every effort has been made to trace copyright, but if omissions have been made, please let us know. COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL IN Literary Masterpieces, Vol. 8: The Stranger, WAS REPRODUCED FROM THE FOllOWING SOURCES: Barthes, Roland. 'TEtranger, roman solaire." Bulletin du Club du mei1Ieur livre, 12 (April 1954): 6-7. Boston Globe, 16 June 1991, national I Foreign sec., p. 23 ..

Bree, Germaine. "Heroes of Our Time: The Stranger." In her Camus. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1959. Buss, Robin. "Absurdists and Comrades." TLS: The Times literary Supplement, 20 July 2001, p. 30. Cruickshank, John. "The Art of the Novel CO." In his Albert Camus and the Literature of Revolt. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959. Feuerlicht, Ignace. (December 1963): 606-621.

'TEtranger

Reconsidered."

PMLA,

78

Fitch, Brian T. "The Hermeneutic Paradigm: LEtranger." In his The Narcissistic Text: A Reading of Camus' Fiction. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982. Girard, Rene. "Camus's Stranger Retried." PMLA, 74 (December 1964): 519-533. Hargreaves, Alec G. "History ~nd Ethnicity in the Reception of LEtranger." In Camus:S LEtranger: Fifty Years On, edited by Adele King. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992. Horowitz, Louise K. "Of Women and Arabs: Sexual and Racial Polarization in Camus." Modem Language Studies, 17 (Summer 1987): 54-61. Leites, Nathan. "The Stranger." In Art and Psychoanalysis, edited by William Phillips. New York: Criterion, 1957. Madden, David. "James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice and Albert Camus's LEtranger." Papers on Language and Literature, 6 (Fall 1970): 407-419. Magny, Claude-Edmonde. "Ellipsis in the Movies and the Novel." In her The Age of the American Novel: The Film Aesthetic of Fiction Between the Two Wars, translated by Eleanor Hochman. New York: Ungar, 1972.

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Gale Study Guides to Great Literature: Literary Masterpieces

Manly, William M. 'Journey to Consciousness: The Symbolic Pattern of Camus' rEtranger." PMLA, 74 (June 1964): 321-328. McCarthy, Patrick. "Class and Race." In his Albert Camus: The Stranger. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Mistacco, Vicki. "Mama's Boy: Reading Woman in rEtranger." In Camuss rEt ranger: Fifty Years On.

O'Brien, Conor Cruise. "The Stranger." In his Camus. London: Fontana, 1970. Rhein, Phillip H. "Narrative Devices." In his The Urge to Live: A Comparative Study of Franz Kafkas Der Prozess and Albert Camus' rEtranger. Studies in Germanic Languages and Literatures, no. 45. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1964. Copyright © 1964 by the University of North Carolina Press. Used by permission of the publisher. Robbe-Grillet, Alain. "Nature, Humanism, Tragedy." In his For A New Novel. Essays on Fiction, translated by Richard Howard. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1965. Said, Edward. "Camus and the French Imperial Experience." In his Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage, 1994. Sarraute, Nathalie. "From Dostoievski to Kafka." In her The Age of Suspicion, translated by MariaJolas. New York: Braziller, 1963. Shattuck, Roger. "Two Inside Narratives: Billy Budd and rEtranger." Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 4 (Autumn 1962):

314-320. Stamm, Julian L. "Camus's Stranger: His Act of Violence." American Imago, 26 (Summer 1969): 281-290. Tarrow, Susan. "The Stranger." In her Exile from the Kingdom: A Political Reading of Albert Camus. University: University of Alabama Press, 1985. "2 Die in Big Berber Rally in Algiers," New York Times, sec. A, p. 18. Vulor, Ena C. "Camus, Mammeri, Feraoun and rEtranger: Landscapes of the Absurd and Colonial Landscapes." In Colonial and Anti-Colonial Discourses: Albert Camus and Algeria: An Intertextual Dialogue with Mouloud Mammeri, Mouloud Feraoun, and Mohammed Dib. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 2000. The Stranger

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PHOTOGRAPHS AND ILLUSTRATIONS APPEARING IN Literary Masterpieces, Vol. 8: The Stranger, WERE REPRODUCED FROM THE FOLLOWING SOURCES: Algiers. Ullstein Bilderdienst, Berlin. Camus, Albert, at trial of Marshal Henri Philippe Petain, 1945. Photo © Rene Saint-Paul. Camus, Albert, in 1946. Photo by Henri Cartier-Bresson. Camus, Albert, in his Gallimard office, 1955. Photo by Henri Cartier-Bresson. Camus, Albert, in trench coat. Henriette GrindatlCollection Favrod, Musee de CElysee, Lausanne. Camus, Albert, receiving Nobel Prize, 10 December 1957. Photo © Paris-MatchIPotier. Camus, Albert, watching performance of Le Malentendu, 1944. Photo © M. Jarnoux. Oettly Collection. Camus, Albert, with colleagues from the Alger Republicain. Courtesy of Catherine Camus. Camus, Albert, with Gaston and Robert Gallimard. Photo © Rene Saint-Paul. Camus, Albert, with teammates from Racing Universitaire d'Alger. Courtesy of Catherine Camus. Camus, Albert, with theatrical mask, 1953. Photo © Bernand. Camus, Catherine Sintes, 1957. Photo © Paris-Match. Chiaromonte, Nicola. Courtesy of Catherine Camus. Clippings from Albert Camus, "Misere de la Kabylie," Alger Republicain (5-15 June 1939). Photo © Archives d'outre-mer, Aix-enProvence. Covers of Albert Camus's notebooks. Courtesy of Catherine Camus. Diploma for Albert Camus from the Universite d'Alger (1936). Courtesy of Catherine Camus. Display at Combat offices. Courtesy of Catherine Camus. False identity papers used by Albert Camus during the Resis·tance. Courtesy of Catherine Camus. xvi

Gale Study Guides to Great Literature: Literary Masterpieces

Grenier, jean, 1926. Courtesy of Catherine Camus. Hie, Simone. Collection of Dr. Cottenceau. journalist's identity card for Albert Camus. Collection Agnely. Karina, Anna, in Luchino Visconti's Lo Straniero. ©1967 by Dino De Laurentiis Cinematografica S.P.A. Letter from Albert Camus to Pascal Pia, 13 February 1940. Camus and Pia, Correspondance: 1939-1947, edited by Yves Marc Ajchenbaum. Paris: FayardJGallimard, 2000. Malraux, Andre, and Pascal Pia at Combat offices. Photo © Rene Saint-Paul. Manifesto (1937) from La Maison de la Culture, Algiers. Collection of Marguerite Dobrenn. Manuscript page from jean-Paul Sartre's explication of LEtranger. Bibliotheque nationale, Paris. Manuscript page from LEtranger. Photo © Fonds Albert Camus! IMEC.

Mastroianni, Marcello, in Luchino Visconti's Lo Straniero. ©1967 by Dino De Laurentiis Cinematografica S.P.A. Newspaper story from LEcho d'Alger, 6 january 1935. Photo © Bibliotheque nationale, Paris. Oran. Private collection of Baghdad: Merabet. Page of letter from Albert Camus to Pascal Pia, November 1945. Camus and Pia, Correspondance: 1939-1947. Pages from Albert Camus's first notebook. Courtesy of Catherine Camus. Pia, Pascal, and Albert Camus, 1940. © Archives Pascal Pial IMEC.

Press credentials, Pascal Pia and Albert Camus. Courtesy of Catherine Camus. Visa, Albert Camus, 1946. Courtesy of Catherine Camus. The Stranger

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ABOUT ALBERT CAMUS

INTRODUCTION On 4 January 1960 the world press announced on its front pages the untimely death of Albert Camus, who had been lionized three years earlier as an exceptionally young winner of the Nobel Prize in literature. He was a passenger in an absurd automobile accident. For a few days extensive obituaries seemed to compete with each other in deploring the premature passing of the forty-six-year-old author of LEtranger (1942; translated as The Stranger; 1946)-considered outside of France one of the shining lights of contemporary French literature-whose best works might yet be forthcoming. However, while Camus's international literary reputation kept growing, his political reputation in France had been subjected, years before he died, to ridicule and open scorn. The erstwhile darling of the new postwar generation gradually had become ideologically suspect in the eyes of the unforgiving French Left. It all started when Camus dared to criticize and equate Nazi and Communist totalitarianism in his 1951 philosophical essay LHomme revolte (translated as The Rebel, 1953). To the coterie of intellectuals of the Parisian Left Bank, with whom he was firmly associated in the public's eyes, Camus seemed to be squandering the immense credit and stellar reputation he had acquired as senior writer of forceful editorials in Combat (Struggle), a former clandestine French Resistance pamphlet he had helped transform into the leading Parisian daily newspaper of the immediate postwar period. Between 1945 and 1947 a series of influential editorials had elevated him briefly to the lofty status of the national conscience. A decade later Camus's proposal for a federalization project for Algeria (a French domain until the Treaty of Evian in 1962) fell on deaf ears on all sides, and his personal and political problems made him retreat into silence. By then, Camus had become not only a persona non grata but also a pariah in the political am! intellectual circles that claimed a monopoly on progressive thought. In the turbulent 1950s and 1960s, a period during which much of France's

Albert Camus

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Gale Study Guides to Great Literature: Literary Masterpieces

decolonization took place, rigid ideological positions linked to the Cold War and the increasingly bloody war for Algerian independence (19541962) dominated the political climate. Issues of national import were frequently debated in a righteous moral context, and, retrospectively, it seems as if public dialogues, more often than not, were carried out in the form of exchanges of monologue-like pamphlets in which intellectuals routinely displayed their need to dominate the discourse. In fact, both in tone and content, many of these editorials and essays pleaded their cases in the court of public opinion, assuming that the presumed defendant could not afford the luxury of silence. As a seasoned journalist who had proved his mettle, first in the local press of Algiers (1937-1940) and later in French Resistance and postwar newspapers and magazines (1941-1956), Camus initally stood in the forefront of these press wars. But as his personal struggles grew stronger and his indecision regarding the status of Algeria became more painful to him, he found himself in the position of an outcast who had been flushed out as a stranger by his chosen tribe, a group to which he had never belonged. Almost two decades before his death, Camus had depicted in fftranger the fate of a character who, while far less brilliant than the author, maneuvered himself into a position of socially unacceptable marginality in which he found solace and, eventually, death, but not before playing out a role that amounted to a stinging critique of his society's vitiated justice system. The theatrical trial in which Meursault, the main character of rEtranger, receives the death penalty offers a satiric version of the institutionalized form of the judicial process carried out by a society that has no doubts about its fundamental values. How could Camus-author of three popular novels, two major philosophical and many political and critical essays, and (from 1944 to 1950) a highly successful playwright-fall into such political and literary disrepute among many of his peers but still remain popular with a large number of his French readers and continue to build a steadily growing international reputation?

EARLY LIFE Camus's birth in Mondovi (an Algerian town named after a Napoleonic victory) on 7 November 1913 became, albeit in fictional transcription, the focal point of the opening scenes in his posthumously published Le Premier Homme (1994; translated as The First Man, 1995), a short draft of a projected novel of Tolstoyan proportions that he was carrying in his briefcase when he died in the car accident. 1 Born into a poor, The Stranger

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Algiers. Camus grew up in Belcourt, a working· class district of the city.

working-class family; Camus never knew his father, Lucien Auguste Camus (1885-1914), who had been called to arms in World War I and died from wounds received in the first battle of the Marne. (The search for the absent father is a major theme in Le Premier Homme.) Albert Camus adored his illiterate but stubbornly devoted mother, Catherine Sintes Camus (1882-1960); his only sibling was an older brother, Lucien (19lO-1983). The extended family included Camus's overPowering grandmother, Catherine-Marie Cardona Sintes (1875-1931), who terrorized her daughter and two grandsons; and two maternal uncles, Joseph and Etienne. Joseph married and left after a few years, but Etienne remained a necessary source of income in this extended family; yet, he did little to protect his sister from their abusive mother. The Sinteses were descendants of emigrants from Majorca but did not speak Spanish. This ancestry partially explains Camus's lifelong Hispanophilia.

To find work the family moved to Belcourt, a working-class district in Algiers, where the six-as of 1920, five-lived in a cramped three-room apartment in which there was no bathroom and the kitchen also served as a bedroom. The only sources of income were Etienne's meager salary and the occasional work that Camus's mother found as a cleaning woman. As Camus stated repeatedly in interviews, growing up poor was no hardship for him because he excelled in school as well as in sports. Enjoying the mild Mediterranean climate with its abundant sunshine, he felt that the school, the soccer field, and the downtown cafes provided promising playing spaces for an aspiring writer. In many ways this environment constituted Camus's true home. Education turned out to be Camus's gateway to challenging new horizons and eventual success. In grammar school he had the good luck to be taken under the wing of an attentive fifth-grade teacher, Louis Germain, to whom he later dedicated his Nobel Prize acceptance speech. Germain took the unusual step of going to Camus's home in order to convince the mother and, especially, the recalcitrant grandmother that their gifted son and grandson, rather than work in a factory to bring home much-needed money, should obtain competitive grants enabling him to attend Algiers's

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Gale Study Guides to Great Literature: Literary Masterpieces

elite Lycee Bugeaud, called the Grand Lycee. This school was usually reserved for upper-middle-class students who intended to attend a university. Toward the end of his lycee curriculum and prior to taking the grueling final exam known in the French educational system as the baccalaurtat, Camus encountered in his philosophy classes a teacher who later became his mentor and substitute father, Jean Grenier (1898-1971). Stressing unorthodoxy as his leitmotiv; Grenier was at that time a budding essayist who enjoyed impressive associations with the leading French publishing house, Gallimard, and its then avant-garde periodical, La Nouvelle Revue Franl;aise. In the eyes of his young students Grenier was the main link to metropolitan intellectual life. His suggested readings and forthcoming publications, therefore, were a must for these young minds. Grenier taught courses at the upper level of the lycee as well as at the University of Algiers, a common occurrence in the French educational system. As their correspondence attests, 2 Grenier's evasiveness, his praise, and his systematic practice of ambiguity exercised a lasting influence on Camus, who later wrote in the preface of the 1959 edition of his teacher's Us Iles (The Islands, 1933), "Ainsi, je ne dois pas a Grenier des certitudes qu'il ne pouvait ni ne voulait donner. Mais, je lui dois, au contraire, un doute, qui n'en finira pas et qui m'a empeche, par exemple, d'etre un humaniste au sens OU on l'entend aujourd'hui, je veux dire un homme aveugle par de courtes certitudes" (Thus I do not owe certainties to Grenier that he neither could nor would provide. Rather, lowe him a doubt that will never end and that has prevented me, for example, from being a humanist in today's sense, that is, a man blinded by shortsighted certainties).) Between 1928 and 1930 Camus was playing in many soccer matches as goalkeeper for the team Racing Universitaire d'Alger. In December 1930 the first of many serious health crises that were to befall him was diagnosed as tuberculosis. In those days there was no treatment for this illness other than plenty of rest, a healthy diet, and periodic stays in sanatoriums located in higher altitudes. For the first time the seventeen-year-old faced permanent illness and the prospect of death. This situation threatened Camus's professional future because it meant that he might forever be barred from teaching in a public school. As Germain did earlier, Grenier took the unusual step of visiting his sick student at home. When Camus became a philosophy student at the Universite d'Alger, he continued to take classes with his mentor. Grenier's inveterate unorthodoxy led him to depart from the traditional French curriculum. He introduced his pupils to a long line of kindred spirits, namely, the pre-Sacra ties, St. Augustine, the Eastern and Western mystics, Blaise Pascal, S0ren Kierkegaard, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Friedrich :--lietzsche. The 5 tranger

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Camus (front, center, in darkjersey) with his teammates from the Racing Universitaire d'Alger soccer team

One immediately recognizes in these names a group of anthropocentric thinkers whose shared concerns make them the forefathers of the various strands of modern existentialism. A standard French philosophy curriculum of that time, especially in the provincial regions, would have featured Plato, Aristotle, Rene Descartes, Pascal, some eighteenth-century French philosophers, and Immanuel Kant, but not G. W F. Hegel. Beginning in 1933 Camus entered a long phase of feverish activities on several fronts. They included the publication of his first essays, the completion of his university thesis, a string of political and cultural ventures, the assumption of intellectual leadership among the junior intelligentsia of Algiers, a large amount of acting and play production, serious stints in journalism, some international travels, and occasional odd jobs simply to survive, not to mention a brief and ill-fated marriage. To assure a better diet for Camus because of his tuberculosis, his doctor recommended that he live with his uncle Gustave Acault (husband

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Gale Study Guides to Great Literature: Literary Masterpieces

of one of Camus's maternal aunts), a butcher who was proud of his personallibrary and his relations with the city's intelligentsia, which he cultivated mainly in cafes. For a while Camus felt at ease in this new environment, which provided him a modicum of stability and some money. He became a neat, some would say dandyish, dresser, preferring to wear all-white attire. A Don Juan himself long before he set out to write a play combining the myth of the legendary lover and the myth of Faust (a project that he barely sketched but never completed), Camus snatched a legendary local beauty, Simone Hie 0914-1970), from his friend Max-Pol Fouchet. Called the Siren of Algiers, Simone was reputed to be a scandal-ridden girl who chose her lovers depending on her drug needs. Acault did not approve of his nephew'S attachment to this woman and threatened to cut his subsidies. Out of pride and loyalty, Camus gave up his uncle's protection rather than abandon Simone. In spite of many breaks and reconciliations, he proposed to and married her in 1934. For a while, financial help for the couple came from Simone's mother, a generous and patient ophthalmologist. The marriage could not have been more difficult; Simone never overcame her addiction to morphine. Two years later the couple separated at the end of a quarrelsome canoe trip in central Europe. Out of consideration for his sick former wife, Camus did not formally divorce her until 1940, the year in which he married his second wife, Francine Faure. In January 1937 he retreated with three women friends, Jeanne-Paule Sicard, Marguerite Dobrenn (who later published the Camus-Grenier correspondence), and Christiane Galindo, to a playful communal life in a rented house th,n they named "la Maison devant Ie Monde" (House above the World). Finally, Camus had found a space conducive to selective social interaction and serious work.

EARLY WRITING CAREER Through all of these tribulations Camus's writing remained foremost on his mind. He had already published some youthful pieces in small periodicals such as Sud and was on the editorial board of Rivages, a new journal for aspiring writers. Now, several literary projects of his own began to take shape, some of which were never published in his lifetime, such as La Mort hnm,use (1971; translated as A Happy Death, 1972), his earliest attempt at a novel. Some of his small essays found a local publisher, Edmond Charlot, who brought out Camus's first "serious" work, which was, not surprisingly, dedicated to Grenier: I'.Envers et l'endroit 0937; translated as "Betwixt and Between" in Lyrical and Critical, 1967; and as "The Wrong Side and the Right Side" in Lyrical and Critical Essays, 1968). In addition, Camus had to devote attention to the philosophy thesis The Stranger

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required for his university diploma, the Dip16me d'Etudes Superieures (DES), which might lead to a teaching career, though the prospect was slim because of his illness. Defended in 1936, the thesis remained unpublished until 1965, when it appeared in Essais, the second of the two volumes in the standard Pleiade edition of Camus's works, as "Metaphysique chretienne et neoplatonisme" (Christian Metaphysics and Neoplatonism). The. thesis director was another philosophy professor, Rene Poirier, a traditionalist of immense erudition who, while qualifying Camus's paper as good, could not refrain from remarking that the candidate possessed more strength as a literary artist than as a philosopher. A typical academic exercise, the thesis presents a string of secondhand quotations and paraphrastic arguments that buttress the main argument. But it also includes a wealth of personal themes and preoccupations that Camus projects into his discussions-for example, in the first part, the connection among the Incarnation, hope, and pessimism in the Simone Hie, Camus's first wife, whom he New Testament. Together with other extrahumarried in 1934. The couple separated two man referents, Camus analyzes the notion of years later and formally divorced in 1940. hope as a cardinal virtue. A few years later, this notion was presented in his first published philosophical work, Le My the de Sisyphe (1942; translated as The Myth of Sisyphus, 1955), as one method of escape from the absurd. Thematically even ;more predictive of his future writing are the second, third, and fourth parts of the thesis, which focus on the Gnostics, Plotinus, and St. Augustine, whom he admired because they attempted to reconcile knowledge and salvation. In these sections Camus observes the early emergence of a Mediterranean culture-the focal point of a group of writers sponsored by his editor friend Charlot-and the conflictual convergence of ahistorical Greek thinking and Christian eschatology. Key terms such as measure, explored in Camus's second major philosophical work, lliomme rtvolte, also first appeared in the thesis-for example, the discussion of the virtues of anthropocentric Hellenistic culture. According to Camus, man as the measure of all things finds a common yardstick and equalizer in architecture and sports: "Thellcnisme implique que l'homme peut se sutfire et qu'il

8

Gale Study Guides to Great Literature: Literary MasterpieCEs

porte en lui de quoi expliquer l'univers et Ie destin. Ses temples sont COIlstruits a sa mesure. En Ull certain sens les Grecs acceptaient une justification sportive de l'existence" (Hellenism implies that man is able to be self-sufficient and that he carries in himself what it takes to explain the universe and destiny. His temples are built to his size. In a certain way, the Greeks accepted a sporting and aesthetic justification of existence).' Nor did it escape Camus that the ancient Greeks' measured way of doing things never separated public and private space, because they always saw the individual as part of the polis. The five essays constituting LEnven et l'endroit were a perfect fit for Charlot's editorial program intended to launch young Mediterranean writers under the promising title "Aux Vraies Richesses" (At the True Riches). The essays deal with Camus's personal situation, occasionally in thinly disguised ways. For example, he states in the preface that "[1) a pauvrete, d'abord, n'a jamais ere un malheur pour moi: la lumiere y repandait ses richesses. Mais mes revoltes en ont ete eclaires" (First, poverty has never meant misfortune to me: light spread its riches. Even my rebellions have been enlightened by it").5 'TIronie" (Irony), the first piece, describes how old people, induding a character resembling Camus's grandmother, await their death. In "Entre oui et non" (Between Yes and No) the painful silence and distance of a mother modeled after his own are reflected in a telling sentence: "EUe ne l'a jamais caresse puisqu'elle ne saurait pas" (She never caressed him since she would not know how).6 Camus's lowest moments in Prague, Czechoslovakia, during the trip to Central Europe that brought an end to his marriage, are transcribed in "La Mort dans l'ame" (Death in the Soul). A trip to the Balearic Islands, which he made in order to visit his wife, who was making yet another attempt at a "cure" to free herself from her addiction, paradoxically yields a cry for life in "Amour de vivre" (Love of Life). Finally, a curious story of an old woman who invested her inheritance in a small mausoleum to herself forms the story line of the title essay, 'TEnvers et l'endroit," the last piece in the volume. "Les gens ne veulent pas qu'on soit lucide et ironique. II disent: 'C:a montre que vous n'etes pas bon'" (People don't want you to be lucid and ironic. They say, "It shows that you are no good").7 Indeed, irony, which is also the title of the first essay, has a pervasive presence in all these pieces and appears in many of Camus's later writings as a central part of his strategy of detached engagement. In the same year that these essays were published, Camus wrote his first "novel," La Mort heureusf, and began to sketch a series of lyrical texts that later became NOCfS (1939; translated as "Nuptials" in Lyrical and Critical The Stranger

9

and Lyrical and Critical Essays). He considered La Mort heureuse an artistic failure and did not allow it to be published in his lifetime. It is not, as some have claimed, an earlier version of I'Etranger, although the latter reproduces a few passages from the earlier work. The most apparent similarity between the two works is found in the names of the protagonists. The name of Patrice Mersault in La Mort heureuse is drawn from a combination of mer (sea) and soleil (sun), as opposed to Meursault, the protagonist of I'Etranger, whose first name is never given. The plot of La Mort heureu.se interweaves autobiographical elements, such as a trip to Central Europe and a communal life with three women, with a murder that is in part orchestrated by a mysterious character named Zagreus, a crippled rich man who promises freedom and happiness to Mersault. The price Mersault has to pay for his financial independence is a murder he must commit in order to liberate Zagreus from his own predicament. There are several reasons why Camus did not want to see La Mort heureuse published, not the least of which were its derivative character and stylistic imperfections. The autobiographical elements remained too transparent, as did the philosophical background (Camus had just read Nietzsche) and, possibly, the thematic affinity with Dmmoraliste (1902; translated as The Immoralist, 1930), an iconic short novel or recit by Andre Gide, Camus's acknowledged master of style. Viewed from this angle, Noces represented a breakthrough as a text sui generis because, as later in IEtranger, Camus was crafting a tone of his own. In Noces he also offered a personal response to his public complaint that contemporary authors had forgotten how to deal with landscapes. The four lyrical essays in Noces read like an extended prose poem alternating the themes of life and death, nature and culture, desertscapes, seascapes, and cityscapes-in short, man's precariously glorious existence in time and space. Endowed with "lucidite aride" (arid lucidity),B Camus, the ironist traversing these spaces, discovers the absurdity of his existence and the creative power of rebellion against the meaninglessness into which he is thrown. Beyond absurdity, a concept forming the core of Le My the de Sisyphe, one already detects the powerful call to action issued in lliomme revolte, namely, negative affirmation: "S'il est vrai que toute verite porte en elle son amertume, il est aussi vrai que toute negation contient une floraison de 'oui''' (If it is true that every truth contains its own bitterness, it is also true that every negation contains a blossoming of "yes").9 Camus's personal notion of engagement, coined through his experiences in his formative years, was at the root of his shrill disagreements later with the ideologically rooted concept of engagement developed by Jean-Paul Sartre. There can be no doubt that Camus's keen interest in politics was shaped by the socioeconomic injustice that he observed around him. He 10

Gate Study Guides to Great Literature: Literary Masterpieces

UNIV&RtlIT& D'ALO&R

FACULT£ DES LETTAE8 D'ALQEA

Camus's Dipl6me d'Etudes Superieures (DES) from the University of Algiers

was naturally inclined to identify with a politically progressive position, as did a vast segment of the contemporary French intelligentsia. In 1939 Camus published a courageous series of critical articles in the daily Alger Rtpublicain on the misery in which the colonial regime kept the Kabyle people (a tribal group of the Kabylia region of Algeria lhal comprises one of the larger segments of the Berber population). From the beginning, however, his initial involvement in politics was ill-fated and soon led to fundamental differences with other progressives on the question of goals and motivations. In tune with most of his friends and acquaintances, Camus never doubted that his political position was located on the Left, where it remained. In 1935, but not before overcoming some hesitation and consulting with Grenier, he jOined the Communist Party, which assigned him to cultural-affairs and propaganda functions in Muslim circles. Once Camus had become a card-carrying member, he plunged full speed into action, serving as cofounder of the party's Maison de la Culture (House of Culture) and as a lecturer at another party institution, the College du Travail, a kind of workers' college. Quickly, theater turned out to be his favorite sphere of activity. An aspiring actor himself, he joined the itinerant The Stranger

11

theatrical group of Radio Algiers. Convinced that drama was a privileged means by which he could reach the uneducated, Camus did not wait long to form a theatrical group with like-minded friends, the Theatre du Travail (Labor Theater). Through programmatic statements that were at once cultural and political manifestos, the group announced that it wanted to familiarize the public with the major plays of the world's dramatic repertory. Individualism and stardom were to be shunned and replaced by an anonymity rooted in the collective nature of the group. By this time it had become clear to Camus that participation in organized, collective enterprises such as theater and sports was his preferred type of activity. From this point on he derived from such activities not only pleasure but also major impulses for his moral values. His most direct effort to disseminate politically rooted culture was his collaboration on a collectively written play titled Rtvoite dans Ies Asturies (Rebellion in Asturias, 1936). The plot retraces the course of a 1934 Spanish miners' strike that was eventually suppressed. Written mostly in the Maison devant Ie Monde by Camus and his friends and comrades Jeanne Sicard, Alfred POignant, and Yves Bourgeois, the play turned out to be too politically explosive, and its performance was banned by the mayor of Algiers. Its publication had to wait until 1962, when the first volume of the standard edition of Camus's works, Theatre, recits, nouvelles, was published. Soon Camus discovered that the idealistic goals of egalitarianism and justice that had led him to join the Communist Party were not compatible with the hard-core ideology of Marxism or the local and international party's hierarchy, and especially not with the realpolitik practiced by Joseph Stalin. Even before Stalin entered into a devil's pact with Adolf Hitler (the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact of August 1939) that utterly confused the Western Left, Camus questioned his party's strategies and motivations in general and, in particular, the priority given to the generic struggle against fascism at the cost of dealing with more practical social issues. Having been suspected all along of being a mere intellectual who did not want to dirty his hands by doing real party work and having associated himself with the wrong party line and persons (such as Messali Hadj, founder of the Parti Populaire Algerien) in his relations with the Muslim population, Camus was formally accused of the cardinal sin of deviationism. Summoned to appear before a party tribunal, he reaffirmed his views. In the summer of 1937 Camus refused an invitation to resign, preferring to be formally excluded from the Communist Party, which of course he promptly was. Most members and friends of his theater group stayed with him. The

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Galc Study Guides to Great Literature: Literary Masterpieces

group immediately changed their name to Theatre de l'Equipe (Team Theater) and continued to operate independently, offering a program that focused on significant plays of the world repertoire. His work with the Theatre de l'Equipe also allowed Camus to maintain his friendly contacts with many party members who knew of his expulsion but admired his courage and determination. However, the insufficient revenue generated by these idealistic activities forced Camus intermittently to seek remunerative employment. Of the many odd jobs Camus held in order to supplement his meager income, the one with the shortest duration was a clerkship at the prefecture (office representing the French government) of Algiers, from which he was fired because in his reports he never mastered the required bureaucratic style. When he was granted his university diploma in 1936, still mindful of a professional career, he naturally thought of taking the highly selective competitive exam called the agregation. To this day; those who successfully pass this exam are assured of a lifetime state position. The required health examination, however, revealed Camus's tuberculosis, which blocked his admission as a candidate. Journalism thus became an almost necessary alternative, although the situation of the local journalism was depressing for a politically progressive mind. Most dailies in Algiers were either right-wing or right-of-center newspapers. Camus and his friends were not alone in feeling stifled by the political climate of the city. In 1938 a handful of well-intentioned friends financed and launched a daily; the Alger Rtpublicain. True to the French tradition, the paper heralded its political leanings by clearly favoring the Popular Front, a coalition of Socialists and Communists then briefly in power in the capital, and by openly requesting more freedom for the Muslim population. The Alger Republicain never acquired a readership large enough to assure its survival, which explains its demise by the time World War II broke out. Camus was among the paper's first writers and had the good luck to work for an editor whose metropolitan background and contacts later proved helpful: Pascal Pia (1902-1979). While the dedication of Le My the de Sisyphe to Pia in 1942 reflected Camus's gratefulness to his journalistic mentor, their relationship soured once they became rivals rather than friends on the slippery slopes of the intellectual and journalistic hills of Paris. Among the principal assignments Camus was given were book reviews and court reporting. His favorable yet critical assessments of Sartre's La Nausee (1938; translated as Nausea, 1949) and Le Mur (1939; translated as The Wall, 1948) offer insightful glimpses into similarities and differences between Camus and his future Parisian colleague, friend, and eventual adversary. Even more impressive was the series of investigaThe Stranger

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CONTINUING PLIGHT OF THE BERBERS "The police fired water cannon and tear gas at rioters today as hundreds of thousands of pro· testers marched on Algeria's presidential palace demanding greater democracy. Two people died and more than 400 were injured in the turmoil. "Ethnic Berbers organized the mass protest against discrimination and they were joined by opposition parties demanding greater freedom, presenting Algeria's military-backed govern· ment with a growing challenge even as it battles the separate threat of an Islamic insurgency.....

tive reports on the Kabyle, "Misere de la Kabylie" (Misery in Kabylia), later reprinted in a collection of Camus's writings on the situation in Algeria, Actuelles III: Chroniques Algeriennes 1939-1958 (1958; translated in part in Resistance, Rebellion, and Death, 1961). Carefully documented, these articles depict nutritional and educational inadequacies among this particularly underprivileged tribal group of the Berber people of Algeria. The aggressive tone of Camus's investigative reporting strengthened the French Algerian authorities' view that he was playing a significant role in the persistently "subversive" stances taken in the paper.

THE WAR YEARS As World War II approached, censors North Africa, have had tense relations with the stepped up their interference with the editorial government for decades as they press their staff of the Alger Republicain. Advertisers, under demand for official recognition of the Berber increasing political pressure, began to withdraw language, Tamazight, and an end to what they their orders for ads. Even an attempted one-page say is discrimination. evening edition, Le SOiT Republicain, of which "At least 52 people have been killed during Camus was to be the editor, could not save the 40 days of rioting in the Berber region of Kabylia, paper. In October 1939 publication of the Alger which begins about 60 miles east of here. The Republicain ceased. In January 1940, a few riots were touched off by the April IS death of a months after the war broke out in September Berber teenager in a Kabylia police station ...." 1939, pressure exerted by the military censors From "2 Die in Big Berber Rally in Algiers," New York Times, also forced Le SOiT Republicain to close. The 15 June 2001, international sec., p. 8. momentous occasion of the outbreak of the war incited Camus to demand twice that he be considered for military service. Both times he was rejected for health reasons. A militant pacifist at first, he wrote in one of his later editorials, "nous savons qu'on peut faire une guerre sans y consentir" (We know that one can make war without consenting to it).1D After the closure of Le SOiT Republicain, Camus felt he had no choice but to seek his fortune in Paris, where, once again, he followed Pia's lead. It was going to be the most consequential move of Camus's life. "The Berbers, the original inhabitants of

Although Pia secured Camus a job with the big daily Paris-Soh; the war soon forced the paper to retreat to the provinces, first to Clermont-Ferrand in the Massif Central, then briefly to Bordeaux, back to Clermont- Fer14

Gale Study Guides to Great Literature: Literary Masterpieces

rand, and finally to Lyons. There, in December 1940, Camus married Francine Faure (1914--1979), Originally from Oran, Algeria's second-largest city, where he had visited her often. In Lyons, Camus lost his job as part of a reduction of the paper's work force. The couple was forced to retreat to Oran, where both hoped to find a life-sustaining situation. Historicall}; Algiers and Oran were in constant competition for superiority. As a true Algerais, Camus never liked Oran. Thus, his negative observations on the city in his notebooks should not come as a surprise: "11 n'y a pas un lieu que les Oranais n'aient souille par quelque hideuse construction qui devrait ecraser n'importe quel paysage" (There is not a place that the people of Oran have not defaced by some hideous construction capable of destroying any landscape).ll Such comments pervade his writings. No matter where destiny led Camus to live, at this point in his life the time had come to circulate manuscripts that he deemed worthy of publication, namely, Le My the de Sisyphe, I'Etranger, and the first version of the play Caligula, which he considered to belong to a single thematic cycle. With the assistance of Pia and Grenier, these works reached a group of stellar readers in Paris, including Francis Ponge, Marcel Arland, Jean Paulhan, Raymond Queneau, and Andre Malraux, all of whom were closely associated with Gallimard and some of whom Camus had briefly met during the few weeks he had spent in Paris. In spite of the German occupation of France, an understanding and even admiring German censor and editorial adviser, Lt. Gerhard Heller, allowed Gallimard to continue its operations. Based on the readers' recommendations and in the midst of a severe paper shortage, the firm decided to publish two of the three works circulated by the unknown French Algerian writer in June (I'Etranger) and October 1942 (L£ My the de Sisyphe). Two years later Gallimard brought out Camus's first plays in a combined volume, Le Ma/entendu suivi de Caligula (1944; translated as Caligula and Crass Purpose, 1947). For his career as a writer these metropolitan connections made up precisely the launching pad that he needed for his future work. Obviously, in the early 1940s the war made life in Paris quite difficult. Even before the newlyweds had to return to Oran in January 1941 because Camus had lost his job with Paris-Soir owing to a cutback in personnel, he already felt that he would always prefer the sunny shores of North Africa to the French capital, "'lith its gray and rainy sky. Yet, health considerations led him to view Oran as an undesirable locale for permanent residence; the humidity there aggravated his tuberculosis and forced him to look for a dryer climate. Camus obtained a medical pass to France and, in August 1942, thinking that he would obtain much-needed rest and fresh air in a friend's boardinghouse in the mountains, he left for Le Panelier, near Chambon-sur-Lyon in the Massif Central. In the meantime his .vife preceded him The Stranger

15

to the drier Algiers, where she sought employment opportunities for both of them. Camus was in possession of his steamship ticket to rejoin her when their plans were upset by the Allied landing in North Africa during the night of 7--8 November 1942. Their separation, which lasted until the liberation of Paris in August 1944, became one of the main themes of La Peste (1947; translated as The Plague, 1948), Camus's second novel. In spite of the turbulence and uncertainties caused by the war, Camus never lost sight of his creative strategy. It is clear from his camets (notebooks) that from the beginning of his writing career he was organizing his work in cycles. The first was the so-called cycle of the absurd (Le My the de Sisyphe, LEtranger, Caligula, and Le Malentendu), and the second was the cycle of rebellion: La Peste, fEtat de siege (1948; translated as State of Siege, 1958), Les]ustes (1950; translated as The Jus t Assassins, 1958), and lliomme revolte. Later Camus planned to begin a third cycle, fOCUSing on love and named after Nemesis, the goddess of measure (moderation and balance) and vengeance. It is also clear that these thematic cycles were never meant to be considered as distinct but rather as complementary. Camus's plan was for each thematic cycle in tum to find its expression in three genres: fiction, theater, and the philosophical essay. Knowing that his stay in the mountain forests of France would not bring a cure for his illness and realizing that the war-related separation from his wife and his Algerian homeland would last for a long while, Camus wrote in November 1942, in one of the few personal remarks in his camets, "Le renoncement a la jeunesse. Ce n'est pas moi qui renonce aux etres et aux choses (je ne Ie pourrais pas) ce sont les choses et les etres qui renoncent a moi. Ma jeunesse me fuit: c'est cela erre malade" (Renouncing youth. I am not the one abandoning persons and things [I could not do sol, it is the persons and things that are giving up on me: my youth slips away from me, that's what it means to be sick)." rEtranger had been published inJune of the same year, and the first reviews had not all been favorable. The publication of Le My the de Sisyphe was imminent, and Camus had every reason to think that his beginnings as a serious writer were promising. Yet, as happened several times in his life, the work on his next project, La Peste, was advancing slowly because a combination of war- and health-related political and personal crises was seriously affecting his writing. After his ambitious My the de Sisyphe was published and reviewed, Camus felt that the professional critics misread it. Most of them viewed this philosophical essay on the absurd as an exercise in pessimism caused by the war, a judgment that seemed quite plausible at the time but that did not recognize the basic ambitions and experiential roots in the essay. For Camus had already formed his views on absurdity long before the war

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Gale Study Guides to Great Literature: Literary Masterpieces

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The Stranger

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broke out. Even before wntmg Le My the de Sisyphe, he had attempted to give dramatic expression to his philosophical findings with COLLAPSE OF THE Caligula, the early drafts of which predate the ALGER REPUBLICAIN war. The plot of Camus's tragedy of the absurd "My Dear Pia, is loosely based on a biographical portrait of the "I have not yet found the time to write to you as Roman emperor Caligula by the historiographer often as I wish, but I thought a lot of you and I hope Suetonius. As Caligula discovered after the that your exodus ended comfortably. Until yesterdeath of his sister and lover, Drusilla, the fundaday I was unable to receive any news from you since mental paradox of human life is that m~n canyour departure. But I have seen Laffont, [Amedee not cease to yearn for answers that cannot be Laffont, a brother-in-law of Simone Hie's mother found. In the play this discovery shatters all and a noted surgeonJ who told me that you had semblance of reality and is at the root of been granted a royal 3,500 francs and that without Caligula's capricious logic and seemingly senseyour friends you had no means of arriving in Paris. less series of murders that ends in a carefully In spite of my well-known endurance I let myself go. orchestrated murder-suicide. Examining this I assume that you are under no illusions concerning quandary in a more detached fashion in Le the settlement due to you. That's why I think you My the de Sisyphe, Camus begins with the quesshould offer some resistance. If you wish to recoup tion of whether the discovery of the absurd your money, you know that I am at your disposal should lead to suicide. Eventually, the answer is and that I can take care of your affairs atthe concila resounding "no." While Camus presented iation board. Under no circumstance should you let innate meaninglessness as a given, he always these great men believe through indifference that considered this discovery to be a starting point caddishness is a virtue accepted by everybody. only and not a conclusion.13 Rather than leading Moreover, this is as also a public health operation. to resignation or a call for superhuman help For even if you were to use this money to buy a from God, transcendence, or metaphysical female elephant for your Sunday excursions, it hope-an escape that he labels "Ie suicide would be of better use than to extend by a few days philosophique" (philosophical suicide)-the the poisonous paper that they are preparing for us. absence of preordained meaning eventually I, for my part, would be delighted to participate in leads the lucid individual to rebellion against this sanitary enterprise." such a seemingly insuperable state of affairs. Hence the choice of Sisyphus as a paradigm of Albert Camus contemporary man: in Greek myth Sisyphus From a letter to Pascal Pia, 13 February 1940, in Correspon· dared to disobey the gods' orders and was condonee, 1939-1947, edited by Yves Marc Ajchenbaum (Paris: demned eternally to roll a boulder up a hill, Fayard/Gallimard, 2000), p.IO. whence it would promptly roll down again, forCing him to repeat endlessly his futile act. Each time Sisyphus strolls down the hill, he thumbs his nose at the gods in this brief moment of respite and paradoxically finds happiness in his gratuitous and repetitive predicament. In the famous last sentence of the essay, Camus writes that "II faut imaginer Sisyphe heureux" (One must imagine Sisyphus 18

Gale Study Guides to Great Literature: Literary Masterpieces

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:¥ ....,.; \oM ~ ~ ' principal aim. In 1939, as a budding journalist, Camus published a series of critical reports on the compounded misery suffered by the Kabyles, a Berber tribe marginalized even by the native Arab population. This series of articles contributed to the demise of the Alger Rtpublicain, Algiers!> only progressive paper. Meursault, the protagonist of tEtranger, is clearly a paradigmatic French Algerian. In every respect but one, he belongs to Algiers's petitbourgeOiS society, the values and institutions of which he has no intention of questioning. His daily domestic routine, his crude, mostly instinctual desires, his working and playing habits, his lack of ambition (he views a possible trip to Paris that his employer has proposed not as a chance for career advancement but as an imposition on his lifestyle), and his uncomplicated acceptance of life and fellow human beings in general make him an inconspicuous and accommodating member of whatever social group he associates with. What sets Meursault apart, however, is his habit of telling things as he sees them. He does not use language to embellish reality as it confronts him, which means that he will not fake exaggerated or false feelings of love or sorrow. During Meursault's trial for murder the directness and simplicity of his discourse present the SOCiety of Algiers with a mirror in which it does not wish to recognize itself. Acting as the legal machine on behalf of the French colonists and their presumed representatives in Algeria, the court sentences him to death, less for the crime he committed-killing an Arab (at that time, such a murder was unlikely to

40

Gale Study Guides to Great Literature: Literary Masterpieces

Oran, Algeria,

1940

lead to the death penalty for a French Algerian)-than for not having cried at his mother's funeral, for having gone to the movies and resumed a love affair on the next day. The reader of rEtranger, in 1942 as well as today; while not excusing Meursault's crime, cannot but sympathize with the part of his defense strategy that gradually unmasks the hypocrisy of his people. Thus, beyond his problematical indifference, his cooperative posture amounts to an implicit critique of the social institutions and mores of his time.

PLOT SUMMARY PART ONE'

A telegram informs Meursault, who lives and works in Algiers, that his mother has died in a home for the elderly in distant Marengo. He travels to the funeral by bus, discusses his mother's recent past with the nursing-home director, and joins her acquaintances in the home at the wake. The funeral procession causes Thomas Perez, an old man who befriended Meursault's mother in the nursing home, to faint under the hot sun. That evening, Meursault returns by bus to Algiers. CHAPTER 1.

CHAPTER 2. The day after the funeral, a Saturday, Meursault goes for a swim at the beach, where he meets Marie Cardona. an old flame. After

The Stranger

41

ALBERT CAMUS: L'ETRANGER. roman. Un volume in-16 double couronne ............................ ,....... 25 fro Le heros de ce livre est « etranger » a la plupart de nos sentiments humains. II n'est peut-etre pas tres different en cela de beaucoup d'autres, mais il ne sait pas ou ne veut pas entrer dans Ie jeu des conventions et des hypocrisies. On verra comment cette attitude, qui Ie conduit jusqu'a un crime. acte presque gratuit de sa part, sera jugee par la Societe ...

Advertisement from the 1 July 1942 issue of La Nouvelle Revue Franc;aist! for the first edition of Camus's first published novel

watching a movie, they spend the night together. Since Marie cannol spend Sunday with Meursault, he kills time by observing the traffic and people from his apartment balcony; he is glad that life has returned to normalcy now that the trip to Marengo and the funeral are behind him.

Meursault goes with an office colleague to the harbor for his lunch break; eats, as usual, at Celeste's cafe; and takes a siesta. In the evening, on his way home from work, he runs into Salamano, an old man from a neighboring apartment, whose scab-covered dog is his constant companion. Another neighbor, Raymond Sintes, who is reputed to be a pimp, drops by and tells Meursault about a run-in with an Arab. The Arab turned out to be the brother of Sintes's mistress, whom he suspects of cheating on him. Intent on punishing her, Sintes asks Meursault to help him draft a letter by which he can lure his mistress into a trap. Meursault obliges and seems to accept that some kind of bond now exists between him and Sintes. CHAPTER 3.

The following weekend, after another swim and romantic encounter with Marie, Meursault is evasive when she asks whether he loves her. The next morning, the two hear a woman scream in Sintes's apartment and witness an ugly scene in which a policeman, who has been called by another neighbor, punches Sint(~s because of his lack of respect for the woman. Marie leaves, and Sintes tells Meursault that he has punished his mistress. The two men go out together, and Meursault again enjoys their camaraderie. Back at the apartment building, he runs into Salamana, who cannot find his dog.

CHAPTER 4.

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Gale Study Guides to Great Literature: Literary Masterpieces

Sintes invites Meursault to a friend's beach house and informs him that he is being followed by a group of Arabs. Meursault turns down his boss's proposition that he enhance his position by working for a related business in Paris. He continues to be evasive when Marie asks him whether he loves her and wants to marry her. Eating dinner at Celeste's, Meursault observes the strange behavior of a robotlike old woman and follows her into the street. Salamano is distressed because his dog is definitely lost. CHAPTER 5.

-----------r,~~'------------

MEURSAULT "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."

Albert Camus From The Stranger, translated by Miltthew Ward (New York: Vintage, 1989), p. 3.

On the next day, a Sunday, Meursault, Marie, and Sintes take the bus to the beach together. Before boarding, they see a group of Arabs staring at them. At the beach house they join Sintes's Parisian friend Masson and his wife. Marie, Meursault, and Masson go for a s\.vim. Masson returns to the bungalow to have lunch, and the two others follow him back to the house after another swim. After lunch, leaving the two womeri behind, the three men take a walk on the beach, where they run into two Arabs. Sintes recognizes one of them as his previous adversary An altercation ensues in which the Arab slashes Sintes's arm and mouth with a knife. Meursault does not participate in the fight. Once Sintes is patched up by a nearby doctor, he decides to return to the beach alone, and Meursault follows him. At the end of the beach, near a little spring, they find the two Arabs. When Sintes, who carries a gun, asks Meursault whether he should shoot his antagonist, Meursault offers to take the weapon so that the two can fight instead. The Arabs disappear behind a rock and the two companions return to the beach house. As they arrive, Meursault, still carrying Sintes's gun, suddenly decides to return to the beach, where he finds the Arab with the knife alone in the same place. Blinded by the midday sun and the light that reflects from the Arab's knife, Meursault shoots him. He then pumps four more shots into the inert body CHAPTER 6.

PART TWO CHAPTER 1. After his arrest, Meursault undergoes an interrogation by the examining magistrate and, on the following da); meets Vli.th the defense lawyer assigned to him. The lawyer is confused and angered by the straight yet odd answers MeursauIt gives him, especially those regarding his feelings at and after his mother's funeraL His crude explanations certainly do not help his case. Another interrogation, without the presence of the defense lawyer,

The Stranger

43

EFFROYABLE TRAG£DIE

•

Aidee de sa Ii/Ie une h6leliere lue pour Ie voleT un voyageur qui n elail autre

que son fils En apprenanf l.ur ",.,..". la mire Ie PMtl. la Iili• .. j.Ile II",..

,

UftI

pail.

Bt'lltnde. 5 Janvlrr. - c La Vmne • tapporte un etfroyable meurtre eo.nmls dans un petlt hOtel de ~la-T..rk .. va par la tenanct~re de eet etabl.... • ment fit .. flUe. sur II penonae de lNr fUI· et tr!re. Petar Nikolaus. . C(!'ltri'"Ci, travaUlant depuis 20 1M l I·~trangtr. Ivalt amasH un peUt ca~ltal

dont U vouilit nPPOrtft'

'lne par-

A report from the 6 January 1935 edition of L'Echo d'Aiger about a hotel guest in Serbia who was mistakenly robbed and murdered by his mother and sister, the proprietresses of the inn. Meursault reads a similar account in his prison cell. The crime also inspired t~e plot of Camus's play Le Moientendu, first published in 1944.

does nothing but exasperate the magistrate, who finishes by probing Meursault's religious beliefs. Later interrogations, with the lawyer present, folIowa polite court routine . Meursault discovers that his prison cell has become his home. After a first and difficult visit, Marie is not allowed to come back again because she is not his wife. From a small window in the cell Meursault can see a .piece of the sky and the sea. At this point he begins a series of introspective observations on his situation, needs, and annoyances. Between the straw mattresses he discovers part of an old newspaper page featuring the story of an odd family crime in Central Europe. 4 Gradually, he loses the sense of time. CHAPTER 2.

After an eleven-month investigation, Meursault's trial finally begins. Looking at the jury, he feels as if he is sitting in a streetcar surrounded by curious observers. He reviews the members of the press, the behavior of the lawyers, and the oddly scripted court procedure. The list of witnesses includes all his friends and acquaintances. Meursault answers the prosecution as instructed to do by his lawyer but is irritated by what he considers irrelevant questions. After a lunch break, the procedure resumes, with the witnesses-the director and the caretaker from the Marengo nursing home, Perez, Celeste, Marie, Masson, and Sintes-giving their perspectives on the events or their relationship with Meursault. The prosecution's strategy and conclusion amount to a moral indictment of Meursault's behavior. CHAPTER 3.

CHAPTER 4. Meursault increasingly feels cut off from the legal process that seems to roll along without his participation. He summarizes the discourse and behavior of the major players, especially the prosecution's and the defense~5 concluding arguments, in a detached manner, as if he were a court

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reporter at his own trial. At the end, Meursault feels excluded from whatever is going on and receives with indifference the guilty verdict and the death sentence.

Meursault refuses to see the chaplain three times and evaluates his chances of avoiding execution or escaping from prison. He remembers a story his mother told him about his father, whom he never knew, coming home sick after witnessing an execution. The potential failure of the guillotine that Meursault imagines is only a brief illusion. The da\vn and his appeal become the obsessive objects of his thoughts. His appeal is denied but, again, he refuses to see the chaplain. The chaplain visits him anyway, at first trying to console him about the denied appeal. He embarks on a series of questions that raises Meursault's ire. Eventually, they scream at each other, and Meursault grabs the clergyman by the collar of his cassock. In the longest speech of the novel he yells his true beliefs at the chaplain, who flees in tears. After calming down, Meursault expresses the wish that "there be a large crowd of spectators the day of my execution and that they greet me with cries of hate."S CHAPTER 5.

NOTES 1. A new, definitive edition of IEtranger will appear in the first volume of CEuvres compldes, a projected four-volume, completely revised Pleiade edition of Camus's works.

2. For a well-informed examination of the shortcomings of Gilberts translation, see Helen Sebba, "Stuart Gilbert's Meursault: Strange Stranger," Contemporary Literature, 13 (Summer 1972): 334-340. See also Eric H. Du Plessis, "The Restoration of Albert Camus' rEtranger in English Translation," Revue de Litterature Comparee, 66 (April-June 1992): 205-213. 3. The events in the first part of the novel take place over an eighteen-day period; in the second part the events cover a span of eleven months. 4. The crime reported in the newspaper clipping repeats events that belong to Central European folklore telling of the fateful reunion of a son with his mother and sister, who run an inn in a desolate comer of the country. After many years abroad, the son returns home a wealthy man but disguises his identity Not recognizing him and follOwing the criminal pattern they have adopted, the two women rob and kill him, believing him to be a stranger. This story became the plot of Camus's play Le Malentendu. 5. Albert Camus, The Stranger; translated by Matthew Ward (New York: Vintage, 1989), p. 123. All subsequent parenthetical page citations are from this edition. The Stranger

45

. THE EVOLUTION OF rETRANGER

WRITING THE NOVEL Between 1936 and 1938 Camus wrote two volumes of essays, rEnvers et l'endroit and Noces; the first draft of the play Caligula; and short fragments to be used later in his philosophical work Le My the de Sisyphe. He also collaborated with Jeanne-Paule Sicard, Yves Bourgeois, and Alfred Poignant of the Theatre du Travail group to write Revolte dans les Asturies. The staging of this politically loaded play was forbidden by the mayor of Algiers, but Charlot, a fledgling publishing house launched by Edmond Charlot, published it anyway. In this same busy period Camus completed a full-length fictional work titled La Mort heureuse that he hoped would be his first novel. Even before it was finished, however, he found it wanting. Major parts of the plot too closely resembled episodes of his own early life, such as his precarious health, his trip to Central Europe and Italy, and his communal life with three women in la Maison devant Ie Monde. Autobiography was not what he was aiming for. Aesthetically and philosophically, La Mort heureuse owed too much to a triad of authors with whom Camus was familiar: Fyodor Dostoevsky, Andre Gide, and Friedrich Nietzsche. Gide's so-called "tamed Romanticism," expressed in polished prose, made him not only a master of style but also a much-admired contemporary practitioner of the technique of saying more by saying less, of calculated understatement, that was the hallmark of seventeenth-century French classical doctrine. Dostoevsky's novels were perfect syntheses of existential angst and grand sentimental themes as epitomized in Camus's favorite character, Ivan Karamazov, from The Brothers Karamazov (1879-1880). Nietzsche, finally, was considered the harbinger of modern philosophy. Camus's teacher and mentor Jean Grenier had enticed his young philosophy students with Nietzsche's writings; between 1936 and 1938 Camus continued to read and annotate Nietzsche avidly. Thus, in spite of thematic similarities and the transposition of passages originally written for La Mort heureuse to raranger, and in spite of the close similarity of the 46

Manuscript page of the 0 p e' . chapter in part 2 of L'Etranger ntng 0 f the first

The Stranger

47

names of the protagonists (Mersault in La Mort heureuse and Meursault in tEtranger) , Camus knew that he needed to distance himselffrom his literary models and personal experiences. In a rare, revealing personal mode, he wrote in his Camets (Notebooks) that an intellectual is capable of distancing himself from the world and himself by playing on both sides of the coin of reality: "An intellectual? Yes. And never deny it. An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself. I like this, because I am happy to be both halves, the watcher and the watched." 1 In order to graduate from aspiring writer to serious novelist, Camus's most pressing task was to purge himself of sentimentality and all-too-transparent retrospection. This was the only way he could find the unmistakable tone that was to be the distinctive trait of tEtranger and became his signature style. Camus's Camets, conceived as a writer's laboratory and not a depository of intimate thoughts, indicate the extent to which La Mort heureuse and fftranger were at first thematically interwoven. But evidence of parallels between the two books does not justify the hasty judgment made on La Mort heureuse upon its posthumous publication in 1971 that it was an earlier version of fftranger. A brief chronological account of some key notebook entries will help to piece together some parts of the puzzle that the origin and evolution of EEtranger represent. In the opening paragraph of the notebooks, in an entry dated May 1935, Camus sketched the psychological foundation for the overarching theme of the mother that is found in the essay "Entre oui et non" in EEnvers et l'endroit and, especially, in tEtranger, La Peste, and the play Le Malentendu: "the strange feeling which the son has for his mother constitutes his whole sensibilHy."2 In early 1936, a time when he was preparing his thesis for his philosophy degree and was still undecided as to what direction to take as a novelist, he noted, "People can think only in images. If you want to be a philosopher, write novels."3 Shortly after this entry there is a sort of table of contents that constitutes the first draft of La Mort heureuse. 4 This draft is immediately followed by the first mention of the main character's first name and a second major theme in Camus's work, the death penalty: "Patrice [his last name, Mersault, was added later] tells his story of a man sentenced to death."s Mersault consciously resorts to a crime to fulfill his search for happiness. In an execution-like assassination he kills Zagreus, a severely crippled millionaire whose fortune will enable him to enjoy what he lacks most: time and leisure. To some degree he has been nudged on by Zagreus, who shows Mersault a hox containing a gun and a letter in his own hand explaining the reasons for a repeatedly deferred suicide. The idea of death by a potential or actual assassin's hand is further developed in Caligula, in which the

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Gale Study Guides to Great Literature: Literary Masterpieces

Roman emperor is the architect of his "superior suicide," carried out by a group of senators whose plot he does not thwart, even though it is known to him in advance. In the end, realizing that travel procures only a false sense of happiness, Mersault returns home to the shores of the Mediterranean to die from a cold that escalates to pleurisy before he can enjoy the fruits of his crime. In rElrangcr Meursault receives the death penalty for having killed an Arab in a futile gesture that, in its murkiness, can be considered, among other things, a murder by proxy. Between 1936 and 1938 references to La Mort heureuse and Mersault appear with increasing frequency in the Camets. Some entries are longer sketches," others observations of events that could potentially be used in the projected noveL Soon, however, several of these notes are interspersed with suggestions of themes that foreshadow rEtranger. One such longer thematic entry includes ambiguous material that can be applied to both novels: "The story of the condemned man" and "The story of the poor neighborhood. Death of the mother."7 Another entry; dated April 1937, can be considered a contribution to the thematic groundwork of rEI ranger: "Story-the man who refuses to justify himself. Other people prefer their idea of him. He dies alone in his awareness of what he really is-Vanity of this consolation."B A few weeks later, in June, Camus added a still-tame prefiguration of the dramatic scene at the end of rEtranger in which Meursault, waiting for his execution in the prison cell, violently confronts the chaplain: "The condemned man visited by the priest every day. ... And every time, the resistance of the man who doesn't want this easy way out, and who wants to chew over and taste all his fear. He dies without a word, his eyes full of tears. "" In July 1937 Camus briefly returned to the death of the mother as a triggering event in a man's life: "'It doesn't apply.'lo True noveL His mother dies. He gives up everything. But the truth of his faith has not really changed. It doesn't apply, that's all."" Such a seemingly open-ended entry makes it easier to understand why Meursault's indifference is one of the anchors of his steadfast faithfulness to himself. By now Camus seemed to have found the rough plotline, vague as it still was, for his second novel, which the public assumed to be his first. It included three components that remained invariable: the death of the mother. a murder, and the murderer's decision to remain true to himself. These thematic forerunners of LEtranger do not invalidate Camus's statement to his friend and editor Roger Quillio! 12 that his novel was about a man who has not adjusted to life and society. An August 1937 entry in the Camels represented his first conscious formulation of the theme of rEt ranger: The Stranger

49

Camus's cahiers (notebooks)

A man who had sought life where most people find it (marriage, work, etc.) and who suddenly notices, while reading a fashion catalog, how foreign he has been to his own life (life as it is seen in fashion catalogs). Part I-His life until then. Part Il-Ufe as a game. Part III-The rejection of compromise and the discovery of truth in nature. lJ

Repeated entries throughout the month of August show that gambling with life and death preoccupied Camus to the point that he even considered writing a "Gambler's Novel."14 Nevertheless, while both Mersault and Meursault, each in his own way, gamble with their lives, the most potent application of the gambling theme occurs in Caligula, which, in Camus's first version of the play, had the projected subtitle "or the Gambler"ls and which began to take shape in 1938. In that same month of August 1937, Camus made a chapter-by-chapter outline of La Mort heureuse. 16 A reference to the same novelistic project opens the "Cahier II."l7 As his creative activities entered a period of intensification, Camus remained dissatisfied with the results of his progress. In a 1937 entry dated 30 September-for the next three months he gave exceptionally precise dates-he once again appears to have felt the need to suppress the urge to publish what he still considered an unfinished product: "It is in order to

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Gale Study Guides to Great Literature: Literary Masterpieces

shine that authors refuse to rewrite. Despicable. Begin again."'" For several months his attention returned to La Mort heureuse or focused on new projects such as CalIgllla and Lc My the de Sisyphc. Several longer fragments for La Mort hcurcusc appear in the Carncts between October 1937 and May 1938. The only significant exception is a December 1937 entry that describes the living habits that were to be applied to both Mersault and Meursault: "On Sundays, he gets up very late and stands in the window, watching the sun or the rain, the passers-by or the silent street. He is waiting for death. What good are promises anyway; since in any case. , , ,"19 In a notebook entry of May 1938 there is a much fuller fragment that pertains clearly to LEtlangCl: Once again, an old woman dies, and the ceremonial stages of her burial are described. The entry mentions a mortuary, an Arab nurse, the dead woman's friends, and an old invalid (Thomas Perez in LEu'anger) who walks "twenty yards behind" the procession,'" As Camus mapped out his program for the summer of 1938, still putting the finishing touches on La Mort hcurcLlse, he seems to have realized gradually, without stating it explicitly, that his first novel-length work required not only extensive polishing but also a complete overhaul. Part of aJune 1938 list of tasks reads: "6) Rewrite Novel."" The thematic strand of May 1938 that later grew into LEt ranger was also included in Camus's "rewriting" of La Mort hcurcusc. In the notebook entries from August to December 1938 the references to La McJ/'l hClIrcllsc or to Patrice Mersault begin to taper off. Concurrently; they show Camus sketching several longer scenes that later became part of LElI'angel: They include the "Story of R, "22 which later evolved into the sordid episode in which the pimp Raymond Sintes punishes his mistress: once again, the burial scene of an old woman, not as yet identified as Maman; and another prefiguration of the sorrows of an old man (Perez in the novel, but still unnamed in the notebook entry), to whom the people in the nursing home say, "She's your fiancee,"" More importantly, with an eye to his ongoing fictional and philosophical projects, Camus articulates aesthetic principles that, in his view, should infoTIll a work of art and the relationship between personal experience and artistic expression: "The tme work of art is the one which says less. z+. , , This relationship is wrong when the work gives the whole of this experience surrounded by a fringe of literature."'; Once Camus had theorized the need to distance himself from his personal experience, he seemed to reach the conclusion that in La lv/ort 11ettrellse he had not made the sustained effort of self-denial that art requires, 'The dry heart of the creator"'" led to the judgment that his first novell11ight not deserve puhlication. In this same period of conscious maturation, artistic and philosophical expansion, and transition from La ,\lort hcur'CllsC to LElral1f,CI: a seemThe Stranger

51

ingly inconspicuous paragraph in the notebooks trumpets the long-awaited breakthrough on a broader thematic and stylistiC scale. This passage, written in either late fall or December 1938, has a strangely familiar ring: "Today, mother died. Or it might have been yesterday, I don't know. I had a telegram from the home: 'Mother died. Funeral tomorrow. Yours faithfully.' It doesn't mean anything. It might have been yesterday."27 With two minor stylistic exceptions, this is the easily recognizable opening paragraph of I'Etranger. At this point Camus had found both the tone and the style that convincingly connotes the protagonist's sensitive indifference in the novel. These few sentences provide the major characteristics of Meursault's presentational mode: unembellished reporting of the naked facts as he sees or experiences them; choppy sentences, reflecting a sustained syntactical parataxis that favors the use of coordinate clauses over subordinate clauses; and a time frame that is typical of oral expression, with the use of mainly the present and the passe compose (past perfect) tenses, conveying a feeling of observational and experiential immediacy devoid of psychological reflection. The paragraph is immediately followed by a loose series of sketches dealing, once again, with scenes and snippets of dialogue from the funeraps Because Camus's attention to what he began to call "the Absurd" was increasing gradually at this time, his preparatory notes in the Camets often apply equally to Le My the de Sisyphe and I'Etranger. Consider the following partial example that might well describe Meursault's frame of mind as he awaits his execution in his prison cell: "the Absurd is perfectly clear. It is the opposite of irrationality. ... The truth of the matter is that they are going to chop his [a man sentenced to death J head off while he knows what is happening-at the very moment when his whole mind is concentrated on the fact that his head is going to be chopped off. "ZY At this early stage in the evolution of I'Etranger a general structural framework emerged, yielding what were to become the beginning and the end of the story line. Because from inception there was no doubt in Camus's mind that an ambiguous murder was to be at the core of the plot, as was the case in La Mort heurruse, the crime itself and its nature, together with the ensuing trial, are simply assumed in the notebook entries but not mentioned. Rather, shortly after jotting down what later became the opening of the new novel, Camus concentrated on the unnamed prisoner's ruminations,l0 which he embedded in the second part of I'Etranger. He had conceived neither the title of the new novel nor the name of the protagonist at this point. Indeed, in entries from December 1938 and early 1939 there are two lists of works or characters that include the names Mersault and Caligula 1 \ but still not Meursault. The last fragment for La Mort hcureuse appears in an entry for March 1939. 12 A little later, but hefore the general mobilization in anticipation of the outbreak of World War II, which is mentioned,1\ Camus wrote dovvn a dialogue over-

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heard in a street fight. A slightly amended version is repeated by Sintes in IEtranger (29). Besides his creative activity, Camus's involvement in local affairs reached a feverish pace at this time. Between 1936 and 1939 he took on, often simultaneously, several occupations and responsibilities. As he was completing his philosophy thesis, he made a meager living by traveling ,vith a theater group of Radio Algiers; became temporarily involved in the Cultural Affairs section of the Communist Party, in which capacity he directed a theatrical group, the Theatre du Travail, rebaptized the Theatre de rEquipe after he broke with the party; published IEnvers et l'endroit in May 1937; and, in October 1938, began work as a journalist for the city's new daily, the Alger Republicain, under the wing of his friend Pascal Pia. In June 1939 Camus's series of provocative investigative reports on the misery in Kabylia, "Misere de la Kabylie," appeared in the Alger Republicain. In May 1938 Pia and Camus, 1940 Noces was published, and that same year Camus wrote the first version of Caligula. Except for sketches referring to illness that he might use in future works, none of the toll that this work took on his health is reflected in the CC1I11cls. Still, his direct involvement in journalism and politics made him especially sensitive to the growing number of national and international crises in the late 1930s. In April 1939, one month after the annexation of Czechoslovakia by the German Third Reich, Camus began the third whier (April 1939 - February 1942), One might assume that events related to World War ll, which broke out on 3 September 1939, would figure prominently in these entries, This is not, however. the case, although there are a few exceptions. sllch as a few notations made immediately after the outbreak of the war. But evcn these entries are pieces of overheard dialogues or reflections that could possibly be used for yet another novel or the projected philosophical work that was published in October 1942 as Lc My/he de 5isyphc. \" Camus's primary purpose with the notebooks, it should be remembered, was not to register hi~ immediate experiences but rather to give textual expression to select observations that had the potential to be transformed into parts of literarY works He The Slrange!

5.3

-----------r,~~'------------

"ABSURDISTS AND COMRADES" "Pascal Pia was a prodigy. He left home, changed his name (from plain Pierre Durand) and pub· lished his first poems by the age of fourteen. He mixed with anarchists and Surrealists, and admired Alfred Jarry and Rimbaud. He must have been aware of some similarities between his own precocious career and Rimbaud's, and in 1927,

when he was twenty-four, following Rim-

baud's example, he abandoned literature as a matter of principle, and took up journalism. He was a good journalist, with an excellent memory and a meticulous approach to his work.... "In the summer of

1938,

Pia was dispatched

to Algiers to edit Alger Republicain. One of those he signed to work on the paper was the twenty-five-year-old Albert Camus .... The two men became friends; there was much in common in their outlook on life (strengthened, perhaps, by the coincidence that both their fathers had been killed early on in the First World War), and they found themselves on the same side, as pacifists, in resisting attempts to commit the paper to a more militant stance in the pre-war struggle against fascism. When it was closed down shortly after the outbreak of hostilities, Pia returned to France and was able to find Camus work on Paris-Soir. He was best man when Camus married Francine Faure, and instrumental in getting Gallimard to publish

L'Etranger and Le My the de Sisyphe . ...

Robin Buss From "Absurdlsts and Comrades," TLS: The Times Literary 20 July 2001, p. 30.

Supplement,

54

reserved personal remarks for his extensive correspondence with his future wife, Francine Faure, from Oran, and with Yvonne Ducailar, a close friend who lived in Algiers. 35 Camus's notebook entries for the summer of 1939 show a marked interest in Greek philosophy and mythology In the entries made after September of that year his tone becomes increasingly philosophical, with many passages either prefiguring Le My the de Sisyphe or including brief q1Jotations from philosophers he was reading or rereading at the time, Nietzsche in particular. In October 1939 the Alger Rtpublicain ceased publication, owing to political pressure exercised by military censors and a lack of advertising revenue. Then, in January 1940, after months of intense struggles with the authorities, an official decree brought an end to the paper's short-lived evening supplement and replacement, Le Soir Rtpublicain. 36 With his livelihood gone and the municipal Gouvernement General putting pressure on any prospective employer he might have had, Camus, now a persona non grata in Algiers, spent most of his time in Oran, which explains the many references to the city in his "Cahier," most of them unflattering. It was now clear to him that a transfer to Paris was his only option. In February 1940 there is a rare notebook entry concerning rEtranger; referring to "The old man and his dog. "37 This man prefigures Salamano in the novel. On 14 March 1940/B with the help of Pia, who had preceded him to Paris, Camus was finally hired as secretaire de redaction (editorial assistant) by the big daily Paris-Soir. With its lack of sunshine, gray tones, and frequent rains, the cityscape of Paris became the perfect place of exile dictated by material necessity and intellectual choice. In the same month, shortly before he undertook what turned out to be a difficult trip to the French capital, Camus found a leitmotiv for his novel, which

Gale Study Guides to Great Literature: Literary Masterpieces

also was to become the title, as seen in the final and beginning sentences of two consecutive notebook entries: "Etranger, qui peut savoir ce que ce mot veut dire? Etranger, avouer que tout m'est etranger. "', These sentences are most telling, although Philip Thody's translation in Notebooks, 1935-1942 (1963) cannot render the ambiguity of the key term: "Foreign-who can know what this word means? Foreign, admit that I find ewrything strange and foreign."-IO According to Herbert R Lottman's calculations, "Camus would be writing rEt ranger in Algiers through that summer [of 1939], fall and \\inter, and in Paris during the early spring of 1940, where at last it was completed."41 Today, a little more is knowTl. In a 2 June 1941 letter to Pia, Camus states, "the first chapter [of rEti"anger] was written in Paris one year before the others."·' From Paris, on 23 March 1940, Camus sent a precise request to Francine, who was still in Oran and to whom he ,\Tote eyery few days: "At least I hope that you kept the text of La Man heHreHse. If 50, you should pay attention to chapter II, I believe, from which you will excerpt 1) the beginning of the passage where Emmanuel and Mersault run after a truck on the docks. 2) Everything that concerns the -Sundays at the window." If these two passages are indeed in chapter II, simply mail me the entire chapter to the rue de Ravignan."H The inference to be dra"'ll1 is that, at the beginning of his short stay in Paris, he was still working on major gaps in his novel. Until the German occupation of the city forced Camus to retreat in May to Clermont-Ferrand 'with his colleagues of Pads-Soir, he resided most of these few weeks in the capital in two hotels: the Poirier, on the rue de Ra\'ignan, and, especially, the Hotel Madison, on the boulevard Saint-Gennain. These, then, are the places where, in his spare time, he composed missing segments of. and put the finishing touches on, rEtranger. On 18 April 1940 Camus reassured Francine that he was at ease with himself: "as I am writing I feel a great peace in myself. I have never worked 50 much before. This room is miserable; I live alone, I am tired, but I don't know whether my troubles are the cause or the consequence of my fatigue. I write everything that I wanted to write and soon I shall be able to judge what I am worth and decide one way or another."44 Shortly thereafter, a notebook entry dated May 1940 states \\ith anticlimactic brevity, "rEt ranger is finished. "45 A much more informative statement can be found in one of Camus's last letters to Francine before he had to leave Paris. It is dated 1 May 1940 and reveals something of the exhaustion and uncertainties that writing I.'Etranger caused him, but also the uncharacteristic facility \\ith which he was able to compose the missing parts: No doubt my work is not finished. Some things have to be taken up again, others must be added, others still rewritten. But the fact is that I am finished and The Stranger

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Pages from Camus's first notebook

that I have penned the last line. Why do I tum immediately to you? I have this manuscript in front of me and I think of all the effort and willpower it cost me-how much presence of mind it required-how many other thoughts, other desires I had to sacrifice to remain in its climate. I don't know what it is worth. Recently, at certain moments, some of its sentences, its tone, its truths penetrate me like lightning and I was terribly vainglorious. At other times I see only ashes and blunders. I am too drunk with this story. I will put these papers in my drawer and begin working on my essay [Le My the de Sisyphel. In two weeks, I will take them out again and work my novel over. Then, I will have it read. I don't want to spend too much time on this because in reality I have been carrying it with me for two years and I could easily see by the way I was writing it that it was already etched in my mind. It will soon be two months that I have been working at it every day and a large portion of my nights. There is a curious thing, I was leaving to work for the paper [Paris-Said, I was abandoning one and a half pages I had written and, when I returned, without effort, perfectly lucid, I picked up my sentence and continued."46

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SALE OF THE 1940 MANUSCRIPT OF L'ETRANGER "PARIS-The handwritten manuscript of Albert Camus' most famous novel, 'The Stranger,' was sold at auction yesterday for $175,000. The 104-page manuscript was signp,d and dated April 1940. 'The Stranger,' about a French expatriate in North Africa who is jailed for murder, brought international acclaim to Camus, already known in French intellectual circles as a leader of the existentialist movement. He won the Nobel prize for literature in 1957, three years before his death. The manuscript had belonged to a private collector. The buyer was not identified." Boston Globe, 16 June 1991, national/foreign sec., p. 23.

When Quilliot prepared the still-authoritative version of rEtranger for Theatre, recits, nouvelles (the first volume in the two-volume Pleiade edition of Camus's works, published in 1962), he had access to two manuscripts. One, entirely in Camus's hand and labeled "rns 1" by Quilliot, features "small drawings in the margins such as the sun, the gallows, etc.,"" as well as many references to part 2 scribbled in the margins of part 1. This version is the base text for the 1962 edition. The other manuscript, called "ms 2," is apparently an earlier version. Quilliot also had access to a third source, a partial typescript'" that is identical with, and therefore posterior to, ms 1, while the rest is written in Camus's hand on the typescript. This text has a small number of variants, a selection of which are reproduced in the 1962 Pleiade edition. In ms 2 there are four possible subtitles for rEtranger: ou la Pudeur (or Modesty) ou Un homme heureux (or A Happy Man) ou Un homme libre (or A Free Man) ou Un hamme comme les autres (or A Man like Others) ....

Additional clarifications pertaining to the history of these manuscriplc; may be made known in the future but are not expected to offer significant The Stranger

.5 7

changes in the text of the novel as it is known today. Quilliot also offers a well-founded conjecture regarding the style of rEtrclllger. He suggests that the unique style of the novel, already manifest in the opening sentences first captured in the Camets, may owe much to the street language of Algiers, called Cagayous, and to the fact that popular narratives in general operate in a two-tense frame of temporal references, in which "sentences are juxtaposed or coordinated only by 'and' or 'then."'5o Quilliot also refers to some entries in the Camets that reproduce this oral style, as well as to a passage in Camus's essay "Entre oui et non," from IEnvers et l'endmit, which describes a son's observations of his mother.

PUBLISHING A FIRST NOVEL: THE PIA CONNECTION In the early fall of 1940 the war once again caused Camus to move, this time to Lyons, where Paris-Soir had a bureau. The now-completed German invasion generated a division of France into three zones: the strategically important North, the Northeast, and the Atlantic coast, all under finn German control; the South, considered a zone libre (free zone) until the November 1942 invasion of North Africa by the Allied troops, at which point the zone libre was also considered occupied; the center of the country, the so-called Etat Franr;ais (French State), with Vichy as the capital. This "French State" was headed by Marshal Philipe Petain, a military hero in World War I, and administrated by a collaborationist government. Located not far from Paris at the gateway to the South, Lyons naturally became a first gathering place for metropolitan refugees. But the intermittent and thinly disguised collaborationist position of Pmis-Soir raised serious questions in Camus's mind as to whether he should continue to work for the paper. Since, as an editorial assistant, he did not write articles himself, and with no prospect for more satisfying work, he decided to wait for a better opportunity. In the meantime his divorce from his first wife, Simone Hie, had been finalized, and he was free to marry Francine. The ceremony took place in Lyons on 3 December 1940. At this time Camus was completing his trilogy on the absurd (rEtrangef, Le My/he de Sisyphc, and Caligula)-"the three absurds," as he labeled them in his 21 February 1941 entry in the Camets. 51 The indefatigable Pia, mobilized in 1940 and then discharged after the defeat, also arrived in Lyons and resumed his work in his customary style, behind the scenes. Unfortunately, before any serious discussions about publication outlets for the nearly finished manuscripts could take place, Camus was laid off from his job in Lyons as part of a workforce reduction. InJanuary 1941 Camus and Francine had no option but to return to Oran via Marseille. vVithout regular income, save for limited funds that he 58

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received from private lessons that he gave as a tutor in Oran, Camus lived for a while with his in-laws, who took good care of him when his tuberculosis flared up again. He attempted to renew his contacts in Algiers (an expensive eleven-hour train trip away), rekindled his friendship with Yvonne Ducailar, made some minor corrections to his manuscripts, and spent much of his time with local friends. Oran remained for Camus an uninspiring city, not only because of its humid climate. Fortunately, he was able to tum to Pia for a way out. The two friends exchanged frequent letters, Pia keeping his correspondent informed of possible job opportunities and urging him to return to France. Pia also inquired about the three manuscripts he had not yet seen: "1 wait impatiently to reread your Caligula and to read your novel,"" he \vrote from Lyons to Camus in Oran on 16 March 1941 before proposing to serialize IEtranger in a yet-to-be-Iaunched periodical that was to be called Promethec. He reiterated this proposal on 24 March H but placed it in doubt in a letter of 31 March.'· Eventually, after searching for a substitute title because Pro me thee had already been used, Pia went ahead \'Vith his periodical project but dropped the plan to serialize the novel. Finally, on 10 April 1941, he confirmed, "I did receive your manuscripts the day before yesterday"55 Two weeks later Pia, one of the most astute readers the author could hope for, sent Camus what must be the first informed critical reaction to IEtranger: Quite frankly, it has been a very long time since I have read something of this quality. I am convinced that sooner or later ~Etranger will find its place, which will be at the LOp. The second part-the investigation, the trial, the cell-is a demonstration of the absurd, constructed like a perfect machine where nothing, however, discloses an organization. And the last fifteen pages are admirable. They are as good as the best pages of Kafka or Rudolf Kassner. I have every reason to believe that this will delight Malraux, La whom I shall send your two manuscripts IUtranger and Caligulal once I have reread them.

The main argument of Pia's rapid assessment constitutes a brilliant anticipation of Jean-Paul Sartre's famous explication of IEtrangcl as an illustration of Le My the de Sisyphc. Equally insightful is Pia's concise cbaracterizatiol1 of the style: "What also struck me in IEtranger is the constant accuracy of the tone and, linked to it, the propriety of the images when you talk about the perspiration on the face of old Perez.... "'7 The first important incident leading to the surprisingly quick publication of l'.Etranger was Pia's chance encounter with Andre Malraux's brother, Roland Malraux. who happened to be passing through Lyons. Pia asked him to deliver the manuscripts of ITtranger and Caligu!a to his brother and informed Camus in May 1941 that he would 'write to Andre Malraux himself. Another friend, Jean Paulhan. the most influential figure in the Gallimard publishing house, informed Pia that he would like to read l'.Etranger The Stranger

59

and that, as Pia reported to Camus, "he will have it published by G.G." (Gaston Gallimard, the founder of the Gallimard firm).58 Le My the de Sisyphe, the third part of the absurd trilogy, was still being typed by Francine in Oran and had not yet been seen by Pia. But from Lyons, he announced its imminent availability to his literary contacts. Andre Malraux's detailed response to Pia concerning the two manuscripts arrived· quickly and was immediately copied to Camus on 27 May 1941: I just finished [writes Malraux] Camus's manuscripts. It bothers me quite a bit not to go to Lyons, for to talk about these things is after all more serious than the letters and other summaries.

Camus with the publisher Gaston Gallimard (center) and his nephew Robert Gallimard (left)

I first read Utranger. The theme is very clear; and it is only clear in Caligula, I believe, because it is made clear by I:Etranger. Grosso modo [in a general sense], it seems to me that Caligula should be left in the drawer as long as I:Etranger-or something else-will not familiarize the public with Camus. We shall talk about this again, if you wish.

I:Etranger is of course an important thing. The force and the simplicity of the means, which end by constraining the reader to accept the point of view of its character, are all the more remarkable as the fate of the book depends entirely on the character who is or is not convincing. And what Camus has to say, by way of convincing, is not nothing."

Malraux followed these remarks with a long list of narrative details in the novel, on which Pia commented one by one in his report to Camus. Given Malraux's prestige and authority and Paulhan's predisposition to have the book published, it was no longer a question of whether but when fftranger would be considered for publication by Gallimard and his firm's so-called comite de lecture (readers' committee), an established formal selection board that functioned even during wartime. 60 The manuscript of rEtranger was read not only by Malraux but also by Grenier, Camus's first mentor from his days as' a student in Algiers, and two already recognized authors: the novelist Roger Martin du Gard and the poet Francis Ponge, whom Camus befriended once they became fellow Resistance activists. To counteract Malraux's concerns about finding ways to familiarize the public with Camus's work, Pia now pushed for rapid delivery of the manuscript of Le My the de Sisyphe so that Gallimard could publish the three works at once (Caligula being the third) in order to

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-----------r,~~'-----------demonstrate to readers the close interrelation among them. In spite of Pia's "publication pool game,"61 as Olivier Todd has called it, the comCAMUS AND THE ABSURD bined publication could not take place. Once "To those who know that you have studied Malraux realized the philosophical connecthe absurd from a philosophical point of view, tions between [Etranger and Le My the de the distance you have covered is obvious. Unfor· Sisyphe-the typescript of which Pia quickly tunately, it is rare that the university and the circulated as soon as he received it-he conSorbonne lead to a great book: in general, their cluded, 'The rapprochement between Sisyphe consequences do not go beyond La Revue de and [Etranger has many more consequences metaphysique et de morale and the Alcan than I assumed. The essay gives the book its Library. And, finally, I frankly admire the mas· full sense, and, above all, changes what initery that enables you at once to expose Meur· tially appeared in the novel to be monochrome sault's news item [the newspaper clipping he and almost poor into an austerity that becomes finds in his prison cellI and to write the crazy positive, that takes on a primitive force." 62 monologues of Caligula." Eventually, Malraux was the powerful messenPascal Pia ger who personally convinced Gallimard to look seriously at the philosophical work and From a letter from Pia to Camus, 25 April 1941, in Correspon. the novel, while for the time being Caligula dance, 1939-/947, edited by Yves Marc Ajchenbaum (Paris: Fayard/Gallimard, 2000), p. 58. seemed to have been forgotten. No less influential than Malraux was that other insider at Gallimard, Paulhan, who also happened to be a member of the [amite de lecture, whose formal approval of the manuscripts was statutorily required. Paulhan, who, like Pia, preferred to remain in the background, told his friend, "1 finally received the Camus [texts]. I read rEtranger at one go. What to do? G.G. will obviously be ready to go ahead. "03 While Paulhan liked the novel, he was less sanguine about Le My the de Sisyphe but was not opposed to it.

In September, Pia mailed the three manuscripts, including a co[rected copy of rEt ranger; to Gallimard, then residing in Cannes but traveling back and forth to Paris. Raymond Gallimard (one of Gaston's brothers and a co-owner of the firm) promised Pia that he would make sure the corrected copy was the text that he would make sure would be used in Paris."4 On 12 November 1941 Gallimards comit[ de lecture"' formally approved the publication of [Etranger, apparently with the understanding that Le My the de Sisyphe would follow soon. The short time that elapsed between acceptance and publication was all the more remarkable because of the material difficulties caused by the war, which seemed to have been overcome with surprising ease. Lt. Gerhard Heller, the chief German censor of French publications, granted the required permission to publish Camus's novel almost overnight. Once enough paper was found in those times of rationing and severe shortages (Gaston Gallimard even inquired whether a cerThe Stranger

61

ALB E R T CAM U S

tain type of paper could be found in Algeria), the not-quite-simultaneous publication of rEtranger and Le My the de Sisyphe took place, with the novel appearing first, in June 1942,66 and the essay in October, although with the suppression of a chapter on Franz Kafka that was unacceptable to the censors.

Between the publication of rEt ranger and Le My the de Sisyphe Camus returned to France, but not to Lyons, as Pia hoped he would. When Camus and Francine made that trip in the summer of 1942-they had to wait for the end of the school year because she was employed as a teacher-they ended up in Le Panelier, near Chambon- sur-Lignon in the Massif Central, where, on doctors' orders, Camus was to rest in the better air of a higher altitude. In October 1942 Francine returned to Oran in order to resume her teaching position, while her husband stayed in France. The November landing of the Allied troops in North Africa prevented Camus from rejoining her in Oran. He now had no choice but to remain in Title page of the first edition of Camus's first France, where he worked on his next play, Le published novel (1942) Malentendu, and his next novel, La Peste. Above all, the time had come to participate in the Resistance against the German occupier. Once again Pia, who left his post at Paris-Soir to work undercover in a leadership capacity, introduced Camus to a new circle, an underground network called Combat that published a clandestine pamphlet of the same name. To help his near-penniless friend, Pia asked his Gallimard connections to help secure a minimal regular income for Camus, in spite of the latter's reluctance.

L'ETRANGER

The last time the Pia connection had an impact on Camus's life was when, immediately after the liberation of Paris in August 1944, Combat the pamphlet became Combat the newspaper and, for a while, France's most prestigious daily, with Pia and Camus as co-editors. Different views on the financial and political strategies of the paper, however, drove the two friends apart. In the late fall of 1945, Camus wrote to Pia explaining why he had decided to quit the paper, although he stressed that he would rejoin it later, once political difficulties had

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ceased to create problems.'" What is surprising in this somewhat formal letter is that, contrary to his customary style, Camus used the familiar tu form of the second-person-singular pronoun, which, however, did not prevent him from confirming his resignation. The letter traces the emerging fault line in their friendship, attributable to Camus's strong suspicion that the paper was taking an ambiguously pro-Gaullist direction. On the other hand, rectifying a false attribution that he perceived in an account of the break in Lottman's Albert Camus: A Biography (1979), Pia explained in a 30 October 1978 letter to Lottman that he in turn resigned from Combat in "late March 194 T' because he felt betrayed by Camus, who did not dispel false rumors that some coworkers were circulating about Pia: "I am not a character who cultivates intermittent friendships. "68

CAMUS'S VIEWS ON VETRANGER AT THE TIME THE NOVEL WAS PUBLISHED When Camus finished I.:Etranger and began to think about La Peste, he continued what by now had become a habit of sketching out snippets of conversation, themes, and even prospective titles, such as "Le joueur" (The Gambler), all combined with occasional reflections on the art of writing. A typical example is an undated notebook entry made sometime in the spring of 1941 in which he reacted to a trend he intended to change: The whole effort of Western art is to provide our imagination with types. And the history of European literature seems to be nothing but a series of variations on the same types of themes. Racinian love is a variation on a type of love perhaps never found in life. It is a simplification, a style. The West does not recount the events of everyday life. It is forever feeding its frenzy on great images. It wants to be Manfred or Faust, Don Juan or Narcissus. But it never quite manages to make itself coincide with these images. It is always carried away by the fever for unity. In desperation, it has invented the movie hero."

While Camus was convinced that good writing must include the creation of myths, he remained opposed to the merely allusive recycling of ancient myths, a strategy much in vogue in the theater of the 1930s, as exemplified in the plays of jean Giraudoux, an author he intensely disliked. Rather, in Camus's view, myth making had to come from within the typical or, possibly, archetypal samples found in the contemporary reservoir of human types. Moreover, if universal types of mythical proportions are used, such as Faust and Don juan, they have to "coincide," as Camus said, with the needs of the contemporary imagination. His planned fusion of Don juan and Faust, briefly indicated in a project that never moved beyond initial The Strangel

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Andre Malraux (left) and Pia on the telTace of the Combat offices

outlines,70 is an example of his own effort to revitalize old myths, injecting them with the visions and desires of his own times. Adjusting such themes for contemporary use, however, does not mean that an author has to be identified with the characters he or she creates. The experience of self-distancing that made Camus abandon the publication of La Mort heureuse and discover his own voice and style in fEtranger also reminded him that "The problem in art is a problem of translation. Bad authors are those who write with reference to an inner context which the reader cannot know. You need to be two people when you write. Once again, the first thing is to learn to govern yourself."71 A few months later Camus added what appears to be an emerging theory on the art of writing: "Hateful, the artist who talks about and exploits what he has never experienced. But be careful, a murderer is not the best man to talk of crime. . . . Essential to imagine a certain distance between creation and the deed. The true artist stands midway between what he imagines and what he does."72 IEtranger is the proof that he had found the required critical distance. Through the summer and fall of 1942 the novel began to generate reviews (some of which visibly upset Camus); the underlying aesthetic principles of IEtranger can be traced through his often extensive reactions to these reviews.

Beyond the general notes and observations on the art of writing in the Camets, Camus did not ask himself directly who or what might have inf1uenced the writing of rEtral1gn: Most of his recorded statements about such influences are answers to friendly readers and, later, to critics, many of whom he felt misread the novel. from the heginning, there was a certain defensiveness in his responses because he feared that readers understood neither the novelty of his narrative technique nor the unorthodoxy of Meursault. In an early interview, published in the 15 November 1945 issue of the widely read journal Nouvelles litteraires, Camus gave a nuanced account of the impact on rElnll1grr of John Steinbeck, William faulkner, Ernest Hemingway; and John Dos Pass as (chief exponents of what was

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then commonly known in France as "the American novel"). Camus readily admitted that he had read the works of these writers but immediately added that the American narrative technique seems to lead to a dead-end. It is true that I used it in LEtranger. But it suited my intention, which was to describe a man without an apparent conscience. By generalizing this technique one ends up in a world of automatons and instincts. This would be a considerable impov' erishment. This is why, while I will render to the American novel everything it deserves, I would give a hundred Hemingways for one Stendhal or Benjamin Constant. And I regret the influence of this literature on many young authors_ 71

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CAMUS ON MYTH AND HERMAN MELVILLE UThe story of Captain Ahab, for example, flying from the southern to the northern seas in pursuit of Moby Dick, the white whale who has taken off his leg, can doubtless be read as the fatal passion of a character gone mad with grief and loneliness. But it can also be seen as one of the most overwhelming myths ever invented on the subject of the struggle of man against evil, depicting the irresistible logic that finally leads the just man to take up arms first against creation and the creator, then against his fellows and against himself. Let us have no doubt about it: if it is true that talent recreates life, while genius has the additional gift of crowning it with myths, Melville is first and foremost acre· ator of myths."

Later Camus took a similar position in a conversation with, and summarized by; Quilliot. This exchange probably took place in the mid to late 1950s, after several French and foreign critics had attempted to identify, beyond the American novel, several other posAlbert Camus sible influences on LEtranger; such as the ficFrom "Herman Melville." ,n Lyrical and Critical Essays, tion of Kafka, Voltaire's contes philosophiques translated by Ellen Conroy Kennedy, edited by Philip Thody (philosophical tales, such as the well-known (New York: Knopf, 1968) , pp. 129-130. Candide, 1759), and Stendhal's novel Le Rouge et Ie noir (1830). In this conversation, paraphrased by Quilliot in Theatre, recits, nouvelles, Camus reiterated that the technique of the American novel reflected "a conception of existence and a way of life that he felt he was unable to share, [indeed] a mechanized and dehumanized world against which he intended to fight." If he adopted this technique, especially in the first part of [Eu-angel; it \vas to a "quasi polemical" end. Camus insisted on Meursault's passivity. calling him "a negative character insofar as he seems deprived of any subjectivity. "'4 In the second part of the novel, Camus pointed out, the "technique arne ricaine" was abandoned at the point at which Meursault becomes conscious of his situation. Such a structural bipolarity led Camus to conclude that he used this contrastive narrative device "paradoxically in order to place it at the service of the myth. "75 Another revealing contemporary comment can be found in an unpublished letter of 16 October 1942 from Camus to Blanche Balain, a The Strangu

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friend from his days with the Theatre du Travail in Algiers: rEtranger is indeed a deliberate and voluntary book which seems to lack emotion.... But [itl projects a double significance and Mersault [sic], whom I tried to render natural and alive, is however at the same time a symbol. On the other hand, he takes on an additional significance insofar as he stands at the beginning of a series of deeds whose later perspective will enlighten him. He describes point O-and what a man camped at point 0 can see of existetlce."

The reference to Meursault's location at "point 0" is an uncanny anticipation of a trailblazing critical work by Roland Barthes, Le Degre zero de l'ecriture (1953; translated as Writing Degree Zero, 1968), in which Barthes uses IEtranger as a paradigmatic example for his concept of ecriture blanche (blank writing). 77 Camus's most widely known interpretive comments on IEtranger are found in his 1955 preface to an American school edition of the novel in the original French. 78 While readily acknowledging the paradoxical nature of the statement, he reiterates a summarizing phrase given as a stock answer in several interviews: "In our society, every man who does not cry at his Postwar d is play at the offices of Combat, wh ich mother's funeral runs the risk of receiving the became a daily after the liberation of Paris in death penalty." His elaboration that "the hero of August 1944 the book is given the death sentence because he doesn't play the game" shows that throughout his career as a writer the notions of game and gamesmanship remained central to him.79 Camus may not have pursued the project of a novel to be called "LeJoueur,"BO but all of his principal and secondary fictional characters are in many ways gamblers on the chessboard of life and death: Meursault, Rieux (the doctor in La Peste who wins temporary victories over death through medical means), and Clamence (the fallen lm,vyer in La Chute who stakes his victory on the game of duplicity). As Camus notes in the preface, Meursault's strangeness and marginality ane! his crude behavioral patterns may lead the reader to the wrong conclusion that he is a "wreck." A more careful reading, with attention to the strategy of his game, cannot but reveal why Meursault does not go along with society's rules: "he refuses to lie," Contrary to "what we all do," he 66

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"doesn't want to simplify life. He says what he is, he refuses to conceal his feelings, and immediately society feels threatened." Instead of the passionless automaton that some readers associate with the protagonist, Camus sees "a profound, that is, tenacious, passion animating him, the passion of the absolute and of truth" albeit, for the time being, "a negative truth, the truth of being and feeling, without which no victory over oneself or the world will ever be possible."~1 The fact that MeursaulL dies for his truth induces Camus to explain yet another paradoxical statement he had made earlier, that he "attempted to embody in [Meursaultl the only Christ we deserve." In the face of such a provocative remark, he stresses in the preface that the biblical reference carries "no intention of blasphemy but only a somewhat ironic affection an artist has the right to feel for the characters of his creation. ""2 The ironic distance that Camus keeps from his character in these statements confinns that he did not identify himself with Meursault.

NOTES 1. Albert Camus, "Notebooks, 1935-1942," translated by Philip Thody in Camus, Notebooks, 1935-1951, translated by Thody and Justin O'Brien (New York: Marlowe, 1998), p. 28. Thody's English translation' does not capture the density of the formulaic French original: "Intellectuel = celui qui se dedouble." See Camus, Carnets, mai 1935 - jevrier 1942 (Paris: Gallimard, 1962), p. 41. Unless otherwise indicated, all subsequent quotations from the notebooks are from the translations of CamelS, mai 1935 - jevrier 1942 and Carnets,janvier 1942 - mars 1951 (Paris: Gallimard, 1964) in Notebooks, 1935-1951. There is no English translation of Carnets III, mars 1951 decembre 1959 (Paris: Gallimard, 1989).

2. Ibid., p. 3. 3. Ibid., p. 10. 4. Ibid., pp. 11-12. 5, Ibid., p. 12.

6. Ibid., pp. 21-22, for example. 7. Ibid., p. 13. 8. Ibid., p. 32. 9. Ibid., p. 35. 10. Thody's translation of "Aucun rapport," which also means "No connection." 11. Camus, "Notebooks, 1935-1942," p. 39. 12. See Camus, Theatre, recits, nouvelles, Bibliotheque de la Pleiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1962), p. 1915. 13. Camus, "Notebooks, 1935-1942," pp. 45-46. 14. Ibid., p. 42. See also the double entry on pp. 47-48. 15. See Camus, Theatre, rt'cits, nouvelles, p. 1738. 16. Camus, "Notebooks, 1935-1942," p. 49. The Stranger

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17. Ibid., p. 63. Thody's translation renders "Cahier II" as "Notebook II," which is not to be confused with the second volume of the original French edition of the Camets, published as CamelS, janvier 1942 - mars 1951. Instead of Cahiers, Gallimard chose the title Camets in order to avoid any confusion with the series Cahiers Albert Camus, which was in preparation when the first volume of the Camets came out in 1962. The primary purpose of the series was and remains the publication of previously unpublished works, such as La Mort heureuse and Le Premier Homme. 18. Ibid., p. 69. 19. Ibid., p. 78. 20. Ibid., p. 89. 2I. Ibid., p. 90. 22. Ibid., p. 99. 23. Ibid., p. 101. 24. Thody's translation of this word as least has been altered to less, because less is the equivalent of mains in French and because the superlative would be too strong in this case. Camus includes a slightly amended version of this theoretical passage in the section of Le My the de Sisyphe titled "La Creation Absurde" ("Absurd Creation"). 25. Camus, "Notebooks, 1935-1942," p. 104. 26. Ibid., p. 105. 27. Ibid. 28. Ibid., p. 106. 29. Ibid., p. 116. 30. Ibid., pp. 115-118. 31. Ibid., pp. 118-119. 32. Ibid., pp. 121-122. 33. Ibid., p. 124. 34. Ibid., p. 137. 35. Both collections of correspondence remain unpublished. Copies of Camus's letters to Yvonne Ducailar are in the Documents Collection of the University of Florida Library, Gainesville. Excerpts from both sets of correspondence are quoted by Olivier Todd in his Albert Camus: Une vie (Paris: Gallimard, 1996). 36. For a useful list of articles by Camus that appeared between 1938 and 1940 in the Alger Republiwin and Le SOiT Republkain, see Appendix A in Camus, "Notebooks, 1935-1942," pp.219-224. 37. Camus, "Notebooks, 1935-1942," p. 168. 38. See Todd, Albert Camus: Une vie, p. 235. 39. Camus, Camets, mai 1935 - jtvrier 1942, p. 202. 40. Camus, "Notebooks, 1935-1942," p. 170. 41. Herbert R. Lottman, Albert Camus: A Biography (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1979), p.208. 42. Camus to Pascal Pia, 2 June 1941, quoted in Todd, Albert Camus: Une vie, p. 280. Curiously, this letter is not included in the most recently published correspondence

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between Camus and Pia, COlTespondance: 1939-1947, edited by Yves Marc Ajchenbaum (Paris: Fayard/GaUimard, 2000). 43. Camus to Francine Faure, 23 March 1940, quoted in Todd, Albert Camus: Une vie, p. 238. 44. Camus to Faure, 18 April 1940, quoted in Todd, Albert Camus: Une vie, p. 246. 45. Camus, "Notebooks, 1935-1942," p. 181. 46. Camus to Faure, 1 May 1940, quoted in Todd, Albert Camus: Une vie, p. 247. A similar lelter from Camus to Faure, dated 13 May 1940 (immediately preceding his retreat to Clermont-Ferrand), is partially quoted in Albert Camus: Une vie, pp. 249-250. 47. Camus, Theatre, recits, nouvelles, p. 1916. 48. From Paris, Camus mailed some 'of his manuscripts to Christiane Galindo for typing. She was one of the three women with whom he had resided earlier in la Maison devant Ie Monde in Algiers and was now living in Oran. She was also the sister of Pierre Galindo, one of the "models" for Meursault. It is possible that Christiane prepared the partial typescript of fEtranger (see Todd, Albert Camus: Une vie, p. 245). Todd also relates a memorable altercation that Camus is reported to have witnessed in which Pierre played a role similar to Meursaull, although no murder occurred (see Albert Camus: Une vie, pp. 230-232). Pierre was employed by Combat after the liberation of Paris (see Camus and Pia, CorTespondance: 1939-1947, p. ISO, n. 1). 49. Camus, Theatre, recits, nouvelles, p. 1916. 50. Ibid., p. 1917. 51. Camus, "Notebooks, 1935-1942," p. 189. 52. Pia to Camus, 16 March 1941, in Correspondance: 1939-1947, p. 33. 53. Pia to Camus, 24 March 1941, in Correspondance: 1939-1947, p. 39. 54. Pia to Camus, 31 March 1941, in Correspondance: 1939-1947, p. 45-46. 55. Pia to Camus, 10 April 1941, in Correspondance: 1939-1947, p. 51. 56. Pia to Camus, 25 April 1941, in Correspondance: 1939-1947, p. 58. 57. Ibid. 58. Pia to Camus, May 1941, in Correspondance: 1939-1947, p. 61. 59. Andre Malraux to Pia, quoted in a 27 May 1941 letter from Pia to Camus, in Correspondance: 1939-1947, p. 67. 60. On 1 November 1943 Camus was given a part-time position and an office at the Rue Sebastien-Bottin headquarters of Gallimard. He later became a member of the comite de lecture. See Lottman, Albert Camus: A Biography, p. 291. 61. Todd, Albert Camus: Une vie, p. 281. 62. Malraux to Pia, 30 October 1941, quoted in Todd, Albert Camus: Une vie, p. 281. 63. Jean Paulhan to Pia, quoted in Todd, Albert Camus: Une vie, p. 283. 64. Pia to Camus, 16 March 1942 in Correspondance, 1939-1947, p. 84. 65. In addition to those readers already mentioned, the selection committee included several well-known names:· Marcel Arland, Emmanuel Boudot-Lamotte, Ramon Fernandez, Bernard Groethuysen, Brice Parain, Raymond Queneau, and various members of the Gallimard family: Gaston, Claude (Gaston's son), Raymond, Michel The Stranger

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(Raymond's son), and Pierre (son of Gaston'S and Raymond's brother Jacques). See Todd, Albert Camus; Une vie, p. 283. 66. See Todd, Albert Camus; Unc vie, p. 291. The first edition of ~Etranger had to be limited to four thousand copies because of the severe rationing of paper. Thus, it could not have become an instant best-seller in today's sense of the term. But the sales figures for the novel continued to grow, especially after it was republished in Gallimard's Livre de poche (paperback) series in 1959. While Gallimard does not divulge sales figures as a matter of policy, an anonymous source of the publishing house indicated that by 1973 more than three million copies of Utranger had been sold. This success induced Jiirgen Rehbein, in a well-documented quantitative study of the reception of the novel, to caU it "a classic of the paperback market." See Rehbein, Albert Camus: Vermittlung und Rezeption in Frankreich: Ober Bedingungen literarisch~ Erfolgs (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1978), p. 38. 67. Camus to Pia, fall 1945, in Correspondance: 1939-1947, p. 143. 68. Pia to LOHman, 30 October 1978, in Correspondance: 1939-1947, pp. ISO, 151. Lottman had sent Pia a copy of the French translation of his biography, which was published in 1978, the year before the original English text appeared. 69. Camus, "Notebooks, 1935-1942," p. 195. 70. Camus's first references to Don Juan appear in Camets, mai 1935 - ftvrier 1942. His plan to fuse the Don Juan and the Faust myths and to create a "Don Faust" is sketchily developed in Camets III, mars 1951 - decembre 1959, pp. 186-187,198-199. 71. Camus, "Notebooks, 1935-1942," p. 197. 72. Camus, "Notebooks, 1942-1951," translated by O'Brien in Notebooks, 1935-1951, p. 11.

73. Camus, Theiltre,

n~cits,

nouvelles, p. 1918.

74. Roger Quilliot, in Camus, Theiltre, recits, nouvelles, p. 1918. 75. Ibid., pp. 1918, 1919. 76. Camus to Blanche Balain, 16 October 1942, quoted in Todd, Albert Camus; Une vie, p. 309. 77. Roland Barthes, Le Degrt ZeTa de I'eeriture (Paris: Seuil, 1953), p. 108. See Writing Degree Zero, translated by Annette Lavers and Colin Smith, with a preface by Susan Sontag (New York: Hill &: Wang, 1968). 78. See Camus, "Avant-propos," in ~Etranger, preface and introduction in English by Germaine Bree and Carlos Lynes (Englewood Cliffs, NJ.: Prentice Hall, 1955), pp. viiviii. The preface was reprinted in the Pleiade edition of Camus's works. See Camus, "Preface 11 l'edition universitaire americaine," in Theatre, reeits, nouvelles, pp. 19281929. 79. Camus, "Preface it I'edition universitaire americaine," p. 1928. 80. See "Notebooks, 1935-1942," p. 42. 81. Camus, "Preface a I'edition universitaire americaine," p. 1928. 82. Ibid., p. 1929.

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I!ETRANGER ANALYZED

SETTING: INDETERMINATE TIME AND SPACES At the beginning of rEtranger the funeral of Meursault's mother occurs in Marengo, a town located "about eighty kilometers from Algiers" 0), where he has placed her in a nursing home. To reach Marengo the sedentary son has to take an uncomfortable bus ride. Algiers, today the capital of Algeria, was, at the intentionally vague time of the novel, not only the provincial capital of French Algeria but also a major Mediterranean port and cultural center and the site of an important French university, the University of Algiers. The action in rEtranger appears to take place some time in the 1930s. The events in part 1, covering a period of eighteen days, take place in five scattered venues: the funeral parlor of the nursing home and the local cemetery in Marengo; Meursault's apartment house in Algiers and his apartment itself, from the window of which he observes activity in the street below; Celeste's cafe; the streets of Algiers; and suburban beaches on the Mediterranean, one of which is also the murder scene. Part 2 covers a span of eleven months and takes place alternately at the courthouse where Meursault's trial is held and in his prison cell, where he mulls over his thoughts and only rarely receives visitors (Marie comes only one time to the prisons visiting room, and the prison chaplain makes several visits to the cell). Meursault lives entirely within himself, which creates for readers the impression that he is completely detached from "reality." Some may judge the protagonist to be truthful to the point of heroism, naive and escapist, or, at worst, egocentric and morally reprehensihle. Not surprisingly, historically conscious readers will be tempted to conclude that the estrangement of this stranger is a sign of his isolation from the time in which he lives. The 1930s were filled with major international conflicts, such as the Spanish Civil War, and other threatening events, including the apparently inevitable ascendancy of Adolf Hitler, all feeding the political turmoil that led to World War II. Meursault's oblivious attitude and his conception of space and time, which is generated entirely by the sen-

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Cover of the 1972 Vintage paperback edition of Stuart Gilbert's translation of L'Etranger. Gilbert's translation first came out in 1946, but he revised it from 1947 to 1953, following the minor changes Camus made to the French reprints of the novel published in those years.

sorial stimuli he receives, make him a transhistorical or even ahistorical, as well as a transnational and apolitical, character capable of generating in readers of different ages and backgrounds sharply conflicting reactions. As English Showalter notes, because of Camus's "somewhat abstract, even allegorical, mode" of writing, "the setting is almost incidental. The character could be of almost any nationality; the time could be almost any year in the twentieth century, the place could be almost any large city with a beach and a hot climate."1

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Indeed, the sites where Meursault lives, works, loves, plays, and commits his crime are archetypically common places. Whether it is, in part 1, a city street, the bus, the drab office, his equally drab apartment, the corner bar, or the beach, Meursault experiences each location as an environment that triggers only sensory perceptions. While the nondescript character of the cityscape and urban living spaces underlines their raw functionality, the sea, the beach, and the sky gradually affect his reflections and language differently. In chapter 6, as Meursault approaches the crime scene, his heartbeat increases, and his confused emotions trigger a vocabulary that becomes richer, even poetic. Gradually, land, sea, and sky form a dramatic, if not cosmic, backdrop to his crime, which he seems to watch in his mind like a slowly unfolding drama. Meursaulfs dual role as both actor and spectator is at the root of the ambiguous effect his narration has on the reader. The scene begins and ends with the "overpowering" sun, which affects Meursault after Raymond Sintes has been cut on the face and an arm by one of his Arab antagonists. The sun "shattered into little pieces on the sand and the water" (55). The two companions in pursuit of their adversaries stop at an unlikely spot that has the appearance of a biblical scene: "At the far end of the beach we finally came to a little spring running down through the sand behind a large rock." One of the two Arabs "was blowing through a little reed over and over again, watching us out of the corner of his eyes. He kept repeating the only three notes he could get out of his instrument" (55). When Sintes, hampered by his wounds, gives his gun to Meursault, who has urged him to hand it over before they both retreat, "the sun glinted off" (56) the weapon. At this moment, time and space coalesce: "everything came to a stop there between the sea, the sand, and the sun, and the double silence of the flute and the water" (56). For Meursault the retreat is only temporary, since he inexplicably decides to return to the spot once he and Sintes reach the safety of the beach house. As if already blinded by "the same dazzling red glare," straining "every nerve in order to overcome the sun and the thick drunkenness it was spilling over me" (57), Meursault, under the spell of the environment's magical forces, links his determination to go back to the cool spring with his sense of oppression under the numbing impact of the elements: "With every blade of light that flashed off the sand, from a bleached shell or a piece of broken glass, my jaws tightened" (57). Once Meursault sees the Arab who slashed Sintes "lying on his back, with his hands behind his head, his forehead in the shade of the rock, the rest of his body in the sun" (57-58), he again concentrates all his attention on the effects of the sun: "For two hours the day had stood The Stranger

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still; for two hours it had been anchored in a sea of molten lead" (58). Just before he pulls the trigger, he feels as if he is melting into the blazing surroundings. At the peak of Meursault's intense feelings, expressed in fierce spatial images, the reader feels compelled to understand why he aims the fatal shots at the sun rather than at the Arab brandishing his knife in self-defense. Moments before the crime, the beach has been transformed from a recreational public expanse into a violent private space in which Meursault feels like a lone ranger assaulted by the elements. The blinding display of the sun, the sand, and the sea enjoin the reader better to understand why, at the trial in part 2 of the novel, the sun is the much-ridiculed sale motive Meursault is capable of eVindng when asked why he committed the murder. At the end of part 1 he gives his account of the crime: The light shot off the steel [of the Arab's knife] and it was like a long flashing blade cutting at my forehead. At the same instant the sweat in my eyebrows dripped down over my eyelids all at once and covered them with a warm, thick film. My eyes were blinded behind the curtain of tears and salt. All I could feel were the cymbals of sunlight crashing on my forehead and, indistinctly, the dazzling spear flying up from the knife in front of me. The scorching blade slashed at my eyelashes and stabbed at my stinging eyes. (59)

Thus, the setting of the murder scene-that is, the natural elements rather than his own will-compels Meursault to pull the trigger and commit an absurd but not entirely senseless crime. Much as Meursault divides the space around him in part 1 between public (the streets, various offices, the beach) and private places (his apartment, especially his spot near the window), in part 2 he develops a similar division of the settings in which his life as a defendant and a prisoner unfolds. The public sphere is composed of the characterless offices in which he is interrogated by the investigating magistrate, the prison's forbidding visiting room, the defendant's dock in the courtroom, and the prison cell that he transforms gradually into a private retreat. Like the opening of his trial, Meursault's first experiences in prison are not reassuring. He is first put in a holding cell with other prisoners, where, he says, "All night I felt bugs crawling over my face" (72). But once he is moved to his own cell, he quickly discovers that it affords him a bird's-eye view even more vast in scope than the one he enjoyed from his apartment window: "The prison was on the heights above the town, and through a small window I could see the sea" (73). After a while Meursault learns how to kill time and find comfort in long hours of sleep, at last coming to think of his cell as a refuge shielding him from the intrusive eyes and questions to which he is exposed at the trial. As the cell becomes a protective shell, he is at liberty to daydream about women,

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sun-filled beaches, a last-minute pardon, and Maman. Just as in the murder scene at the end of part 1, so in the final moments of the novel Meursault, now awaiting his execution, surrenders to the elements with whieh he has never lost contact, in spite of his seclusion, and which have at this time a soothing effect: "Sounds of the countryside were drifting in. Smells of night, earth, and salt air were cooling my temples. The wondrous peace of that sleeping summer flowed through me like a tide. Then, in the dark hour before dawn, sirens blasted. They were announcing departures for a world that now and forever meant nothing to me. For the first time in a long time I thought about Maman" (122).

PLOT The plot of ~Etranger closely follows the two-part structure of the novel. Part 1 comprises six chapters and presents a step-by-step account of the events leading to Meursault's crime. The trial is at the core of part 2, which has five chapters. Part 1 opens with Maman's funeral in Marengo. After returning to Algiers, Meursault goes for a swim and has a chance meeting with Marie, who spends the night with him. The next day, a Sunday, he observes the street life below his apartment window. Monday is a lypical workday for Meursault. Returning home, he encounters his neighbors Salamano and Sintes; the latter involves Meursault in a sordid scheme. The following weekend Meursault and Marie go for another swim at the beach and spend the evening together. The next day the two witness Sintes's abuse of his mistress, a Moorish woman. After going out with Sintes, Meursault has a second encounter with Salamano, who has lost his dog. Meursault reacts indifferently to the offer of a job transfer that would advance his career and to Marie's marriage proposal. He ohserves the curious behavior of a little old woman at Celeste's cafe and witnesses Salamano's despair at the loss of his dog. Finally, Meursault, :Ylarie, and Sintes join Sintes's friend Masson and his wife at their beach house. The fateful outing ends with Meursault's murder of one of the Arabs who have been tailing Sintes. All of these encounters and events are related by Meursault in a matter-of-fact way, except for the murder scene, in which his language becomes loaded with metaphors. DiSjointed as they may sound, the events are held together by Meursault's unifying perspective: he narrates them as if he had just experienced them. In fact. he reconstructs these events in order to explain to himself how he came to be in a prison cell accused of a troubling murder. His nonreflective and nonjudgmental The Stranger

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style of narration may be interpreted either as a demonstration of straightforward objectivity or as part of a clever strategy to convince the reader that his criminal act was not premeditated but the result of an accident of nature. Yet, because there is no mention of pencil and paper, the reader cannot know whether Meursault ever writes anything while in prison. As part 2 of the novel progresses, so does Meursault's level of consciousness-and self-consciousness. The seemingly uninformed defendant, closely examined by a battery of lawyers and judges,. becomes a keen observer and judge of the legal theater that the French court system appears to put on in this colonial environment. The theatrical manner in which Meursault describes the murder at the end of part 1 sets the stage for the transition to the stark theatricality of pait 2. The histrionic aspects of the court system are underscored by the way in which Meursault sets himself up in the triple role of defendant, actor, and spectator on the stage of a judicial comedy. While the defendant's dock, the judges' bench, and the prosecutor's and defense lawyer's tables provide the props, the loaded dialogues between Meursault and various actors in the court drama-the examining magistrate, his court-appointed defense lawyer, Marie, the presiding judge, the prosecutor, and the prison chaplain-supply the verbal evidence for the vicious circle in which the protagonist wants to be seen caught. The third and fourth chapters of part 2 offer at once a semibelievable account of a murder trial as it might have been conducted in a French court of the 1930s and a caricature of the justice system in general. As Meursault prepares for his execution in chapter 5, his private thoughts are disturbed by the prison chaplain's third visit (108). After the justice of this earth, Meursault is now confronted with the justice of heaven, both of which he considers abstract and extraneous constructs. The dialogue with the gentle chaplain deteriorates into a shouting match in which, for the first and only time in the novel, Meursault loses his temper. As he faces death, it seems that he also hopes to have won over the hearts and minds of those who have to evaluate the veracity of his account. He certainly comes across as a common man with an uncommon destiny. The pervasive ambiguity of words and situations in LEtranger makes one thing clear: two plots are at work, one being the story line proper and the other, and possibly more important one, being the plot of the narrator in search of an audience. The narrative ensures that Meursault, beyond his death, will always have the last word.

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CHARACTERS True to the technique Camus employed in WTiting rEtranger, the intentionally underdefined characters lack psychological depth and act primarily as narrative voices. Accordingly, they are characterized by their speech patterns rather than their rarely described physical traits. MAMAN: Paradoxically~ Meursault's mother's strength as a character is

underscored by her absence. The famous opening paragraph of the novel not only sets the tone but also captures Meursault's complex relationship with his mother. "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" (3). While living with him, she was a silent but strong presence. Part of the opening entry in the first of Camus's notebooks, which he consistently used as a laboratory for the transformation of personal experiences into literary texts, could be applied to Meursault: "the strange feeling which the son has for his mother constitutes his whole sensibility." Once Meursault places her in the nursing home in Marengo, she remains "a glue that has stuck to the soul."2 Maman's absence (both figurative and real) and Meursault's desire to be loved and understood by her mean that she is his principal emotional point of reference and the source of his own strength. Whether, in his sporadic recollections, she is dead or alive, whether she is living with him or waiting for death in the Marengo nursing home, Maman seems to be omnipresent in the texl. Meursault's lack of tears at her burial is not an indication of heartlessness. Alone in his cell, when all hope is lost and he awaits his imminent execution, he gives one last thought to his mother, who found a second life in the nursing home: "So close to death, Maman must have felt free then and ready to live it all again. Nobody, nobody has the right to cry over her" (122).

MEURSAULT: A man of few words, Meursault paradoxically exists only by

virtue of his speech and thoughts. All that can ever be known about him must be deduced from the manner in which he tells his story. He has nothing to hide, least of all criminal intent. The reader follows Meursault from the moment he reflects on the telegram announcing his mother's death to the point at which he emphatically expresses, for the first and only time, his feelings about her, after a violent confrontation with the prison chaplain and shortly before he faces the guillotine. He appears to be a keen observer of himself and the world around him, although more so in part 2, when he has time for reflection in his prison cell. Like a good reporter, Meursault always tells things as he sees them, with economy Thc Stranger

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., ...... " ...

~,

and precision but without embellishment or ulterior motive. His neutrality, emerging from what Roland Barthes describes as Camus's "ecriture blanche" (blank writing),3 not only produces a bland manner of expression but also renders him faceless. While Meursault deftly sketches the appearance of others, there are no physical descriptions of himself, not even when he looks at his reflection in a tin case in the prison cell, only to describe his facial expression as "serious," "sad," and "stern" (81). When he talks about himself, he restricts his observations to the feelings generated by his immediate environment: hunger, sexual appetite, sleep, heat, and so forth.

To the reader it does not come as a surprise that Meursault attributes his criminal act to the natural elements, nor is it surprising that he answers the presiding judge's question about why he killed the Arab by saying that it was because of the sun. Since he is a strange mixture of the elemental and the elementary, LlIllll~'S 1l1lltlH'I', Lltlll'rilll' Sillt('~ ClIllllS, ill Ml'lIrsalllt's inlriguing Simplicity unTIl'S across 1"',7.111 ,11'1 I'; l1oh'lHlOk \'l1tl y l'.llllllS wrlltl' th,lt ,IS llllldeslY lin Ihe parlicuiar french sense of "till' Stl',II1t-:l' h'l'lillt-: wili, h 1111' ~lIll il"s fllr his pl/L1n,r). II is .\ nhlral quality-Camus initially IIlll! 1"'1 l "1l~1 it II tl'~ his II'ho/., .,,'/lsihilillt" l'Pl1sidnl'l1 II' Plh/cttl as a possible subtitle for the noveli-and the prime reason for Meursault's seeming inability to tell a lie. Sin and repentance are not part of his vocabulary. He always tries to blend in and easily agrees with his interlocutors, even when they build a case against him. As much as Meursault resists being dislllrill'd ill his I'lllllllll', he is Iwl willing III lrouble lllhl'l's and thus plays along with grace, His mother, with whom he feels the strongest, if not the nnly, human bond, is the principal reason for both his modesty and his rrankness. Ironically, she is the cause of both his life and his death. To Meursault, silence i~ a sign of respect for feelings that cannot be expressed in words. Yet, at the trial, his guilt is primarily linked to his alleged lack of respect for his mother, since he goes to a movie and rl'Sllmes a love affair the day after her funeral. hi~

While in the first part of the novel Meursault seems to follow hillillgici\ instilll'IS, I'l'gislning and I'l'SPlllldilig mainly III srnsllry

stimuli, in the second part, when he is in prison for murder, his consciousness and self-consciousness are awakened and continue to develop as the trial proceeds. He may be a stranger to society, but over the course of the novel he gradually grows less strange to himself, as well as to the reader. Nevertheless, Meursault remains an "outsider"-as the quickly abandoned title of the first English edition implies-whether as an observer of himself during his stay in prison or as an outcast who decides not to play society'S games. Meursault's determination to speak the truth as he sees it and to remain faithful to himself to the bitter end explains why he can be perceived, in Robert Champigny's words, as a "pagan hero."s The strange attraction that Meursaulfs language exerts on the reader is attributable to his preternatural ability to remain at once both close and far from the events he is describing and from the interlocutor to whom he is speaking.

-----------.,~~~'------------

JUDGMENT OF MEURSAULT "Meursault is the fictional embodiment of the nihilistic individualism expounded in Le

My the de Sisyphe and commonly referred to as l'absurde .... "Meursdult has no responsibilities, no fam· ily, no personal problems; he feels no sympathy for unpopular causes. Apparently he drinks nothing but cate au lait. He really lives the pru· dent life of a little bureaucrat anywhere and of a French petit bourgeois into the bargain. He car· ries the foresight of his class so far that he waits the medically recommended hours after his noonday meal before he plunges into the Mediterranean. His way of life should constitute a good insurance against nervous breakdowns, mental exhaustion, heart failure, and, a fortiori, the guillotine."

Rene Girard From ·Camus·s Stranger Retried," PMLA, 1964): 519. 521.

CELESTE: The owner of the cafe where Meursault eats and socializes regularly. He is one of Meursault's friends and companions who appear at the trial as clumsy witnesses for the defense. Celeste is to Meursault what today a patient and well-meaning bartender is to a patron who spills his problems while having a drink. The sincerity and banality of the restaurant owner's answers to the presiding judge explain Celeste's affinity \"ith the defendant, \\'hose murderous act he characterizes repeatedly as "bad luck" (92). Such good-natured directness and expressions of sympathy induce l\leursault to admit, in a rare show of emotion. that "it was the first time in my life I ever wanted to kiss a man" (93).

A puppetlike and bizarre character ",hom Meursault observes while eating dinner at Celeste's. Like a scorekeeper. she reads every line of the menu. adds up her bill in advance, and checks off one by one the radio programs listed in a magazine. Hcr "whot-like THE ROBOTLlKE WOMAN:

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(December

-----------r,~~'------------

MEURSAUL T'S CRIME "The pied·noir has to kill the Arab-in this sense it is correct to use the term destiny-in order to take possession of the new Mediterra· nean kingdom. If Meursault is not to die himself, he must carry out the political murder of slaying the Arab."

movements" (43) intrigue Meursault to the point that he follows her in the street until he loses sight of her. One way to interpret this strange character is to see her as a female counterpart to Meursault who is caught in an absurdly mechanized lifestyle that seems to suit her perfectly.

Originally from Paris, this sixty-four-year-old man is the first person Meursault sees at the nursing home in From Albert Camus, The Stranger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 60. Marengo. Beginning his vigil at the mortuary, the son does not want the caretaker "to unscrew the casket" (6) containing his mother. Like other representatives of society, the caretaker does not, in Meursaulfs view, take care of anything. Rather, the old man intrudes upon his privacy by attempting to create an unrealistic portrait of his mother. The ensuing dialogue is awkward and deals mainly with the caretaker's professional past and the final days of Meursault's mother. It becomes clear that the caretaker considers the old people in the home to be detached objects and damaged goods rather than fellow human beings. When he volunteers to serve coffee, Meursault offers him a cigarette in return, which the caretaker accepts with a gesture of surprise. Their smoking in the presence of the deceased and Meursaulfs refusal to view his mother's corpse are two incriminating details that the caretaker remembers and reports when he is called as a witness for the prosecution. THE CARETAKER:

Patrick McCarthy

A "little old man with the ribbon of the Legion of Honor on his lapel" (4), the director appears as a jovial and talkative type who pretends to understand why Meursault's limited resources forced him to place his ailing mother in the nursing home. When the director arrives for the funeral procession "dressed in black with pin-striped trousers" (13), he resembles a ringmaster controlling the deployment of the animals in a circus arena. He also fills Mcursault in on the speCial relationship that Thomas Perez, another resident of the home, had developed with Maman. As the first witness for the prosecution the director testifies, contrary to what he told Meursault before the funeral, that Maman did in fact complain about the manner in which her son treated her. According to the director's testimony against him, Meursault

THE NURSING-HOME DIRECTOR:

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recounts, "I hadn't wanted to see Maman, ... 1 hadn't cried once, and ... 1 had left right after the funeral without paying my last respects at her grave" (89). To this list of incriminating factors the director adds Meursault's inability to remember his mother's age.

THE NURSES: There are two nurses, one wearing a mask and the other

having a masklike face, giving them both a mechanical appearance. The first, an Arab nurse, is present at the vigil for Meursault's mother and moves about like a speechless ghost. With a white bandage she has covered an abscess that eats at her nose and makes her face look flat. Her concealed face accentuates the theme of the omnipresent, yet absent, Arabs in colonial Algerian society. Rather than the nurture and care usually associated with nurses, the images connected with her are sickness, blinding light, whiteness, and a pair of eyes with a bland glance." The second nurse is delegated by the home to attend the funeral, at the end of which she "lowered her long, gaunt face" (14) while stiffly extending her sympathy to Meursault.

NURSING-HOME PATIENTS: Maman's "friends" (9) who attend the vigilwomen with "bulging stomachs" (0) and a few skinny men with canes. Their participation in the ritual of the wake makes them seem like puppets gUided by invisible strings. They make strange noises, and one woman cries demonstratively. "For a second 1 had the ridiculous feeling that they were there La judge me" (10), Meursault remarks, half asleep and unable to "see their eyes" CIa).

THOMAS PEREZ: Maman's special friend at the nursing home, "an awk-

ward, embarrassed-looking old man" (14). He is the only one of the elderly people permitted to attend the funeral (the patients at the home were usually not permitted to attend funerals). Because Perez is weak, he does not participate in the wake. With his "trousers that were corkscrewed down around his ankles, and a black tie with a knot that was too small for the big white collar of his shirt" CI4-15) and "Strange, floppy, thick-rimmed ears [that] stuck out through his fine, white hair"' (15), Perez looks like a clown lost in the crowd. He has trouble following the funeral procession and takes several shortcuts before fainting, "crumpled like a rag doll"' (18). On the witness stand at the trial, he is confused and says that his "sadness made it impossible to see anything"' (91) before The Stranger

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stating in response to the prosecutor's questioning that he did not see Meursault either cry or not cry.

MARIE CARDONA: 7 Marie is a former coworker and girlfriend whom

Meursault meets by chance while swimming in the ocean the day after his mother's funeral. A radiant beauty, Marie plays along when he flirts with her, accompanies him to a movie, and sleeps with him that same evening. Unlike Meursault, who refuses a transfer to a position in Paris that would mean a boost to his career, she would like to go ~o Paris. Above all, Marie wants a deeper relationship and repeatedly asks him whether he loves her and whether he would be interested in marrying her. Disappointing as Meursault's evasive answers are to her, they do not put her off. During one of her stays with him, Marie overhears the beating that Meursault's neighbor Sintes administers to his mistress. When she leaves with Meursault and Sintes for the beach, she witnesses the angry stares of a group of Arabs, one of whom is the brother of Sintes's mistress. A happy woman who cherishes her independence by keeping undefined social appointments at moments when Meursault expects her to stay with him, Marie is the only one to visit him in prison. "You'll get out and we'll get married!" (75) she shouts in her initial confidence. At the trial she reluctantly recapitulates the details of her first encounter with Meursault after his return from Marengo and is forced to identify the movie they went to see the day after the funeral as a "Fernandel film" (94).8 Marie forcefully protests that she is "being made to say the opposite of what she was thinking" (94), realizing that she is becoming, against her win, the prosecution's star witness. Yet, once her visitation rights have been suspended after her first trip to the prison because she is not Meursault's wife, she fails to maintain contact with him even through letters. For his part, Meursault understands that Marie has to move on with her life, much as he would do under similar circumstances.

EMMANUEL: An office colleague with whom Meursault chases and jumps a truck, which they ride to Celeste's cafe to eat lunch.

SAlAMANO: One of Meursault's neighbors, Salama no is the saddest figure

in the novel. With his scaly flesh and "yellowing moustache" (44), the old man is defined by his verbally and physically violent relationship with his spaniel, which is covered with scabs. Salamano's pathetic dependence on his aging pet makes the pair look like a quarreling old couple.

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Meursault, who is sensitive to the dog's whimperings, has observed their fixed daily routine for eight years. When the animal is lost. Salamano naturally shares his despair with Meursault, the only person \\'ho will listen to him. The two exchange sympathy, first for the loss of Salamano's beloved dog, then for the loss of Meursault's mother. Like the statements of the other witnesses for the defense, Salama no's emotional testimony at the trial has the opposite of the intended effect: "Hardly anyone listened to Salamano either. when he recalled how I had been good to his dog and when he answered a question about my mother and me by saying that I had run out of things to say to Maman and that's why I'd put her in the horne" (94).

RAYMOND SINTES:" Another neighbor in Meursault's apartment house. Meursault does not really know him well before the death of Maman. Sintes's seedy reputation as a pimp does not give \'1eursault "any reason not to talk to him" (28). A warehouse guard who is "a little on the short side. with broad shoulders and a nose like a boxer's" (28). Sintes's physique seems to confirm the cliches about individuals suspected of contacts with the underworld. As a "petit colon" (petty settler) he represents one side of the dichotomy "Arabite!Algerianite'" (Arabness/Algerianity) that pervades the text. h' Sintes volunteers information about his abusive relationship with a "Moorish" (32) woman and the problems she creates for him. He does not mince ""ords and succeeds in compelling Meursault not only to listen patiently to his story but also to write a letter that will set a trap for the mistress. whom Sintes intends to punish cruelly. Resorting to simple gestures and phrases-"men always understand each other" (32)- Sintes quickly establishes a bond with Meursault.

When Sintes invites him to a friend's beach house, Meursault does not hesitate to accept. At the beach. stumbling upon t\VO Arabs (the brother of his mistress and a companion) who have stalked him for days. Sintes enjoins his friend Masson to instigate a fistfight that ends in Sintes's being slashed on the face and an arm. But it is Meursault. not Masson, who follows the bandaged Sintt~s back to the beach in pursuit of the Arabs. He hands Meursault his gun. thus signaling that he is leaYing it up to his neighbor to deal with the Arab who wounded him. The two companions head back to the bungalow. but when they reach it. Meursault makes the fateful decision to return to the scene. where he commits the murder. Sintes's behavior encourages Meursault to become not only a tacit accomplice but also a seemingly deliberate criminal. Sintes is also "the last witness" (95) at the trial. As in the case of Marie's testimony. his bold statements are meant to help \1eursault but are used by the prosecuThe Stranger

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tion to prove that the defendant killed "in order to settle an affair of unspeakable vice" (96).

THE ARABS: The first mention of a nameless Arab occurs when Sintes

refers to "some guy who was trying to start trouble" (28), who turns out to be the brother of his mistress. Later, several Arabs appear as a group staring at or following Sintes, who feels threatened. As Christiane Chaulet-Achour points out, the Arab population in I.'.Etranger is consistently associated with "devalorizing semes" such as "lies, deception, inferiority, prostitution."ll The Arabs' anonymity and silent presence in the background have been the motivation for some harsh, sociopolitically based critiques of the novel and, implicitly or explicitly, of Camus himself. 12 One could also argue that the Arabs' facelessness and silence (other than the music one of them plays on his flute at the scene of the crime) mirror the virtual invisibility imposed on them qy the Algerian settlers of the 1930s. The Arabs' imperceptible voice and threatening physical presence fulfill a narrative function in I.'.Etranger and are not meant to sanction a culturally, socially, economically, and politically unacceptable situation. In spite of the threat they present to Sintes, they clearly act in defense of family honor and thus are the victims of games of aggression that the settlers think they can play with impunity. The Arabs' voicelessness and their self-imposed silence actually speak volumes.

MASSON: Sintes's Parisian friend who offers his beach house for a week-

end excursion. In spite of his polished language and bourgeoiS demeanor, Masson seems to belong to the same kind of seedy underworld in which Raymond moves. When the three companions encounter the Arabs on the beach, Masson (whose name alone suggests masse, massif, and massue-a club or bludgeon-all implying brute force) does not hesitate to hit the second Arab "as hard as he could" (53). Because Masson's awkward testimony at the trial follows Marie's dramatic deposition, few listen to his platitudes when he says that Meursault is an honest man "and I'd even say a decent one" (94). Masson is less than convincing; his appearance and shallow characterizations add to the ever larger pile of morally incriminating evidence that the prosecution assembles.

juge instructeur (examining magistrate) has the task of preparing the facts of a case and decides whether it should go to trial, much like a state attorney.

THE EXAMINING MAGISTRATE: In the French court system the

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Neither the debonair tone the magistrate strikes in conversation with Meursault nor the assistance he offers him are really aimed at bringing out the truth." Openly professing his own Christian faith and angrily but unsuccessfully calling on Meursault to acknowledge the validity of the crucifix, the magistrate at last says sadly, "The criminals who have come before me have always wept at the sight of this image of suffering" (69). This scene prefigures the violent clash between the prison chaplain and Meursault at the end of the novel. The magistrate resumes his professional tone and ironic distance, calling Meursault "Monsieur Antichrist" (71).

Like most court-appointed attorneys, Meursault's defense lawyer tries to do a competent job by follOwing routine procedures. Dressed formally in spite of the hot weather, he is "short and chubby, quite young, his hair carefully slicked back" (64). He attempts to formulate a defense strategy that will counteract the mechanistic cause-and-effect psychology the prosecution is expected to use in order to prove, at any cost, a motive for the crime. At the same time, the defense la'W)1er overestimates his own skill. Meursault's straightforward explanations confuse him as much as they confuse the examining magistrate and the judges: "He gave me a strange look, as if he found me slightly disgusting" (65), Meursault recalls. When the trial takes a bad turn because of the testimony of the nurSing-home staff, the defense lawyer misreads the development and tells his client "that everything was working out for the best" (91). He succeeds in temporarily undermining the prosecution's approach by asking, for once, the right question: "Come now, is my client on trial for burying his mother or for killing a man?" (96). Once Meursault is given the death penalty, the lawyer tries to justify his own premature optimism as part of a necessary strategy of encouragement and reassurance. THE DEFENSE lAWYER:

THE PRESIDING JUDGE: The task of the red-robed presiding judge (his

two associates wear black robes) is not only to supervise the actions of the prosecution and the defense but also to question defendants directly. His lofty position allows him to address Meursault with "a hint of cordiality" (87), but he wastes no time in getting to what the court believes is the heart of the matter: Meursault's treatment of his mother. Still, the presiding judge gives the defendant a chance to state clearly "the motives" (03) for his inexplicable crime. When Meursault blurts out that "it was The Stranger

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because of the sun" (103), his case is sealed and the judge has no difficulty in concluding that he is guilty.

The theatrical aspect of the criminal court procedure, reflected in the disposition of the participants in the courtroom and the carefully scripted role each group or individual plays, reaches its high point in the proverbial attack-dog mentality of the prosecution. As they greet each other, the group of lawyers resembles a fraternity of actors who know that they are going to assume a specific role in a morality play in which adversarial posturing feeds the drama. For his part, the prosecutor is expected to use hyperbole, and he does so to the fullest by methodically shifting the attention away from the crime to the state of Meursaulfs soul: "He [the prosecutor] said he had peered into it and that he had found nothing, gentlemen of the jury. He said the truth was that I didn't have a soul and that nothing human, not one of the moral principles that govern men's hearts, was within my reach" (101). Specifically referring to a trial for a case of patricide scheduled for the following day, the prosecutor virtually accuses Meursault of the equally condemnable crime of matricide. To the defense lawyer's accurate observation that his client is accused of killing a man and not of burying his mother, the prosecutor, using one of the oldest tricks in the box of legal arguments, responds, "I accuse this man of burying his mother with crime in his heart!" (96). THE PROSECUTOR:

The most dramatic event in the novel is neither the murder nor the verdict at the end of the trial but the violent confrontation in the prison cell between the chaplain and Meursault. Even though he has not seen the chaplain before because he has refused his earlier requests to visit him, Meursault considers the priest an intruder into his carefully nurtured private sphere. Looking for closure, he rejects the chance of another appeal. At a moment when Meursault is about to reach inner peace, as he is waiting for his execution and observing serenely "from the golden glow in the sky that evening was coming on," the unexpected arrival of the chaplain gives him a "shudder" (llS). Physically, the priest is not an imposing person. Unlike Masson's or Sintes's hands, his "were slender and sinewy," reminding Meursault "of two nimble animals" (16). Spiritually, the chaplain feels uncomfortable because of the prisoner's stubborn religious indifference. The chaplain is shaken in his own faith by the condemned man's heroic clinging to life and steadfast refusal of God in the face of his imminent death. THE PRISON CHAPLAIN:

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Scene from the summer 1945 trial of Marshal Henri Philippe Petain, leader of the collaboration ist Vichy government during the German occupation of France. Camus, who covered the trial as a journalist, can be seen in the second row of spectators, to the immediate left of Pierre Laval (standing in front), who served in the Vichy government as vice premier and foreign minister.

As an agent of the supreme moral authority, the priest is sure that he will not blink in the face of the condemned man's denial of God. Thus, when he looks Meursault "straight in the eye," engaging in a staring game that both players know well, "his gaze never faltered" (117). Increasingly exasperated, the chaplain attempts several strategies to convert the prisoner. He attempts to instill fear; expresses pity; invokes the threat of despair and the burden of sin, with its associated guilt; and raises the prospect that even "the most wretched" may see "a divine face emerge from their darkness" (119). None of these arguments touches The Stranger

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Meursault, and eventually the priest is crushed by the conclusion that he has to concede defeat. Meursault's final verbal and physical outburst is so terrible that guards have to separate him from the chaplain, who leaves with his eyes "full of tears" (122). In a draft of a letter to a critic in one of his notebooks, Camus clarifies that his intentions in this scene were an "artistic means and not ... [an] end": With the Chaplain, my Stranger does not justify himself. He gets angry; and that's quite different. ... The great moment had to stand out. But just notice that there is no break in my character. In that chapter, as in the rest of the book, he limits himself to answering questions. Before there were the questions that the world asks us every day; at this moment there are the questions of the Chaplain. So I define my character negatively."

TWO THEMES, ONE READING PULLING THE TRIGGER: KNOCKING AT THE DOOR OF KNOWLEDGE

Whether his murder of the Arab is a criminal act or an accident is a question that Meursault poses implicitly by providing a highly charged account of the event. The murder scene, because of the way it is narrated, is probably the most analyzed and, consequently, one of the most controversial passages in Camus's fiction. Meursault's way of describing his act can be seen as a blatant attempt to shift responsibility onto nature, fate, or, as Rene Girard disdainfully puts it, "an implacable Nemesis."15 Readers such as Girard, who are disturbed by the protagonist's troubling distance from his victim and the world in general, offer a morally founded interpretation. Since its publication in 1942, ~Etranger has generated readings that lead in a vast array of directions. Some are philosophical (for example, Meursault viewed as an example of the absurd man), some are moral or theological (Meursaulfs blind sensualism, stubborn paganism, or heartlessness), and others are sociopolitical (Meursault's, or even Camus's, implicit or explicit racism and lack of social commitment). Quite a few interpretations of the novel are psychoanalytical (Meursault as a clinical test case), and still others are legal (the novel as a distortion or caricature of the French legal system). Narratological readings abound, restricting themselves to a consideration of the structural functioning of the text. Most earlier critical interpretations belong to either one or a combination of these categories, the only exceptions being strictly literary comparative studies with a thematic orientation, of which there are many. Gradually, but especially since the 1970s, more recent generations of readers have been asking why CEtranger has remained so popular across cultural and generational boundaries and why the bland life of a

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French Algerian office clerk continues to provoke such passionate yet contradictory reactions. Sociopolitical and feminist critical readings of the novel gained strength in the 1980s and 1990s, as did refined text-oriented interpretations that focused on structural and reader-response questions. An even more recent type of exegesis detects in [Etranger a "hermeneutic paradigm," to use the terminology coined by Brian T. Fitch, its most sophisticated practitioner. In The debate about whether to read [Etranger as an artifact, a self-sufficient fictional text, or an historically, culturally, politically, or psychoanalytically loaded document will never be resolved because the pervasive ambiguity of the novel was clearly intended by Camus. Moreover, the deeper roots of the debate place its eventual resolution in doubt because they raise questions about the degree to which fiction is supposed to represent reality, Girard's convenient but artificial separation of the fictional and the fantastic notwithstanding. 17 It is possible that the deepest layers of meaning in LEtrangcr are hidden not in the text but in the reader's reactions to it. A brief interpretation of Meursault's account of the murder can serve as an example of a text-oriented approach that includes a reader-response perspective. As he tells it, My whole being tensed and I squeezed my hand around the revolver. The trigger gave; I felt the smooth underside of the butt; and there, in that noise, sharp and deafening at the same time, is where it all started. I shook off the sweat and the sun. I knew that I had shattered the harmony of the day, the exceptional silence of a beach where I'd been happy Then I fired four more times at the motionless body where the bullets lodged without leaving a trace. And it was like knocking four quick times on the door of unhappiness. (59)

Meursault presents himself after the fact as if he had been in a trance, blinded by the sun and numbed by the heat, while committing the crime. As he tells it, he neither walks to the crime scene nor pulls the trigger of his own will. Much as the elements appear to guide his incomprehensible and solitary steps from the secure beach house back to the paradoxically spring-fed desert spot where the Arabs are resting, the trigger of the revolver "gives" unexpectedly-that is, the gun seems to go off as if gUided by an unknown force. What MeursauIt feels at this decisive moment is not the recoiling force of the weapon with which he has just killed a fellow man but the "smooth underside of the butt," as if he were caressing the soft skin of a living person for the final time. When the sharp noise of the discharging gun wakes Meursault from his stupor and hreaks the wall of silence behind which he likes to live, the concern one might expect him to have for the murder victim is displaced by his desire for harmony and preoccupation with his future. His immediate thought is that the trigger did not The Stranger

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----------~l~~'-----------

SUBCONSCIOUS MOTIVES? "When Meursault, 'the stranger,' fires on 'the Arab,' he magically kills a racial entity in which he is afraid of being dissolved. This action, which he believes is 'caused by the sun,' is the subconscious realisation of the obscure, childish dream of the little white man that Camus never stopped being."

so much cause the death of a human being as signal the first signs of an impending change in his own destiny. The shot also marks the end of the primordial ordinariness that has been the basis of his seemingly uncomplicated happiness. Only then does Meursault admit to his agency, stating that he deliberately fired four more shots into the inert body: This is a bizarre act that the prosecution promptly seizes upon in the trial to buttress its argument fo~ the premeditated nature of the crime.

Henri Krea

Unlike the prosecution, the jury, or the judges, readers are more inclined, if not to believe, at least to lend an ear to Meursault's account of the events. Far from being a stranger, which he never is to his peers, he makes good use of his voice as a talented narrator and establishes a degree of familiarity and transparency that readers are able and possibly willing to take into account in their assessment of his behavior and possible gUilt. The gradual preparation and close observation in Meursault's narration, however, does not compel readers to make an impossible either/or decision as to whether he is "an 'everyman' figure, symbolic of human beings in the modern world, or ... an extreme case, whose fate tests the limits of our moral sensibility: "18 Rather, by the end of chapter 6 in part 1, even the most skeptical interpreters are prepared to take a more detached look at the murderous act from a vantage point that, at least momentarily, suspends the traditional dichotomy between good and evil. While the murder can be viewed as a fait divers, an event reported among other crimes and accidents in the daily newspaper, it is transformed, by virtue of the qualities of Meursault's narrative, into a "textual event"19 destined to capture the readers' attention and imagination entirely: As a captive audience, readers still may not feel much sympathy for Meursault, but they are now primed to share the defendant's box with him imaginatively and, looking through his eyes at the curious but ignorant onlookers in the courtroom, to transform the dock into an observation deck from which to judge the world around him. Thus, the reader is to Meursault what the latter is to Raymond, a patient listener in danger of complicity.

From "Le Malentendu algerien" (The Algerian Misunder· standing, 1961), quoted in translation in Alec C. Hargreaves, "History and Ethnicity in the Reception of L'Etranger," in Camus's L'Etranger: Fifty Years On, edited by Adele King (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992), p. 107.

Each reader of the novel is destined to be an interpreter and, as such, induced rather than seduced into paying close attention to Meur-

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,~ -----------~~,----------sault's presentation. Indeed, his trigger, while deadly in the virtual reality of the story and strongly incriminating in its repetitive use, THE ROLE OF FATE generates discursive effects in the world of fic"The fate theory looks satisfactory as long as tion and reiteration. Directing his aim at the the episode of the murder remains detached interpretant, Meursault succeeds in tempofrom the novel, but it cannot be integrated with rarily suspending (killing) the referential systhe novel. ... tem of his willing readers and, although not "As I read the novel, my attention is replacing it entirely with his own, nevertheless focused upon details which are insignificant in prompts them to keep their minds open. Yet, in themselves but which come to be regarded as offering his own interpretation of the murder, portents of doom just because the writer has he does not seek to impose a particular interseen fit to record them. I sense that Meursault pretation of the events. Rather, he triggers in is moving towards a tragedy, and this impres· the minds of the recipients of his bettersion, which has nothing to do with the hero's informed yet slanted viewpoint a more careful actions, seems to arise from them. Who can see but potentially still critical reaction. Most a woman knitting alone in a dark house at the importantly, Meursault's narration induces beginn ing of a mystery story without being led readers to become the real judges of his crime. to believe that knitting is the most dangerous Nor does his reach stop there. Each subseoccupation?" quent reading of the novel is bound to trigger in the same reader a different judgment, makRene Girard ing it quite difficult to decide whether the most From "Camus's Stranger Retried," PMLA, 74 (December recent interpretation has more validity than an 1964); 522, 523. earlier one. As Meursault acknowledges during the trial (99), the sequence of events, especially the four inexplicable additional shots that he fires into the body of his lifeless victim, constitutes a strong case for his guilt and thus prevents even the most sympathetic readers from overestimating the mitigating circumstances that the narrative of the crime carefully assembles through its powerful imagery By the time the trial begins, readers are primed to follow the defendant's tribulations and observations as more-understanding, because better-informed, judges, but they will eventually have to render and live with their own judgment.

The complex narrative strategies of ~Etranger thus rely on procedures of inclusion and familiarization that, depending on how they are received, work to readers' satisfaction or dissatisfaction. The narrative also proVides strategies of defamiliarization, "procedures d'exclusion"20 (procedures of exclusion) that, according to Michel Foucault, ensure that certain subtexts are available only to a select few who are sharp enough to detect and comprehend them. Meanwhile, the more readily transparent portions of these loaded strategies induce readers at the least to make The Stranger

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a choice-to render their own judgments, including a moral judgment if they are so compelled. The consequences of Meursault's crime, which he compares to a knock at the door of fate, go far beyond his ambiguous legal case. Before the trial even begins, his five shots shatter more than just the deceptive harmony and placid passivity of his life: they also spoil the false cognitive stability and certitude in which both murderer and readers have been basking up to this fatal breakthrough, which both awakens Meursault's consciousness and conscience and sharpens the critical sense of readers. The door of fate is also the door of knowledge. Henceforth, readers and the defendant together have to engage in. a painful search for a truth that threatens to remain elusive forever. Those who think they have found it soon discover its evasiveness. Since judging and interpreting are interchangeable acts, readers may never be able to leave the blind alley of Meursault's contradictions. If they do, what will they find behind the door of knowledge that the novel opens for them?

WHO OR WHAT IS ON TRIAL ANYWAY?

At the beginning of part 2, Meursault is clearly on trial and the sale defendant of a crime that he described from his point of view in part 1. Gradually; as the hearings proceed, French Algerian society and its institutions, especially the court and prison system, are also put on trial as the various actors of the social and legal theater speak up. Their voices simply drown out Meursault's. The Arab, the murder victim, who had no voice even before his death, is further marginalized by the prosecution, which never thinks of placing him in the center of its case. Definitive as they may be, the victim's silence and absence continue to be taken for granted by a court representing colonial power. Beyond this level of meaning there is more at stake in the text than a series of explicit and implicit indictments of vitiated mores and justice. The counterpart to Meursault's almost poetic and therefore, to some, quite irritating description of the murder scene can be found in the latter portion of his trial, when he summarizes the gist of the prosecutor's arguments and concedes that they have "a certain consistency," which is not to say that they are correct: I thought his way of viewing the events had a certain consistency. What he was saying was plausible. I had agreed with Raymond to write the letter in order to lure his mistress and submit her to mistreatment by a man "of doubtful morality." I had provoked Raymond's adversaries at the beach. Raymond had been wounded. I had asked him to give me his gun. I had gone back alone intending to use it. I had shot the Arab as I planned. I had waited. And to make sure I had done the job right, I fired four more shots, calmly, point-blank-thoughtfully, as it were. (99)

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o

I

Ie

,

False identity papers Camus used during the Resistance

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"Plausible" as this list of incriminating factors might seem, it does not mean that they correspond to the events as Meursault experienced them. His summation of the prosecutor's arguments is obviously intended to be ironic. When he says "I had agreed with Raymond" and then continues to use the first-person pronoun several times, he appears to be mocking the prosecutor, who might have adopted the tactic of borrowing Meursault's identity to sound more convincing to the jury, just as his defense lawyer does a little later. This is one among several examples of an ironic use of free indirect discourse. Meursault's use of I in these sentences is not an admission of guilt: he employs the pronoun not to indicate that ?-e actually committed these acts but rather to subvert the prosecutor's speech by exposing his mannerisms. In the context of the verbally reconstructedbut not the actual-crime, the inauthenticity of this "I" represents a type of interpretation that is "plausible" to everyone, especially the jury. Remembering Meursault's own account of the shooting, which they perceive to be a rhetorical tour de force, readers witness how, in the course of the trial, he receives and reacts to verbally loaded and often contradictory information. They are inclined to share his astonishment when he balks at some interpretations and fails to recognize himself in the descriptions that some witnesses and acquaintances make of him. When Meursault trusts in the person on whom his life depends, the defense lawyer, the consequences are fatal. Although at the end he seems to be condemned to death for a reason that is as ridiculous as it is wrong-for not having wept at his mother's funeral-he is also, and perhaps to an even greater extent, the victim of the trust he has placed in his lawyer's words. Compliant as usual, and to his own detriment, Meursault agrees with, and pays dearly for, the lawyer's decision "not to file any motion so as not to antagonize the jury. He explained to me that verdicts weren't set aside just like that, for nothing. That seemed obvious and 1 accepted his logic" (l06). In the end the defendant will die not only for a crime he committed but also for questions he refrained from asking. While readers may agree that Meursault is entitled to doubt the veracity of some of the testimony made on his behalf, they are made aware of an even more serious problem: any verbal account of an underlying reality remains flawed, including the defendant's ironic retelling of the prosecution's argument. Indeed, Meursault agrees that the incriminating factors are "plausible" when presented in the manner that they are, but this does not mean he agrees that they correspond to the facts. Conversely, readers assume a similar stance vis-a.-vis his reports of the verbal "facts" as he heard them in the co'urt room. They may have mentally joined Meursault in the defendant's

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box, but they remain separated from the actual trial by the wall of words that he uses and the partially mirroring, partially distorting flashes that these words reflect. Viewed from this angle, the problem readers encounter is no longer a simple search for veracity but rather a more fundamental series of questions: How does one derive meaning from Meursault's observations in particular and words in general? How does one rely not merely on other people's words but also on any words that purport to reflect facts and reality? By what means can one distinguish conflicting layers of meaning? That is to say, what is interpretation? This is the foundational level of investigation that Fitch embarks upon in his trailblazing study, The Narcissistic Text: A Reading of Camus' Fiction (1982). To flesh out the "hermeneutic paradigm" underpinning LEtranger he relies initially on the affinity between the lawyer's role and that of the reader [Fitch's emphasisl of novels. So before reducing this portrayal of the legal system solely to its SOciological and indeed, within the Algerian colonial situation, political dimensions, it may be as well to take into consideration its more properly literary Significance arising from the resemblances noted between the lawyers' occupation and that of the novelist and his reader!'

Beyond telling the story of a hapless clerk who seems to wander into committing a crime, although the murder is not the main reason for which he faces the guillotine, LEt ranger puts on trial the way everyone-Meursault, his accusers, the judges, and, ultimately, the reader-sees things. Embedded in the narration with its false mirror effects are questions about the reliability of the act of reading. Driven by an inescapable ambiguity that renders not only the narrator's but also potentially all statements unreliable, the text displays a self-reflexivity and, in so doing, makes a theme of "the hermeneutic process. "22 By the time readers reach the second part of the novel, and certainly no later than in the course of a second reading-itself an exercise that induces a mirror-like reflection effect between the two readings-they realize how problematical it is to interpret. At this very moment "the critical enigma'''; posed by LEI ranger becomes an end in itself and is turned into a theme. More than a text that hides a fixed set of meanings waiting to be uncovered, the nove 1 functions as a generator of multiple contradictory meanings that can never be resolved. As Fitch notes, "What if the texts of its critics were in fact to be seen as a direct reflection of the functioning of the text being scrutinized precisely to the extent that the former throws into sharp relief The Stranger

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the very problem of interpretation? Could the wood have been obscured by the trees?"24 One can read LEtranger as an ongoing trial in which each interpretation, even if made by the same reader, leads to a new judgment. As Fitch aptly concludes, "The result is a text wherein the reader reads the story of his own activity. The experience provided by LEtranger is paradoxically that of his own reading. "25 What is on trial in the novel, then, is far more complex than Meursault's absurd crime and the ensuing warped court procedure: it is the never-ending trial of the false certitude implicit in any judgment. With the help of the theatrical enactment of the trial, the text pitilessly exposes the masks worn by everyone involved: Meursault, those who represent society'S central institutions, and, ultimately, the readers themselves, whose identities become problematic each time they come up with a different interpretation. In the chapter titled "La Creation Absurde" ("Absurd Creation") in Le My the Camus in his Gallimard office, 1955. The picture de Sisyphe, a companion work to LEtranger, was taken by the French photojournalist Henri Camus does not hesitate to compare the creCartier-Bresson. ative process with Sisyphus's predicament. That logic may well extend to the reader of the novel. Sisyphus keeps rolling the same boulder up a hill, whence it tumbles down again, but he finds solace in the short respite during his descent, when he briefly escapes the gods' wrath and finds pleasure in his repetitive action. Similarly, readers of LEtranger will find any particular interpretation questionable the moment they reach it. Rather than being frustrated by the never-ending changes of perspective that each act of reading generates, frustrated readers, like Sisyphus, learn to be gratified by the need to resume endlessly their efforts at interpretation without stopping in discouragement. As Camus observes in the closing sentences of Le My the de Sisyphe, "The struggle itself toward the height is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus [or the reader of LEtrangerl happy."26 96

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NOTES 1. English Showalter, The Stranger: Humanity and the Absurd (Boston: Twayne, 1989), p. 2. 2. Albert Camus, "Notebooks, 1935-1942," translated by Philip Thody in Notebooks, 1935-1951, translated by Thody and Justin O'Brien (New York: Marlowe, 1998), p. 3. 3. Roland Barthes, Le Degrt ztro de l'teriture (Paris: Seuil, 1953), p. 76. The term teriture blanche is from Barthes's famous conclusion to his opening argument that "Narration, as a form common to both the Novel and to History, does remain, in general, the choice or the expression of an historical moment" (29). In Writing Degree Zero, their 1968 translation of Le Degrt zero de I'teriture, Annette Lavers and Colin Smith render the term as "colourless writing." Barthes also calls the "style of absence" in rEtranger "writing at the zero degree," "neutral writing," and "innocent," a mode of expression "initiated by Camus's The Stranger" (77). Barthes, who in 1947 attacked the ahistorical dimension of Camus's La Peste, gives credit in Le Degre zero de !'eeriture to rEtranger for its just historical contextualization. 4. See Camus, Theatre, recits, nouvelles, Bibliotheque de la Pleiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1962), p. 1916. 5. See Robert Champigny, A Pagan Hero: An Interpretation of Meursault in Camus' The Stranger, translated by Rowe Portis (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1969). 6. See Christiane Chaulet-Achour, 'TEtranger, une fiction troublante," in her Albert Camus, Alger: rEtranger et autres rreits (Biarritz, France: Atlantica, 1998), p. 52. 7

Cardona was the maiden name of Camus's maternal grandmother, Catherine Marie Cardona, who married Etienne Sintes.

8. Femandel (Fernand Joseph Desire Contandin, 1903-1971) was the most popular French motion-picture comedian between the mid 1930s and the late 1950s. He is best known for his roles in movie adaptations of several stories by Marcel Pagnol (1895-1974) and a series based on popular narratives by the Italian writer Giovanni Guareschi (1908-1968) about the humorously adversarial relationship of Don Camillo, an anticommunist priest, and Peppone, a communist mayor. 9 Sintes was the maiden name of Camus's mother, Catherine Helene Sintes. 10. Chaulet-Achour, "rEtranger, une fiction troublante," p. 52. 11. Ibid. 12. Two examples of such criticism are Conor Cruise O'Briens highly critical assessment in Camus (London: Fontana, 1970) and, more recently, Edward Said's excellent but debatable treatment of atranger in his "Camus and the French Imperial Experience," a chapter of his Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993), pp. 169185. 13. Ever since his days as a budding court journalist in Algiers, Camus hated lawyers, particularly their deceptive and manipulative strategies. In rEt ranger he fabricates a kind of literary cameo appearance of himself by inserting a young reporter in the crowd observing the trial. Attracted by his glance, Meursault remarks that "I had the odd impression of being watched by myself" (85). 14. Camus, "Notebooks, 1942-1951," translated by O'Brien in Notebooks, 1935-1951, pp. 18-19. 15. Rene Girard, "Camus's Stranger Retried," PMLA, 74 (December 1964): 522. Girard pointedly asks, "If the murderer is not held responsible for his actions, why should the judges be held responsible for theirs 7"

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16. See Brian T. Fitch, "The Hermeneutic Paradigm: rEtranger," in his The Narcissistic Text: A Reading oj Camus' Fiction (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1982), pp. 4967. 17. Girard, "Camus's Stranger Retried," p. 522.

lB. Showalter, The Stranger: Humanity and the Absurd, p. 5B. 19. See Raymond Gay-Crosier, "Une etrangete peu commune: Camus et Robbe-Grillet," in rEtranger, cinquante ans apre:s: Act!:s du COllOqUf d'Amirns, 11-12 decembre 1992, Albert Camus, no. 16; Revue des Lettres Modemes, nos. 1259-1265 (Paris: Minard, 1995), p. 162 and passim.

20. Michel Foucault, rOrdre du discours (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), p. 19. 21. Fitch, "The Hermeneutic Paradigm: rEtranger," p. 55.

22. Ibid., p. 67. 23. Ibid., p. 51. 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid., p. 67. 26. Camus, The Myth oj Sisyphus, translated by Justin O'Brien (New York: Random House, 1955), p. 91.

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,~ CRITICAL RESPONSE TO I:ETRANGER

RECEPTION EARLY RECEYIION IN FRANCE

The first critical reactions to rEtranger were, of course, those by the readers who reviewed the manuscript for the publishing firm Gallimard. One of the pivotal judgments came from Andre Malraux, already an internationally renowned novelist, who had also played a leading role in assisting the legitimately elected Republicans against General Franco's mercenaries in the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) and who, much later, during the Fifth Republic, became minister of culture under Charles de Gaulle. Malraux's long assessment of LEtranger, which is quoted in a 27 May 1941 letter to Camus from Pascal Pia, makes a series of specific editorial recommendations: l' The sentence structure is a little too systematic: subject, verb, object, period. From time to time, it becomes procedural. Very easy to arrange by modifying punctuation occasionally.

2' It would be best to rework the scene with the Chaplain. It is not clear. What is said is clear, but what Camus wants to say is said only partially. And the scene is important. I know that it is very difficult. The more reason to do it as the "other" says.

3' Same observation regarding the murder scene. It is good; it is not as convincing, to use this word again, as the whole book. Maybe one should simply insist more (an additional paragraph) on the link between the sun and the knife of the Arab. 4' Concerning everything related to the mother, tighten up. All the accents one finds there are necessary, and good; but between them, there is cotton.'

While Camus was elated to receive these extensive comments from such an illustrious reader, he did not follow Malraux's suggestions. There were several reasons for Camus's decision. Like any writer who practices his craft with hard-earned assurance, he knew that he had found the proper register of expression for LEtranger. In the same letter Pia revisits each point raised by Malraux and reassures Camus thal there is not much reason for concern. Pia also reveals to his correspondent a detail that Mal-

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Camus with a theatrical mask for his adaptation of Pierre de Larivey's play Les esprits (The Spirits, 1579). The production was performed at the Festival d'Art Dramatique in Angers on 16 and 19 June 1953.

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raux could not have known at the time: there was still some doubt at the publishing house as to whether Camus's three manuscripts-fEtranger, Le My the de Sisyphe, and Caligula-could be considered for publication as a set; however, Pia assures Camus, 'TEtranger has received priority acceptance by G,G. [Gaston Gallimardl."2 At the time of the publication of fEtranger the immediate reaction in the press was mixed. Most reviews ranged from positive to guardedly favorable, while several were quite negative. Two that unnerved Camus came from influential professional reviewers who dominated the book-review sections of their respective newspapers. A summary of one will suffice to capture their tone and perspective, which irritated Camus. Emile Henriot was among the first critics to write a review of rEtranger and Le My the de Sisyphe together, which appeared in the 3 November 1942 edition of Le Temps. Henriot's extensive discussion of the books is mostly negative; he states summarily from the outset that "It is the lucid essay that sheds light on the novel. Incomprehensible and disagreeable. "1 Although he writes that Le My the de Sisyphe has some philosophical coherence, he presents the novel as devoid of value and lacking a minimum of believability rooted in reality. The authors of some partially favorable reviews could not resist identifying Camus with Meursault. An example is the review by Fieschi (no first name), a member of the editorial staff of La Nouvelle Revue Franr;:aise in charge of reviewing newly published novels. His pOSition as a member of Gallimard's "stable" (La Nouvelle Revue Franr;:aise was published by Gallimard) did not prevent him from asserting that rEI ranger has "a terribly conspicuous tragic dimension that tastes a little like a Punch and Judy show.'" Such a handicap, he quickly adds, is compensated by the author's exceptional literary talent that allows him to transform what could have been a gaudy piece of fiction into "a great book" thanks to its "philosophical density and polemical tartness.'" Eventually, however, neither the emphasis on "the entry of the mother into the nursing home" as the "center of the book"6 nor the suspicion that Camus himself was guilty of the same kind of rhetorical dirty tricks as Meursault endeared Fieschi to the thin-skinned author. In spite of his customary distance and preference for vagueness, Jean Grenier, Camus's first mentor in Algeria, who faithfully followed his former student's budding writing career, reviewed rEtrallgcr favorably in Les Cahiers du Sud as "a very Significant book."? Grenier particularly admired how the young novelist expressed with bittersweet strokes the simple joys of life in a manner atypical for contemporary French novels set in North Africa, which were often condescendingly folkloric. No The Stranger

10 1

doubt because Grenier was intimately familiar with Camus's way of thinking, he was one of the first critics to detect, between the bland lines, a refreshing "sentiment of revolt," even if the reader does not have much sympathy for the protagonist, whose rebellion ""expresses itself in a rather negative fashion."A In Grenier's view; Meursault's weakness of character prevents him from becoming a social activist. In the aesthetic portion of his discussion Grenier points out that rEtranger owes much not only to "the technique of the American novel inherited from film"9 but also to Camus's extensive theatrical experience. The reviewer agrees with other critics that "the drama [in rEtrangerl is essentially of the metaphysical order."lo Referring to the forthcoming My the de Sisyphe, the manuscript of which he had read, Grenier, who felt challenged by Camus's "categorical"l1 tone, ends on a slightly critical note that expresses his philosophical disagreement with the notion of the absurd. Thus, typically mixing sympathy and distance in his review, Camus's intellectual mentor expresses his reservations about a central notion to be developed in Le My the de Sisyphe, which his former student had not even published at the time of the review. For two decades Jean-Paul Sartre's brilliant "Explication de LEtranger" (1943) remained the major reference point for a large number of critics, especially the philosophically inclined. Sartre's reading is not exclusively philosophical; indeed, the best part has to do with the aesthetics of the novel. When he wrote this landmark review, Sarlre no doubt remembered Camus's favorable but nevertheless critical reviews of his own La Nausee and Le Mur; which appeared in the Alger Republicain on 20 October 1938 and 12 March 1939, respectively. From the outset, Sartre's magisterial interpretation shows rEtranger to be a fictional application of the philosophy of the absurd as proposed in Le My the de Sisyphe, which was as much an object of his attention as rEtranger. For a long time, unfortunately, his philosophical contextualization constituted the better-known part of his review. Seen from the vantage point theorized in Le My the de Sisyphe, Meursault's taciturn heroism shows him to be a man who does not fear the "passion of the absurd" and "who does not hesitate to draw the inevitable conclusions from a fundamental absurdity." Il Referring to Blaise Pascal and several other of Camus's spiritual and philosophical ancestors, Sartre points out that rEtranger does not feature "very new themes, and M. Camus does not present them as such."13 Like Prince Mishkin in Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Idiot (1868), Meursault is "one of those terrible innocents who shock society by not accepting the rules of the game."14 True to his beliefs, Meursault "does not explain; he describes," thus exemplifying "the futility of abstract rea102

Gale Study Guides to Great Literature: Literary Masterpieces

soning."IJ By restricting himself to description without explanation, Meursault follows the path that contemporary phenomenologists were adopting in their philosophical endeavor. From the first page the novel initiates "a brief communion between . . . the author and the reader, beyond reason, in the realm of the absurd." To remain silent is a sign of virility, as Meursault's "refusal to indulge in words" demonstrates. 16 Sanre sees in this silence another contemporary trend, which he calls "the obsession with silence." Ii Finding full satisfaction "in the present and the concrete," the protagonist never has any inclination to fall for the artificial notion of a sustained feeling: "What we call a feeling is merely the abstract unity and the meaning of discontinuous impressions."ls Yet, in spite of his apparent simplicity and transparency, Meursault is a complex man who knows how and when to use his lucidity; his natural, rather than calculated, indifference; and his innate tendency to remain silent. Because of these qualities, "The character thus retains a real opacity, even to the absurd-conscious observer." In the end, the true quality of LEtranger lies in the ambiguity of the main character and the overall "fictional density" of the novel. l9 The best part of Sanre's explication, however, is his analysis of Camus's technique, which enables Meursault "to be silent with words." Contrary to a widely held assumption, Camus's novel is not "Kafka written by Hemingway," although the comparison with the latter makes more sense, because "Both men write in the same short sentence. Each sentence refuses to exploit the momentum accumulated by the preeeeding ones, Eaeh is a new beginning. Each is like a snapshot of a gesture or object. "", Yet, underneath the seemingly simple and transparent style, Sartre catches "a glimpse of poetic prose. "21 Referring to Camus's own example in Lc My the de Sisyphe of a man talking in a telephone booth, who can be seen but not heard from the outside, Sartre describes the narrative strategy of LEt ranger as the insertion of a glass partition between the reader and his characters. Is there really anything sillier than a man behind a glass window? Glass seems to let everything through. It stops only one thing: the meaning of his gestures. The glass remains to be chosen. It v.i11 be the Outsider's mind, which is really transparent, since we see everything it sees. However, it is so constructed as to be transparent to things and opaque to meanings."

Camus's narrative strategy prevents the reader from falling into the trap of a much desired but nonexistent continuity. Once again, the effect of his style, like Ernest Hemingway's, is attributable to "the discontinuity between the clipped phrases that imitate the discontinuity of time." To underscore his point that "Each sentence is a present instant, but not an indecisive one that spreads like stain to the following one," Sartre argues The Stranger

103

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Gale Study Guides to Great Literature: Literary Masterpieces

I

that Camus had to remain in a simple temporal system consisting of the

passe compose (present perfect tense), which "conceals the verbality of the verb. The verb is broken in two. "23 Such a technique of temporal fragmentation and juxtaposition undermines the establishment of clear causal links. With each sentence "Reality appears on the scene without being introduced then disappears without being destroyed. "c< Ultimately, the combination of stylistic and structural features in the book induced Sartre to replace Camus's own classification of rEt ranger as a novel with a designation that Voltaire coined in the eighteenth century: the conte philosophique (philosophical tale). One of the most perceptive and refined of the early readings of rEtranger is by Maurice Blanchot, already a critical trailblazer at the time the book was published. In "Le roman de rEtranger" (1943) Blanchot's observations are generally favorable, but he is slightly critical of the dramatic segment at the end of part 2 of the novel, where "There is a rather awkward change in tone between the almost absolute objectivity of the narration that is its profound truth and the last pages, where the stranger expresses what he thinks and what he feels in the face of death and life.""' Focusing primarily on narrative technique, Blanchot peremptorily situates fEtranger beyond the psychological realm and calls it "a book that makes the notion of subject disappear."26 This intuitive characterization is only one example of Blanchot>~ visionary anticipation of the epistemological paradigm shift that, starting with Claude Levi-Strauss's anthropological studies in the 1950s, systematically displaced the subject as center of critical attention, Meursault's prismatic detachment is deemed exemplary: "Everything that is shown is caught in its objective form: we spin around the events, around the central character as if we could only catch an exterior glimpse of them, as if, in order to truly know them, we had to watch them always as spectators and. moreover. imagine that there is no other way to reach them than this strange and alien way of knowing. "27 The impression of cold objectivity, especially in part 1, is created by the protagonist's determination to limit descriptions to "his gesture, his conduct, his manner of doing and not his manner of being." Because his narration concentrates on essential facts and deeds without interpreting them. it "offers us an image of fatality."" Meursaults strangeness, repulsive as it is to some readers, might be less so to others once they realize that he "is a profound absence necessary to every human spectacle, an abyss where there is possibly nothing, where there is possibly everything." The outcome of the trial is as inevitable as the outcome of a tragedy. Himself an author of landmark ontological novels, Blanchot predictahly fleshes out the existential consequences of the ontological The Stranger

105

dimensions of rEtranger: "Society cannot admit that one reveals with so much ingenuity, with a kind of dismaying lack of conscience, the fact that truth, man's constant mode of thinking, amounts to 'I don't think,' 'I have nothing to think,' '1 have nothing to say."'29

CAMUS'S REACTIONS

Early reviews of IEtranger left Camus with the kind of mixed feelings typical of an author reacting to criticism of his first novel: "Criticism: mediocre in the free zone, excellent in Paris," he wrote to his friend Claude de Freminville on 6 September 1942. "Finally, everything is built on misunderstandings. The best one can do is to close one's ears and work. "30 Each in his own way, Gaston Gallimard and Pia attempted to reassure the fledgling author: "Indeed," wrote Gallimard, Camus's publisher, "the critiques have been absurd. However, there has been a good article by [Marcel} Arland in Comoedia and another, which is also favorable, in the NRF [Nouvelle Revue Fran(aise]."31 Pia's bluntness reflects his concern for his protege: "I never doubted that Emile Henriot was an ass. He insisted on confirming this opinion. Aside from this, what he says is rather encouraging since, once one has read him, one has the feeling that it would have been annoying for rEt ranger to have secured his approval. From Rousseaux to Henriot, that's the public Meursault was expecting at his execution. "32 As Olivier Todd succinctly sums up Camus's situation in his 1996 biography Albert Camus: Une vie, "When Malraux, Uean] Paulhan, and Pia are on your side, you can accept hostile conventional reviewers. "33 Still, Camus, anxious to make an impressive entrance on the stage of the Parisian literary theater, made exceptionally long and animated remarks in his notebooks as he tried to sort out why some readers were reacting to rEtranger as they were. As was his custom, he either kept these remarks to himself or restricted access solely to the reviewer to whom he was responding. But as long as the critics limited their observations to the novel without ascribing perceived political or philosophical faults to the author (as was the case later, when Andre Breton attacked La Peste and he responded publicly), Camus speCifically asked that his mailed responses not he published. Three such letters or letter projects articulating his disappointment are to be found in Camels, janvier 1942 mars 1951. They are not dated but belong to a series of entries made in the summer of 1942. A few excerpts will illustrate Camus's attempt to clear up misunderstandings. They are not without an occasional touch of humor. At other times he expresses openly his frustration with superficial

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readers. More importantly, his reactions offer valuable additional glimpses of his narrative technique: To J. T. on The Stranger. It's a very studied book and the tone ... is intentional. The tone is heightened four or five times, to be sure, but this is to avoid monotony and to provide composition. With the Chaplain, my Stranger does not justify himself. He gets angry, and that's quite different. ... In all this of course I am talking of artistic means and not the end. The meaning of the book lies precisely in the parallelism of the two parts. Conclusion: society needs people who weep at their mother's funeral; or else one is never condemned for the crime one thinks. Moreover, I see ten other possible conclusions."

One type of interpretation that Camus found particularly irritating was the moral kind. Such criticism had to be expected in these darkest of the war years, but none of the readers outside his immediate circle of friends knew that rEtranger was conceived before World War II broke out. Meursault's unorthodox behavior and discourse were easy prey for an ethically oriented critique. True to his cultural upbringing, Camus, who was politically astute and always sensitive to the extraordinary historical period in which he lived, continued to cling to the sharp distinction between art as a transcending creation or re-creation and life as an experience that escapes adequate direct description: Criticism of The Stranger. An epidemic of "Moralitis." You fools who think that negation is a forsaking when it is a choice. (The author of The Plague [still a projected work at this time] shows the heroic side of negation.) There is no other possible life for a man deprived of God; and all men are. Fancying that virility lies in prophetic fidgeting, that greatness lies in spiritual affectation! But that struggle through poetry and its obscurities, that apparent revolt of the mind is the one that costs least. It is invalid and tyrants are well aware of this."

Camus's third notebook entry on early criticism of rEtranger is the longest and most violent. In it he raises an age-old question: what is the artist to make of critics who look at the wrong face of the coin? A few key sentences will suffice: Concerning criticism. Three years to make a book, five lines to ridicule it, and the quotations wrong. Letter to A. R., literary critic (fated not to be sent) .... One sentence in your criticism struck me: "I am not taking into account .... " How can an enlightened critic, aware of the careful planning that goes into any work of art, fail to take into account, in the depiction of a character, the sale moment when he talks about himself and entrusts the reader with some of his secret? ... Nothing in the book, in fact, can allow you to assert that I believe in the natural man, that I identify a human being with a vegetable, that human nature is foreign to morality, etc., etc. The chief character in the book never takes an initiaThe Stranger

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tive. You didn't notice that he always limits himself to answering questions, those asked by life or those asked by men. Hence he never asserts anything .... There is a very vague frontier between your [moral] criticisms and the judgments that may soon be made by a dictatorship (that were made in France not so long ago) as to the moral character of this work. Let me tell you without anger, that is hateful."

Private as they might have been, Camus's angry reactions were echoed a decade later in the public arena when, on similar grounds, he duked it out with Sartre in their famous 1952 polemic over Camus's LHomme revolte. (Sartre saw the book as philosophically superficial and lacking in true political engagement.) Censorship of mind and behavioral control of any kind, whether corning from the political right or left, were always reasons for Camus to part company with a friend or colleague.

EARLY RECEPTION IN THE UNITED STATES

On 11 April 1946, the publication date of the first American edition of LEtranger (in translation by Stuart Gilbert as The Stranger), a short review of the novel appeared in the "Books of the Times" section of The New York Times. Charles Poore's visionary opening paragraph stresses the Dostoevskian themes and the innovative quality of Camus's book: "THE STRANGER,' a novel of crime and punishment by Albert Camus, published today, should touch off in this country a renewed burst of discussion about the young French writers who are at the moment making more unusual literary news than the writers of any other country. Poore contrasts Camus's original theme and technique with the "gaudy parade of historical novels born in the splendid isolation of the research files and bound happily for the coasts of technicolor." After summarizing the plot in this "story of pre-war Algiers," he points out an omission that haunted Camus and has colored the legacy of The Stranger to this day, namely, that "the fate of the Arab's family is completey overlooked in the proceedings." The translation is deemed adequate, bUL many a phrase sounds "closer to London than to Algiers. "37 Nicola Chiaro monte's more extensive review in the 29 April 1946 issue of The New Republic has a speCial significance. This Spanish Civil War veteran was a close personal friend of the author from the moment when, as an established antifascist writer, he first met Camus through a common acquaintance in Paris in 1940. During the German occupation, thanks to Camus's recommendations, Chiaromonte found refuge in Algiers, where he hid with other members of a loosely organized Algerian resistance movement that also assisted politically marked individuals in finding temporary housing. (They stayed in places such as the publisher Edmond Charlot's

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bookshop; the "House above the World," now held by Robert Namia; and various addresses in Oran, including the homes of members of Francine Camus's family).38 Eventually, some of them found a pathway to freedom, usually via Morocco, as did Chiaromonte. He escaped to the United States, where he began a new career as a frequent contributor to the Partisan Review, The New Republic, The Nation, and Politics. He also continued to lend active support to like-minded European intellectuals by organizing fund-raising groups. He maintained a regular correspondence with Camus up until the time of the latter's death in 1960. (Chiaramonte died in the United States in 1972.) When Camus arrived for his American visit on 25 March 1946 (a little more than a month before the review in The New Republic appeared), one of the friends greeting him in person was Chiaromonte, who showed him around New York.

-----------r,~~'------------

THE "FECKLESS, DOOMED" MEURSAUL T "Every character encountered in the early part of the story-Mersault's Isicl girl, the owner, and even one customer, of a restaurant where he eats, the people who live in the same building-has a part to play in the trial, which is the main thing in the book. The story is told in the first person, so that there is nothing between the reader and Mersault as the tale of his feckless, doomed, uncaring life is told. Very little matters to him until the end, and even then he maintains his amazing objectivity."

Charles Poore From "Books of the Times," New York Times, p.23.

All of these connections explain the unusually personal tone of Chiaromonte's review, which is as much about himself and Camus as it is about The Stranger, then just published by Alfred A. Knopf: "We were born at the beginning of the First World War. When we were adolescents, we had the depression. When we were twenty, Hitler came. Then we had the Ethiopian war; the Spanish war; Munich. This is what we got, in the way of an education."]'! This autobiographical vignette also sets the tone and the background for the review. In 1946 Camus was already working on [Homme rivollt', his next philosophical work, and trying to finish, not without considerable difficulties, the manuscript for his next novel, La Peste. One of the main ideas in that novel is that the plague never disappears and thus must be fought vigorously in spite of the fact that victories over the contagious disease are only temporary. In [Homme rtvolte Camus argues forcefully that under no circumstances should an individual be made a means to an abstract end, no matter what the historical or ideological justification might be. In a strikingly similar vein. Chiaramonte-who remained fully informed of Camus's plans through all the years they were geographically separated-writes, "We fought Hitlerism because it was unbearable. And now that Hitler has disappeared, we know a few things. The first is that the poison that was Hitler has not The 5tran~er

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II

April 1946,

.

~~.-

•

Nicola Chiaramonte, who was Camus's close friend and went into hiding in Algiers with the novelist's assistance during the German occupation of France. Chiaromonte eventually escaped to the United States, where he reviewed

The Strangerfor The New Republic in 1946.

been eliminated. It is still there, in a1l of us. Anyone who speaks of human life in terms of power, of efficiency, of 'historical tasks,' is like Hitler: he is a murderer." From such an ethical vantage point Chiaramonte presents The Stranger to the American public as "the tragedy of integrity as a modem man can sense it. "40 As might be expected, the reviewer's principal attention is focused on Meursault, whom he sees in a light similar to Camus's own, as stated in his 1955 preface to the American school edition of the novel in French. In precocious anticipation of comparative studies published much later, Chiaramonte also points out a significant difference between the so-called "American novel"-the generic roman americain with which many early French readers too readily associated rEtranger-and the preoccupations of Hemingway and Erskine Caldwell: Who is Meursault? "Just like everybody else; quite an ordinary person," is his answer. The only difference is that a certain series of events befell him, instead of a certain other.... Meursault is Everyman, with a vengeance. For his actions he has only one explanation, which is very tentative: "Though I mightn't be sure about what interested me, I was absolutely sure about what didn't interest me." A quite common predicament. Except that Meursault acknowledges it. Because what is right is not dear to him, he can do no wrong; but to lie would be to confuse the issue .. He cannot do it. The tension of the story consists entirely of the obstinacy with which this man refuses to lie. We feel this tension from the very beginning, and

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from the very beginning we expect doom. Rather than a virtue, truthfulness here is a radical decision, something like a last defense. That is why the story is tragic. It is a tragedy of the ethical. No book in contemporary literature points with such soberness and directness to what we still call "a man's soul," Macbeth's "eternal jewel." And this is why, among other things, although the tone of the narration reminds us of Hemingway or Caldwell, the parallel remains superficial. What Camus has attempted to describe is precisely what the Americans leave out: the dimension of the ethical, the "1."41

In a special 1948 issue of Yale French Studies devoted to existentialism (in that year Camus's staunch refusal of the existentialist label was still not widely known), Victor Brombert offered one of the earliest critical essays on I.:.Etranger in a leading American scholarly journal. His assessment is sharply critical. Brombert begins the essay by asking whether the book is a novel of ideas, a study of a psychological or pathological case, or a philosophical novel. In order to answer his questions, he picks apart Sartre's explication of I.:.Etranger by stating that Sartre's "distinction between 'notion' and 'feeling' [of the absurd] may seem no less subtle than the one between 'theory' and 'thesis."'42 Sartre framed in advance what he thought Camus wanted to say in I.:.Etranger by first elucidating the theory behind the "feeling of the absurd" in Le My the de Sisyphe. Brombert writes that this method is "neither logical nor truly critical," and he chides Sanre, somewhat exaggeratedly, for not having looked at the value of I.:.Etranger "as a work of literary art." He finds, however, "serious weaknesses in the composition, the style, and the tone of the novel." Using psychological criteria applicable to realistic fictionbecause Camus "aims at a certain 'realism"'-Brombert finds Meursault to be "too passive to be convincing."43 He is particularly critical of the heightened level of consciousness and articulation in part 2 that makes the protagonist think and speak "like Camus." Brombert sees the outburst during the chaplain's visit as a concession to the author's "romantic temperament" and as a sign that "the attempt at artistic discipline breaks down."" Before suggesting how Camus might have saved the novel (if fiction about the absurd is salvageable at all) by writing a third-person rather than a first-person narrative, Brombert concludes that Meursault is Camus's mere "mouthpiece."4s

CRITICAL SURVEY: 1950-2000 No synopsis can possibly do justice to the rich, diverse, enormous, but qualitatively uneven body of studies that more than half a century of criticism on LEt ranger has produced. The selection of critical excerpts has been guided by their topicality as much as by their representativeness. When possible, essays in English have received speCial attenThe Stranger

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tion. The chronological presentation is intended to create a sense of some trends in Camus criticism-that is, changes in perspective that successive generations of readers have adopted for the novel.

A FORKED BEGINNING

The political turmoil that the war in Algeria (1954-1962) caused in the domestic and international politics of France had a paralyzing effect on Camus's creat.ive production, especially in the last decade of his life (1950-1960). A pervasive uncertainty and malaise were at the root of the governmental instability that marked the Fourth Republic (19461958) and caused the recall of Charles de Gaulle from his self-imposed exile in a small French village to be the architect and president of the Fifth Republic, founded in 1958. In particular, the impending loss of Asian and African colonies signaled a difficult transition from the colonial to the postcolonial period, in which France saw its great-power status seriously questioned. The intermittent political and social instability of the Fourth Republic had been aggravated by a deepening global malaise attributable to the Cold War, which seemed to have the potential to become a hot war at any time. By debating the issues publicly and furiously, frequently guided by ideological certitude, French intellectuals, especially on the Left, took Sanre's example of political engagement seriously, thus not only advancing the debate in a starkly opposite direction from the right-wing rhetoric of the Cold War but also adding more tension to an already charged atmosphere. Neither the publication in 1956 of Camus's mostly well-received third novel, La Chute, nor his successful theatrical adaptations of William Faulkner's Requiem for a Nun in the same year and of Dostoevsky's The Possessed in 1959 helped him to overcome a prolonged case of writer's block. Not even the publication of I.:Exil et Ie royaume in March 1957 and the award of the Nobel Prize in literature in October of the same year cured his block. Captive of his much envied fame, Camus fell into ever greater isolation when his proposals for the resolution of the Algerian conflict" were received with a deafening silence in influential political and intellectual circles. Continuing health problems did not help his situation, either. In this eventful and tension-laden decade, Camus's image changed in France from that of a shining slar to that of an intellectually, politically, and even artistically questionable figure. Part of Camus's image as an assured and somewhat self-righteous moralist was of his own making. By the end of the 1940s he was a firmly established figure on the French and international literary horizon. As the 112

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cultural climate began to reflect the hardening of ideological lines during the Cold War and the growing impact of decolonization, and as positions frequently had to be taken on almost any major national and international political event, the author of the best-selling 1947 novel La Peste was still struggling to free himself from a label he hated but had himself helped to create: "Camus the just." People viewed him in this way for several reasons. His eloquent style in taking positions on issues had a cumulative effect on some of his closest observers. He had a tendency to speak with the certitude of an arbiter of all things political and social, from his editorials for Combat to his last play, the very title of which, Les ]ustes, seemed to confirm the generally held notion of his righteousness. The concept of saintete laique (secular sainthood) that he created for Rieux, the attenJean Grenler In 1926. Grenler, who taught Camus at tive doctor and chronicler of La Peste, also conthe Grand Lycee In Alglers and atthe Unlverslty of tributed to the image of "Camus the just." If his Alglers, was a lifelong mentor and friend of the no less self-assured fellow intellectuals reacted novelist. acidly to rHomme revolte, his second major philosophical work, it was not because he placed the right to fairness and "distributive justice" at its core, but because the champions of the Left considered his brazen juxtaposition of communism and fascism an unforgivable betrayal of Marxism, which they viewed as an ideologically justified historical cause. Thus, the sharp polemical exchanges of 1952 in Les Temps Modemes between Camus and two of his antagonists from the Left, Francis jeanson and Sartre, set a contentious and ultimately stifling tone not only for future ideological battles but also for the critical discourse in France for the remainder of the decade. Because Camus had attained, \\'ith the publication of La Peste, the status of an internationally recognized and promising representative of the contemporary French novel, his detractors were no longer attacking an up-and-coming young writer but a figure of the intellectual establishment. There was, however, yet another label clinging to Camus that is attributable to the time and place in which he was writing and the people with whom he chose to associate, at least for a while, at the end of \Norld War I!. As a contemporary of the emerging French promoters of exislenThe Stranger

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tialism-Sartre being the undisputed leader of the atheistic version and Gabriel Marcel representing a Christian version-Camus was associated against his will with this latest philosophical trend. It was as if readers simply ignored his severe critique of existentialism in Le My the de Sisyphe and in many subsequent interviews. Ironically, both labels acted as catalysts for his rapidly growing international reputation. "Camus the just" became a much admired model of journalistic and political behavior rooted in ethical values, while superficial or uninformed observers saw a diluted version of existentialism as part of a little-understood but fashionable Left Bank culture in which Camus was thought to have a firm place.

1951-1960: THE LONG SHADOWS OF A POLEMIC

In literary feuilleton columns and magazine articles, many commentators treated the famous 1952 polemic concerning Ufomme revolte almost as if it were a sports event, a grudge match between two estranged intellectual brothers. Skirmishes ~ithin the intellectual Left were followed abroad with curiosity but also with a healthy amount of detachment, if not amusement. \Vhile Camus's erstwhile comrades in France increasingly suspected that he had mutated into a politically and philosophically outdated author and an unreliable political analyst, outside of France his reputation seemed by and large unaffected by the ideological cliches that the French Left continued to feed the public. During the 1950s his international reception followed two complementary tracks, one that was predicated on the publication of his works in the French original and another that represented the reaction to their publication in translation. In general, the international response from that part of the public able to read French Coften professional critics) and the public at large remained measured, even in negative or guarded reviews. In France, too, fEtranger continued to receive serious attention, although a few reviewers still revealed their moral reservations. Camus was convinced that Jeanson's stinging rebuttal of the scope and method of fHomme revoltc in Les Temp.s Modemes was actually a proxy review intended to mask thinly Sanre's contempt for the book. 47 Therefore, Camus addressed the opening salvo of his polemic not to Jeanson the reviewer but to Sartre the editor, whom he ironically addressed with stiff formality as "Monsieur Ie directeur." In his long answer, Sanre waxed nostalgic by deploring the fading of a bright star-that is, the fading of the original Camus, of the promising young author who had written the truly original fEtranger and Le My the de Sisyphe and who had turned into the philosophically and politically questionable author of LHomme 1'e\'olte.

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Paradoxically, in spite of Sartre's emphatic public break with Camus at the end of the polemic,i8 his 1943 explication of rEtranger, because of its brilliantly argued thoroughness, remained for more than two decades the paradigm for many French and international critics. Three other major French analyses of the novel gradually came to compete for influence. Claude-Edmonde Magny's methodical examination of the elliptical qualities of Camus's narrative offered a welcome clarification of the complex rather than merely mimetic relation between l'Etranger and the "American novel." Magny argued that the latter was a much more diversified body of texts than was assumed by less-informed French readers!9 Nathalie Sarraute also brought a welcome corrective to Sartre's one-sided reading of Camus's novel. Her argument was rooted in the reader's reaction to the text and aimed at reinstating Ie psychologique, "the psychological dimension," which she thought had been abandoned too summarily.so The original versions of both of these studies date back to the late 1940s; their main influence, however, came in the 1950s and early 1960s, respectively. In 1954, before he became suspicious of the concepts of author and masterwork, Roland Barthes enthusiastically called l'Etranger "the first classical novel of the post-war period" and stressed that '''first' referred not only to its date but to its quality."51 In 1956 John Cruickshank became one of the first critics to analyze systematically the narrative patterns in Camus's handling of point of view, his choice of vocabulary, and his manipulation of grammatical tenses-in particular, the present-perfect tense, the primary task of which is to capture lived experience.'2 Time and structure as thematic devices form the core of a rich article by Carl A. Viggiani, also published in 1956. Viggiani argues, on the grounds of dissymmetry, that chapter 5 in part 2 of I.:Etranger constitutes a third part of the novel. He suggests that the names of all the characters have an allegorical function and that Meursault is an ironic version of Sisyphus. Viggiani maintains that in the beach scene, which functions both as an epiphany and a major epistemological turning point in the novel, the protagonist seems godlike and thus elevated to the status of a Christ figure, as Camus himself has stated." For Leon S. Roudiez, also writing in 1958, the treatment of the motif of the stranger in rEtlanger and Herman Melville's Billy Budd (1924 )-Melville was Camus's favorite American author-takes its cue from the absurd as common root. '" Both protagonists assume Christlike traits and display the same air of innocence regarding their crimes. For a long time Germaine Bree's 1959 introductory study remained the standard gUide for American readers of LEtrangfl; which she contextualizes biographically and thematically.55 The Stranger

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Robert Champigny broke new ground in 1959 with his book on Meursault as a pagan hero. Shunning the psychological approach, Champigny connects Meursault's rectitude and truthfulness to himself with the salient themes in rEt ranger of "Innocence,". "Justness," "Guilt," and "The Hero," which are also the titles of Champigny's chapters. The "artistic coherence of a piece of fiction involves semantics as well as grammar. In order to be consonant, it has to be resonant." Such a programmatic statement summarizes Cham pig ny's primary purpose, which is to correct what he considers some earlier misreadings by "composing a portrait of Meursault in ethical colors" without, however, applying preconceived values. 56 One of the earHest psychoanalytical studies of Meursault was a 1959 essay by Arminda A. Pichon-Riviere and Willy Baranger. In their view; the protagonist's latent indifference and suppression of mourning exhibit characteristics of schizophrenia and paranoia. Meursault projects his mother image onto his representation of nature. His insatiable need for physical contact expresses his frustration about his separation from the womb. Ultimately, his execution is to be seen as a suicide through which he unconsciously seeks to pay for his mother's death. 57

1961-1970

In 1961, thanks to her access to texts by Camus not yet published at the time, Bree produced an exceptionally well-informed review of the components that contributed to the genesis of fEtranger.'" Her article illuminates how difficult it was for Camus to write a first-person narrative and how he eventually found the tone and the voice that became the signature features of the novel. In a 1962 study on the art of the novel in fEtranger, Maurice Georges Barrier bases his close examination of Camus's literary style on a lexicographic index and sees the neutralization of traditional literary signs as a method of strengthening Meursault's continuing estrangement.'" Barrier's most original contribution is his contrastive analysis of how the creative process leads to a particular style and how that style effects the reader. "Nature, humanisme, tragedie" ("Nature, Humanism, Tragedy") is. a well-known article that the novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet wrote in 1958 and included in his groundbreaking collection of theoretical articles, Pour un Nouveau Roman (1963; translated as For a New Novel: Essays on Fiction, 1965), a book that became a sort of manifesto on the nouveau roman (new novel). Assuming a critical viewpoint similar to that of Barthes, Robbe-Grillet attributes the objectivity of Camus's style to his 116

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sophisticated use of language, particularly his ironic play with metaphors. Meursault captivates the reader because he is an ambiguous character who maintains "an obscure complicity with the world, composed of rancor and fascination." Absurdity as discovered by Meursault before and during the murder on the beach "is really a form of tragic humanism. "60 Another perceptive reading of tEtranger can be found in Carina Gadourek's exploration of the "innocent penitent," published in 1963. 61 Her essay remains a stimulating analysis of the geneSis of the novel; she identifies the thematic centers of gravity and their relation to Camus's compositional technique. Particularly useful is an index of key notions and images. Gadourek also attempts to demonstrate the possible influence of Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment (1866) on tEtranger. Many critics interpret the murder on the beach as a turning point in Meursault's life that will transform him from a nonreflective sensualist into a more self-conscious thinking individual, especially when he hears others talk about him during the trial and reviews these impressions during his long hours in the prison cell. A typical example is a 1964 article by William M. Manly that retraces the awakening of Meursault's consciousness through the symbolic patterns in the nove1. 62 Meursault's cognitive journey, which is seen as parallel to the adventure of the mind that takes place in Le My the de Sisyphe, leads him from merely sensing his environment as composed of absurd objects to becoming himself an absurd subject. For many years Pierre-Georges Castex's Albert Camus et ITtranger (1965) remained the standard general introduction to the novel in French. 63 Castex examines in detail how some of Camus's personal experiences were transfigured into the fictional context of the novel. For the first time the Carnets, of which the first volume had been published in 1962, served systematically as the primary source of information to determine the influence on rEt ranger of the author's illness, his reading background, and related literary projects, such as La Mort heureuse. Castex gives his account a chronological frame by placing it between August 1937 and May 1940-that is, between the date when Camus began planning the novel and the date he wrote in his notebooks that it was finished. Like several critics after him, W D. Redfern compares Meursault and Julien Sorel, the protagonist of Stendhal's Le Rouge et Ie nair (1830; translated as The Red and the Blach, 1925), in a 1968 essay. Redfern views Meursault and Sorel as two outlaws who find themselves through their The Stranger

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opposition to society.64 The privileged place for their insights is the prison cell. In another essay published in 1968, Jere Tarle assesses previous stylistic and grammatical interpretations of LEtranger that often contradict each other.65 He then invokes Emile Benveniste's definition of verb tense and Barthes's notion of ecriture (writing) as a format that creates an autonomous reality between language and the styles it creates. The present perfect, according to Tarle, is the only tense capable of capturing the dynamics of a conflict-laden plurality of styles. Thanks to the multiple and complementary functions of the present perfect, the discourse of part 1 and the story of part 2 can be told in the same tense. A pioneering departure from the beaten thematic paths is Brian T. Fitch's systematic exploration of the complex connections between

Meursault, his discourse, the text of the novel, and the reader in Narrateur et narration dans LEtranger d'Albert Camus (Narrator and Narration in Albert Camus's The Stranger, 1961; revised, 1968).66 Three pairs of complementary relations constitute the narrative linchpins: protagonist and narrator, reader and Meursault, and reader and text. There is a narrative voice that speaks independently from Meursault's. Aesthetic distance enables author and reader to penetrate articulated as well as unarticulated levels of meaning in the text. Ultimately, however, not unlike Meursault's consciousness, which remains fragmentary even at the end of the trial, the reader's comprehension of the novel remains always incomplete because the omnipresent ambiguity prevents him from entering an always fleeting textual universe. In 1968, inspired by Stephen Ullman's theories in his Style in the French Novel (1964), Fitch published an essay scrutinizing Meursault's patterns of reporting other people's speech. The protagonist alternates freely between direct, indirect, and indirect free discourse, the last being primarily a device to generate ambiguity. Camus's stylistic discursive strategy in LEtranger, Fitch argues, is a good illustration of the ironic and parodic effects that indirect free discourse can create. 67 In a similar but methodologically less sophisticated vein, Pierre-Louis Rey's LEtranger: Analyse critique (1970) focuses on the formal qualities of LEtranger. 6B In his introductory essay, after retracing the genesis of the novel based on the sources available at the time, Rey concludes with a definition of the classical qualities of the book, which he sees as continuing and expanding the tradition of the French short novel. Meursault's behavior and differentiated use of language, espeCially in the beach scene, induced Wilbur M. Frohock to interpret the text from a poeto logical vantage point in a 1970 essay."" The protagonist's initially spare 118

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use of metaphors becomes ever richer as the murder approaches, indicating that Meursault is neither linguistically nor psychologically impaired but a sensitive human capable of reflecting the evolution of his inner being. hi another 1970 essay, with the help of an extensive inventory of themes and motifs in LEtranger, Eugene Falk painstakingly retraces the linear evolution of the plot in order to identify "linking phrases and images. "7l' Using these as the building blocks of the textual structure, Falk aims at demonstrating how Camus creates thematic coherence in the novel. Remarkably free of jargon, John Fletcher's "Interpreting fEtranger" (1970) touches on several themes that later became autonomous in criticism of the novel, such as the oedipal myth, repressed eroticism in the murder act, and the specificity of Meursault's tragic heroism.71 Political criticism of Camus's novel was not limited to France. Roland C. Wagner took a sharply critical view in a 1970 essay, imputing Meursault's silence and indifference to Camus's presumed inability to deal with his own contradictions." In spite of some valid points, Wagner's article is an example of criticism that makes a dangerous confusion of author with character.

1971-1980

In a 1971 essay drawing on semiotic text theory, then being given a broader scope in French structural criticism, Lubomir Dolezel constructs a dense synthetic model of narrative structure, as opposed to the customary outline of sentence structure. Three levels-type, structure, and texture-are used to identify "patterns of motif combinatorics,"n or a grammar of motifs. These patterns are illustrated by two elaborate schemes, one correlating narrative categories with motif structure, the other identifying narrative strings leading to and linking operational components of narration and interpretation. Key examples in fEtranger are seemingly simple statements and introductory sentences.

During the heyday of structuralism in the 1970s, critical transparency was a must. The time had corne to categorize past readings and set directions for new readings of LEtranger. The first systematic response to this need came from Fitch, who in 1972 proVided a thorough methodological assessment of the rapidly growing and frequently repetitive body of studies of the nove!." In the first part of his book Fitch analyzes biographical, political, sociological, metaphysical, existentialist, ontological, and psychoanalytical interpretations. The second part is devoted to the The Stranger

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text itself and to theoretical examinations of the various dialectical relationships involved in the act of reading. Although Stuart Gilbert's English translation served for years as a seemingly adequate rendering of the French original, voices critical of the excessive literariness of Gilbert's version could be heard every now and then. One challenge came in 1975 with Helen Sebba's critical discussion of the distortions in the Gilbert translation that place the protagonist and his discourse at a level that does not truly reflect Meursault's and the other characters' mentality and social status. 7S In a 1972 study Renee Balibar focuses on ideological patterns reflected in Camus's insistence on the passe compose, the use of which she qualifies as "literary" rather than colloquial. 76 According to Balibar, the novelist's attempt to produce an appropriate level of diction, contrary to a widely held view, actually deforms the popular linguistic practices it is supposed to mimic. A lengthy catalogue of grammatically "normal" uses of the present perfect confirms that the supposedly elementary style of the novel is an elaborate literary device accessible to an upper-class readership but not reflective of normal popular usage. Going against Sartre's reading of rEtranger, which still exercised a dominating influence in the early 19705, Donald Lazere's holistic and aesthetically grounded approach in The Unique Creation of Albert Camus (1973) examines inter- and intratextual themes and their particular meaning for American readers of the novel. Because he rejects any type of professional and philosophical ambition, Meursault is presented as "the opposite of the stranger described in The Myth [of Sisyphus}. "77 In Lazere's view, Camus's narrative techniques derive their strength from many types of ambiguities in which the plot, the character, the themes, and the point of view are embedded. Meursault is a negative hero: "The only unequivocally affirmative theme is to be found, not explicitly in Meursault's narrative but in the novel's narrative structure and in the author'S having remained alive and chOOSing to write that novel. ... "78 According to a 1973 study by Alain Costes, the economy of silence in Camus's work makes him go through three cycles from the absurd to guilt via rebellion. Costes concentrates his attention on Camus's "phantasms,"79 of which the title is but one example. Meursault's behavior reflects Camus's own experiences, which were rooted in his complex relationship with his mother. Through his remembrance of his mother's brutalization by an unknown intruder, Meursault is marked by what he fantasizes as the "primitive scene"H'l-that is, the witnessing of a

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taboo sex act. Meursault and Camus feel guilty about what happened to their mothers. The refusal to lie and the aim for authenticity are at the root of existentialist thought. Against Camus's claims and with the help of phenomenological theories, Robert C. Solomon refutes the common view that Meursault is a man of truth in "LEtranger and the Truth" (1978). Rather than "in the reflective realm of truth and falsity" the protagonist must be seen "in the prereflective realm of simple 'seeing' and 'lived experience."'81 Because Meursault fails to reach rationality, let alone a level of consciousness enabling him to analyze his feelings, his utterances to the very end are located somewhere between truth and lies. He remains unable to exercise reflected sincerity or honesty, nor does he recognize the importance of agency during the trial. When he reflects upon himself, it is in general terms only: "his euphoric indifference is a falsification of his emotion. "82 A curious but not improbable source for LEtranger was proposed by C. Harold Hurley in 1979. Hurley argues that Camus's access to French translations of works by the Irish author james joyce and his references to joyce (albeit not to specific works) in his notebooks justify a consideration of "A Painful Case," from joyce's short-story collection Dubliners (1914), as a possible intertext of LElranger. The protagonists of both works share a similar worldview, reject social codes, and reach self-knowledge toward the end of the narrative. Most striking are the "correspondences between Duffy's and Meursault's rooms, furnishings, and 'common place books. "'83 "Racialist" readings of LEtranger, such as those by Henri Krea, Pierre Nora, and Conor Cruise O'Brien, illustrate how the interpretation of a text can change radically over time. An author's known intentions and the perceptions he shared with his contemporary readership may be overlooked by a later generation of critics and readers less disposed to a sentimental or metaphysical perspective and more inclined to undertake a decisively political exegesis of a text. In "Camus's LEt ranger Revisited" (1979) Philip Thody deplores the total subordination of the Arabs in LEtranger and finds that Camus's own remarks on the meaning of the novel in his notebooks in the end justify a political reading. 84 In a 1980 essay Alessandro Briosi makes a philosophical reappraisal of Sartre's famous explication of LEtrangn; identifying the "frozen present" and "silence"~j as two components in Camus's classical style that triggered Sartre's ideological resistance even before the latter had formulated his notion of ideologically rooted engagement. According to Briosi, The Stranger

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both Camus and Sartre took some of their cues from the language philosopher Brice Parain, but with opposite results. Sartre's concept of language continued to link the word with truth, while Camus once wrote that language is "une machine a fabriquer du doute" (a machine to manufacture doubt).B6 One of the few critics to assert that LEt ranger may be thought of as Meursault's journal is Oscar Tacca. In an essay published in 1980 he labels the text a recit (story) related by an "auteur-transcripteur" (transcribing author), thus assigning to the protagonist primary control over his words. To buttress his thesis, Tacca defines the act of writing in terms of its relation to the "moments de narration" (moments of narration) aiming for the coherence of the text and indicating the suspension of the author's presence. 87 Tacca sees Meursault as a primal creature forced into civilization but fully capable of ordering and expressing the events that determined his life and death. In "The Life-Death Nexus in LEtranger" (1980) Redmond O'Hanlon argues that the thematic link between LEtranger and earlier or contemporary works, the "life-death nexus," is present at all narrative levels, "from the elaborate literary; through the para-literary; to the patently discursive."88 Three deaths (Maman's, the Arab's, and Meursault's) structure the novel, each of which is embedded in a culture where, unlike in traditional Western society, the interpenetration of life and death is commonly accepted. In each death the sun plays an ambivalent role, at once "generative" and "destructive." The "life-death nexus" "explodes on the crescendo of concentrated metaphors" before the murder scene. 89 Wherever this nexus is evoked, the text undergoes a transition from the naturalistic to the symbolic level that can go all the way to "metaphorical violence. "90 With its rising rhythms, the symbolic treatment eternalizes and essentializes the depicted scenes.

1981-1990

The petites phrases (short recurring sentences) that characterize Meursault's direct, indirect, and free indirect speech are extensively scrutinized by Robin Adamson in "Speech Mannerisms in LEt ranger" (1984). Individual speech mannerisms must be distinguished from common cliches. Adamson's analysis of recurring words or word combinations in the novel shows a pattern of filled pauses and speech mannerisms that "have a syntactic as well as a psychological function. "9] These recurring words also constitute a stylistic device used by Camus in order to manipulate the reader. Adamson's extensive list of such mannerisms, their syntax, 122

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and their distributional scheme or intermittent occurrence in the novel permits the reader to identify implicit or explicit messages they convey, including irony. The mannerisms also yield insights into Meursault's character. Building on the work done by the most important critics writing on Camus between 1959 and 1983 (Barrier, Champigny, Fitch, Rey, Alfred Noyer-Weidner, Jean-Claude Pariente, and Bernard Pingaud) Nils Soelberg seeks to complement Gerard Genette's synthetic concept of "homodiegetic narration with external focalisation" with an analytical component. 92 In Soelberg's 1985 essay all actions and reactions and the varied narrative procedures by which they are filtered through Meursault undergo a systematic examination, resulting in the identification of multiple levels of narrative coherence in LEtranger. 93 Andre Abbou uses the anonymity of the Arabs as a distinctive narrative mark and the abstractness of their presence as a means of asking whether LEtranger masks a philosophical tale. He detects two opposite but complementary types of discourses: one of sublimation and one of rebellion, the purpose of which is to transform failure into destiny. Meursault is caught between two systems of communication, writing and talking, both of which deform reality and thus are unable to capture it. The trivial and the sacred give structure to lived experiences and yield the modes of discourse relating these experiences. According to Abbou, the many passages in the novel depicting everything from surface appearances to hidden worlds, from the ordinary to the extraordinary, constitute turning points in the narration that cast new light on key episodes. Unknowingly, Meursault is engaged in a quest for the sacred, during which he commits the sacrilege of confusing the kingdom with the exile. His crime plunges him back into the clockwork of history and forces him to use natural arguments against culturally based accusations. LELranger as a system of linguistic signs reflects Camus's "primordial experiences and not a cultural surplus." The reference to the sacred as a human aspiration is to be seen as a "repression of the quotidian and of history. "94 Why is the murder victim an Arab, and why does Meursault make two attempts to kill him? These hard-to-answer questions induce Costes to invoke two phantasms that obsessed Camus between 1933 and 1940: the burial of his grandmother referred to in various youthful writings and transferred to various types of mourning in La Mort heureuse, tEtranger, and Caligula; and the jealousy of a handicapped man who beats up his sister's lover. Variations of this second phantasm appear in several texts by Camus and suggest a sadomasochistic triangle. Similarly sadomasochistic events in LEt ranger, including the relationship between The Stranger

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Salamano and his dog and the Arab brother's protection of his sister, replay the same foundational scheme. Costes argues that Meursault's murder of the Arab is of an intra textual nature and involves "killing a possessive bratfln;""' which also explains why he assists Raymond Sintes, who wants to punish his Moorish mistress. Meursault's figurative second "murder" has intertextual roots and is aimed at the Arab brother as a generically suspected aggressor of his mother. The strange, robotlike old woman who makes a brief appearance at Celestes cafe and reappears during the trial fascinates Meursault and readers far beyond the seemingly insignificant role she plays in the novel. Jean Gassin compares the woman's mechanical actions with similar behavioral patterns of other characters (Caligula in Camus's play of the same name, Tarrou's father in La Peste, and the old mother in Le Malentendu) obsessed with a death that they anticipate, witness, or even bring about themselves. 96 The robotlike woman appears at the very moment when Meursault becomes aware of his inability to mourn and to commit to a loving relationship. She launches him on the long road toward the reunification with his mother through death. In 'TEtranger: The Difficulty in Authentication between Film and Novel" (1987) Thomas F. Lannin makes a parallel reading of fE/ranger and Luchino Visconti's 1967 motion-picture adaptation of the novel, taking a broad-brushed philosophical and thematic approach. Lannin finds that the movie is visually representative of the narrative but suffers from the lack of Meursault's introspective discourse. He attributes this disturbing omission to the "production time limitations and the viewing habits of an audience" that a director typically faces. 9 Dorothy Bryson argues in "Plot and Counter-Plot in I:.Etranger" (1988) that Camus offers a "counter-plot" in I:.Etranger by exploding conventional novel techniques while narratively establishing Meursault's subversive antihero status. Tacit as it may be, the "authorial organisation" runs counter to Meursault's sustained indifference and injects a common moral imperative that confirms his guilt through aesthetic means.O K Using aesthetic means to ethical ends was Camus's unorthodox way of dispelling suspicions about his alleged political naivete or callousness. Because his aim is principally pedagogical, English Showalter's sober 1989 study continues Lo be a valuable general introduction to the novel. Apart from summarizing some of the critical literature on the text, he provides excellent gUidance in a section titled "A Reading," ~n which he treats five central features ("the Murder of the Arab," "the Trial," "Meursault," "Reconstructing the Past," and "Meursault's Final 124

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Thoughts") that form the main structural components of I'.Etranger.° q Particularly informative are Showalter's assessments of Meursault, whom he describes as a highly unreliable narrator. The many contradictory judgments on Meursault's behavior, ranging from heroic (Champigny) to nihilistic (Rene Girard), prompted Ben Stolzfus in 1989 to reexamine I'.Etranger as "a work that reads the reader" in the belief that a Lacanian reading "resolves the sun's part in the death of the Arab." Earlier psychoanalytical interpretations of the novel indicate that "We each read the book with our own unconscious desire."'oo Unlike interpretations of Camus's (or Meursault's) preexisting traumas and complexes, which contribute little to an understanding of the text, the fore grounding of figures of speech (such as metonymies and metaphors) in the murder scene reveals the latency of content as a projection of the unconscious. Connotative and denotative interplays such as those between mer (sea)/mtre (mother), sun, blade, and spring receive special attention from Stolzfus. He argues that through the complicity of language, the unconscious presence of the mythical castrating father and the nurturing earth mother is metaphorically reflected in the dominant role played by sun and sea: "Incest is the latent and repressed content of [I'.Etrangerl, and it continues to fascinate readers who, as in a mirror ('this is you'), recognize in Meursault's actions the image of Oedipal desire. " 101 Of all of Meursault's actions, none are more controversial than the four additional shots he pumps into the inert body of his Arab victim. As a medical doctor George]. Makari had little reticence about subjecting "textual mysteries" (as opposed to living subjects) to psychoanalysis in "The Last Four Shots: Problems of Intention and Camus' The Stranger" (1988). To explain the murderer's intentions Makari establishes a behavioral and discursive profile, starting with Meursault's "primary narcissism," which helps to explain his indifference in human relationships (such as those with his mother and Marie Cardona).102 As several earlier studies had pointed out, Meursault's "abnormality" is linked with his sadomasochistic propensity, which, Makari contends, the protagonist attempts to mask with his indifference. In the same vein Makari argues that Meursault "projects his own defense of affective impassivity onto the Arabs." Unconsciously attracted by the Arab's body near the spring, he takes pleasure in watching him without being seen (a practice that Sigmund Freud termed scopophilia, or "love of looking"). The Arab's brandished knife becomes an imminent threat of castration and pierces Meursault's indifference. His four shots "are a defensive attempt to regain the hegemony of narcissistic indifference.",o3 The Stranger

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In "The Verdict on Meursault" (1990) ]. McCann submits various claims regarding the protagonist's innocence or guilt to a comparative assessment. He reviews the case presented by Meursault, the text, and the often contradictory or misleading interpretations critics have made. In McCann's view the question remains unanswerable because it depends on the vantage point from which it is asked: "If we attempt to decide whether Meursault or the Arab were dealt with justly or unjustly, we are in fact assuming that such concepts matter, that they make a difference. In the world of the novel, they do not." The novel "offers no solutions beyond facing up to death. And yet that is a not inconsiderable .achievement. It is a positive step forward."!04 Barthes's five narrative codes developed in S/Z (1970) are the starting point for Jean H. Duffy's reading of Meursault's trial in "Narrative Code versus Truth: The Prosecution Case in LEtranger" (1989). The prosecution lawyers manipulate all five of Barthes's codes to the defendant's detriment: the cultural code, by indicting Meursault's moral flaws; the semic code, by exercising narrative and interpretive power; the proaieretic code, by relating minor incidents to incriminating behavioral patterns; the hermeneutic code, by using Meursault's complex relationship with his mother to create suspense and suspicion; and, finally, the symbolic code, by consistently assigning antithetical meanings to Meursault's seemingly innocuous behavioral patterns. 105

1991-2000

In 1991 Hiroshi Mino, one of the best Camus specialists in Japan, published a study of a well-known 1951 debate carried on in journals between the traditional writer Kazuo Hirotsu, who negatively reviewed LEt ranger, and the critic Mitsuo Nakamura, who responded by elucidating why Japanese readers were able to see a significant connection between Meursault's and their own lives. 106 (The 1951 Japanese translation of the novel received mostly favorable critical notices.) Mino also provides a retranslation into French of Camus's answers to questions provoked by the debate, which were first published in Japanese in 1952 in the newspaper Asahi. A thorough assessment of the genesis of LEt ranger and Camus's writing technique is offered in a 1992 book-length study by Bernard Pingaud, himself a noted novelist. Ill'- The book also features a judicious selection of phtographs. In the first part Pingaud investigates what he calls "t:Enigme" (The Enigma) of several biographical strands that e\ entually led to the thematic configuration of the novel, while in the second part 126

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he reviews twelve modes of reading the text, one of which focuses on a presumed structural deficiency. In two companion articles, both published in 1992, Gilbert D. Chaitin gives a competent synthesis of the considerable body of research on Meursault's presumed early lack of, and later development of, consciousness. Chaitin's position is that a narrative strategy commands Meursault's telling of the story from the very beginning. This strategy is fed by "narrative desire," which "does not arise at the conclusion of the narrative; there from the start, it makes possible the birth of the subject which constitutes its end point."lOB In "Cultural Alienation: A New Look at the Hero of The Stranger" (1992) Jerry L. Curtis contends that because Camus was much more grounded in the northern Mediterranean culture of France, Spain, Italy, and Greece than in the North African culture of the Maghreb (the part of Northwest Africa between the Atlas Mountains and the Mediterranean Sea), Camus in 1946, the year Stuart Gilbert's English he was, like Meursault, an alien in his own translation of L'Etrangerwas published in environment without knowing it. Many of England as The Outsider and in the United Meursault's behavioral patterns, such as his States as The Stranger work and leisure habits and his placing his mother in a nursing home, are alien to Arab culture, of which he displays a myopic view. Equally one-sided are his observations of street life from his apartment balcony. This partial blindness to Arab otherness extends to his inability to establish human relationships with members of the indigenous population. According to Curtis, Meursault's "alienation is both unnecessary and self-imposed." Far from suggesting the status of societal victim, the protagonist's alienation indicates "the arrogance, the indifference, the paranoia, the loneliness, and the disdain of the hero with respect to the community."lo9 Curtis argues that Camus had these same prejudices. While the seemingly disjointed elements in part 1 of LEtranger eventually seem to fall into an overall scheme, Jack Murray maintains that one can distinguish between "two contending construals of the The Su·anger

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MEURSAUL T ON TRIAL "In the end, all I remember is that while my lawyer went on talking, I could hear through the expanse of chambers and courtrooms an ice cream vendor blowing his tin trumpet out in the street. I was assa iled by memor.ies of a life that wasn't mine anymore, but one in which I'd found the simplest and most lasting joys: the smells of summer, the part of town I loved, a certain evening sky, Marie's dresses and the way she laughed. The utter pointlessness of whatever I was doing there seized me by the throat, and all I wanted was to get it over with and get back to my cell and sleep."

Albert Camus From The Stranger, translated by Matthew Ward (New York: Vintage, 1989), pp. 104-105.

same series of narratives, Meursault's and the prosecutor's." Against narratological patterns that are mechanistically organized by causality leading from one beginning to one end, "a non-determined series of narrative segments" in Meursault's narration allows for bifurcations, each of which may have its own beginning and end. 110 The prosecutor follows the logic of the mechanistically organized narrative pattern, whereas Meursault'~ narration evolves along the multiple lines of the second, "antinarrative" pattern. III The most striking event related in these two narrative modes is the murder scene. Ultimately, the perceived "formal anarchy"ll2 reveals hyperbole on both the prosecutor's and Meursault's part, which masks deeper ideological issues by projecting the real events onto an allegorical plane. The closure/antic1osure dialectic maintains the novel as an object of multiple debates.

Robbe-Grillet's "misreading"lI3 of LEtranger, as John Fletcher calls it, does not negate Camus's preoccupation with the distortion of reality that narrative discourse entails. Camus's rhetorical concerns are close to those of the theoreticians and practitioners of the French "new novel," many of whom were his contemporaries. Through several examples Fletcher shows the extent to which Camus anticipated the tenets of the "new novel." His narrative technique confirms the major claims of the nouveau roman theorists: that reported data are always unreliable and that the text of a novel constructs its own reality applies to both LEtranger and the new novel, of which Fletcher examines several samples. Jules Roy (1907-2000), a fellow French Algerian writer and a friend of Camus, never ceased to affirm his affinities with the author of LEtranger, which were reflected as late as in Roy's autobiographical work Etranger pour mes freres (Stranger to My Brothers, 1982). Catharine Savage Brosman compares the two friends' marginality and alienation, for which Meursault's conflictual relation with his society constitutes an emblematic parallel. The title of the novel may be interpreted as "Meursault and the Arabs together as strangers to the European Other.... " IH 128

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In a 1992 essay comparing the four published English translations of L:Etranger, Eric H. du Plessis points out that, after Gilbert's translation appeared in 1946, the standard French edition became the 1953 reprint, which, like earlier reprints of the novel, was slightly amended by Camus. For thirty-six years Gilbert's text remained the standard English translation until, in 1982, Kate Griffith in the United States and Joseph Laredo in England published new translations, neither of which reached a large audience. Since then, Matthew Ward's 1988 translation has become the standard reference text of the novel in English. Du Plessis reviews a representative list of translational quandaries and stylistic inadequacies in these English versions, such as Gilbert's tendency to interpret or "embroider" Camus's text. ll5 Griffith used the 1955 expurgated American school edition as her reference text and produced a translation riddled with errors of all kinds. Laredo's version has the title originally used but then abandoned for the Gilbert translation, The Outsider; it has been welcomed as a faithful and improved translation, although distribution of the book is limited to England for legal reasons. Finally, as many other reviewers have done, du Plessis heralds Ward's translation not only as yet another improvement but as the "definitive rendering of I'.Etranger" in English. 116 While agreeing with many earlier critics who consider Camus guilty of either erasing the Arabs' presence or creating stereotypes, Vincent Gregoire explains the mysterious kindness of the Arab prisoners in the holding cell where Meursault is first kept by pointing to their "second nature,"ll7 their culturally induced false respect-that is, their interiorization of the status forced upon them by the dominant colonialist power. This "second nature" explains their seemingly respectful silence, an expression of inner suffering that Camus himself diagnosed as a "complexe d'humiliation" (a humiliation complex).llo Gregoire compares the Arabs' behavior to that of the Arab prisoner in Camus's 'THote," one of the stories in rExil et Ie royaume. Another possible explanation for their silence might be found in Camus's habitual romanticization of marginalized people, much in the same way that he romanticizes Meursault's innocence. Michel Foucault's central notions of power-Same versus the Other, disciplinarian society, and episteme (conceptual paradigm)induced William Cloonan to interpret three types of characters in I'.Etranger and their discursive practice (or lack thereof) in a Foucaldian mode: official characters with functions and voices but no names; those with names, voices, and functions; and those who lack names, voices, and functions. Societal discourse determines who belongs to a society, and silence indicates either acquiescence or exclusion. Sameness is expressed The Stranger

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by politeness, whereas Otherness is marked by marginality. The absence of names for people in positions of authority in the novel (the judges, the lawyers, and the priest) confirms Foucault's view that, in Cloonan's words, such people are separate "conduits through which power flows." Cloonan observes that "Meursault's crime is on the level of discourse."1l9 The strangeness of this discourse produces the threat of a new episteme, a new conceptual paradigm. A Foucaldian reading of rEtranger is more inclusive because it shows that Meursault is but one nexus in the discursive network that society represents. After his first reaction in "Nature, humanisme, tragedie," Robbe-Grillet returned several times to the "reference maudite" (cursed point of reference) that rEtranger and Sartre's La Nausee represented for aspiring novelists. 120 A close examination of key references in RobbeGrillefs Le Miroir qui revient (1984) yields an "epistemological affinity" between Camus and Robbe-Grillet that Raymond Gay-Crosier anchors in their similar use of irony.l2l At some point, Robbe-Griller's interpretation demonstrates intertextuality at work, because he consciously blurs the line between reading rEtranger and writing his own fictional autobiography. Theorizing the function of the narrative voice in rEtranger, Dominique Rabate posits that Meursault's first-person narrative problematizes the status of the speaking and acting subject to the point that, ultimately, the I cannot be assigned to a specific subject. The enunciation of this narrative is addressed to equally vague recipients, so that the reality of part 1 is subverted by the theatricality of part 2. Meursau\t's discourse follows a narrative economy that, beginning with his mother's death, is rooted in "the mourning of any presence," his own included.122 Beyond the enduring popularity and timelessness of rEtranger, the novel also exhibits a high degree of judicial, political, social, and philosophical relevance, of which Edouard Morot-Sir identifies and comments on representative examples. Through Meursau\t's fictional prism, the younger Camus implicitly presents a sharp criticism of contemporary social values and networks. The question posed by Morot-Sir-"is the relation between people less absurd in the 1990s than it was in 19407"-is not a rhetorical one. rEtranger is at once a "puritan" and "hedonistic" love story in which Meursault plays the role of a secularized Christ-man figure incarnating deadly rebellion against false norms.123 A 1996 study by Anne Rubinlicht-Proux is one of the few that reviews the trial from a strictly legal viewpoint. Starting with the political context, Rubinlicht-Proux analyzes the "sociological reality" and the "judicial situation·' before systematically confronting the impact of metropolitan

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models in Paris on the French Algerian judiciary.1l4 The bulk of her essay, however, concerns questions of the philosophy of law: law and ideology, nature and law; obligation and responsibility, and, especially, contradictions in the theory of natural law as they become apparent in Meursault's trial. Rubinlicht-Proux's conclusions about law as practiced in a French colony show the extent to which such a colony might resist legal acculturation for social reasons, as well as the extent to which Meursault rejects the metaphysical roots of the legal system that condemns him. Death is omnipresent in Camus's fiction, whether in the form of a murder (rEt ranger) , a suicide (La Chute), or a plague (La Peste). Mino explains how the protagonists in these novels produce a discourse generated by a death that occurred naturally; by commission or omission, or by fate. '25 Meursault's discourse indicates the nuances of his indifference and his steadily increasing eloquence. His rejection of culpability prefigures Clamence's position as a "judge-penitent" in La Chute, by which he plunges the world around him into a growing feeling of collective guilt. In a 1999 article Gerald Prince, the leading American narratologist, revisits the question of Meursault's two narratives-one recounting events before and leading up to the murder, representing his own perspective; and one reporting what happens after the crime, in which he renders society's view of justice. Of particular interest are "Meursault's attitude as a narratee" (one who receives the narratives of others) and his stance as a critic of narratives and "metanarrative positions."llb The protagonist has little sympathy and understanding for traditional narratives with a beginning, a middle, and an end. He has a different notion of plausibility from that of the prosecutor because he is motivated by his "regard for truth" and his "distrust of rhetoric."127 Ultimately, Meursualt succeeds in planting doubt in the minds of readers as to the accuracy of any narrative, his own included. According to Gregoire in an essay published in 2000, womenespeCially Maman, Marie, and Sintes's Arab mistress-"preside" over Meursault's fate and exercise a dominating presence in the novel. 1'8 Meursault's behavior reflects his latent misogyny and racism, but in disguised form. His lack of respect for his elderly, widowed mother leads to the same punishment as the one dealt to a son by his estranged mother in the newspaper story that Meursault discovers under his mattress in his prison cell-death by yet another widow, as Honore de Balzac lahels the guillotine in Lc Perc Gonot (1835). (In Balzac's novel "the widow" is "the name filled with terrible poetry that the convicts give to the guillotine, "120 Meursault's relationship with young women is predicated on his sense of possession and dispossession, much like Sintes in his treatment of his mistress. Meursault The Stranger

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does not hate women as such, but he loves them, in Gregoire's view; as "interchangeable objects."lJO This attitude leads Meursault to go against his inborn fidelity to the truth and to tell lies in the letter he writes for Sintes. Other women (the nurses, the robotlike old woman, and Madame Masson) playa combined real, symbolic, and structural role in the novel. In general, old women are associated with Thanatos (death) and young women with Eros (love).

CRITICAL EXCERPTS The number of books and articles devoted to rEtranger has reached such uncontrollable proportions that only a small choice of studies can be included in a general presentation. To enable readers either to follow or to form their own thematic and methodological preference, excerpts from a representative sampling of seven critical categories are presented here. The selections are based primarily on the topical representativeness of the studies and their accessibility to a broad audience. The recent popularity of sociopolitical, psychoanalytical, and narratological studies is reflected in the larger number of examples selected from those categories. Obviously, many excellent books, chapters, and articles have simply had to be left out for practical reasons.

PHILOSOPHICAL AND MORAL APPROACHES

From Germaine Bree, "Heroes of Our Time: The Stranger," in Camus (New Brunswick, N.].: Rutgers University Press, 1959), pp. 112-117. Meursault, the hero of rEtranger; is a kind of Adam, a man content just to live and who asks no questions. But like Melville's Billy Budd, Meursault kills a man. He is then judged to be guilty, but why? The prosecutor, lawyer, and chaplain answer the question in conventional semi-social, semi-religious, Occidental terms, but these officials represent abstract entities and their answers mean nothing to Meursault nor to a simple-minded man like Meursault's friend, Celeste; quite obviously their explanations do not apply to the case as Camus devised it. But as the tale develops, it seems clear that Meursault's error lies precisely in his estrangement. He acts in a human situation as though human relationships. and therefore responsibilities, do not exist, and before he knows it he is involved in Raymond's elementary but violent drama. That Meursault killed an Arab is a fact. That his act is not premeditated and that there was a provocation is also a fact. But at the trial what both prosecution and defense present to the jury are all unrelated events in Meursault's life between his mother's death and the murder; these events are presented in a logically organized whole as the basis of an interpretation of Meursault's personality. As Meursault sits in bewildered surprise through this reconstruction of his crime, he begins to feel that he . is being condemned to death because he was found guilty of not crying at his mother's funeral. And in a sense he is right. In fact he is condemned, according

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to Camus himself, "because he does not play the game." He is a stranger to society, because he refuses to make any concession whatsoever to its codes and rituMS. He sees no relation at all between his mother's death and the fact that he goes to see a comic film two days later, and he establishes none. And, seeing through his eyes, we are almost in complete agreement with him. He is, as Camus himself has said, a man who refuses to lie .... Meursault ... [finally1 becomes a sacrificial victim, his end is an apotheosis, the equivalent of Patrice's "happy death" [in Camus's novel of the same title (La MOTt Heureuse in the original French) 1, a descent into the sea and the sun, a reintegration into cosmos. The stranger has in his prison cell, on the brink of death, found his kingdom: the irreplaceable, every-moment life of an ordinary human being who by an inexplicable decree of fate is destined to death. Meursault, as Camus conceived him, must disappear with his revelation. It is clear that Meursault's initial mental attitude proves inadequate to cope with even the simplest of lives. The very essence of l'absurde in his case is that out of indifference he linked forces with violence and death, not with love and life. Like Parsifal in the legend of the Fisher-King he fails to ask any question and thereby gravely errs. In ~Etranger Camus thus suggests that in the face of the absurd no man can afford passively to just exist. To fail to question the meaning of the spectacle of life is to condemn both ourselves, as individuals, and the whole world to nothingness.

From Rene Girard, "Camus's Stranger Retried," PMLA, 74 (December 1964): 519-533; reprinted in his "To Double Business Bound": Essays on Literature, Mimesis, and Anthropology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), pp. 9-35. We still invoke Fate today when we do not want to ascribe an event to chance, even though we cannot account for it. This "explanation" is not meant seriously, however, when we are talking about real happenings taking place in the real world. We feel that this world is essentially rational and that it should be interpreted rationally. An artist is entitled to disregard rational laws in his search for esthetic effects. No one denies this. If he makes use of this privilege, however, the world he creates is not only fictional but fantastic. If Meursault is sentenced to death in such a fantastic world, my indignation against the iniquitous judges must be fantastic too, and I cannot say, as Camus did in his preface to the Bree-Lynes edition of ITtranger, that, in our society, people who behave like Meursault are likely to be sentenced to death. The conclusions that I infer from the novel are valid for this novel only and not for the real world, since the laws of verisimilitude have been violated. Meursault's drama does not give me the right to look with contempt upon real judges operating in a real court. Such contempt must be justified by a perfectly rational sequence of causes or motivations leading from the funeral of the mother to the death of the hero. If, at the most crucial point in this sequence, Fatum is suddenly brandished, or some other deity as vague as it is dark, we must note this sudden disregard for the rational course of human affairs and take a very close look at the antisocial message in the novel. ... Camus needs his "innocent murder" because his a priori principle is blatantly false. The irritating cult of motherhood and the alleged profundities of l'absurde must not obscure the main issue. Let us translate the brilliant paradoxes of the The Stranger

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author back into the terms of his story, let us remove the halo of intellectual sophistication that surrounds the novel, and no one will take its message seriously. Do we really believe that the French judicial system is ruthlessly dedicated to the extermination of little bureaucrats addicted to cafe au lait, Fernandel movies, and casual love affairs with the boss's secretary? ...

LEtranger; as the expression of egotistical values and meanings, forms a structure, a relatively stable "world view." Camus "sincerely" believed in the guilt of the "judges." The incoherence of the plot does not stem from an awkward effort to prove something that was only half believed or not believed at all. On the contrary, the author's conviction that iniquity of the judges can always be proved was so strong that nothing could shake it. The innocent will inevitably be treated as a criminal. In the process of proving this point, Camus had to ·turn his innocent into a real criminal, but his faith was such that he did not perceive the tautology. We can understand, now, why the "generous lawyer" is presented to us both as the sincere defender of his clients and as the accomplice of their crimes. As long as the egotistical Manicheism that produced LEtrangcr held its sway over him, the author could not perceive the structural flaw of his novel. All illusions are one. They stand together and they fall together as soon as their cause, egotistical passion, is perceived. The confession of Clamence [the hero in Camus's La Chute, deemed a superior novel] does not lead to a new "interpretation" of LEtranger but to an act of transcendence; the perspective of this first novel is rejected .... The structural flaw in LEtranger becomes intelligible when the novel is assimilated to the type of behavior that has become very common, even among adults, in our contemporary world. Meursault's empty life, his sullen mood, his upside-down world, no less than his healf-hearted and secretly provocative crime, are typical of what we call "juvenile delinquency." This social aspect can easily be reconciled with the ultra-Romantic conception of the self that underlies the novel. Observers have pointed out the element of latter-day Romanticism in juvenile delinquency. In recent years, some novels and films dealing openly with this social phenomenon have borrowed features from LEtranger, a work that, outwardly at least, has nothing to do with it. The hero of the film A bout de souJjle, for instance, half voluntarily kills a policeman, thus becoming a "good criminal" after Meursault's fashion. The theme of juvenile delinquency is absent from LEtranger because the novel is the literary equivalent of the action, its perfect analogon.

From William M. Manly, "Journey to Consciousness: The Symbolic Pattern of Camus' rEtranger;" PMLA., 79 (June 1964): 321-328. The suggestion that a symbolic waking to consciousness is at issue in this crucial scene [the murder] is reinforced by the descriptive details of the actual shooting. Unsettled by the sun and not fully in control, Meursault shoots the Arab five times. In this moment he realizes that something basic and irrevocable has happened in his life: ["The trigger gave; I felt the smooth underside of the butt; and there, in that noise, sharp and deafening at the same time, is where it all started. I shook off the sweat and the sun. I knew that I had shattered the harmony of the day; the exceptional silence of a beach where I'd been happy."]lJl Meursault's curious phrase, ["shattered the harmony of the day"], and the implication that he has shattered the calm surface of a life in which he had been

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happy, invite attention to the following passage of Le Myrhe de Sisyphe: ["So long as the mind keeps silent in the motionless world of its hopes, everything is reflected and arranged in the unity of its nostalgia. But with its first move this world cracks and tumbles: an infinite number of shimmering fragments is offered to the understanding. We must despair of ever reconstructing the familiar, calm surface which would give us peace of heart."]'" In view of the symbolic and metaphOrical associations that exist between light and consciousness in Le My the, and the stress on the penetrating quality of light on the beach in tEtranger, the shattering effect Meursault feels after shooting may be fruitfully viewed as having a relation to the "premier mouvement" ["first move"] of his mind. This "premier mouvement" is the beginning of absurd awareness, which is described in Le My the as a mental fragmentation leading to a destruction of mental equilibrium-precisely the sensations that Meursault feels after killing the Arab .... Meursault's slow corning to knowledge [at the conclusion of part 2] has at last ended with the paradox which Le Myrhe de Sisyphe propounded more philosophically: Man, as part of an absurd existence, is least alienated from the sensation of being when he is most sensitive to that inhuman hostility that lurks beneath the mask of habit. To strip the mask is to feel to the last agony that grandeur in loneliness of Christ and Sisyphus.

HISTORICAL AND SOCIOPOLITICAL APPROACHES

From Conor Cruise O'Brien, "The Stranger;" in Camus (London: Fontana, 1970), pp. 20-22. I have found from reading a number of students' essays on Camus that a prevalent stock response is one seeing Meursault as a hero and martyr for the truth, and at the same time identifying with him. Yet the Meursault of the actual novel is not quite the same person as the Meursault of the commentaries. Meursault in the novel lies. He concocts for Raymond the letter which is designed to deceive the Arab girl and expose her to humiliation, and later he lies to the police to get Raymond discharged after he has beaten the girl up. It is simply not true that Meursault is "intractable in his absolute respect for truth."ll3 These episodes show him as indifferent to truth as he is to cruelty. And his consent to these actions sets in motion the chain of events which leads to the killing of the Arab on the beach.

I:Etranger is in fact a more complex and interesting novel than would appear from the commentaries-including Camus's own commentary-which sanctify the hero. There is just one category of phenomena about which Meursault will not lie, and that is his own feelings. Neither to give pleasure to others nor to save them pain nor to save his own skin will he pretend that he feels something that he does not feel. Logically there is no reason why this should be so. There is no reason why he should not use lies to get himself out of the trouble which he got himself into by lies. Indeed, in the second case the motivation is (one could imagine) infinitely stronger than in the first. Yet it is in the second that he resists. The reason can only be that his own feelings, and his feelings about his feelings, are sacrosanct. They are the god whom he will not betray and for whom he is martyred. His integrity is that of the artist, the Nietzschean integrity. The idea of him as an enemy of "social oppression" lacks reality. When Raymond is beating up the Arab girl, Meursault refuses to send for the police because he dislikes the police. But this dislike of the police The Stranger

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cannot be dislike of social oppression because he per~onal1y makes no move to interrupt the social oppression which is at that moment very tangibly proceeding in Raymond's room as a result of Meursault's letter. The reason why he will not have the police sellt for is simply, as always, his rigorous fidelity to the hierarchy of his own feelings. He dislikes the idea of the police. He is indifferent to the beating up of the woman.

From Patrick McCarthy, "Class and Race," in his Albert Camus: The Stranger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 46-47. McCarthy's quotations from fEtranger are from the 1984 Gallimard Folio edition. A further detail is the tumour which has eaten away her [the Arab nurse in the morgue} nose. The illness, which will presumably kill her, makes her even more like a mother, but it also represents an impersonal act of brutality. As such it stands outside of history, and yet it foreshadows the brutalities that stem not from fate but from the colonial system. So, although the nurse, who comes and goes without regard to Meursault or the caretaker, vanishes from the novel, she has established the Arab as a disturbing presence and her whiteness may be said to trigger the intense white light which so troubles Meursault. In not speaking she offers parallels with the mother and with Meursault. ... [T}he silence is a sign both of oppression and of authenticity The next Arab, Raymond's mistress, will utter the cry when Raymond beats her for the second time and will then add a brief sentence that unmasks him: "He has beaten me up. He's a pimp" (61). This-the language of denunciation-cuts through Raymond's lies and may be read as an outburst of revolt against the two occasions when he imposes his language on her and her brother, by describing to Meursault how he beat them up. If this woman too is a surrogate of the mother, the discourse on Arabs has nonetheless shifted because the brutality done to her is committed by a French-Algerian. It appears that from this point on psychoanalytical interpretations do not in themselves suffice. For, while such readings reaffirm that the Arab on the beach is an agent of the mother, they do not answer the question of why the agent is an Arab. One might speculate that, as the original inhabitant of North Africa, the Arab is identified with the mother or the father, just as the mother is briefly linked with metropolitan France, that other threat to the pied-noir. But this is a nebulous argument and we must attempt a political reading that will trace the growing rivalry between the French-Algerians, Raymond and Meursault, and the Arabs. We cannot agree with Jean Gassin who asserts that the origins of Meursault's "strangeness" are psychoanalytical but not political.)34 Why should they not be both? Meursault's sense that his identity is being menaced by his mother overlaps with his sense that his identity as a pied-noir is being menaced by the Arab.

From Susan Tarrow, "Tht' StrcmgCl;" in her Exilcfrom tht' Kingdom: A Political Readil1g of Albert Camus (University: University or Alabama Press, 1985), pp. 66-90. In 1937 Camus had warned the PCF lthe French Communist Party) in Algiers of the consequences of not listening: in his preface to Algerian Reports he reiterates the same theme to attack French nationalism: "If France alone should reign

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in Algeria over eight million mutes (muets), she will die there."l35 The Arabs in this story are silent. Camus's indictment of an oppressive class system is widely applicable and reflects his concern with Fascism, but in The Stranger the specific elements of colonialism are Singularly evident. Most commentaries on the political aspects of the work have centered on Camus's (or Meursault's) presentation of Arabs, the role they play in the story; and the author's or narrator's attitude towards them. Two examples are Pierre Nora's view that Camus voiced fears typical of the petit blanc [the little white settler] in Algeria, and Conor Cruise O'Brien's that he unconsciously upheld the status quo of French jurisdiction and domination of the Arab population. To test the validity of these opinions, the narrator's perception and presentation of French society in Algeria should first be examined ... How does this French society relate to the indigenous Arab population? Far from propagating the colonial myth as O'Brien suggests, Camus presents it in its true light and shows up its inherent injustices. The policeman handles Raymond roughly for causing a breach of the peace, but at the police station Raymond has no difficulty in brushing off the Arab girl's accusations, and Meursault's statement is not even questioned. Only when the prosecution wishes to prove Meursault a sordid underworld figure does Raymond appear to the authorities as a reprobate .... Henri Krea's assertion that Meursault exhibits the typical racial prejudice of the colonial petit blanc seems without foundation in the text. The attitude of the French government authorities is pointed up quite sharply, however, and leads to an Arab expectation of hostility that Meursault is in fact far from feeling. But his mere association with Raymond marks him as an enemy in the situation where appearances are the sole criteria available. The Arabs have no legal recourse against aggressors, but are forced to take the law into their own hands. They are obviously treated as second-class citizens in the prison, where they outnumber Europeans, and the death of an Arab is not considered an unforgivable offense. But nowhere is it clear that Meursault shares these attitudes .... Camus is playing ironically with ambiguity here, but this does not detract from the moral intent, to demonstrate that the judgment is unjust because it is based on ambiguous data. Misinterpretation can be accidental or intentional, but in either case the consequences can prove fatal. Metaphysical absurdity is mirrored by the social situation depicted in The Stranger; as Camus remarked, "The Plague has a social meaning and a metaphysical meaning. It's exactly the same. This ambigUity is also present in The Stranger."!36 The injustice of the social situation is in turn reflected and complicated by the particular attributes of a colonial society. Meursault lEarns in the course of writing his life that it is not meaningless, and his desire to relive it is the first positive affirmation he makes.

From Edward Said, "Camus and the French Imperial Experience," in his

Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1994), pp. 169-185. I would go so far as to say that because Camus's most famous fiction incorporates, intranSigently recapitulates, and in many ways depends on a massive French discourse on Algeria, one that belongs to the language of French imperial attitudes and geographical reference, his work is more, not less interesting. The Stranger

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His clean style, the anguished moral dilemmas he lays bare, the harrowing personal fates of his characters, which he treats with such finesse and regulated irony-all these draw on and in fact revive the history of French domination in Algeria, with a circumspect precision and a remarkable lack of remorse or compassion .... Camus's novels and stories thus very precisely distill the traditions, idioms, and discursive strategies of France's appropriation of Algeria. He gives its most exquisite articulation, its final evolution to this massive "structure of feeling." But to discern this structure, we must consider Camus's works as a metropolitan transfiguration of the colonial dilemma: they represent the colon [colonist] writing for a French audience whose personal history is tied irrevocably to this southern department of France; a history taking place anywhere else is unintelligible .... The deeply conflicted strength of Meursault's suicidal self-ackn9wledgment can have emerged only out of that specific history and in that specific community. At the end, he accepts what he is and yet also understands why his mother, confined to an old persons' home, has decided to remarry: "elle avait joue a recommencer.... Si pres de la mort, maman devait s'y sentir libre et prete a tout revivre" ("She had played at starting again.... So close to death, Mother had to feel free and ready to live everything again").J37 We have done what we have done here, and so let us do it again. This tragically unsentimental obduracy turns into unflinching human capacity for renewed generation and regeneration. Camus's readers have imputed to ~Etranger the universality of a liberated humanity facing cosmic indifference and human cruelty with impudent stoicism. To resituate ~Etranger in the geographical nexus from which its narrative trajectory emerges is to interpret it as a heightened form of historical experience.... Counterposed with the decolonizing literature of the time, whether French or Arab-Germaine Tillion, Kateb Yacine, Fanon, or Genet-Camus's narratives have a negative vitality, in which the tragic human seriousness of the colonial effort achieves its last great clarification before ruin overtakes it. They express a waste and sadness we have still not completely understood or recovered from.

From Alec G. Hargreaves, "History and Ethnicity in the Reception of fftranger," in Camuss ~Etranger: Fifty Years On, edited by Adele King (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992), pp. 101-112. The very notion of the absurd as a universally felt human condition is itself indicative of the ethnic divide which stood between Camus and most of Algeria's inhabitants. Had they been able to read Camus's novel, it is highly unlikely that the Muslims who accounted for the overwhelming majority of the Algerian population would have recognised themselves in its picture of cosmic meaninglessness. The godless universe inhabited by Camus was that of a twentieth-century European; it was light years away from the Islamic beliefs adhered to by most Algerians. Few of the Muslims living in Algeria in Camus's day were capable of reading tEtranger, for after more than a century of colonial rule education remained the preserve of the minority settler population, together with a small native elite. Most Muslims therefore remained as ignorant of European thought as did Camus or for that matter Sartre where the ideas and beliefs of non-Europeans . were concerned. SartTe's description of Arab chants as meandering and incomprehenSible is an obvious mark of his ignorance; such chants would appear

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wholly natural and coherent in Arab ears. Sartre was of course a native of metropolitan France and had never set foot in Algeria, so his lack of instruction in North African culture is perhaps hardly surprising. Granted that Camus had been born and lived practically all his life in Algeria, his ignorance of the Arabic language and of Islamic culture in general is far more striking. Camus always claimed to feel a deep affinity with Algerians of non-European descent,l'" and was proud to have campaigned for improvements in their lot during his early career as journalist. The road to the improvement which Camus wished to secure for the Muslims lay through assimilation .... [E]ven apparently sincere assimilationists such as Camus implicitly took the view that indigenous cultures were of lesser value than French civilisation; the arrogance inherent in that view rather took the edge off the generosity of spirit often associated with assimilation. Although Camus never acknowledged his commitment to full-blown cultural assimilation, his deepest instincts undoubtedly lay in that direction.

From Ena C. Vulor, "Camus, Mammeri, Feraoun and rEtranger: Landscapes of the Absurd and Colonial Landscapes," in Colonial and Anti-Colonial Discourses: Albert Camus and Algeria: An Intertextual Dialogue with Mouloud Mammeri, Mouloud Feraoun, and Mohammed Dib (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 2000), pp. 69-119. To say that Meursault refuses to play the game presupposes a certain awareness which, in my estimation, is lacking in the hero. Meursault ... lives in a kind of rousseauiste pre-civilized realm, entirely detached from such notions as norms, rules, and even "truth," so that whatever perception of things and people he has at the time is itself, detached from any ethical presuppositions. Meursault, totally given to a life of the phySical senses, seems devoid of that intellectual sophistication necessary to link, or effect any causality between, past, present and future. Susan Tarrow sees this as "an intellectual confusion ... stem[ming] from the limits of his education." Far from being a moralist, he is simply at home with the physical setting of Algiers. Contrary to Sartre's reading, Meursault's consciousness of the absurd emerges with the killing of the Arab. Meursault becomes, then, an "intelligent," articulate being. He develops from ["total indifference and apathy" and] "from an acquiescent figure ... to a combatant who claims the right to be different. ""' ... It appears ... that the marginalization of the Arab within the narrative is geared toward Camus's exposition of his philosophical ideas. What is thereby explOited is injustice but in an inverted way, a travesty of injustice. The theme of justice evidently permeates the entire novel; it is however exploited to illustrate the injustice of institutionalized violence against which Meursault is an emblematic victim. What is interesting is that this formulation puts the writer in a peculiar position of having to present colonial injustice as unproblematic. It could be, and has been argued, that Camus is in effect offering a realistic portrayal of colonial justice. The inherent racism of the colonial system is evidenced by the fact that the crime, a homicide, fails to pass as sufficient ground for incrimination. The murder of the Arab can stand as crime only if it is reinforced by other unrelated details which confirm Meursault's "spiritual insensibility." One could infer then that had Meursault not had the misfortune of lacking moral decorum, had his crime been limited to killing an Arab, there would have been no case against him. In exploiting the absurdity of the trial, the non-sequitur

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logic of the legal system, the narrative inverts the terms of injustice seemingly to exonerate, and to bring out Meursault's innocence .... Let us remember that the colonial experience in North Africa faced two major obstructions that were felt to a lesser extent in the 5ubsaharan part of the continent, namely religious and sexual barriers. These two secluded domains constituted formidable weapons for the indigenous culture and a threat to the colonizer. The latter'S effort to overcome religiOUS antagonism and penetrate the domestic life of the colonized remained unyielding, thus contributing to the insecurity of the settler in colonial space. The Arab's culture of the shail [seragliol aided greatly in isolating and insulating the indigenous culture. The subsequent reification of the Arab woman within Western myth and orientalist discourse was an attempt to vulgarize that which was kept hidden. The image of the "oriental" woman as a "prostitute," or a mere object of desire, was significantly related to the European endeavor. So also, the absence of indigenous women from the colonial arena created a certain inequality in which the colonizer felt rather vulnerable. It also rendered the conflict much more violent. Raymond's relationship with the Mauresque woman in fEtranger can be interpreted in the light of such an antagonism. Raymond is a European pimp having control over an indigenous prostitute. He is both a lover and a master. Let us keep in mind that it was this conflict which triggered the entire drama of the novel. Of great significance also was the Arab males' (brother of the woman, and friend) attack on the Europeans. It was a protest against the violation made to their honor, and one that set in motion subsequent incidents leading to the murder on the beach. Also significant was the fact that the Arabs were shown as "trespassers" on the beach. I believe that the narrative components here do have symbolic values. Raymond's relationship with the Mauresque, which replicates the master/slave dialectics, is a colonial male's intrusion into the protected space of the harem. It is an act of violation aimed at defiling that which has been held "sacred." By putting the indigenous woman to work as a prostitute for his financial benefits, Raymond not only devalues the "sacred" world of the Arab woman, he also reenacts symbolically the colonial appropriation and exploitation. The beach here can be seen as a symbolic ground, representing that domain of the indigenous culture which has been violated. The Arabs' antagonistic moves dramatize the Indigenes' hostility to colonial intrusion.

PSYCHOLOGICAL AND PSYCHOANALYTICAL APPROACHES

From Nathan Leites, "The Stranger," in Art and Psychoanalysis, edited by William Phillips (New York: Criterion, 1957), pp. 247-267. The hero presumably experiences intense guilt about the death of his mother, toward whom he has felt conscious, though consciously feeble, death wishes (pp. 14, 80). In accordance with his overall techniques of defense against affect, he has largely repressed guilt feelings. When the magistrate asks him whether he regrets his murder, he answers that "what I felt was less regret (du regret veritable) than a kind of vexation (un certain ennui)."'40 When the public prosecutor accuses him of his lack of guilt feelings about the murder, "I'd have liked to have a chance of explaining to him in a quite friendly, almost affectionate way, but I have never been able really to regret anything in all my life" (127). Having repressed his guilt feelings, the hero additionally projects the accuser into the outer world. While he consciously feels innocent of his

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mother's death, he believes exaggeratedly or at least prematurely that others accuse him of it, or of his behavior in connection with it. ... Another major manifestation of the hero's intense unconscious rage consists in the commission of acts which aggress his environment and provoke it into aggressing him, thus alleviating his guilt. The self-destructive aspect of these acts is only a little conscious; and the same is true for the aggressive aspect of some of them. For example, the hero adopts a "free association" policy in his verbal utterances, however grave the consequences of this may be. When he is asked to speak at his trial, "I said the first thing that crossed my mind ... as I felt in the mood to speak" (129). The hero is conSistently and consciously frank, in words and acts, in expressing the nonconformism corresponding to his affectlessness. (For many of the hero's fictional predecessors the refusal to conform to conventional modes of expressing affect had been related to the awareness of a unique nuance of affect which insisted on its own channels.) He indicates dearly his lack of grief about the death of his mother and refuses to go through the paces of conventional mourning behavior (31, passim), his atheism (85, passim), his lack of response to others as conveyed by silence. The effect, of course, is to stimulate hostilities directed against himself. But the hero scarcely-or only belatedly-recognizes this. He has, indeed, little empathy for his environment's aggressive reactions to acts of his own which are interpreted as aggressive. As he represses destructiveness in himself, he denies it in others. When he communicates to his lawyer his unfavorable attitude toward his mother, the lawyer makes him promise "not to say anything of that sort at the trial" (80). Thereupon the hero attempts to satisfy the lawyer: "Anyhow I could assure him of one thing: that I would rather Mother hadn't died." He has no awareness of the unfavorable impact of such a communication.

From Nathalie Sarraute, "From Dostoievski to Kafka," in her The Age of Suspicion: Essays on the Novel, translated by Maria Jolas (New York: Braziller, 1963), pp. 16-24. When Albert Camus' The Stranger appeared, it was permissible to believe with good reason that it would fulfill all hopes. Like all works of real value it came at the appointed time; it responded to our expectations; it crystallized all our suspended stray impulses. From now on, we need envy no one. We too had our homo absurdus. And he enjoyed the undeniable advantage over even Dos Passos' and Steinbeck's heroes of being depicted not at a distance and from the outside, as they were, but from within, through the classical process of introspection, so dear to adherents of "the psychological": we could ascertain his inner nothingness at close range and, as it were, from a front box. In fact, as Maurice Blanchot wrote, "this Stranger's relation to himself is as though someone else were observing and speaking of him .... He is entirely on the outside, and all the more himself in that he seems to think less, feel less, be less intimate with his self. The very image of human reality when it is stripped of all psychological conventions, when we try to grasp it by a description made solely from the outside, deprived of all false, subjective explanations. . . ."141 And Claude-Edmonde Magny wrote: "Camus wants to let us see the inner nothingness of his hero and, through it, our own nothingness .... Meursault is man stripped of all the ready-made garments with which society clothes the normal void of his being: his conscience ... the sentiments and psychological reactions he tries to find in himself (sadness as his mother lies dying, love for Maria, remorse at the murder of the Arab) he does not find: indeed, all he finds is a The Stranger

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view that is absolutely similar to the view that others may have of his behavior." I·~'

And the fact is that during this scene of his mother's funeral, although he does occaSionally discover within himself a few sentiments that classical analysis, albeit with a certain timorous fluster, succeeded in uncovering; a few of the fugitive thoughts, "shadowy and shy," that it detected (among many others) "gliding by with the furtive speed of fish"-such as the pleasure he derives from

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a lovely morning in the country, the disappointment he feels at the thought of the outing this funeral has made him miss, or the memory of what he usually does at this time of morning-on the contrary, everything that in any way concerns his mother, and not only ordinary sorrow (without surprising us too much, he might have experienced a sense of deliverance and satisfaction, like one of Virginia Woolf's heroines), but all sentiment or thought whatsoever, appears to have been completely abolished, as though by a magic wand. In this well-scrubbed, well-adorned conscience, there is not the slightest scrap of memory that ties back to childhood impressions, not the palest shadow of those ready-made sentiments that the very persons who think they are protected against conventional emotions and literary reminiscences, feel slip through them. This state of anesthesia appears to be so profound that we are reminded of the patients described by Dr. Janet, who suffer from what he has called "feelings of emptiness," and who keep saying: "All my feelings have disappeared .... My head is empty. ... My heart is empty ... people and things are a matter of equal indifference to me .... I can go through all the motions but, in doing so, I feel neither joy nor sorrow.... Nothing tempts me, nothing disgusts me .... I am a living statue; whatever happens to me, it is impossible for me to have a sensation or a sentiment about anything.... " Despite these similarities of language, however, there is nothing in common between Albert Camus' character and Dr. Janet's patients. Meursault who, in certain things, appears to be so insensitive, so simple-minded and as though in a daze, in certain others, gives evidence of refinement of taste and exquisite delicacy. The very style in which he expresses himself makes him, rather than the rival of Steinbeck's bellowing hero, the heir to [Mme de Lafayette'S] Princess of Cleve and [Benjamin Constant's] Adolphe. As the abbe Bremond would say, he is "all strewn with winter roses." This Stranger has the vigorous acuity of line, the rich palette of a great painter: "Without a smile she inclined her long, bony face .... " "I was a bit lost between the blue and white sky and the monotony of these colors, the sticky black of the fresh tar, the dull black of people's clothes, the enamel black of the car." ... He notes with the tenderness of a poet the delicate play of light and shadow and the varying tints of the sky. He recalls the "brimming sun that made the landscape quiver," "an odor of night and flower." He hears a "moan that became slowly audible like a flower born of silence." Unerring taste guides the choice of his epithets. He speaks of "a drowsy headland," "a dark breath." But there are things that are still more disturbing. If we are to judge by the details that hold his attention-such as the episode of the maniac or, above all, the one about Salamano, who hates and martyrizes his dog and, at the same time, loves it with deep, moving tenderness-he is not averse to skirting about the edges of the abyss, with prudence, of course, and circumspection. Despite the "ingenuousness" and "unconsciousness" with which he discloses, to quote Maurice Blanchot, that "man's real, constant mood is: I do not think, I have nothing to think about," he is much more aware than we imagine. As witness, such a remark as this, that he lets drop: "All healthy human beings (have) more or less wished for the death of those they loved," which shows that, on occasion, and doubtless oftener than most, he has made rather deep incursions into forbidden, dangerous zones. The feeling of malaise that we are unable to shake off all through the book probably comes from these very apparent contradictions, and only at the end when, incapable of containing himself any longer, Camus' hero feels that "someThe Stranger

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thing ... has burst inside (him)" and "he pours out ... all the depths of (his) heart," do we feel, with him, a sense of release: " ... I appeared to have empty hands. But I was sure of myself, sure of everything ... sure of my life and of this death that was going to come .... I had been right, I was still right ... what did the death of others mean to me, or a mother's love; what was the meaning of the lives we choose, the fates we elect, since one single fate had elected me and, with me, billions of privileged people .... Everybody was privileged ... , there were nothing but privileged people. . . . One day the others too would be condemned." Now we have it. Finally! What we had timidly surmised is suddenly confirmed. This young employee, who is so simple and rough-hewn, in whom we were asked to recognize the new; long-awaited man, was, in reality, diametr~cally opposed to him. His attitude, at times, may possibly have recalled the stubborn negativism of a sulky child, was one of determined, haughty prejudice, a desperate, lucid refusal, an example and perhaps, too, a lesson. The willful frenzy, characteristic of genuine intellectuals, with which he cultivates pure sensation, his very conscious egoism, fruit of some tragic experience that, to this exceptional sensitivity of his, has left him with a fine, constant sense of nothingness (had he not given us to understand that formerly, "when (he was) a student, (he had) been obliged to leave school, (he had) very soon understood that none of that was really important") relate The Stranger to Gide's The Immoralist. Thus, by way of analysis, and the psychological explanations that, up till the last moment, Camus took such pains to avoid, the contradictions and improbabilities of his book are explained, and the emotion to which we yield at last, unreservedly, is justified. Camus' situation recalls somewhat that of King Lear, taken in charge by the least favored of his daughters. For, in the end, it is to the "psychological," which he had tried so carefully to root out, but which came up again everywhere like weeds, that he owes his salvation. But however relieved we may feel when we have closed the book, we cannot help harboring a certain resentment against the author: we begrudge him the fact of having led us too long astray. His behavior toward the character reminds us a bit too much of certain mothers who persist in dressing their buxom and already adult daughters in skirts that are too short. In unequal struggle, the "psychological," like nature, came out on top. But perhaps, on the contrary, Camus was trying to demonstrate a wager on the impossibility, in our climes, of doing without psychology. If this was his purpose, he more than succeeded.

From Julian L. Stamm, "Camus's Stranger: His Act of Violence," American Imago, 26 (Summer 1969): 281-290. At the beginning, Meursault appears indolent, aimless and drifting. Now [at the beach] we see a man, driven by the heat and the sun. At the same time, he is magnetized by it and returns once more to the beach. The piercing rays of the sun symbolize the feared and yearned for attack from the outside world as well as the projection of his own homosexual excitement from within. In addition, note the comment: "Each time a hot blast struck my forehead I had to fend off the sun and the dark befuddlement, it was pouring into me." The dark befuddlement expresses the state of depersonalization or feelings of unreality, that is,

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an altered state of the ego which was occurring at that moment in his psyche, precipitated by a combination of inner depression, guilt, the hot sun, and his homosexual excitement. In short, he was in a dazed twilight state as he walked along the beach for the second time. The glare of the sun has multiple determinations. It expresses the seething homosexual desires within him, projected onto the outside, as well as his passive wish to be penetrated by the rays (homosexual assault). Sun and heat are a residue of the recent past and preconsciously linked with the hot day of mother's funeral. This would appear to be borne out in this paragraph: "The small black lump of rock came into view: It was rimmed by a dazzling sheen of light and feathery spray, but I was thinking of the cold, clear stream behind it. Anything to be rid of the glare, the sight of women in tears, the strain and effort, and to retrieve the pool of shadows by the rock and its cool silence." In other words, he is seeking a haven or retreat from the memories of mother and the strain and effort of masculine responsibility that would be entailed in the threatening, deepening relationship with Marie. The pool of shadow by the rock might be considered a twilight zone, a tnmsient altered state of his ego buffeted as it was at this point between heterosexuality and homosexuality, between his repressed yearning for mother that her death had stimulated and now in its wake, the emergence of a repressed passive homosexual wish for father. The latter wish had won out. This is expressed in the following passage: "When I came nearer I saw Raymonds Arab had returned. He was by himself, lying on his back, his hands behind his head, his face shaded by the rock while the sun beat on the rest of his body"-(a passive feminine seductive position). Then the author adds: "One could see his dungaree steaming in the heat." And now further evidence of the powerful maneuverings of the unconscious and the true motive force of his dark destiny, "1 was rather taken aback; my impression had been that the incident was closed, and I hadn't given a thought to it on my way here." There follows the acting out of his unconscious sadomasochistic fantasies with the Arab as an innocent object. "The Arab raised himself a little and his hands went to his pocket. Naturally I gripped Raymond's revolver in the pocket of my coat. The Arab let himself sink back again. [All this entirely passive, non-threatening.] I was some distance off and most of the time saw him as a blurred, dark form wobbling in the heat haze." (Since he was actually only ten yards away, the blurred vision of the Arab has reference to his own blurred state of consciousness at that moment.) Once more, Camus would point to the murderous act as something which could just as readily have been diverted and substituted by some ordinary act. It is my contention that, at the moment Meursault had completely surrendered to the compelling force of his unconscious sadistic drive and that his ego, now tom, was merely the passive instrument, the trigger at the behest of his unconscious drive. The id had won out over the regressed ego. His sadistic urges had seized control. Long pent up, they are now expressed in a violent act of shooting.

THEMATIC APPROACHES

From Roland Barthes, 'TEtranger; roman solaire," Bulletin du Club du meilleur livre, 12 (April 1954): 6-7. Reprinted in Les Critiques de notre temps et Camus, edited by Jacqueline Levi-Valensi (Paris: Garnier, 1970), pp.60-66. What makes LEtranger an opus and not a thesis is that in its story man is not only endowed with a moral code but also with a temperament. Meur,ault is The Stranger

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a man whose flesh is subjected to the sun, and I believe that this submission must be understood to have a quasi-sacral sense. As in ancient mythologies or in Racine's Phedre, the sun is here such a profound experience of the body that it becomes fate; it makes the story and disposes, in Meursault's enduring indifference, certain moments that generate actions. There isn't a single episode among the three in the novel (the funeral, the beach, the trial) that is not dominated by this presence of the sun; the solar fire functions here with the very rigor of ancient Necessity. As in any authentic work, the mythical element doesn't cease developing its figures and, to say it properly, it is not the same sun that leads Meursault in three instances of the recit. The funerary sun at the beginning obviously is only the condition for getting caught in matter: the sweat of the faces or the softening of the asphalt on the scorching road where the funeral cortege is proceeding, everything here is the image of a sticky environment; Meursault is no more able to become detached from the sun than from the rites themselves, and the solar sun's function is to shed light on, and to get stuck in, the absurdity of the scene. On the beach, another image of the sun: the latter does not liquefy, it hardens, it transforms all matter into metal, the sea into a sword, the sand into steel, the gesture into murder: the sun is at once arm, blade, triangle, mutilation, opposed to man's soft and deaf flesh. And in the court of assizes where Meursault is judged there is finally a dry sun, a dust-laden sun, the timeworn sun of the Hypogeum. This mixture of sun and nothingness supports each word of the book; Meursault is not only struggling with an idea of the world but also with a fatality-the Sun-which extends to an entire ancestral order of signs, for here the sun is everything: heat, lull, holiday, sadness, power, madness, cause and light. It is, by the way, this ambiguity between Sun-Heat and Sun-Lucidity that makes of rEtranger a tragedy. As in Oedipus at Colonus [by Sophocles] or Richard II by Shakespeare, Meursault's behavior is paralleled by a carnal itinerary that binds us to his magnificent and fragile existence. Thus the novel is not only grounded in philosophy but in literature: ten years after its appearance, something in this book continues to sing, something continues to tear us up, which is, of course, the double power of all beauty.

From Ignace Feuerlkht, "I'.Etranger Reconsidered," PMLA, 78 (December 1963): 606-621. Camus's treatment of time in LEtrangcr shows the puzzling juxtaposition of interweaving of precision, vagueness, and silence so characteristic of the whole novel. The time of the day is often stated (seven-thirty, ten o'clock, and-particularly important in Camus's world-two o'clock); so are the days of the week (Saturday, Sunday, and by implication Monday, Thursday, Friday). Of the months only June, the last month of the court sessions, is mentioned, in addition to August, when Meursault, Masson, and Raymond intend to spend their vacation together; of the seasons only summer. No day of the month and no year (except the historical 1789) are given. Often the data are rather vague: "the hour without name," "one day." The length of time is sometimes precise (two hours, two days, five months, eight years), sometimes vague (for many days), sometimes disregarded. We don't know Meursault's age (he is "young"), nor the month in which he killed the Arab. By implication, since the investigation alone lasts eleven months and the trial is held in Mayor June, we may assume that he committed the crime either in

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the latter part of May, or in June, or perhaps in the beginning of July. Because of the excessive heat during the funeral and the crime and Meursault's mention of summer as the time of the crucial events, the month of May is somewhat doubtful, and the month of June is the most likely time when the crime is committed and the trial is held. There is nothing unique about Meursault's experience of time in prison, where the days seem to him both long and short, their names lose all Significance, and they seem to form just one long day. Nor is there any peculiarity about the fact that he finds unpleasant stretches of time very long. The three quarters of an hour that the funeral procession lasts seem to be an eternal ordeal. The three quarters of an hour he has to wait in court for sentencing are "very long." ... Those who see in Meursault a Christ figure recall "the last moments of Christ, whose crucifixion was preceded by cries of hatred from the crowds."w But then one must also explain why Meursault suddenly and consciously identifies himself with Christ or parodies him. When one thinks that Meursault deserves the hatred of the people because he "has denied their myths,"'" and they see in him the symbol of their fate, which is usually masked by myths,'" one overlooks the fact that Meursault does not speak of expecting, but of wishing those cries of hate; also he has never been aware of his denying collective myths or of his being a symbol of something. When one believes that Meursault "wants the crowds to be there because he wants society to give some sign that it realizes how much he defies it,"]'" one forgets that the death penalty is a clear enough sign of how society regards him. Meursault's strange last wish is above all proof of the firmness of his indifference in contrast to his attitude in court where the mere Sight of people who, as he thought, detested him, made him feel like crying. He actually does not express that strange wish, but he feels the desirability or necessity of it; that wish probably means the ultimate height of tender indifference, which he thinks he has not achieved yet, but mayor will very soon achieve.

TEXTUAL AND NARRATOLOGlCAL APPROACHES

From Claude-Edmonde Magny; "Ellipsis in the Movies and the Novel," in her The Age of the American Novel: The Film Aesthetic of Fiction Between the Two Wars, translated by Eleanor Hochman (New York: Ungar, 1972), pp. 52-70. Ellipsis--understood in the broadest sense as a choice of elements, some (the image of film) registered mechanically, others (the novelistic description of the characters' behavior) reproducing reality as faithfully and impartially as possibleallows the presentation of raw material ordered in terms of a desired specific artistic effect, that is, of meaning. It consequently permits the reintroduction of the author's subjectivity and will, whether that auteur be director or writer. By means of this will, art accentuates and invigorates the paradox that is the very principle of perception: vision is the arbitrary act of will par excellence, that by which we choose to see right-side up the objects which in reality are painted upside down on our retinas. The right to an arbitrary vision of the world is the most sacred, the most inalienable right of man. Art only proclaims out loud this too-often-forgotten right. ..

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A PSYCHOANALYTICAL READING "Superficially, the evil mother pursues her son throughout Part 2. She has enlisted lawyers and magistrates, who succeeded in pun ishing him for loving her incestuously-they are the agents of his father-or for not loving her suffi· ciently-they are her agents."

Patrick McCarthy From Albert Camus: The Stranger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 198B), p. 60.

In rEtranger (The Stranger) Camus systematically uses ellipsis to express a particular form of nonbeing-the absurd. His problem is to present us with events that have carefully been sifted. fiJterf~d, in such a way as to remove from them all meanings not appropriate to his purpose. . . . There is nothing sensational in [the] description of [the] murder: every horrible detail has been removed as nonessential. There is no analysis of the murderers mind, either; he is absent from himself, at this moment more than ever. The only significance of the act that the filter has allowed to pass through is its inevitability: in an absurd universe the only function of human acts is to form a destiny. This is why during the second part of the story, during the trial, the most casual, the most insignificant acts of the first part-Meursault drinking coffee, going to the movies, swimming with his girlfriend-seem suddenly imbued with a sinister meaning. They lead to the murder of the Arab....

Everywhere else in the novel Camuss artificial filtering consists of the presentation of a character who says "I" while telling us only what a third person might know of him. He does not say "I felt like shooting an Arab" (and actually he is not conscious of feeling anything like that), but "The trigger gave ... I fired four shots more .. ."; not "I wanted Maria," but "She had a pretty dress with red and white stripes and leather sandals. "147 This is exactly the opposite of Dos Passoss method. What is subjective in the latter is objective in the former, and vice versa, yet the method of narration achieves the same ambiguity in rEtranger as in U.S.A. It provokes the same uneasiness, through which the author is able to communicate his desolate vision of an absurd universe, peopled by consciousness without solidity, where emotions, desires, and wishes find momentary resting places without our ever being able to understand the precise laws governing their appearance and disappearance. Meursault is the container of his feelings and his intentions; he does not produce them. He knows no more of their origins or their workings than any spectator of his actions. One might say that his life projects itself on a screen as it unfolds and that he observes from without. He does not succeed in finding within himself the feelings or psychological reactions he looks for (sadness during the death of his mother, love for Maria, regret for the murder of the Arab) but sees only what others can see-his acts. He thus appears as a "stranger" to himself: he sees himself as others see him, from the same vantage point as they do. The technical paradox of Camuss narration is to be falsely introspective, as that of Dos Passos was falsely objective. Of course, Camus was not the first to present us with characters who, when speaking of themselves, limit themselves to reporting their acts, their behavior, and who seem to be ignorant of what is going on in their minds. In two of James M. Cains novels-The Postman Always Rings Twice and Serenade-the characters say "I," as does the narrator of [Dashiell Hamrnetts] Red Harvest, who gives us as impartial a stenographic record of his actions as possible. But the technique remains a simple method of exposition, one it would not have been inconceivable to replace by another: the effect Hammett obtains in Red Harvest is not appreciably different from that of The Maltese Falcon, where the story unfolds in the third person, as is normal in an objective narrative.

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This superficial, resemblance between Camus's technique and that of some American novelists explains one of the descriptions of rEtranger as "Kafka written by Hemingway." It was said simply because Hemingway is one of the. best-known authors regularly using this method, But the profound Significance of the technique is absolutely different. What is new in rEtranger is its use of the subtle dissonance between an objective description of events and the first-person narration-which is usually, especially in the French tradition, introspective-to communicate a very personal conception of man and the world. Camus wants us to see his character's inner nothingness-and beyond this, our own nothingness, the nothingness of we who are brothers. Meursault is man denuded of all the ready-made coverings with which society clothes the normal emptiness of his being; he roughly corresponds to what a Dos Passos character would be if he were deprived of all the cliches and conventional feelings that fill his consciousness. Faced with the death of his mother, he does not find within himself the unhappiness he is supposed to feel; his emotion is reduced to a few acts that do not make much sense-spending the night next to the body and following the funeral cortege the next day. He Camus's I D card as a young journalist horrifies the society whose hypocrisy he rejects. He scandalizes the critics just as, in the novel, he infuriates the judges and jurors. He is Voltaire's Huron in tlngtnu, Huxley'S Savage in Brave New World-a man whose very existence strikingly shows up the vanity of society's efforts to mask from us the nothingness we are. This brings us to the profound truth revealed to us by the very nature of the objective technique: inner life does not exist; the psychological level does not reveal any reality; consciousness is not important. All this becomes obvious if one restricts oneself to describing a human life from the out~ide, deleting all subjective elements. This truth, so distressing to our pride, can already be glimpsed in [Gustave Flaubert'sl rEducation sentimentale, and it blazes out from Maupassant's "Une vie" ("A Life"). Man always has less of an inner life than he thinks, and especially if his idea of an inner life is based on faith in traditional introspection. He is little more than a "republic of reflexes," Such is the cheerless lesson that can be learned from naturalism.

From John Cruickshank, "The Art of the Novel (1)," in his Albert Camus and the Literature of Revolt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959), pp. 142-163. l.'Etranger contains, of course, many ideas and attitudes referred to in I.e My the de Sisyphe. What makes it a work of art, however, and sharply differentiates it from the essay, is the remarkable congruity between the view of life that it

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implies and the embodiment of this life in literary terms. In order to achieve this congruity Camus uses several technical devices which raise his subject-matter from the straightforward content of the essay to the artistically wrought content of the novel. These devices are used in connection with the narrative viewpoint, the vocabulary, the treatment of time and the tense employed....

IEtranger is written in the first person: the narrative viewpoint is an individual and subjective one. Traditionally, the first-person narrator in fiction has possessed a high degree of self-knowledge and has enjoyed a privileged insight into the thoughts and motives of his fellow-characters. His task has normally been to enlighten the reader and guide him towards a full understanding of those events and experiences which make up the story. In fact the first-person narrator has possessed virtual omniscience, being the mouthpiece of a novelist who accepted as axiomatic his own ability to understand and interpret aright the data of experience. The omniscient narrator argued, in short, a coherent and comprehensive universe. Immediately one begins to read IEtranger, however, one is struck by the fact that the narrator, who is also the main character, appears peculiarly ill-eqUipped, by traditional standards, for his task. His intellectual powers are unimpressive, his psychological insight is almost non-existent, and in general he appears bemused by experience. He also lacks an ethical sense and generally displays moral indifference. In other words, Meursault is the direct opposite of his counterpart in nineteenth-century fiction. Whereas the latter is confident of his ability to understand what he saw and attempted to describe, Meursault makes frequent reference to his own inadequacy, his failure to understand, his apparently genuine ethical indifference .... The first-person narrative is the ideal vehicle for conveying [the experience of absurdisml which hinges on the failure to explain. Meursault's experience, by its nature and by his nature, precludes explanation. Now it is important that this impossibility of explanation should not appear to reside in an omniscient third-person narrator, much less in the novelist himself. It must be the distingUishing feature of a character within the novel's own world, and this character must speak directly; in his own person, to the reader. Camus manages to do this by using as his narrator a person who is also the central character of the novel and whose own telling of his story shows that, although his senses are finely receptive to experience, his mind gives it no meaning.... Turning from the narrative viewpoint of IEtranger to its vocabulary, we find that this latter is severely restricted and remarkably concrete .... The impact of the novel is partly due, in fact, to the combined effect of choosing the first-person narrative, and using a non-analytical vocabulary The first-person narrative, particularly within the tradition of the French roman personnel, is associated with subtle and searching introspection. In IEtranger, however, Camus uses a vocabulary that is continually and uncompromisingly objective. An unusual discordance results between language and narrative method, and Camus uses this discordance in order to sharpen our sense of the incoherence lying at the heart of Meursault's experience. This is one more example of the way in which the novelist uses a technical device in order to emphasize the point of his novel without resorting to direct comment. The first-person narrative gives an impression of authentic directness. The severely restricted vocabulary prevents analytical complication. And by bringing authentic directness and lack of analytical power together in the same character Camus conveys a strong impression of the void felt by someone who experiences the absurd.

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From Alain Robbe-Grillet, "Nature, Humanism, Tragedy," in For a New Novel: Essays on Fiction, translated by Richard Howard (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1965), pp. 49-75. Albert Camus, as we know, has named absurdity the impassable gulf which exists between man and the world, between the aspirations of the human mind and the world's incapacity to satisfy them. Absurdity is in neither man nor things, but in the impossibility of establishing between them any relation other than strangeness. Every reader has noticed, nonetheless, that the hero of The Stranger maintains an obscure complicity with the world, composed of rancor and fascination. The relations of this man with the objects surrounding him are not at all innocent: absurdity constantly involves disappointment, withdrawal, rebellion. It is no exaggeration to claim that it is things, quite specifically, which ultimately lead this man to crime: the sun, the sea, the brilliant sand, the gleaming knife, the spring among the rocks . . . . As, of course, among these things, the leading role is taken by Nature. Thus the book is not written in a language as Jiltered as the first pages may lead one to believe. Only, in fact, the objects already charged with a flagrant human content are carefully neutralized, andJor moral reasons (such as the old mother's coffin, whose screws are described in terms of their shape and the depth they penetrate into the wood). Alongside this we discover, increasingly numerous as the moment of the murder approaches, the most revealing classical metaphors, naming man or infected by his omnipresence: the countryside is "swollen with sunlight," the evening is "like a melancholy truce," the rutted road reveals the "shiny flesh" of the tar, the soil is "the color of blood," the sun is a "blinding rain," its reflection on a shell is "a sword of light," the day has "cast anchor in an ocean of molten metal,"-not to mention the "breathing" of the "lazy" waves, the "somnolent" headland, the sea that "pants" and the "cymbals" of the sun .... The crucial scene of the novel affords the perfect image of a painful solidarity: the implacable sun is always "the same," its reflection on the blade of the knife the Arab is holding "strikes" the hero full in the face and "searches" his eyes, his hand tightens on the revolver, he tries to "shake off" the sun, he fires again, four times. "And it was"-he says-"as though I had knocked four times on the door of unhappiness." Absurdity, then, is really a form of tragic humanism. It is not an observation of the separation between man and things. It is a lover's quarrel, which leads to a crime of passion. The world is accused of complicity in a murder. When Sartre writes (in Situations 1) that The Stranger "rejects anthropomorphism," he is giving us, as the quotations above show; an incomplete view of the work. Sartre has doubtless noticed these passages, but he supposes that Camus, "unfaithful to his principle, is being poetic." Can we not say, rather, that these metaphors are precisely the explanation of the book? Camus does not reject anthropomorphism, he utilizes it with economy and subtlety in order to give it more weight. Everything is in order, since the point is ultimately, as Sartre points out, to show us, according to Pascal's phrase, "the natural unhappiness of our condition. " The Stranger

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From Brian T. Fitch, "The Hermeneutic Paradigm: LEtranger," in his The Narcissistic Text: A Reading oj Camus' Fiction (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982), pp. 49-67. If the fictive creations that pass for Meursault in the second part of the novel appear, in the first instance, to render the activity of the lawyers analogous to the work of the novelist as he creates his characters according to the laws of a certain plausibility, when they are placed in relation to the life of Meursault as depicted in the first part of the novel their status as interpretations of the latter immediately emerges, thus creating an affinity between the lawyers' role and that of the reader of the novels. So before reducing this portrayal of the legal system to its sociological and indeed, within the Algerian colonial situation, political dimensions, it may be as well to take into consideration its more properly literary significance arising from the resemblances noted between the lawyers's occupation and that of the novelist and the reader. The analogy between legal plausibility and novelistic verisimilitude that both stand in exactly the same relationship to fact and reality and that between the creative reconstitution of past events in the courtroom and both the production and the reproduction of literary fiction suggest we have already the potential for self-commentary on the part of the novel in question. Before exploring how this potential is developed in the functioning of the text, we should not overlook the fact that legal writings have traditionally, together with biblical texts and philological analyses, constituted one of the main branches of hermeneutics of the discipline of textual interpretation. The whole of the second part of rEtranger is thus centered on the problem of interpretation or more precisely that of inaccurate interpretation. All this interpretive activity is occasioned precisely by the events recounted in the first part. What is important in the present context is that the reader is convinced of the inaccuracy of a given interpretation (that of the examining magistrate, Meursault's lawyer, or the prosecuting counsel, for example) not because it departs from any of the other interpretations proposed since all they have in common is their fictive status as a posteriori fabrications, but rather because of the heavy irony that pervades all the scenes involving representatives of the legal system. This irony rules out any misinterpretation by the reader of the way he is to evaluate the portraits of the protagonist that emerge during the trial and its preliminaries. However, as we shall see, this is not the only operative factor in this respect. What I wish to stress for the moment is that nowhere in the second part of the novel is there provided any explicit corrective of the false portraits of Meursault. ... The second part of the novel is therefore not only an interpretation-or rather a number of interpretations--of the first part, but also a judgment that is, by implication, pronounced upon the reader's own interpretation of that first part. The reader of the second part is confronted by a patently false interpretation that has at the same time nonetheless been the one that began to establish itself within his own mind. He is faced therefore not only by a mirror reflection of his own activity as reader of the preceding text but also by an interpretation that bears striking resemblance to the result of that selfsame activity. It is important to realize that no explicit corrective to the false portrait of Meursault is provided by the text. As a result, it is not a question for him of simply transforming his nascent view of the character according to indications proVided. What is required of him is to go back to his initial task as interpreter and reader and to start all over again, his previous efforts having clearly been invalidated.

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There exists in the text an image where Meursault is seen looking at himself in his metal plate as he sits in his cell: "je me suis regarde dans rna gamelle de fer. II m'a semble que mon image restait serieuse alors meme que j'essayais de lui sourire" [I looked at myself in my tin plate. My reflection seemed to remain serious even though I was trying to smile at itl.I" This image can be seen as a mise-en-abyme of the experience of the reader.... What more appropriate image of autorepresentation could there indeed be than that of the mirror? For we are involved here with a process of autorepresentation. However, whereas more commonly in this type of process, the text refers to itself as text ... , here it refers to that dialectical relationship that comes into being through the act of reading and that relates the text to its interpreter. It is that relationship that it reproduces within itself and proffers to the reader, whose reading is thus reduced to a narcissistic exercise from which there is no escape within the confines of the text.

FEMINIST APPROACHES

Louise K. Horowitz, "Of Women and Arabs: Sexual and Racial Polarization in Camus," Modem Language Studies, 17 (Summer 1987): 54-61. That Albert Camus systematically excluded-one is tempted to say eradicated-both women and the colonial Arab population of North Africa from his work is a literary fact. Yet, traditionally, to call attention to the fact is to make a political statement, and, in particular, to risk being branded as the very type of left-wing intellectual ostensibly abhorred by Camus. Even those Western critics who pinpoint the racial foundation of Camus's fiction ultimately retreat into apologetic statements for having revealed the all too obvious .... The. "radical" critic ... , either Western or Arab or feminist, will focus precisely on the physical dimension-in the case of Meursault, on his curious indifference to various brutalities-and accuse Camus of complicity; subconscious or conscious, in allOwing the book's second half to move away from that reality. Whereas the majority of readers will see the failure to refer to the Arab's murder in the novel's second half as the result of Meursaults "solar" conditioning, which thus absolves him of premeditated intent to kill, other readers will come to see in such silence Camus's own (one that foreshadows no doubt the ambivalent positions he assumed concerning the Algerian revolution), a silence that is thereby a sort of hegemony-in-narrative. The sleight of hand accorded to the murder of the Arab throughout the second half is seen as Camus's own dismissal of the murder and preceding violence. Thus, we remain polarized, asked either not to condemn this writing as racially and sexually exploitative (for in this view such issues are secondary to the major "humanistic" ones), or to believe that Camus was a saboteur, presenting in La Peste, for example, a sanitized colonial fiction at the expense of a troubled and troubling colonial reality. The fact of the matter is that one need not evade or condemn. The eradication of women and Arabs from Camus's work can neither be denied, nor explained away ("it was the sun"), nor seen as a coloniallapsus. Camus has placed in his work men who reflect a collective attitude or mentality of sexual and racial fear and ill concealed desire for degradation. He himself calls attention to these issues, often in the early pages of his works, and only subsequently allows us to dismiss them, thereby encouraging oUT participation-but without our being made aware of it-in the exploitative situation at hand. That the "human" dimension-be it fear of death, solitude, alienation from the The Stranger

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social unit-comes to dominate in the discussion of these works is only a reflection of how such discourse inevitably detracts from textual realities .... Persisting in seeing Camus as the expressor of modern liberal human values denies the narcissistic and both sexually and racially polarizing sides of his protagonist. In eliminating in the second part of raranger any reference to Meursault's sexual and racial violence, in failing throughout the novel to give introspective voice to the very fears which by necessity are hidden in these acts, Camus textually parallels the ongoing reader reaction, it too prepared, at least subconsciously, to focus on the encompassing "humanistic" text, prepared to repress the fears lying underneath the claims of the individual spirit. ...

Vicki Mistacco, "Mama's Boy: Reading Woman in LEtranger," in "Camus:S LEtranger: Fifty Years On, pp. 152-169. In his last interview, when asked what he felt critics had most neglected in his work, Camus replied: "La part obscure, ce qu'il y a d'aveugle et d'instinctif en moi" [The obscure part of myself, the blind and instinctive elements I am concealing]. Ii' Many have since sought to approach this dark, enigmatic side from the perspective of psychoanalysis, emphasising, as Freudian and Lacanian orthodoxy requires, the oedipal moment, and in so doing, repressing or devaluing the maternal bond, giving primacy to the phallus and the threat of castration. To my knowledge, however, no sustained effort has been made to view Camus's writing from the perspective of psychoanalytic feminism, stressing rather the importance of the pre-oedipal stage in which the primary figure is not the father but the mother and the primary relationship is a dual not triangular one, between mother and child. Feminist critics have most often adopted this approach to study the mother/daughter dyad in women writers. Shifting the context, I propose here to effect a kind of "naive" reading, to "overread" Camus, as if he were a woman writer, for traces of the relationship between the feminine and the text production, bracketing psychoanalytic orthodoxy to allow the "underread," the feminine maternal, to emerge from the shadows of critical repression and be seen in Meursault's revolt in rEtranger, the text's ambiguities, and the author's concept of the Absurd. By referring positively to Meursault as a "marna's boy," I am drawing upon the hero's infantile vocabulary to suggest the transgressive potential in this relationship and to question the term's pejorative cultural connotations of a somehow "effeminate" boy whose excessive attachment to the mother extends scandalously beyond the "normal" time .... According to Costes, Gassin, Lazere, and other Freudian critics, this ambivalence [Camus's own relationship with his mother-torn between deep communication and impenetrable silence] and the frustrations that the mother's seeming indifference "must have" (a key phrase in these analyses) caused the child, led to a splitting of her imago as a defence mechanism. She thus becomes both Good Mother and Bad Mother and is endowed with both maternal (good) and paternal (bad) characteristics, including in the latter instance, as phallus. What is interesting is that although Camus stresses in these essays ambivalence and tension maintained between opposing notions which ultimately revert back to the mother ("Entre cet endroit et cet envers du monde, je ne veux pas choisir, je n'aime pas qu'on choisisse" [Between the two sides of the world I don't want a choice to be made]),l'O for all these critics the scales definitely tip toward the Bad or Phallic Mother whose phallus is her silence.

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COMPARATIVE APPROACHES

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From Roger Shattuck, "Two Inside Narratives: Billy Budd and I.:Etranger," Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 4 (Autumn 1962): 314-

320. Like two mineral specimens different in color and texture yet remarkably similar in structure, Melville's last novel and Camus's first seem designed for comparison. A few scholars have remarked the kinship without analyzing it at length. Direct influence can be ruled out, since Camus read Billy Budd after having written LEt ranger. Thus we are left very much in the clear with something suggestive to assay. The evident value of comparing the independent approach of two major authors to a similar theme is here augmented by the fact that the Significance of both works remains in dispute.

"GENTLE INDIFFERENCE" "[Flor 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 tl:Jat there be a large crowd of spectators the day of my execution and that they greet me with cries of hate."

Albert Camus From The Strang!!!; translated by Matthew Ward (New York: Vintage, 1989), pp. 122-123.

The two narratives turn on the same, essentially equivocal situation. From one point of view, a real crime, not of passion or premeditation, but of impulse, is described as an innocent action. From an opposing point of view; a spiritually innocent man discovers and ultimately affirms his guilt. "Innocence and guilt ... in effect changed places," writes Melville just before Billy's trial. In both books this ambivalent situation arises through the rigid application of a system of justice to a murder that follows a series of fortuitous misdemeanors. Billy, for example, spills soup in Claggart's path. Two days after his mother's funeral Meursault goes to a Fernandel movie with his new girlfriend. In each case a lengthy trial scene leading to the death sentence reveals the narrowness and distortion of the "justice" defined respectively by the British Articles of War in 1797 and by the Napoleonic Criminal Code. Yet neither man defends himself against the charges, nor does he show any remorse. Thus the two crimes remain inwardly unjudged and produce no moral angUish, even though Billy and Meursault accept their gUilt. In his final moments Billy cries out, "God bless Captain Vere!" and dies peacefully. Meursault finds the prosecutor's case against him "plausible" and faces the facts in the middle of his trial: "]'ai senti alors quelque chose qui soulevait toute la salle et, pour la premiere fois, j'ai compris que j'etais coupable" [It was then I felt a stirring go through the room and for the first time I realized that I was guilty]. The statement turns on the fact that at this point Meursault still cannot disengage what he inwardly knows himself to be from what society judges him to be .... Under longer scrutiny these similarities of theme yield to extensive differences in the narrative style employed. Billy's story comes to us through the eyes and mind of a shadowy narrator who speaks alternatively as a keen witness (who nevertheless misses many of the crucial scenes), and as a Singularly obtuse and tendentious commentator on the events. His refracting presence has been neglected by all but one critic, Lawrence Thompson, who makes it the basis for interpreting the story as essentially ironic, a masked quarrel with God. From behind this further ambiguity of style, however, one fact emerges clearly: none of the principal characters changes in the course of the action, Billy least of all. "The

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handsome sailor," as Melville repeatedly calls him, is born to his status of "natural" election, learns nothing from experience, and maintains to the end his upright character and resignation to misfortune. We learn that, though a foundling, he is "evidently no ignoble one." Though many critics have proposed a major shift in Billy's attitude toward life and death during the off-stage interview in which Captain Vere tells him the sentence, nothing in the text supports this hypothesis. Even with allowances for irony, Billy remains the "noble barbarian," a second Adam with no taint of the serpent but a stutter, an angel of God. Accordingly, his punishment is imposed solely on the basis of his deed, without consideration of his innocence of character and lack of evil intent. The exact opposite holds for Meursault. The trial focuses not on his deed but on the purported insensitivity and moral depravity of every part of his life. And, unlike Billy, he changes. The unpremeditated and fateful shooting, plus the ritualized trial, conspire to capsize Meursault's inner equilibrium ....

Camus with his colleagues from the Alger Republicain, for which he wrote from 1938 to 1940

[AJ change of method is required to search beyond the set of similarities and differences examined up to now. The science of crystallography discovered over a century ago insists that in comparing mineral specimens one must not be content with looking at them but must go on to examine a beam of light that has passed through them. The discovery of plane-polarized light led to major revelations about the internal molecular structure of crystals. The final stage o[ the comparative method applied to related works like Billy Budd and IEtranga may be to regard them in series, seeking the clearest meaning they transmit together....

Held together to the light, these two novels have an iridescent quality, a flickering of implied meanings ranging from Christian atonement, to the embodiment of fate in social situations, to the sinfulness of God himself. Despite flaws of artificial style and some labored symbolism in both books, they are true gems with the capacity to refract light in multiple ways. But the clearest beam they transmit when set in the proper alignment emanates [rom a single area of experience. These two inside narratives reveal man's consciousness deadlocked with its own most awe-inspiring work-civilization-here in the form of "justice" under law. The particular natures of Billy and Meursault lead to exceptional treatments of this theme, faced less squarely and less often in fiction than we should like to believe.

From Phillip H. Rhein, "Narrative Devices," in his The Urge to Live: A

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tEL ranger (Chapel Hill: University of North

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Carolina Press, 1964), pp. 12-28. Der Prozess [The Trial] and .cEtranger are unusual works which at first puzzle the reader. Kafka and Camus present a sequence of events that are unmistakable, concretely realized, and plausible; however, at the moment the reader is called upon to fit these events into a logical pattern, he is forced to readjust his position or to regard the novels as absurd. Neither Kafka nor Camus disputes the man of facts; rather by a displacement of time-spaced relationships, they upset the conception of the world held by the man of facts. Both authors understand that the fictive world must somehow be made real, and that to be made real, it must be depicted with great particularity of detail; but this precision of method applies to worlds of their own creation. It is only at the point where the reader realizes that he must readjust his position that he is aware that the works are not intended as representations of everyday life but as symbols of man's condition.

THE "BIOLOGICAL ACCIDENT" OF MURDER An American novel frequently mentioned in connection with L'Etrangeris Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy (1925). H. L. Mencken's characterization of Dreiser's book can also be applied to L'Etranger and the public that it either pleased or scandalized:

"An American Tragedy was forbidden as obscene in Boston. It is, in fact, no more obscene than a table of stock prices. But it is undoubtedly profoundly immoral, for if it teaches anything at all it is that committing a murder is a sort of biological accident, like breaking a leg or becoming a father."

H. L. Menchen Although the action of the novels is priFrom the introduction to Theodore Dreiser, An American marily symbolic in meaning, these works are Tragedy (Cleveland: World, 1948), p. 10. objectively presented in every respect. The events, the characters are given. Never are they interpreted. At every moment the reader feels that he is somewhat removed from his everyday world of facts, but at no moment is he able to state definitely that at exactly this point, in exactly this way, the author has rejected realism. Never-even in the most bizarre moments-is a totally unreal interpretation the only possible one. Everything can be logically described, even though it cannot always be known. What has happened here is that although realism is upended, it is never discarded. Kafka and Camus parade the conglomeration of everyday living before the reader. He gets an appearance of work-a-day living: there are men and women leading diverse, insignificant lives in cities that are real in every respect. There is the curious party of three that is on watch during K.'s first moments of trial, and there is the strange little automaton in LEtranger who appears one day at Celeste's and again at the trial. There are the conventionally inexplicable acts of a man being arrested for no obvious guilt and a man being executed for not having wept at his mother's funeral. There are these characters and events, but in the presentation of neither does Kafka or Camus ever offer an explanation .... It is in the artistic presentation of these details, in the use of literary devices to create atmosphere and give meaning to the action of Der Prozess and rEt ranger, that one of the major similarities between Kafka and Camus is discernible. In the significance of time to the protagonists, in the portrayal of characters, in the creation of settings, in the emphasis upon sense impressions, and in the use of counterpoint and irony there are many similarities in the writing of Kafka and Camus. The Stranger

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From David Madden, 'James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice and Albert Camus's rEtranger," Papers on Language and Literature, 6 (Fall 1970): 407-419.

Camus watches from backstage during a performance of his play Le Malentendu, first staged on 24 August 1944. The plot is based on

Both authors. proceed from certain assumptions about their readers. Cain assumes that they will sympathize and identify with the killer-narrator in spite of and because of his acts yet agree with Cain that he should die in the end. Camus assumes that his readers will be repelled by Meursault's attitudes, gradually won over to sympathy; then suspend judgment of the act while others are stupidly judging it. But Camus goes further. His novel is deliberately about attitudes and assumptions, worked out through Meursault's relationship with society In having the court judge Meursault for his attitudes rather than his criminal acts, Camus puts society on trial. Cain, of course, has Frank convicted only for his acts. Frank's conduct is intended to do temporary violence to certain of the reader's moral attitudes. Camus deliberately and directly does permanent violence to more serious and representative normal attitudes and assumptions-about mother, marriage and love, friendship, jobs, ambitions, God-but not so much through overt acts as through Meursault's responses to ordinary human events, as in the novel's opening lines ....

the legend of a family murder in Central Europe that also features in L'Etranger as the subject of a newspaper story Meursault reads in

Cain's [novel] has bogus religious overtones; Camus's has a serious philosophical intention. Camus begins with the world as it is given in The Postman; but by the end Camus has suggested a point of view that is never quite explicit though always implicit in Cain. But if Cain moves toward a pure novel, Camus, with his philosophical concerns, moves toward a pure antinovel, as described by Cruickshank. The pure-novel characteristics of The Postman are carried forward only in the first half of LEtranger, and in the second, Camus begins to develop a philosophical point of view that affects man in every phase of his life; thus IEtranger, ultimately, is the very opposite of the pure novel. ...

his prison cell.

While one cannot say with certainty that Camus deliberately used The Postman as a model, it can be said that every element in Camus's novel that parallels an element in Cain's novel has been transformed into something finer. What in Cain is crude and mechanical (but in its own way superb) is elevated and ennobled in Camus. If The Postman is a tough-guy novel of action, LEtranger is a serious novel of character, with implications about the human predicament. But though a profound philosophical concept may make for good philosophy; it . does not endow a novel of art automatically with value. It is not Camus's philosophy alone that makes LEtranger a better novel than The Postman.

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NOTES 1. Pascal Pia to Albert Camus, 27 May 1941, in Correspondance, 1939-1947, edited by Yves Marc Ajchenbaum (Paris: FayardlGallimard, 2000), p. 67. 2. Ibid., p. 69. 3. Emile Henriot, "La Vie litteraire: la bibliotheque noire," Temps, 3 November 1942., col. 1, n.p.

4. Fieschi, "Chronique des romans," La Nouvelle Revue Fran,aise, no. 343 (1 September 1942): 368. 5. Ibid., p. 370. 6. Ibid., p. 369. 7. Jean Grenier, "Une oeuvre, un homme" (One Work, One Man, 1943), reprinted in Les Critiques de notre temps et Camus, edited by Jacqueline Levi-Valensi (Paris: Garnier, 1970): 36. 8. Ibid., p. 38. 9. Ibid., p. 38-39.

ro. Ibid., p 39. II. Ibid., p. 40. 12. Jean-Paul Sartre, "Explication de LEtranger" (1943), translated by Annette Michelson as "Camus' The Outsider" in Sartre, Literary and Philosophical Essays (New York: Collier, 1955), pp. 29, 27. 13. Ibid, p. 27. 14. Ibid., p. 30. 15. Ibid., pp. 30-31. 16. Ibid, p. 32. 17. Ibid, p. 36. 18. Ibid., p. 33. 19. Ibid., p. 34. 20. Ibid., pp. 36-37. 21. Ibid., p. 38. 22. Ibid., p. 39. 23. Ibid., p. 41. 24. Ibid., p. 42. 25. Maurice Blanchot, "Le roman de LEtranger," in his Faux Pas, revised edition (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), p. 252. 26. Ibid., p. 249.

27. Ibid., p. 248. 28. Ibid., p. 249.

29. Ibid., p. 251. The Stranger

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30. Camus to Claude de Frt!minville, 6 September 1942, quoted in Olivier Todd, Albert Camus: Unevie (Paris: Gallimard, 1996), p. 304. 3l. Gaston Gallimard to Camus, 10 August 1942, quoted in Todd, Albert Camus: Une vie, p.304. 32. Pia to Camus, 4 November 1942, quoted in Todd, Albert Camus: Une vie, p. 305. 33. Todd, Albert Camus: Une vie, pp. 305-306. 34. Camus, "Notebooks, 1942-1951," translated by Justin O'Brien in Notebooks, 19351951, translated by Philip Thody and O'Brien (New York: Marlowe, 199B), pp. 18--19. The identity of J. T. is not known. See also Camus, Thedtre, recits, nouvelles, Bibliotheque de la Pleiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1962), p. 1931. 35. Camus, "Notebooks, 1942-1951," pp. 19-20. See also Camus, Theatre, n!cits, nouvelles, p.1932. 36. Camus, "Notebooks, 1942-1951," pp. 20--22. See also Camus, Thedtre, recits, nouvelles, pp. 1932-1934. 37. Charles Poore, "Books of the Times," New York Times, 11 April 1946, p. 23. 3B. More details on how this loose group of resistance-prone friends functioned in Vichy-controlled Algeria, especially on Chiaromonte's stay in Algeria and passage to the United States, can be found in Herbert R. Lottman's Albert Camus: A Biography (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday), pp. 234-237. 39. Nicola Chiaromonte, "Albert Camus," New Republic (29 April 1946): 630. 40. Ibid., p. 631. 41. Ibid., p. 632. 42. Victor Brombert, "Camus and the Novel of the Absurd," Yale French Studies, 1 (Fall 1948): 119. 43. Ibid., p. 12l. 44. Ibid., p. 122. 45. Ibid., p. 123. 46. See Camus, Actuelles I1I:Chroniques algt'riennes 1939-1958 (Paris: Gallimard, 1958). 47. Francis Jeanson, "Albert Camus, ['arne rt!voltee," Temps Modemes, no. 7 (May 1952): 2070-2090. Jeanson's response to Camus's reaction, which was addressed to Sartre rather than to Jeanson, can be found in "Pour tout vous dire," Temps Modemes, no. 8 (August 1952): 354-383. 48. The opening sentence of Sartre's long accusatory response to Camus puts it succinctly: "Our friendship was not easy, but I shall regret it." See his "Reponse a Albert Camus," Temps Modemes, no. 8 (August 1952): 334. See also Sartre, Situations, IV (Paris: Gallimard,1964): 90-125. 49. Claude-Edmonde Magny, "Ellipsis in the Movies and the Novel," in his The Age of the American Novel: The Film Aesthetic of Fiction Between the Two Wars, translated by Eleanor Hochman eN ew York: Ungar, 1972), pp. 52-70. Magny's original French text, LAge du roman americain (Paris: Seuil, 1948), was influential mainly in the 1950s. 50. Nathalie Sarraute, "From Dostoievski to Kafka," in her The Age lif Suspicion: Essays on the Novel, translated by Maria Jola (New York: Braziller, 1963), pp. 17,24. 51. Roland Barthes, 'TEtranger, roman solaire" (1954), reprinted in Les Critiques de notre temps et Camus, pp. 60-61.

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52. John Cruickshank, "Camus' Technique in rEtranger," French Studies, 10 (July 1956): 241-253. 53. Carl A. Viggiani, "Camus' IEtranger," PMLA, 71 (December 1956): 865-887. 54. Leon S. Roudiez, "Strangers in Melville and Camus," French Review, 31 Uanuary 1958): 217-226. See also Roger Shattuck, "Two Inside Narratives: Billy Budd and rEtranger," Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 4 (Autumn 1962): 314-320. 55. Germaine Bn~e, "Heroes of Our Time: The Stranger;" in her Camus (New Brunswick, N.].: Rutgers University Press, 1959), pp. 112-117. 56. Robert Champigny, Sur un heros palen (Paris: Gallimard, 1959), pp. 115, 116. See also the English-language version, A Pagan Hero: An Interpretation of Camus' "The Stranger," translated by Rowe Portis (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1969). 57. Arminda A. pichon-Riviere and Willy Baranger, "Repression du deuil et intensification des mecanismes schizo-paranoides," Revue franr,;aise de psychanalyse, 23 (MayJune 1959): 409-420. 58. Bree,"The Genesis of The Stranger," Shenandoah, 12 (1961): 3-10. 59. Maurice Georges Barrier, tArt du recit dans IEtranger de Camus (Paris: Nizet, 1962). 60. Alain Robbe-Grillet, "Nature, humanisme, tragedie," in his Pour un Nouveau Roman (Paris: Minuit, 1963); translated by Richard Howard as "Nature, Humanism, Tragedy" in For a New Novel: Essays on Fiction (Evanston, IlL: Northwestern University Press, 1989), pp. 63, 64. 61. Carina Gadourek, 'Tinnocent penitent: rEtranger," in Les Innocents et les coupables (The Hague: Mouton, 1963), pp. 47-89. 62. William M. Manly, "Journey to Consciousness: The Symbolic Pattern of Camus' rEtranger," PMLA, 74 (June 1964): 321-328. 63. Pierre-Georges Castex, Albert Camus et rEtranger (Paris: Corti, 1965). 64. W D. Redfern, "The Prisoners of Stendhal and Camus," French Review, 41 (April 1968): 649-659. 65. Jere Tarle, "Sur l'emploi du passe compose dans rEtranger d'Albert Camus: De la grammaire a l'ecriture et au style," Studia Romanica et Anglim Zagrabiensia, nos. 2526 (July-December 1968); 87-101. 66. Brian T. Fitch, Narrateur et narration dans IEtranger d'Albert Camus (Paris: Minard, 1961; revised, 1968). 67. Fitch, "Aspects de l'emploi du discours indirect libre dans rEtranger," in Albert Camus, Albert Camus, no. 1; Revue des Lettres Modernes, nos. 170-194 (Paris: Minard, 1968), pp. 81-91. 68. Pierre-Louis Rey, L'Etranger: Analyse critique (Paris: Hatier, 1970). 69. Wilbur M. Frohock, "First-person Narration: Albert Camus in rEtranger," in his Style and Temper: Studies in French Fiction, 1925-1960 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970),pp.247-272. 70. Eugene Falk, 'TEtranger," in his Types of Thematic Structure: The Nature and Function of Motifs in Gide, Camus, and Sartre (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), p. 12. For a semiotic approach to structural analysis, see Jean Claude Coquet, "Problemes de l'analyse structurale du recit dans rEtranger de Camus," Langue Fran(aisf',3 (1969): 61-72.

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71. John Fletcher, "Interpreting rEtranger," French Review, 43 (Winter 1970): 523-533. 72. Roland C. Wagner, "The Silence of The Stranger," Modem Fiction Studies, 10 (Spring 1970): 27-40. 73. Lubomfr Dolezel, "Motif Analysis and the System of Sensitivity in IEtranger;" in Problemes de l'analyse textuelleiProblems of Textual Analysis, edited by Pierre R. Leon and others (Montreal: Didier, 1971), p. 165. 74. Fitch, LEtranger d'Albert Camus: Un texte, ses lecteurs, leurs lectures (Paris: Larousse, 1972). 75. Helen Sebba, "Stuart Gilbert's Meursault: A Strange 'Stranger,'" Contemporary Literature, 13 (Summer 1972): 334-340. 76. Renee Balibar, "Le passe compose fictif dans fEtranger d'Albert Camus," LitUrature, 7 (1972): 102. 77. Donald Lazere. "The Ambiguities of The Stranger," in his The Unique Creation of Albert Camus (New Haven: Yale University Press: 1973), p. 153.

78. Ibid., p. 169. 79. Alain Castes, "De Meursault 11 Camus," in his Albert Camus et la parole manquante: etude psychanalytique (Paris: Payot, 1973), p. 69. 80. Ibid., p. 71. 81. Robert C. Solomon, "fEtranger and the Truth," Philosophy and Literature, 2 (Fall 1978): 144. 82. Ibid., p. 158. 83. C. Harold Hurley, "Is Joyce's 'A Painful Case' a Source for Camus' IEtranger?" Romance Notes, 20 (Fall 1979): 160. 84. Philip Thody, "Camus's IEtranger Revisited," Critical Quarterly, 21 (Summer 1979): 1-69. 85. Alessandro Briosi, "Sartre et Ie caractere 'c1assique' de IEtranger;" in Albert Camus, 1980, edited by Raymond Gay-Crosier (Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 1980), p. 236. 86. Camus, "Sur une philosophie de l'expression," in Essais, Bibliotheque de la Pleiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1965), p. 1678. 87. Oscar Tacca, 'TEtranger camme recit d'auto-transcripteur," in Albert Camus, 1980, p. 93. 88. Redmond O'Hanlon, "The Life-Death Nexus in fEtranger," Nottingham French Studies, 19 COctober 1980): 31. 89. Ibid., pp. 36, 38. 90. Ibid., p. 41. 91. Robin Adamson, "Speech Mannerisms in IEtranger;" Language and Style, 17 (Fall 1984): 333. 92. Gerard Genette, Nouveau Discours du Redt (Paris: Seuil, 1983), p. 44. 93. Nils Soelberg, "Le Paradoxe du 1e'-narrateur: Approche narratologique de fEtranger de Camus," Revue Romane, 20, no. 1 (1985): 68--97.

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94. Andre Abbou, "Le Quotidien et Ie saCfj~: Introduction a une nouvelle lecture de L'Etranger," in Albert Camus: CEuvre fermee,