Meursault and so

*Spoiled like a sandwich left out on a summer day in Algiers*

I have taken a brief break in my reading challenge to read two classic works that my son has been assigned this semester.  The first was Shakespeare’s Macbeth, and the second is Camus’s The Stranger.  I hadn’t read The Stranger since I was in high school, and I was interested to see what it was like, my memory never being my strongest feature.

What a fascinating novel to return to!  What I think makes it so interesting is the way in which it struggles with the difficult terrain that lies between a novel and a work of philosophy.  It seems to me that there were two things that Camus wanted to discuss in The Stranger.  The first is the idea that Meursault is condemned to death less for the murder of another human being than for his reaction to his mother’s death.  This plays out in detail twice, once in the first chapter when we go through his entire experience surrounding his mother’s funeral, and then again during the trial when the prosecutor harps on the subject.  Meursault offends everyone’s sense of decorum and proper behavior and is punished primarily for that offense.  The second thing Camus was interested in in telling this story was the contemplation of a condemned man who understood the absurdities of life.  The final chapter is a powerhouse of ideas and a fitting culmination of the story being told.  Among the things discussed in these final pages are “the machinery of justice” that grinds up men who are in turn “forced into a kind of moral collaboration” with it, the notion that the death penalty has been handed down by mere mortals (“it had been decided by men who change their underwear”), and the belief that “there was nothing more important than an execution . . . it was the only thing a man could truly be interested in.”  Meursault already confronted the religious fervor of the magistrate, but he has a much more pointed conversation with the chaplain, as Camus uses Meursault to show an acceptance of life and death without the presence of God and an afterlife.

In these two areas, Camus’s novel does some pretty great things and makes some pretty piercing observations.  The problem is that character in a novel cannot be confined to just the points that you as a writer wish to discuss.  By Camus making Meursault the narrator as well as the main character, we are invited into his head for the entirety of the novel, and we are left with questions about him and his behavior that I think Camus would rather not discuss.  For example, we know that not everyone has a great relationship with his or her parents, and we know that even those who feel a loss sharply will respond in different ways to grief.  I, as I imagine many other readers were as well, was not put off by Meursault’s actions and reactions in the first chapter.  But of course, his apathy about his mother’s death is only part of a larger apathy, one that included not caring about whether he stays in Algiers or moves to Paris, whether he marries Marie or never sees her again, and whether he shot five bullets into another man or not.  As he tells us during the trial, “I had never been able to truly feel remorse for anything.”  The prosecutor is certainly blowing things out of proportion when he call Meursault “a monster, a man without morals,” but morality does not in fact appear to be a needle on his compass.  While judging other people’s morality is certainly an absurd thing to do, we are asked by the novel to overlook the fact that someone lies dead with five bullets in his body.  If we are upset by the trial being waged over the burial of Meursault’s mother, we cannot say that an innocent man has been incarcerated.  All of this leads to a weird indictment of society while asking us to side with a capricious murderer.  It is worth noting that the murdered man’s friend and his sister, the woman Raymond beat extensively, were not called on the stand to testify about the dead man’s life.  The victim here is forgotten as much by Camus as by the prosecutor.

Because character is a continuum in a novel, it is hard to resist the urge to analyze Meursault and declare that he has some kind of affective disorder, which is of course a far cry from Camus’s interest.  All the same, Meursault’s bouts of passion during the trial and his jail cell ruminations are shocking when we first encounter them, since before then nothing seemed to move Meursault to have feelings.  After the trial is adjourned, Meursault hears “the familiar sounds of a town I loved.”  It is surprising to hear that he “loves” the town, especially when it was not long ago that he tells his boss he could live in Paris or in Algiers, “it was all the same to me.”  Then of course in the final pages, Meursault grabs the chaplain by the collar when “something inside me snapped.  I started yelling at the top of my lungs.”  Is it that only in facing death does anything genuinely matter to a person?  Or is it that Meursault’s been having deeply felt feelings and desires the whole novel and not coming clean with us?  As he tells his attorney, “I had pretty much lost the habit of analyzing myself.”  This is what I mean by the character getting away from Camus and pointing to much more than the few things that interested him.  In short, in spite of Camus’s best efforts, we are forced to do what the jury is asked to do, and pass judgment on who Meursault is.  How you interpret this character has everything to do with how you respond to the novel and its analysis of the individual’s place in both society and the “gentle indifference of the world.”

That’s my impression at least.  Perhaps I do not give Camus enough credit, and perhaps the struggle over our insistence on understanding Meursault is actually his point.  If it is, he has done a damn fine job of it.  That’s the futility of debating an author’s intention, as I have discussed in these reviews before.