The use of the disconnected compound past ( passe compose)—of which so much has been made in critical studies since Sartre’s “Explication de l’Etranger”—tends to reduce each fact to an irreducible and unconnected given, thus strengthening this emerging sense of the absurdity of the human situation when it lacks any aspiration to order. Clearly this is Camus’s intention.
That our world is governed by chance is brought home so much more forcefully when presented by and realized in the life of one who is so unassumingly natural and unself-conscious. A simple individual, without depth or contrivance, presents our world to us in a way that reveals it as being without deeper significance. Confronting such a world tends to make people uncomfortable. “Do you want my life to have no meaning?” the magistrate cries. Whatever his intentions, Patrice’s way of living is felt as threatening to society’s institutions, beliefs, and aspirations.
ESTRANGEMENT
The social order from which Meursault is so estranged is the world of ambition and the desire for advancement that his employer expects, as well as the decorum and grief to which all at the burial bear witness. It is the wearing of black as a show of mourning, and the sustained sadness that forbids the beginning of a liaison on the day following the burial of one’s mother, not to say the sacrilege of viewing a Fernandel film. It is also the expectation that one ought to cry at the funeral of one’s grandmother, about which Camus personally felt such conflict and hypocrisy. And it is certainly viewing love as a serious matter and treating marriage as an important social institution. Here we glimpse the deeper social meaning to which normal people cling with ferocious tenacity. The rituals and ceremonies, the institutions and practices, by which society daily reenacts the drama of its cosmic significance arc grounded in a system of values and beliefs that give shape to a living that might otherwise hover precariously close to the abyss of nothingness. Not to speak of the offices, hierarchies, and prerogatives by which the power and self-esteem of the few may be protected from the desires of the many.
The personal appropriation of that ritualized belief system defines and valorizes an individual’s place, giving us our sense of what it is important to do, to strive after, to avoid, and to
become. People act in the belief that some things matter more than others, and because they feel that it is worth the effort. This is quite normal. Precisely so.
Meursault had in fact given up on these beliefs when he gave up his ambition. We can take bin to have been an intelligent working-class French Algerian whose social development was short-circuited by the need to leave school and get a job. We may even conjecture that this necessity followed upon an upbringing in which circumstances—perhaps including his more than average intelligence—had conspired to keep him somewhat apart from others, not fully integrated into social norms and practices. All this might of course have described Camus himself to some extent.
In any case, giving up ambition and, by implication, the belief system by which it is sustained, Meursault settles into a style of life in which inarticulate personal needs and satisfactions dictate spontaneous responses to the demands of nature and others. He goes along with the flow of habits and events. Such is the path of least resistance, except when his inclination moves him otherwise. And why act differently when “it’s all the same to him”?
But then the beach, where “the trigger gave way [and Meursault] . . . understood that [he] had broken the harmony of the day, the marvellous silence of a beach where [he] had been happy.
Then [he] pulled the trigger four more times on the motionless corpse where the bullets buried themselves effortlessly. And it was as if, with these four brief shots, [he] was knocking on the door of misfortune” (STR, 50). What could have been simpler or more natural? Heat, exhaustion, the beating of the sun, the shaft of light, the threatening confrontation—and the body tightens up to defend itself: The hand clenches the revolver, and the trigger gives way. With perhaps a touch of exasperation, even annoyance, at the intrusion of the threatening other into this already oppressive situation, the tension previously held coiled within his body bursts forth with those four fatal shots, as if it had been waiting for that moment of release.
All of which is, in one sense, no great deal. Oppressive conditions give rise to tension. The tension is released, and life goes on. Yet a person was killed. Surprisingly perhaps, the authorities initially show little interest in Meursault. As they become aware of his strangeness, their attitude changes. He does not “live by the rules.” He does not think like ordinary people.
He does not pay his respects, but seems indifferent to everything that is usually taken seriously. Is not such an attitude offensive? Who is this person, to treat cavalierly what we hold so dear? How can he act this way? There must be something the matter with him. Otherwise there would have to be something the matter with us for taking so seriously that which is not worthy of such respect. If we can’t get him to see the error of his ways, thus acknowledging the Truth of ours, we must treat him as a traitor to the human community, and make him pay for his transgression.
Thus a transformed portrait of Meursault emerges. Initially he had simply appeared to be a bit odd, certainly not offensive or brutish. But he didn’t want to see his mother’s body, he smoked at her funeral, he rejected a chance to move to Paris, and he didn’t take marriage seriously. He even seemed inordinately sensitive to trivial matters but awkward, even dense about the norms of social behavior. Now that queerness becomes perversity, indifference metamorphoses into insensitivity, and passivity into calculated criminality. No longer will Meursault’s life be allowed to follow the trajectory of inclination and habit. The socialized demand for coherence and purposefulness now takes control. What may well have been lurking in the background now takes center stage, insisting that events conform to its terms. The portrait of a coldblooded, ruthless murderer takes shape. And why did Meursault fire those four extra shots into the body of a corpse, asks the prosecutor, if not to make sure that the job was well done?
Returning to the beach and Meursault’s description of what took place, the why seems about as relevant as asking a plant why it grows toward the light. Genetics, habit, and inclination seem sufficient. The why presupposes a world of purposeful beings who act for more or less premeditated reasons. But is that what took place on the beach?
I walked slowly toward the rocks and it felt like my forehead was swelling and pulsating under the sun. All this heat pressed down on me. … I gritted my teeth, clenched my fists in my pants pockets. . . . My jaws would contract with every sword-like reflexion that darted up from the sand, from a bleached shell, or from a piece of broken glass. . . .
As soon as [the Arab] saw me, he raised up a little and put one hand in his pocket. Naturally my hand closed around Raymond’s revolver which I hadn’t removed from my jacket…. A whole beach vibrating with the sun was surging behind me. I took a few steps toward the source. . . . The scorching sun attacked my cheeks and I felt drops of sweat forming in my eyebrows. It was the same sun as on the day I had buried Mother and, as then, my forehead hurt and all my veins were pulsating underneath my skin. Because of this heat which I could no longer stand, I took a step forward. . . . The Arab took out his knife and pointed it at me in the sun. The light flashed on the steel and it was like a long blade attacking me on the forehead. At the same instant, the sweat that had been forming in my eyebrows ran down all at once over my pupils, covering them with a warm, thick veil. … I felt nothing more then but the cymbals of sun on my forehead, and, indistinctly, the bursting blade of light from the sword continually in front of me. This burning sword was eating away at my eyelids and digging into my aching eyes. It was then that everything reeled. … It seemed to me that the heavens had opened to their full extent in order to let it rain fire.
My entire being became tight and I closed my grip on the revolver. The trigger gave way (STR, 48-50, modified).
No interpretation, no motive, no conscious revolt is apparent. Only the quasi-instinctive, perhaps physiological, response of a natural animal to an oppressive situation. Under the pressure of the sun, he tenses up and the