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PARTISAN REVIEW
The students in their papers and Camus in his preface have "understood"
in the sense of empathizing with Meursault's absorption in a pure present
without history or responsibility. That perspective impedes their judg–
ment even during the second part when Meursault gains enough
detachment to glimpse his own guilt.
In its impact on people's behavior and sense of "alienation" and by its
apparent sincerity of feeling,
The Stranger
came close to becoming the
mid-twentieth century equivalent of Goethe's earliest bestseller,
SO"OW5
of
Young Werther
in 1774. It provoked hundreds of suicides all over Europe.
Werther cannot explain to himself the sentiment he has of disintegration
and decline from the ideal nobility of heart inspired in him by Lotte's
perfection. His rebellion turns him first against the society that supports
him and then against himself in a carefully staged suicide.
Werther
and The
Stranger
are excessively romantic and self-absorbed stories verging on
solipcism. Meursault has no inkling of how estranged he is from human
life until he is arrested for destroying another life. Then his brief rebellion
burns itself out on a well-intentioned priest, and Meursault tries to trans–
form his execution into a symbolic suicide by choosing it, by welcoming
it. Werther's over-reaching of sentiment in the eighteenth century col–
lapses into Meursault's twentieth-century listless "absurd," and the
influence of the latter echoes the enormous vogue of the former. If
Ca–
mus had told us the color of Meursault's shirt, it would have set off a
fashion as widespread as that ofWerther's yellow waiscoat.
Camus perfected a hypnotic prose style combining Hemingway's la–
conicism, Kafka's sense of tragicomic inscrutability in all things, and
Voltaire's deadpan portrayal of naivete in
Candide.
The resulting novella
entraps us all on first reading. We feel more fascination than horror at the
course Meursault's life takes. Our inside knowledge of his deeds becomes
a form of bewitchment or possession, difficult to exorcise, leading us to
suspend judgment, even to unseat justice. A small leap of association per–
mits us to read beyond the highly-charged literal meaning of
The Stranger
to discern a double parable about contemporary events that were taking
place in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. Meursault stands for the
citizen whose passiveness and stunted imagination allow him to yield to
outside pressures to carry out inhuman action. And readers who sympa–
thize unthinkingly with Meursault stand for potential accomplices and
collaborators in his actions. The power of the book's political significance
arises from the fact that it remains entirely implicit. The risk of misreading
Camus's novel lies in the appeal of the empathetic knowledge it offers us
of an enigmatic character only too easy to identify with. Is there, conse–
quently, a point at which we must beware of such knowledge? Beware of
empathy?
