The stranger, it might be thought, bespeaks an inner call of our being, a countercultural invitation to return to a precivilized innocence, free of the burdens of individuality and conscience.
One might think here of Freud’s death instinct, the purported desire to return to our inorganic origins that constituted for Freud such a profound threat to the requirements of civilized living.
Freud is, of course, not alone in speculating upon such presocial needs, desires, or longings. Whatever their scientific warrant, the pervasiveness of attention to them suggests that these reflections are giving expression, however inadequate the form, to very significant human concerns. At an archetypal level, Meursault might remind us of Rousseau’s noble savage, whose innocence has not yet been sullied by sophistication and social pretention. There is, however, a price to be paid for such natural innocence, of which both the killing and society’s response give us a sense.
Two further points about the dramatic significance of this cryptomythic tale need to be noted. First, there seems to be some ambiguity in the novel concerning the positive aspects of Meursault’s character. Many have taken him to be bored with, and generally indifferent to, living. Certainly he shows no enthusiasm for all those futures we hold so dear. Similarly for matters of social etiquette. At the same time, he is fascinated by the behavior of the automaton woman—to the extent of trying to follow her when she leaves the restaurant—while he carefully attends to events at the home, at the trial, or, on Sundays, in the street in front of his balcony. Further, he evinces an enthusiasm for swimming, for hopping on the truck to take off for the port with Emmanuel, and, of course, for Marie Cardona. The “normal” reading of his character as indifferent to life may tell us more about the readers than about the person being interpreted. Such a reading of Meursault may be fur-ther confirmation of the extent to which we readers predicate the significance of our lives on the meaningfulness of belief systems that are being placed in question by him. Thus we would be finding him guilty in a manner similar to that of the jurors.
Whether or not Camus is successful in making this point, however, his intent should not be in doubt. “Meursault is not… a derelict for me, but a poor and naked man, in love with the sun which leaves no shadows. Far from
his being deprived of all sensitivity, a profound, because tenacious, passion animates him, the passion for the absolute and for truth. It concerns a truth which remains negative, the truth of being and feeling, but one without which no conquest of self and world will ever be possible” (TRN, 1920, my italics).
The second point concerns the mythic significance of Oran. Given the previous description of the quality of Oranian life, the selection of Oran as the location for the outbreak of plague should not come as a surprise. The citizens of Oran, in their passive innocence, their boredom, their lack of lucidity, succumb to the temptations of habit. They are a sort of collective Meursault without the inarticulate passion, captives of the forces of nature and habit, waiting for whatever may befall them. The plague, a symbol of the unreasonable in nature that constitutes a permanent threat to the realm of the human, gains supremacy in proportion to the degree to which the inhabitants have abandoned the spirit, with its vigilant lucidity. A failure not unlike that of which Meursault is guilty.7
FROM REBELLION TO CONDUCT
With Meursault confronting death and opening up, “for the first time, to the tender indifference of the world” (STR, 100), Camus has completed his dramatization of the development of the human spirit from complete immersion in the natural/social world to the emergence of the self-conscious and self-possessing individual.8 What remains is for such an emergent being to find a way to live. What meaning can a Meursault thus come unto himself find in his life? And what positive relations can he establish with his fellows? In this context we can appreciate the evocative explorations of the human condition encountered in Nuptials, and then the more argumentative theoretical exposition set forth in The Myth of Sisyphus. We would not be misled in viewing these works as the developing expressions of the being that Meursault has become.
I have already delineated the essential parameters of the Camusian vision. As natural animals we are extensions of the natural world with which we instinctively feel at one. But as conscious beings who can reflectively grasp the structure of that world, and of our distinctive place in it, we must recognize that our humanity is built upon the partial separation from nature of the realm of the human. We must, without imperiling our ties to nature, distance ourselves from its random course. And we must to some extent take upon ourselves the responsibility for the life we live. We must come to terms with our past and our future, incorporating into our lives the meaning that emerges from reflective appreciation of our finitude. We do not have unlimited time! Our potentially joyful union with nature will eventually be shattered by death. The “must” here is of course an ethical one, Meursault’s rejection of the chaplain’s consolations is not essentially negative. “There is a refusal which has nothing in common with renunciation. … If I obstinately refuse all the “later-ons” of the world, it is as much a matter of not renouncing my present riches. . . . Everything that is proposed to me is an effort to discharge man of the weight of his own life. . . . Between the horror and the silence, the certitude of a death without hope … I understand that all my horror of dying comes from my jealousy for living” (Noces, LCE, 76).
At this point, Camus explicitly refuses to view the absurd as a justification of resignation—as it had been for Sartre in “The Wall,” of which Camus was quite aware at this time.9 In response to the chaplain’s invitation to resignation, Meursault recapitulates Camus’s response before the religious inscriptions in Florence: “‘One must,’ said the inscription. But no, and my revolt was right. This joy which was in process, indifferent and absorbed like a pilgrim on the earth, I had to follow it step by step. And, for the rest, I said no. I said no with all my strength. … I did not see what uselessness took away from my revolt and I know well that it added to it” ( Noces, LCE, 99). The revolt here articulated still lacks clarity as to what is being rejected —death, or the nihilistic resignation drawn therefrom—as well as a positive direction. Yet it has given forceful expression to the decision to affirm life in its present richness.
The conclusion of The Stranger is thus a beginning. Meursault now understands “why [his mother] had pretended to start over.” We have come full circle. “Freed of the illusions of another life,” our world has been returned to us fresh, inviting, uncertain, awaiting the significances we can give to it. The burdensome metaphysical and social rationalizations that fogged our vision and clogged our senses have been lifted. No wonder that sense of liberating release to which Meursault gives expression in opening up “for the first time, to the tender indifference of the world” (STR, 100).
There can be little doubt that Camus personally felt the oppressive weight of social expectations and conventions, even to the extent of exhibiting traits of which he was not at all proud. The normal and expected, even the admired and rewarded, can often be quite violative of our self-respect and personal integrity. We can both play up to those expectations and at the same time be disgusted by so doing. The struggle to find acceptance, along with the distaste for such a need, can play havoc with a desire to be true to oneself. This tension plays like a basso continuo to the explicit themes of Camus’s life and work. Thus Meursault’s revolt is not only the metaphysical rejection of social hypocrisy, but also the personal purgation of the temptation to play by the rules – even to be the dandy—and the reaffirmation of the individual’s right,
experienced by Camus almost as a characterological duty, to bear witness in
one’s actions to the truth of one’s experience.
Meursault’s revolt thus consummates a series of rejections:
■ Of resignation in the face of death’s inevitability.
■ Of acceptance of the meaninglessness of a life without transcendence.
■ Of any “leap of faith” in an afterlife at the expense of the only life we are given with certainty.
■ Of the rituals of habit through which one’s life is reduced to a meaningless routine—often rationalized in terms of a hoped-for life hereafter.
■ Of the oppression of normal social order in which we are expected to be, feel, and behave in accordance with the “rules of the game.”