Writing & Other Bloodsports, page 22
To debit the late Albert Camus as the innovator of the nouveau roman would be unfair to the Nobel prizewinner; but Camus pointed the way, and he also provided the “new” novelists with a methodology of sorts. This is not to say that major writers of the nouveau roman group are not reflecting our times as they see and interpret them.1 But Camus must accept the responsibility for the dehumanization of the immobilized hero. The next and less obvious step, to turn man into an object, was taken by Alain Robbe-Grillet and Michel Butor.
In The Myth of Sisyphus, a long philosophical essay which delineates Camus’ theory of the Absurd, the author reduced man to a machine pushing a stone to the top of a mountain, only to have the stone roll down again. And the machine man, like Sisyphus, is condemned to do this labor forever. The biological analogue here of the tumblebug rolling its little ball of shit across an endless plain immediately comes to mind. The thinking man, or man thinking, will eventually balk against the idea of making another fruitless journey up the mountain. But Sisyphus could not balk. He believed in the gods who ordered his punishment, and therefore had to carry it out. But Camus did not believe in a personal god; to rationalize the daily assignment of rolling the stone uphill, gods and religion were jettisoned, and the task was turned into a labor of Art. Art needs no excuse, no justification: Art is. Man exists, Man procreates, or Man creates.
Camus made a short outline of this idea in his Notebooks (October 10, 1937):
To be worth something or nothing. To create or not to create. In the first case everything is justified. Everything without exception. In the second case, everything is completely absurd. The only choice then to be made is the most aesthetically satisfying form of suicide: marriage and a forty-hour week, or a revolver, (p. 70.)
In his long essay, The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus managed to reject the revolver and, instead of accepting “marriage” as an alternative, settled for a “divorce” instead. “The absurd is essentially a divorce. It lies in neither of the elements compared; it is born of their confrontation.” (p. 31.) Inevitably, then, once a man accepts the absurd, he is bound to live with it. “A man who has become conscious of the absurd is forever bound to it. A man devoid of hope and conscious of being so has ceased to belong to the future.” (pp. 31-32.) In this latter respect, the immobilized hero in Camus’ fiction lives in the present; he is important neither to the past nor the future, i.e., “history,” and exists solely for his own amusement, or (extended) “Art for art’s sake.” By divorcing man from history, Camus alienated Jean-Paul Sartre; and the famous break between the two writers stems from this basic concept. But the immobilized hero is both apolitical and anti-history. As Camus’ narrator-hero with an assumed name says in The Fall, “I sometimes think of what future historians will say of us. A single sentence will suffice for modern man: he fornicated and read the papers. After that vigorous definition, the subject will be if I may say so, exhausted.” (pp. 6-7.)
To appreciate the attitude struck by Camus’ immobilized heroes and characters in The Stranger and The Plague, the author’s central idea of the Absurd is enough to understand: life is absurd; it is more engaging to observe life than it is to participate in it; and, by recording one’s observations and sensations, man-artist may or may not (it makes no measurable difference) produce an artifact that will outlive or outlast the mortal self. The fact that Camus did not altogether follow this personal philosophy in his own life does not affect his philosophical position, or the stand taken by his fictional heroes. Camus was active in the Resistance during World War II, and he was never as aloof from Algerian and French politics as his philosophical works led his readers to believe. Camus strived, in his fiction, to be as objective as possible, and he considered himself an objective novelist. “I call an objective writer,” he says in his Notebooks, “one who chooses subjects without ever taking himself as subject matter.”
The deliberate dehumanization of the hero was accomplished by Camus in The Stranger. The emotional detachment from life of the observer-hero, Meursault, is easily misunderstood by the reader who is unacquainted with Camus’ theory of the Absurd. When the novel was first published in English translation in the U. S., most book reviewers considered the novel as a mystery—and not a very good one at that.2
In Part One of The Stranger, the hero as an immobilized, disinterested observer of death is carefully delineated. The narrator, Meursault, a young Algerian, is called away from his job to attend his mother’s funeral. He did not know that his mother had died until he received a wire which also gave him the day of the funeral—“Tomorrow.” The novel is written in the present tense, first person singular, which gives an urgency to the prose that is in sharp contrast with the slow-motion actions of the unemotional narrator. His emotional indifference to his mother’s death is noticed first by his employer and then by the elderly persons who attend the funeral with him at the Home for Aged Persons at Marengo, some fifty miles from Algiers.
After returning to Algiers, Meursault goes swimming, takes Marie, his girl friend, to the movies, and she then spends the night with him in his room. Marie is gone when he awakens, and he stays in bed until noon, smoking cigarettes. The next few pages, as uneventful and unexciting as the activities are that the narrator describes, are of special interest to the development of the immobilized hero novel. The narrator becomes a camera-eye, and the reader follows the descriptions of the pointless street activity with the same degree of interest he would have if he walked into a movie theater in the middle of a movie. Meursault watches the street scenes from his balcony, and his balcony seat resembles a theater seat above the stage.
My bedroom overlooks the main street of our district. Though it was a fine afternoon, the paving blocks were black and glistening. What few people were about seemed in an absurd hurry. First of all there came a family going for their Sunday afternoon walk; two small boys in sailor suits, with short trousers down to their knees, and looking rather uneasy in their Sunday best; then a little girl with a big pink bow and black patent-leather shoes. Behind them was their mother, an enormously fat woman in a brown silk dress, and their father, a dapper little man, whom I knew by sight. He had a straw hat, a walking stick, and a butterfly tie. Seeing him beside his wife, I understood why people said he came of a good family and had married beneath him. (p. 26.)
In keeping with his philosophy, Camus presents a classic case of “suicide” in this “family portrait,” although the narrator is unaware of this common bourgeois death. The scene shifts without further comment to the next group of passers-by, “the local ‘bloods,’ with sleek oiled hair, red ties, coats cut very tight at the waist, braided pockets, and square-toed shoes.” The bloods pass without any comment from the hero. He does not identify himself with either the paterfamilias or the young-men-about-town. He is the placeless stranger, and he is engaged in the familiar immobilized hero’s occupation of list-making, or the taking of an inventory pattern. Although he describes what he sees in the street for three full pages, including the passing of streetcars, the weight or value that is given to each passing person or streetcar is the same. The descriptions do not develop into any intellectual pattern, nor do they have any particular bearing on the story, except, of course, as characterization. In fact, Meursault watches the street when it is empty with the same disinterest he watches the passing of people or things. “Anything,” he seems to say, “is entertaining.” However, Meursault’s intelligence level is low; he is not, as yet, consciously aware of Camus’ dictum, “A man devoid of hope and conscious of being so has ceased to belong to the future.” Meursault lives in the present like a conscious animal without intelligence. The common measurement of intelligence is the ability to relate one thing to something else in some sort of patterned order.
After an empty afternoon of looking from his balcony, without thinking about it, Meursault realizes all at once that he has got through another Sunday, that his mother is buried, and that the next day is Monday and the beginning of another week. “Really,” he concludes, “nothing in my life had changed.”
The immobilized hero is never an “average” man. He is either a supersensitive intellectual like Dr. Seymour Glass, who sees through every shaded nuance of experience how empty his life has become, or, like Meursault, he exists at a substandard level of awareness. Meursault, who does not question his existence, who accepts things and people as he finds them, would have had, under ordinary circumstances, an excellent chance of living out a rather dull and sensual life for a normal life-span. His normal pattern, as Camus outlined the choice of the average modern man, would have been, “marriage and the forty-hour week.” When Marie casually asks Meursault if he wants to marry her, for example, he says “Yes” without even pausing to think about it— and there is neither love nor financial betterment for motivation. In another novel, posthumously published, La Mort Heureuse, the hero, Mersault (not Meursault), kills for love and dies happy. “Novel: the man who realizes that one needs to be rich in order to live, who devotes himself completely to the acquisition of money, who succeeds, lives and dies happy.” (His emphasis. Notebooks, p. 50.) This latter theme is the opposite of the theme in The Stranger, although Meursault also dies happily—in a different way—but the idea contains the first half of Camus’ either/or syllogism in his theory of the Absurd. To Camus, as “man thinking,” ordinary family life is a form of suicide as deadly as the revolver.
But there is no real hope of compromise for Meursault; he is a warehouseman, not a would-be artist. Whether he lives or dies is unimportant; for all practical purposes he is dead already. The author even denies him the minor intellectual pleasures of making connective relationships in his mind. Except for the procuring of simple animal pleasures, Meursault does not have to use his mind at all.
The following day Meursault visits a neighbor, Raymond, who tells him that his (Raymond’s) Arabian girl friend has done him “dirt.” He asks Meursault to write the girl an offensive letter, which the hero does, quite indifferently. The two men drink some wine, and Meursault is puzzled by Raymond’s condoling statement that he should not “let things get you down.” Meursault has already forgotten about his mother’s death and burial, and it takes him a few moments to realize that Raymond, in his clumsy way, is trying to give him a little conventional sympathy.
The next section of the novel is puzzling to every reader, whether he is familiar with Camus’ theory of the Absurd or not. Why does Meursault shoot the Arab?
The following Sunday the hero goes to the beach to spend the day at a cottage owned by Raymond’s friend, Masson. Raymond has called Meursault during the week to tell him he has been followed by some sinister Arabs, probably because of the letter Meursault wrote to the Arabian girl. This is a foreshadowing plant device Camus uses to explain the appearance of the Arabs later on at the beach, but it is not very effective. Meursault is undisturbed by the message; in Algiers it would be unusual if a white colon was not trailed occasionally by Arabs.
Masson serves wine generously at lunch, and Meursault drinks enough to become dizzy. The three men, Masson, Raymond and Meursault, go for a walk, leaving Marie and Mme. Masson to wash the dishes. They run into the Arabs who had followed them to the beach. There is a short fight, and Raymond is slashed across the arm and face with a knife. The Arabs run away, and Masson takes the slightly wounded Raymond to a doctor. Meursault awaits their return in the cottage, and explains what has happened to the two women. Raymond is angry when he returns. He has a revolver and rushes out of the house, refusing to allow Meursault and Masson to accompany him. Nevertheless, the two men trail Raymond at a distance down the beach. They catch up with him when he comes upon the two Arabs, who are lying down behind a large black stone. For a few moments there is a tableau; the only sound comes from the Arab who is playing the same three notes over and over again on a reed. The tableau is both absurd and Chaplinesque. One expects the projector to break down, and in a way, that is what happens.
Raymond reaches for his revolver and says to Meursault, “Shall I plug him one?”
Meursault replies with the first words that occur to him, “It would be a low-down trick to shoot him like that, in cold blood.”
This corny gangster dialogue adds to the motion picture effect; one hears these words as one reads subtitles on a foreign film, wondering what the actors are actually saying in their own language. Raymond fidgets, and Meursault, not wanting Raymond to shoot the Arab “in cold blood,” asks for the revolver. And when he says, “If the other one starts making trouble or gets out his knife, I’ll shoot,” Raymond hands over the weapon.
As the men continue to eye each other uneasily, without moving, Meursault thinks, “And just then it crossed my mind that one might fire, or not fire—and it would come to absolutely the same thing.”3
This is in Algiers, where the nearly-East meets the nearly-West, and the thought is a near-miss on the nearly-mystical level. Meursault is not astute enough to have an idea this complicated occur to him; this is philosopher Camus speaking through Meursault. The scene that follows, after the Arabs vanish and the Europeans return to the cottage, is also well beyond the hero’s level of comprehension.
The heat is intense, the fumes of the wine are still fogging Meursault’s mind, and he returns alone to the black stone on the beach. Only one Arab remains to face him; the other has disappeared. The Arab is lying down and his hand is clutching the handle of the knife in his pocket. Meursault brandishes his revolver, and the two men stare at each other. Meursault realizes that he could simply walk away and the incident would be closed; but he waits for a few more moments, and then takes one step forward.
And then the Arab drew his knife and held it up toward me, athwart the sunlight. A shaft of light shot upward from the steel, and I felt as if a long thin blade transfixed my forehead. At the same moment all the sweat that had accumulated in my eyebrows splashed down on my eyelids, covering them with a warm film of moisture. Beneath a veil of brine and tears my eyes were blinded; I was conscious only of the cymbals of the sun clashing on my skull, and, less distinctly, of the keen blade of light flashing up from the knife, scarring my eyelashes, and gouging into my eyeballs. Then everything began to reel before my eyes. (pp. 75-76.)
Meursault fires five shots into the supine body of the Arab.
The writing is highly emotional. The sun has something to do with the urge to kill, but the murder is accomplished without any apparent motivation. (In the recent past, a puzzled California college student bought a pistol and killed a stranger he met on the street in a vain effort to understand Meursault’s motivation.) Meursault is not angry at the Arab: he is in no sense avenging Raymond’s injuries, because Raymond is merely an acquaintance, not an intimate friend; he owes no favors to Raymond. And although Meursault has had enough wine to feel its effects, he is not so drunk that he does not know what he is doing. In fact, enough time has passed since lunch for most of the effects of the wine to have worn off. The reason that must be inferred is the “light” of the Absurd, the author’s “truth.” By denying a moral distinction between right and wrong (“. . . one might fire, or not fire—and it would come to absolutely the same thing.”), by arguing that there is no discernible difference between life and death, Meursault is denied even the instinctual concept of self-preservation. He could just as easily have shot himself as the Arab, but had he done so the author’s novel would have been ended too quickly; and Camus’ expressed purpose in life was to produce a work of art. More room, much more, was needed to round out his theory of the Absurd.
Part Two of The Stranger is concerned with Meursault’s trial and imprisonment. He attends his trial as a disinterested spectator; his interest is no greater than it was when he watched the street scenes from his balcony. He seems to be watching the trial of someone else; he does not feel the burning need to defend himself as Joseph K. did in The Trial. He does feel some resentment when witnesses discuss his lack of emotion when he attended his mother’s funeral. He resents their accusations because he could not help it if he felt nothing; his irritation at the heat of the courtroom, together with his fatigue, is more emotionally important to him than the sentence to be decapitated.
After being sentenced to death, he is alone in his cell; and now the certitude of his death begins to nag at him. He wants a “loophole,” a way out, some method to cheat the justice of the French legal system. The French legal system, incidentally, which is based on the Napoleonic Code, gives a great deal of weight to the “character” of the accused; in an American court, most of the so-called character evidence would have been dismissed as irrelevant by an impartial trial judge. Although Meursault searches his mind for flaws in the system, he is forced at last to admire the efficiency of the system. He still has his appeal to think about, but when the appeal is denied he consoles himself by saying, “It’s common knowledge that life isn’t worth living, anyhow.” Camus has reduced life, at this point, to a trite and absurd cliche.
All that remains is the argument with the priest; no philosopher can completely ignore metaphysics; and Camus seizes this opportunity to expose the absurdity of organized religion. Meursault, like Camus, does not believe in God; and the arguments of the foolish priest, made even more foolish by the author, who broadly hints that the priest is a homosexual, are demolished forcefully by the condemned man. The actual reason for his death sentence, which Meursault knows by now and explains to the priest, was his failure to weep at his mother’s funeral. The matter of expressing “remorse” and “regret” are important factors under the French (or any other Western) judicial system; and had Meursault demonstrated such emotions, feigned or real, it is possible that he would have been given imprisonment for life instead of being sentenced to death. Camus’ argument against God is excellent, but it weakens the novel as a work of art by Meursault’s improbable ability to talk above his education and experience, as well as not allowing the priest to rise to his. The author also quickly terminates the argument by having Meursault become angry enough to lay hands on the priest’s cassock. The jailers rush in and rescue the priest.
