438
PARTISAN REVIEW
These astonishing claims have rarely been challenged. Originally,
Camus said in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, he conceived Meur–
sault as a figure of "negation." He allowed a haunting ambiguity to hover
over his laconic hero. Fifteen years later in the passage quoted above,
Camus presents Meursault as a hero of nonconformity and uncompro–
mising truth. Rene Girard's essay, "Camus's Stranger Retried," makes a
strong case for Camus having written in 1958, in
The Fall,
a thorough–
going rebuttal of "the implicit indictment of the judges" expressed by
The
Stranger.
I fully concur with Girard's description of how Camus attempts
in
The Stranger
to narrate a crime without a criminal. The puzzle lies in
how the 1955 preface could distill the original ambiguity into a Christ
figure, whereas first
The Rebel
(1951) and then
The Fall
distance them–
selves increasingly from this Romantic myth of the persecuted sel£
So how we should read
The Stranger?
Has Camus forgotten that
Meursault lies at least twice for Raymond: once in writing the letter to
the Moorish woman who, Raymond claimed, had cheated on him; and
once to the police? Was Meursault condemned to death for refusing to lie
and to play the game of saying more than he feels? Or was he guilty of
letting himself be drawn into settling a score for a violent small-time pimp
and of killing an Arab? Like the students I have quoted, Camus in his
preface insists that Meursault is condemned for his sincerity. Camus con–
veniently overlooks that fact that his hero committed murder. I believe
that Camus's preface provides a case of an author who grievously misun–
derstands his own work and his most famous character. Possibly his
repetition of "paradoxical" and his use of "ironic" in the last sentence
should lead us to reverse the meanings of "hero" and "Christ." But I
don't think so. Camus's wandering yet succinct prose in his novel seems
to have hypnotized him along with his readers.
We should be closer now to perceiving the paradox of
The Stranger.
How do we explain our spontaneous or perverse admiration for a gener–
ally morose citizen who is duped into murder and experiences no
remorse? In comparison, Adam and Eve and even Faust display greater
responsibility for the consequences of their deeds. In Part One Meursault
makes no effort to hide his feelings, ifhe can find any. He remains insen–
sitive to his own actions and to their consequences for others. Though his
new girlfriend, Marie, has a name and sometimes occupies his thoughts,
she barely concerns him as a person any more than does his nameless vic–
tim, the Arab. Meursault is self-absorbed rather than self-conscious and
describes tiny sensations of eating, waiting, smoking, and watching - de–
scribes them so vividly that we are drawn into his vacuous life. Then,
yielding to the gradually accelerating tempo of the style, we live through
the whole sun-spangled, heat-driven scene on the beach
from the inside.
It
