Camus: The Stranger
Camus, Albert. The Stranger, trans. Matthew Ward. New York: Random House, Inc. 1988.
I
There’s something strange about The Stranger. Not simply the stranger himself, a man named Mersault living in French Algeria, though he is certainly strange, as we’ll see. There’s something off about the book itself. Instead of starting with an explanation of what I mean, I’ll start with a piece of the text itself, which I think will show that there’s something off, though it may not be clear what. This is from the fourth page, where Mersault is at the home where his mother lived her last days:
The conversation here, where Mersault refuses to look at his mother who has just died, is of course important for figuring out the main character of the story, and this snippet in particular is one that is relevant later. However, that Mersault is a character who says such odd things isn’t quite what’s off about this text. This next piece comes two pages later:
There’s something off about these passages, about the way they are written. And the rest of the book is written in the same style. What’s more, the style isn’t a peculiarity of Camus, the author. He could write long-winded, classical sentences with the best of them. Rather, in this case, the style is demonstrative of something else, which is an essential part of what makes The Stranger a unique and significant novel.
II
To understand what that is, first we have to figure out just what is off about what we’ve read. As I mentioned above, Camus was capable of writing classical, elegant “literary” prose when he wanted to. What that means, of course, and what seems to be unique here, is that such prose is absent in The Stranger. The prose is, if anything, incredibly simple and short. The sentences are literally brief and immediate; they state exactly what is the case, just like a student in school might list off facts about a setting for an English assignment. Each sentence corresponds to a fact or a state; there is no excess, and each sentence gives a new, independent fact. In terms of word choice, what is unique is the blatant lack of anything that is unique; Camus never goes into expressive side-routes or wanders through metaphors; expression is as literal and, again, straightforward as can be, stating exactly what is the case with, significantly, virtually no inflection.
What results is a novel that is written from a seemingly anti-literary perspective. Events are given to us as sets of facts that meshed in a certain way. A thing is its physical description, in this lexicon; nothing, for instance, is ever evoked, except in the most literal way in which one impression causes another to come to mind. In a sense it seems simplistic, even amateurish, to write in such a way. How is this supposed to draw the reader? What is interesting about it? What is literary about it?
III
To explain this oddity, and thereby show that Camus is anything but an amateur, one fact needs to be taken into consideration; the narrator, the one who tells us all the facts and, ultimately, expresses the sentences in the novel, is not an intangible third person (i.e. the author, Camus); it is Mersault himself. This is a first person novel, which means that all of the sentences, and therefore the style of the novel itself, is Mersault’s doing. The way events are explained, then, is not just an explanation of events; it is an expression of the way Mersault saw them; that is, it is a window into who he is. This is an interesting fact about narration that one should pay attention to, and that an author ignores at her peril. For if the story is given by a narrator who exist within the story, that means that those words are that character’s words, the expressions used and literary devices employed a part of the character. In that case, a “literary style” full of colorful metaphors would make sense if the character narrating was a literary story (or, perhaps, was explicitly narrating in order to write such a story).
But what of Mersault? Or, more generally, what of non-literary characters explaining events in a literary world? It’s something I don’t think one often thinks about while reading a novel, but there is a certain incongruousness when the only change that a character narrator brings to the perspective is the use of the word “I” instead of “he/she.” A character is supposed to be a person, with all the complexities that involves, including an entire worldview that shapes how every moment of experience is registered. Different people, of course, see the world differently; thus, when they are describing events, they will notice different things, or describe them differently, or draw different connections (a fact any lawyer would have to know in order to make sense out of vastly disparate eye-witness accounts of the same events). The narrator could even lie, a novelist’s trick we are a bit more familiar with because it is generally more explicit (that is, when it is there a big deal is made of it, as though it’s some vital feature; it’s taken for granted that, in the normal case, the character narrator will tell you exactly what you need to know). This simple fact, along with the fact that the narrator’s tale is the only way through which we know the story, gives the nature of the narrator a status of absolute importance; the narrator is the window to the world and everything that happens within the pages of the novel. If the narrator is the author, an impartial voice speaking from the heavens, then there is no problem; description can be absolute, all views understood, because the view is that of God, basically, and can be anything and everything. But when the role of narrator is given to a human, all-too-human, all bets are (or should be) off.
This finally leads us back to our man, Mersault, and the story. What kind of person is he, and, given that he is the narrator, how does this impact the story? For that, I think, is what makes The Stranger significant; Camus found an extraordinary type of person, one so far distanced from anything we usually experienced, and, through the device of character narration, gave it flesh. Mersault, it becomes very clear, is an unusual man. He spends his days mostly lounging around his home. Occasionally he visits neighbors, watches movies, and so on. But, by and large, he seems to lack any motivation in life. It’s not simply that he lacks a great and final goal towards which he strives; there seems to be no, so to speak, moral motivation; that is, nothing grabs him. He just doesn’t care about much; he remains detached from everything, even in a sense from his very real emotions. How detached? This is a conversation with the woman he supposedly loves, or at least who he seems, by all outward appearances (by what would be given us by the impartial narrator), to love:
I think that most of us would find it extremely difficult to believe that a human being could talk this way. What kind of human being could honestly say to a woman who he spent time each week with and who clearly loved him that he probably didn’t love her? And do it so matter-of-factly, as if it was meant as a purely statistical explanation? What kind of person is this, who says that he could marry her “if she wanted to,” as though there are no other implications that come from marriage, as though it’s just a thing some people do?
Later on, Mersault finds himself in another difficult position: on trial for murder. He watches what appears to be a circus before him as prosecution and defense go through the motions, calling him devil and saint in alternation, ultimately hinging their case on his visit to his dead mother (remember that?). Mersault’s fate is on the line; he’d already been in prison nearly a year awaiting his trial, and at the very least a guilty verdict would send him there much longer. Yet for all that he just doesn’t appear to care. He follows almost none of the concluding arguments of both defense and prosecution, catching only the gist of what they were saying (though, notably, he takes impartial notice of “a glaring omission” in the summary argument of his own lawyer, counting it up as a flaw but reading no more into what that means). He doesn’t seem to understand what is going on at all. Yet he’s not stupid; he knows what he’s there for, and how a court system works. He is even gripped by the odd moment of emotion every now and again during the trial: “Céleste then turned toward me. It looked to me as if his eyes were glistening and his lips were trembling. He seemed to be asking me what else he could do. I said nothing; I made no gesture of any kind, but it was the first time in my life I ever wanted to kiss a man.” (92-3) But what is strange about these moments is the incongruous nature in Mersault; it’s been well-established at this point that they don’t fit him at all.
So who is Mersault, exactly? What kind of person is it that can do this? Can such a person exist? The novel doesn’t answer these questions. But it does give us a complete character, a person of some sort who we might hesitate to call a person at all. In fact, if anyone gives us something approaching an answer to this character, it’s Mersault himself:
Yet this only seems part of the story, for, though we all have something of a reality check when we leave college, it’s never like this. People don’t just quit like Mersault apparently did; they may quite many of their ambitions, but he appears to have left off on the idea of living for anything at all. Something said much later, when the prosecutor at the trial has finished calling him a cold murder, fills in a bit more of the story:
IV
We started with a discussion of the writing style in The Stranger. Then we look at the idea of a character narrator, and at one narrator in particular, Mersault. Although, as noted above, we cannot answer the important questions about Mersault himself, we can answer the question we started with: what is it that’s strange about The Stranger? The answer is simply that it is an account of a strange man; not simply that, but it is an account told by a strange man. A man with no particular attachment to anything. A man for whom emotions are like events in his psyche, simple pushes, that seem to be no more or less significant than anything else. A man for whom what is is, by and large, what it appears to be. He is not a naïve man, nor stupid, nor uneducated, nor an enemy of society; he has friends, relationships, and, by outward appearances, a regular life. However, that life lacks vitality. Mersault simply doesn’t get involved in anything. What is worse, there doesn’t seem to be a reason for this. There’s no traumatic childhood that we know of. His life isn’t a shambles. He has human relationships, and participates in everyday life. There’s no explanation for Mersault being this shockingly callous man (not evil in any sense, but not genuinely moral either); it’s just who he is, and for him that’s the way the world is.
And since this story is told by Mersault himself, the story as told reflects the man who tells it. It is a series of facts, of appearances, that hold together in some relationships, and the meaning of it all is no more than the sum of that. Things happen. When Mersault was in school, he tells us, he had ambitions. But then he discovered that they didn’t really matter. This doesn’t hold special significance for him. He doesn’t reflect on it as an element of growing up, a part of the human experience, nor does he think it an individual event, something he was subjected to for some special reason. It holds no significance at all; it’s just the way things are. This is also why he can be confused by the way the prosecutor acts. He doesn’t understand why people would get so worked up over something, why they would fabricate such a vast story. He also can’t understand his own stake in it, thus allowing him to casually compare the relative merits of the summary arguments by prosecution and defense.
This is how the man is reflected in practice, and the style of the novel is the same. There are no unique or special events. There is no special significance to anything. Mesault’s narration is the most blithely straightforward, no-frills narration simply because frills are meaningless to him. Why stretch a metaphor when a minimal description will do? Why wind a long, curvaceous sentence full of exposition and wordplay? It’s a waste of time. The narration of the book is how Mersault actually sees the world; thus, perhaps without realizing it, you get a more precise, more personal, more complete demonstration of this most unbelievable person simply through what is and isn’t said, and how it is said, than could possibly be offered by the impartial narrator Camus telling you about a stranger to humanity named Mersault.
I
There’s something strange about The Stranger. Not simply the stranger himself, a man named Mersault living in French Algeria, though he is certainly strange, as we’ll see. There’s something off about the book itself. Instead of starting with an explanation of what I mean, I’ll start with a piece of the text itself, which I think will show that there’s something off, though it may not be clear what. This is from the fourth page, where Mersault is at the home where his mother lived her last days:
Just then the caretaker came in behind me. He must have been running. He stuttered a little. “We put the cover on, but I’m supposed to unscrew the casket so you can look at her.” He was moving toward the casket when I stopped him. He said, “You don’t want to?” I answered, “No.” He was quiet, and I was embarrassed because I felt I shouldn’t have said that. (Camus, The Stranger 6)
The conversation here, where Mersault refuses to look at his mother who has just died, is of course important for figuring out the main character of the story, and this snippet in particular is one that is relevant later. However, that Mersault is a character who says such odd things isn’t quite what’s off about this text. This next piece comes two pages later:
Darkness had gathered, quickly, above the skylight. The caretaker turned the switch and I was blinded by the sudden flash of light. He suggested I go to the dining hall for dinner. But I wasn’t hungry. Then he offered to bring me a cup of coffee with milk. I like milk in my coffee, so I said yes, and he came back a few minutes later with a tray. I drank the coffee. (8)
There’s something off about these passages, about the way they are written. And the rest of the book is written in the same style. What’s more, the style isn’t a peculiarity of Camus, the author. He could write long-winded, classical sentences with the best of them. Rather, in this case, the style is demonstrative of something else, which is an essential part of what makes The Stranger a unique and significant novel.
II
To understand what that is, first we have to figure out just what is off about what we’ve read. As I mentioned above, Camus was capable of writing classical, elegant “literary” prose when he wanted to. What that means, of course, and what seems to be unique here, is that such prose is absent in The Stranger. The prose is, if anything, incredibly simple and short. The sentences are literally brief and immediate; they state exactly what is the case, just like a student in school might list off facts about a setting for an English assignment. Each sentence corresponds to a fact or a state; there is no excess, and each sentence gives a new, independent fact. In terms of word choice, what is unique is the blatant lack of anything that is unique; Camus never goes into expressive side-routes or wanders through metaphors; expression is as literal and, again, straightforward as can be, stating exactly what is the case with, significantly, virtually no inflection.
What results is a novel that is written from a seemingly anti-literary perspective. Events are given to us as sets of facts that meshed in a certain way. A thing is its physical description, in this lexicon; nothing, for instance, is ever evoked, except in the most literal way in which one impression causes another to come to mind. In a sense it seems simplistic, even amateurish, to write in such a way. How is this supposed to draw the reader? What is interesting about it? What is literary about it?
III
To explain this oddity, and thereby show that Camus is anything but an amateur, one fact needs to be taken into consideration; the narrator, the one who tells us all the facts and, ultimately, expresses the sentences in the novel, is not an intangible third person (i.e. the author, Camus); it is Mersault himself. This is a first person novel, which means that all of the sentences, and therefore the style of the novel itself, is Mersault’s doing. The way events are explained, then, is not just an explanation of events; it is an expression of the way Mersault saw them; that is, it is a window into who he is. This is an interesting fact about narration that one should pay attention to, and that an author ignores at her peril. For if the story is given by a narrator who exist within the story, that means that those words are that character’s words, the expressions used and literary devices employed a part of the character. In that case, a “literary style” full of colorful metaphors would make sense if the character narrating was a literary story (or, perhaps, was explicitly narrating in order to write such a story).
But what of Mersault? Or, more generally, what of non-literary characters explaining events in a literary world? It’s something I don’t think one often thinks about while reading a novel, but there is a certain incongruousness when the only change that a character narrator brings to the perspective is the use of the word “I” instead of “he/she.” A character is supposed to be a person, with all the complexities that involves, including an entire worldview that shapes how every moment of experience is registered. Different people, of course, see the world differently; thus, when they are describing events, they will notice different things, or describe them differently, or draw different connections (a fact any lawyer would have to know in order to make sense out of vastly disparate eye-witness accounts of the same events). The narrator could even lie, a novelist’s trick we are a bit more familiar with because it is generally more explicit (that is, when it is there a big deal is made of it, as though it’s some vital feature; it’s taken for granted that, in the normal case, the character narrator will tell you exactly what you need to know). This simple fact, along with the fact that the narrator’s tale is the only way through which we know the story, gives the nature of the narrator a status of absolute importance; the narrator is the window to the world and everything that happens within the pages of the novel. If the narrator is the author, an impartial voice speaking from the heavens, then there is no problem; description can be absolute, all views understood, because the view is that of God, basically, and can be anything and everything. But when the role of narrator is given to a human, all-too-human, all bets are (or should be) off.
This finally leads us back to our man, Mersault, and the story. What kind of person is he, and, given that he is the narrator, how does this impact the story? For that, I think, is what makes The Stranger significant; Camus found an extraordinary type of person, one so far distanced from anything we usually experienced, and, through the device of character narration, gave it flesh. Mersault, it becomes very clear, is an unusual man. He spends his days mostly lounging around his home. Occasionally he visits neighbors, watches movies, and so on. But, by and large, he seems to lack any motivation in life. It’s not simply that he lacks a great and final goal towards which he strives; there seems to be no, so to speak, moral motivation; that is, nothing grabs him. He just doesn’t care about much; he remains detached from everything, even in a sense from his very real emotions. How detached? This is a conversation with the woman he supposedly loves, or at least who he seems, by all outward appearances (by what would be given us by the impartial narrator), to love:
That evening Marie came by to see me and asked me if I wanted to marry her. I said it didn’t make any difference to me and that we could if she wanted to. Then she wanted to know if I loved her. I answered the same way I had the last time, that it didn’t mean anything but that I probably didn’t love her. “So why marry me, then?” she said. I explained to her that it didn’t really matter and that if she wanted to, we could get married. (41)
I think that most of us would find it extremely difficult to believe that a human being could talk this way. What kind of human being could honestly say to a woman who he spent time each week with and who clearly loved him that he probably didn’t love her? And do it so matter-of-factly, as if it was meant as a purely statistical explanation? What kind of person is this, who says that he could marry her “if she wanted to,” as though there are no other implications that come from marriage, as though it’s just a thing some people do?
Later on, Mersault finds himself in another difficult position: on trial for murder. He watches what appears to be a circus before him as prosecution and defense go through the motions, calling him devil and saint in alternation, ultimately hinging their case on his visit to his dead mother (remember that?). Mersault’s fate is on the line; he’d already been in prison nearly a year awaiting his trial, and at the very least a guilty verdict would send him there much longer. Yet for all that he just doesn’t appear to care. He follows almost none of the concluding arguments of both defense and prosecution, catching only the gist of what they were saying (though, notably, he takes impartial notice of “a glaring omission” in the summary argument of his own lawyer, counting it up as a flaw but reading no more into what that means). He doesn’t seem to understand what is going on at all. Yet he’s not stupid; he knows what he’s there for, and how a court system works. He is even gripped by the odd moment of emotion every now and again during the trial: “Céleste then turned toward me. It looked to me as if his eyes were glistening and his lips were trembling. He seemed to be asking me what else he could do. I said nothing; I made no gesture of any kind, but it was the first time in my life I ever wanted to kiss a man.” (92-3) But what is strange about these moments is the incongruous nature in Mersault; it’s been well-established at this point that they don’t fit him at all.
So who is Mersault, exactly? What kind of person is it that can do this? Can such a person exist? The novel doesn’t answer these questions. But it does give us a complete character, a person of some sort who we might hesitate to call a person at all. In fact, if anyone gives us something approaching an answer to this character, it’s Mersault himself:
I said that people never change their lives, that in any case one life was as good as another and that I wasn’t dissatisfied with mine here at all. He looked upset and told me that I never gave him a straight answer, that I had no ambition, and that that was disastrous in business . . . . Looking back on it, I wasn’t unhappy. When I was a student, I had lots of ambitions like that. But when I had to give up my studies I learned very quickly that none of it really mattered. (41)
Yet this only seems part of the story, for, though we all have something of a reality check when we leave college, it’s never like this. People don’t just quit like Mersault apparently did; they may quite many of their ambitions, but he appears to have left off on the idea of living for anything at all. Something said much later, when the prosecutor at the trial has finished calling him a cold murder, fills in a bit more of the story:
Of course, I couldn’t help admitting that he was right. I didn’t feel much remorse for what I’d done. But I was surprised by how relentless he was. I would have liked to have tried explaining to him cordially, almost affectionately, that I had never been able to truly feel remorse for everything. My mind was always on what was coming next, today or tomorrow. (100)
IV
We started with a discussion of the writing style in The Stranger. Then we look at the idea of a character narrator, and at one narrator in particular, Mersault. Although, as noted above, we cannot answer the important questions about Mersault himself, we can answer the question we started with: what is it that’s strange about The Stranger? The answer is simply that it is an account of a strange man; not simply that, but it is an account told by a strange man. A man with no particular attachment to anything. A man for whom emotions are like events in his psyche, simple pushes, that seem to be no more or less significant than anything else. A man for whom what is is, by and large, what it appears to be. He is not a naïve man, nor stupid, nor uneducated, nor an enemy of society; he has friends, relationships, and, by outward appearances, a regular life. However, that life lacks vitality. Mersault simply doesn’t get involved in anything. What is worse, there doesn’t seem to be a reason for this. There’s no traumatic childhood that we know of. His life isn’t a shambles. He has human relationships, and participates in everyday life. There’s no explanation for Mersault being this shockingly callous man (not evil in any sense, but not genuinely moral either); it’s just who he is, and for him that’s the way the world is.
And since this story is told by Mersault himself, the story as told reflects the man who tells it. It is a series of facts, of appearances, that hold together in some relationships, and the meaning of it all is no more than the sum of that. Things happen. When Mersault was in school, he tells us, he had ambitions. But then he discovered that they didn’t really matter. This doesn’t hold special significance for him. He doesn’t reflect on it as an element of growing up, a part of the human experience, nor does he think it an individual event, something he was subjected to for some special reason. It holds no significance at all; it’s just the way things are. This is also why he can be confused by the way the prosecutor acts. He doesn’t understand why people would get so worked up over something, why they would fabricate such a vast story. He also can’t understand his own stake in it, thus allowing him to casually compare the relative merits of the summary arguments by prosecution and defense.
This is how the man is reflected in practice, and the style of the novel is the same. There are no unique or special events. There is no special significance to anything. Mesault’s narration is the most blithely straightforward, no-frills narration simply because frills are meaningless to him. Why stretch a metaphor when a minimal description will do? Why wind a long, curvaceous sentence full of exposition and wordplay? It’s a waste of time. The narration of the book is how Mersault actually sees the world; thus, perhaps without realizing it, you get a more precise, more personal, more complete demonstration of this most unbelievable person simply through what is and isn’t said, and how it is said, than could possibly be offered by the impartial narrator Camus telling you about a stranger to humanity named Mersault.
posted by Derek at 6:08 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home