ROGER SHATTUCK
433
hero of that decade. There were a few copycat crimes on beaches in
California and elsewhere. The book's idealized affectlessness costumed it–
self in terms like "the absurd," "authenticity," and "sincerity." As the
century closes,
The Stranger
is still widely read and ttqually widely misread.
I link that serious misreading to an aspect of forbidden knowledge and
will compare it to the closely related action of
Billy Budd.
Melville's subtitle "An Inside Narrative"
fits
Camus's
The Stranger
like
a glove. The first half of Camus's tale confines the reader inside a single
intermittently vivid yet numbing sensibility. One diffident character tells
us his own story. Then during the interrogation and trial scenes forming
the second half, everything happens
all
over again in retrospect according
to a terse principle Camus affirmed at the same period in
The Myth of
Sisyphus:
"To create is to live twice."
Anyone who has read this troubling modern classic probably remem–
bers the pervading moral deadness of Meursault's life and character
punctuated by moments of intense physical immediacy.
It
helps very little
to attach the labels "absurd" and "alienated" to his existence. One per–
ceptive commentator has noticed how closely Meursault's behavior
parallels the automatism that Bergson in his essay,
lAughter,
identifies as
the source of humor. In an interview Camus mentioned "humor" as the
theme most neglected in his work. A more likely reference or even
source for Meursault's obtuse sensuousness comes from an observation by
Nietzsche, a philosopher whose work Camus was reading in 1938-39
while working on
The Stranger:
An animal lives unhistorically, for it is entirely absorbed in the present ... It does
not know how to dissemble or pretend. The animal appears at every moment ex–
actly what it is. It cannot be other than honest and sincere.
(Thoughts Out oj
Season)
Nietzsche's description of animal consciousness follows close behind
Rousseau's Second
Discourse on the Ongin
if
Inequality:
"I almost dare to
affirm that the state of reflection is a state contrary to nature and that the
man who meditates is a depraved animal." Camus catches the mood of
Meursault's stunted mind in great part through a muted style tending to–
ward dysfunction and parataxis. Nothing connects. Things just happen. In
a famous commentary, Sartre calls our attention to the indolence and in–
difference of this mute writing. Camus carries his flat chopped-off style a
step further than Kafka and Hemingway. It conveys the metaphysical drift
of our age as acutely as the montage principle in cinema and in painting.
