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A NOVELIST OF THE ABSURD
L'ETRANGER.
By
Albert Camus. Gallimard.
Paris, 1942.
QNE
MIGHT
well hesitate whether to translate the title of this little
tale by Albert Camus as The Stranger or The Alien. One would
probably choose Alien as meaning one who, unlike a mere stranger, is
a foreign person who may become well known but with whom there will
always be at some point a blank wall never to be surmounted. Much of
the irony of the book is foreshadowed in this title; for it is a factual ac–
count of a man,
moyen sensuel,
whom we have all met and who remains
alien to all who have touched him closely. There is nobody, in a sense,
more average than this Meursault; and one of the book's indictments lies
in the fact that such a man should ever be so quietly regarded. He is the
man in the street whose reactions are reduced to the intelligent mini–
mum. One must insist on the intelligence of the prototype. It is not only
evident in the story, but is important in the double moral that shows
how society wastes such a man; and how little intelligence serves a per–
son who lacks so signally, one starts to say, belief, but one might as well
say vitality.
This is then the tale of a man whose mother dies in an old peoples'
home, who gets into bad company because he doesn't care what kind of
company he is in, who gets himself a girl with a nice laugh, who is kind
to an old man, who has no ambition in his work although he works well,
who kills a man because it is so hot. He is condemned to the guillotine
because, as one makes it out, he didn't care enough about his work to
try to advance in it and he didn't care enough not to kill a man.
(The facts that the man killed was an Arab and the sun of Mrican in–
tensity appear to have no sociological connotation. The whole incident
might as well have happened in France as in Algiers.) As Meursault
puts it himself, he is condemned as a murderer because he didn't weep
at his mother's funeral. His crime is that he didn't believe enough in
society to fake emotions that he didn't feel. He is, of course, the product
of that society which he ends by so flagrantly affronting. When his boss
is urging him to go to Paris, he asks him if he doesn't want to change
his life. "I answered that one never changes one's life, that anyway one
life was worth as much as another and that I was quite satisfied with
mine here." He later reflects that he used to have a good deal of ambi–
tion but that when he had to stop his studies he soon saw that such no–
tions were of no importance. Yet, to pass over the primary guilt of
society, one sees that it has a right to be outraged by Meursault. One
cannot consent to be lived by life- consent to it openly, that is-and
advance the business of civilization.
If
the man in the street has become
the anti-bourgeois, descended from Hemingway's cafes to the streets of
