And yet, however chancy the process leading up to the judgment, “from the second it had been given, its effects became as sure, as serious” as the most palpable and inescapable of facts.
Doubtless, there is something absurd in the disproportion between the haphazard and contingent nature of daily existence and the certainty of the punishment’s execution. Confronted with this absurdity, Meursault’s initial response is typical.
What interests me just now is if I can avoid the machine, if there can be a way to escape the unavoidable. … I don’t know how many times I’ve asked myself if there are any cases of condemned men who were able to fool the machine, who were able to disappear before the execution. … I scolded myself for not having paid enough attention to the accounts of executions..
. . There, perhaps, I might have found accounts of escape. I would have learned that in at least one case, the wheel had stopped, that in its never-ceasing momentum, hazard and chance, one time only, had caused a change in the normal order of things. One time! In a way, I believe that would have sufficed for me (STR, 89).
Patrice is struggling here to find grounds for the “leap of faith.” Faced directly with death, his passionate will to live becomes explicit in his search for a way out. “What mattered was the possibility of escape, of being able to jump out of the path of inevitability, a crazy course which offered all chances of hope.” Here, through his struggle, we encounter the fundamentals of the human condition that constitute the problematic of The Myth.
Only after having confronted the facts of his impending execution will he allow himself the luxury of hoping that his appeal might be granted. That thought let loose a “surge of blood that ran through my body, causing tears to come to my eyes. I needed to work at moderating my cries of ecstasy, to reason with them so to speak” (STR, 94).
It is precisely at such a moment that the chaplain entered; after having thrice been rejected by Meursault. This missionary for Jesus, who exudes the self-satisfaction of those who “know”
themselves to be “in the Truth,” incarnates a religious hope built upon acquiescence in the sacrifice of inno-cence. For the nonbeliever, however, who feels the full weight of finitude bearing down upon him, the chaplain’s complacent acquiescence in, and even
complicity with, this capricious and unjust order of things is ultimately unbearable. Having struggled vainly to reconcile two contradictory visions of his future, Meursault’s outrage finally coalesces in an explosive rejection of rationalized injustice. As the chaplain literally pins Patrice to the wall, chastising him for his attachment to this life, and challenging him to deny that he had come to hope for another, de facto rebellion finds articulate expression, retrospectively justifying his previous life. Having made explicit the link between the leap of faith and the rejection of life, Meursault can no longer contain the rage welling up within him. The only after-life for which he could hope would be “a life where I could remember this one” (STR, 98). No, the chaplain was not his “father: he was with the others.” And what is this “truth” he is offering but a path of illusions built upon renunciation? Meursault will not acquiesce in this life-denying myth. His truth had been of this earth, and it will remain so.
He had lived by the impassioned and transitory values of this life. “I had been right. I was still right” (STR, 98). So what if they were finite? He had not been wrong. He may have failed to reflectively appreciate the life he had lived. He may have let that life slide along, rather than consciously giving shape to it. But he had not betrayed it. If he had lived in a way that involved de facto alienation from social norms, that had not been a mistake. “Far from his being deprived of all sensitivity, a profound, because tenacious, passion animate[d] him” (TRN, 1920). He had glimpsed a truth that involved rejection of normalized hypocrisy. “It was but a negative truth —the truth of being and feeling—but one without which no conquest over self or world will ever be possible.”
It thus becomes clear what Camus meant when he referred to Meursault as the sole Christ we deserve today. For this sacrificial figure’s innocence is born out of social and even metaphysical naivete, upon which altar he will be crucified. Unlike Jesus, however, who can accept his death in resignation, asking his father to “forgive them for they know not what they do,” Meursault rejects such resignation. Acceptance of the unjust suffering of innocents—for Camus, the rock upon which Peter’s church is built—can be counterposed to the revolt that bursts forth like a mighty stream, drowning the chaplain in its righteous indignation and passionate reaffirmation. Perhaps it makes sense for one who believes in a salvific afterlife to be so forgiving, but that makes only more poignant the loss of this life for which Meursault can find no redeeming features. Resignation and forgiveness only add insult to injury, compounding injustice with complicity. No, rather than forgiving them, Patrice wants his revolt confirmed in the cries of hatred with which he hopes to be greeted by a crowd of spectators on the day of his execution.
From the death of his mother to his impending execution, passing through his killing of the Arab and society’s condemnation of him. The Stranger reveals a more sophisticated development of that transition from natural to conscious death that had been the basic structure of A Happy Death. What could be more natural for Meursault than the dying of an elderly woman who had lived out her life? Thus his response. But such nonchalance with respect to natural processes leaves us totally prey to chance and to the dissolution of human meanings. Thus the death of the Arab, but one more natural event for Meursault. And yet, it was by his hand that the trigger was pulled, a point of which the authorities make much. Consciousness was a participant in and contributor to this death, even if only by inadvertence. Such will not be the case for society. It intends consciously and quite deliberately to kill Meursault for transgressing the moral bounds of its world. For these bounds constitute society’s response to the existential challenge of finitude. However unjust this sentence, the chaplain intercedes on behalf of accepting it as the price that must be paid if belief in the transcendent significance of human life is to be sustained. Patrice rebels so vehemently because death is not an entree into another life but the end of this one, and we should not so easily acquiesce in its realization. Death will come, inevitably, but we need not—
must not— assist it. Not by inadvertence and certainly not by conscious decision. As for rational justification of such complicity, that is an evil of another order. We must rather draw forth
from this dawning recognition of human finitude a renewed appreciation for what life has to offer. A passionate will “to exhaust the field of the possible” must replace our “longing for immortal heights.”
A CRYPTOMYTHIC TALE
If Meursault is not guilty of murder, nevertheless a human being is dead and Meursault did pull the trigger. Although not guilty of having willed the slaying, he is guilty of permitting himself to become an accessory in the destruction of a human life. Actually, his guilt seems to lie precisely in his not having willed anything.6 Lacking lucidity, Camus seems to be suggesting, we are ever in danger of entering into complicity with the forces of destruction. Consider the drama of “The Misunderstanding” or the citizens of Oran at the onset of The Plague. Human revolt at this stage of Camus’s development primarily consists in the struggle to maintain a lucid awareness of our condition. Meursault at the crucial moment fails to take control of himself, to maintain the necessary human distance from the forces of nature. He succumbs passively to union with nature—at the expense of the human. This failure is similar in source to the temptation that Camus speaks of in his contemporaneous essay “The Minotaur, or the Stop at Oran.”
The Minotaur is boredom … These are the lands of innocence. But innocence needs sand and stones. And man has forgotten how to live among them. At least it seems so, for he has taken refuge in this extraordinary city where boredom sleeps. Nevertheless, that very confrontation constitutes the value of Oran. The capital of boredom … is surrounded by an army in which every stone is a soldier. In the city, and at certain hours . . . what a temptation to identify oneself with those stones, to melt into that burning and impassive universe that defies history and its ferments! That is doubtless futile. But there is in every man a profound instinct which is neither that of destruction nor that of creation. It is merely a matter of resembling nothing (LCE, 130).