The Stranger (novel)

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The Stranger/The Outsider
Author	Albert Camus
Cover artist	Jack Walser
Country	France
Language	Translated from French
Genre(s)	Absurdist, Existentialist
Publisher	Libraire Gallimard
Publication date	1943, French 1942
Media type	print (hardback & paperback)
Pages	117 p. (UK Penguin Classics paperback edition)
ISBN	ISBN 0-14-118250-4 (UK Penguin Classics paperback)

The Stranger or The Outsider, (L’Étranger) (1942), by Albert Camus, is one of the most famous French novels of the twentieth century and is among the most notable literary expositions of the absurdity of human existence in an indifferent universe. Philosophically, it is often labeled an existentialist novel, though Camus did not consider himself an existentialist; in fact, its content explores various different philosophical schools of thought, including (most prominently and specifically) absurdism, as well as atheism, determinism, nihilism, and stoicism.

The title character is Meursault, a French man (characterized by being largely emotionally detached, innately passive, and anomic) who seemingly irrationally kills an Arab man whom he recognizes in French Algiers. The story is divided into Parts One and Two: Meursault's first-person narrative view before and after the murder.

[edit] Plot

Part One begins with Meursault being notified of his mother's death. He attends her funeral, yet expresses none of the emotions typical and expected in such a circumstance. At her wake, when asked if he wishes to view the body, he declines, and, instead, smokes a cigarette and drinks white coffee before the unviewed body. Rather than expressing his own feelings (either secretly to the reader or openly to the others characters) he, instead, only comments to the reader about the others at the funeral. He later encounters, by chance, Marie, a former employee of his firm, and the two become re-acquainted and begin to have a sexual relationship. In the next few days, he helps his friend and neighbour, Raymond Sintès, take revenge on a Moorish girlfriend suspected of infidelity. For Raymond, Meursault agrees to write a break-up letter, because, he claims, there is no reason not to help him. Meursault simply cannot see any reason not to if it pleases Raymond. One must understand that Meursault lives completely in the present. As an existentialist, he has no reason to regret what he does because it is done; regret is redundant. In this state of mind, Meursault is also living fully in the present: he feels joy and anger and frustration like every other human; he has a soul. The difference is that his feelings are sensual, they are experienced and explained through his senses: feeling the heat of the sun, etc. Mersault's chronicle is bereft of emotions, empathy, and concern for others. This is not necessarily to say that he lacks these; however, they are conspicuously absent from the narrative.

The events are narrated by the main character, Meursault, a clerk in what seems to be an export-import firm located in Algiers. We are given no positive information about his age; he is a young man, and like most of Camus’ heroes, he is probably around thirty. In Part I, the events are narrated day by day, as if Meursault were keeping a journal. The shooting takes place on the eighteenth day, a Sunday. Part two covers a period a little over eleven months, and the whole period is narrated retrospectively. No time preferences are given in Part III: the narrator talks of his meditations and one of the event, his interview with the chaplain. This is a personal chronicle… Marsault is writing a chronicle of death (Viggiani 866).^[1]

Subsequently, on a beach, they encounter the spurned girlfriend's brother and an Arab friend; these two confront Raymond and wound him with a knife during a fist fight. Later, walking back along the beach alone and now armed with a pistol he took from Raymond so that Raymond would not do anything rash, Mersault encounters the Arab and the trigger gives. Despite killing the Arab man with the first gun shot, he shoots the cadaver four more times. He does not divulge to the reader any specific reason for his crime or emotions he experiences at the time.

Part Two begins with Meursault incarcerated, explaining his arrest, time in prison, and upcoming trial.

At the trial, Meursault's quietness and passivity is seen as demonstrative of his seeming lack of remorse or guilt by the prosecuting attorney, and so the attorney concentrates more upon Mersault's inability or unwillingness to cry at his mother's funeral than on the actual murder. Meursault explains to the reader that he simply was never really able to feel any remorse or personal emotions for any of his actions in life, due to his philosophical world view. The dramatic prosecutor theatrically denounces Mersault to the point that he claims Mersault must be a soulless monster, incapable of remorse and that he thus deserves only to die for his crime. Although Mersault's attorney defends him and later tells Mersault that he expects the sentence to be light and not overly harsh, Mersault is alarmed when the judge later informs him of the final decision: that he will be decapitated during a public execution.

In prison, whilst awaiting the execution of his death sentence by the guillotine, Meursault meets with a chaplain, but rejects his proffered opportunity of turning to God because God is a waste of his time and breath. Although the chaplain persists in leading Mersault from his atheism, Mersault finally attacks and nearly injures him in a rage. Meursault ultimately grasps the universe's indifference towards humankind (coming to terms with his execution based on the fact that he would die sooner or later):

As if that blind rage had washed me clean, rid me of hope; for the first time, in that night alive with signs and stars, I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world. Finding it so much like myself — so like a brother, really — I felt that I had been happy and that I was happy again. For everything to be consummated, for me to feel less alone, I had only to wish that there be a large crowd of spectators the day of my execution and that they greet me with cries of hate.^[2]

[edit] Philosophy

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Like Meursault, Albert Camus was a Pied-Noir (black foot) — a Frenchman born in the Maghreb, the northernmost crescent of Mediterranean Africa, the heart of France's African colonies. Literarily classed as an existential novel, The Stranger exposits his theory of the absurd. In the story's first half, Meursault is an unperceptive man, existing only via sensory experience (the funeral procession, swimming in the sea, copulating with his girlfriend, et cetera): the only absolute Truth being death, with many relative truths — and, in particular, the truths of religion and science (empiricism, rationality, et cetera) are, ultimately, meaningless.

Meursault is unaware of the absurdity of human existence, yet it colours his actions, the only real and true things are his physical experiences, thus, he kills the Arab man as his response to the sun's physical effects upon him, as he moves toward his adversary on the brightly over-lighted beach. In itself, his killing of the Arab man is meaningless — merely another occurrence that happens to Meursault. The episode's significance is in his forced introspection about his life — and its meaning — while contemplating his impending death by formal execution; only in formal trial and death does he acknowledge his mortality and responsibility for his own life.

Per Existentialism: Destiny is responsibility for one's actions and their consequences, because one has free will; Truth is in being consistently honest and direct; despite being judged amoral. Throughout the book, Meursault lives passively and accepts the destiny that comes to him. While Meursault takes "responsibility" for his actions by accepting the consequences, the motivating philosophy alters the actual intent. In the end, Meursault realizes that everyone's life ends with death. By accepting this, he also deduces that the life one leads and the manner of one's death are completely irrelevant. Death is the permanent end. Illustrating this, Meursault never displays emotions he does not feel, nor participates in social conventions requiring emotional dishonesty. Although grief is the normal, socially acceptable response, he does not openly grieve at his mother's funeral, but his incorruptible honesty assumes a naïve dimension in his murder trial when he questions the need for a defense lawyer, claiming that the truth should speak for itself.

The point is that we are slaves to a brute necessity of nature. There is no nature of brute necessity to be enslaved to. Everything is indifferent. No moral is drawn nor is there one to be drawn. There is no room for moral. He did this. He might just as well have done that. This and that are equally unimportant. We search for a meaning, but as we read and ponder it is borne upon us that there is no meaning; and that is the only meaning. The individual who is the Stranger is a purposeless atom moved about in a purposeless void. Mere life, like mere death, is not even confusion. It is emptiness (Roth 292).

The story's second half examines the arbitrariness of Justice: the public official compiling the details of the murder case tells him repentance and turning to Christianity will save him, but Meursault refuses to pretend he has found religion; emotional honesty overrides self-preservation, and he accepts punishment for the consequence of his actions.

Thematically, the Absurd over-rides Responsibility; in fact, despite his physical terror, Meursault is satisfied with his death; his discrete sensory perceptions only physically affect him, and thus are relevant to his self and his being, i.e. in facing death, he finds revelation and happiness in the gentle indifference of the world. Central to that happiness is his pausing after the fatal, first gun shot when killing the Arab man. Interviewed by the magistrate, he mentions it did not matter that he paused and then shot four more times; Meursault is objective, there was no resultant, tangible difference: the Arab man died of one gun shot, and four more gun shots did not render him 'more dead'. The absurdity is in society's creating a justice system to give meaning to his action via capital punishment: The fact that the death sentence had been read at eight o'clock at night and not at five o'clock . . . the fact that it had been handed down in the name of some vague notion called the French (or German, or Chinese) people — all of it seemed to detract from the seriousness of the decision.

The Stranger shows the influence of other existentialists such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Martin Heidegger. To wit, Camus and Sartre, in particular, were of the French resistance against the Nazis; their friendship ultimately differing only in philosophic stance. Albert Camus presents the world as meaningless, therefore, its meaning is rendered by oneself; it is the individual person who gives meaning to a circumstance. Camus deals with this matter and Man's relationship with Man via considerations of suicide in the novels A Happy Death and The Plague and in non-fiction works such as The Rebel and The Myth of Sisyphus.

[edit] English translations from the French

The Libraire Gallimard first published the original French-language novel in 1942. British author Stuart Gilbert first translated L’Étranger to English in 1946; his work became established as the English translation for thirty-odd years. In 1982, the British publisher Hamish Hamilton published a second translation, by Joseph Laredo, that Penguin Books bought in 1983 and reprinted in the Penguin Classics line in 2000. In 1988, a third translation, by the American Matthew Ward, was published, by Random House Inc., in the Vintage International line of Vintage Books. ^[4]

The three translations differ much in tone; Gilbert's translation is formal, notable in the initiating sentence of the first chapter. The French original is: "Aujourd'hui, maman est morte. Ou peut-être hier, je ne sais pas. J'ai reçu un télégramme de l'asile: Mère décédée. Enterrement demain. Sentiments distingués. Cela ne veut rien dire. C'était peut-être hier"

• Gilbert's 1946 translation is: "Mother died today. Or, maybe, yesterday; I can't be sure. The telegram from the Home says: YOUR MOTHER PASSED AWAY. FUNERAL TOMORROW. DEEP SYMPATHY. Which leaves the matter doubtful; it could have been yesterday."
• Ward's 1988 translation is: "Maman died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don't know. I got a telegram from the home: Mother deceased. Funeral tomorrow. Faithfully yours. That doesn't mean anything. Maybe it was yesterday." [Maman is informal French for the informal English Mum/Mam/Mom.]
• Laredo's 1982 translation is: "Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don't know. I had a telegram from the home: 'Mother passed away. Funeral tomorrow. Yours sincerely.' That doesn't mean anything. It may have been yesterday."

The critical, literary difference of translation is in the accurate connotation of the original French emotion in the story's key sentence, i.e. "I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe" versus "I laid my heart open to the gentle indifference of the universe" (original French: la tendre indifférence du monde = literally, "the tender indifference of the world").

[edit] Translations of the title

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In French, étranger can mean: foreign, unknown, extraneous, outsider, stranger, alien, unconnected, and irrelevant. Arguably, the title might be translated as The Foreigner, because Meursault, the anti-heroic protagonist is culturally foreign to Algeria; or as The Outsider, because Meursault feels alien to the Arab Muslim society in which he lives as a colonist. As he is oblivious of the motifs he lives, he is unencumbered by any meaning exterior to his sensory experience, a character trait rendering him foreign to his contemporaries; thus, most English translations of the French title L’Étranger are rendered as The Stranger, and less frequently as The Outsider.

[edit] L’Étranger in popular culture

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Cinema: The Italian director Luchino Visconti adapted L’Étranger as Lo Straniero (1967); Turkish director Zeki Demirkubuz adapted the novel as Yazgı (Fate) (2001); the Japanese film Who's Camus Anyway? refers to Albert Camus, The Stranger, and Meursault Anthony Swofford played by Jake Gyllenhaal in the movie Jarhead carries around a copy of the book The Stranger by Albert Camus.

Comic books: Writer Steve Gerber cites Albert Camus, and especially The Stranger, as his principal influence, particularly upon Howard the Duck (1974-1978): Howard is Mersault with a sense of humor, an existentialist who screams and quacks as a hedge against sinking into utter despair. ^[5]

Popular music: The novel inspired songs by Blur, The Cure (Killing an Arab), ^[6][7] Aria, John Frusciante ("Head"), Tuxedomoon, and "The Return".

Politics: In 2006, the U.S. press reported that U.S. President George W. Bush read The Stranger, while on vacation; he was derided for it, especially in The Daily Show. ^[8][9]

[edit] References

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/movies/cl-et-jarhead4nov04,1,7395593.story

[edit] External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Albert Camus#The Stranger (1942)

• The Stranger on Literapedia