The Postmodern Outsider

Garry Gillard, 1995

Lecture given 20 September 1995 for H237 Narrative Fiction 2 at Murdoch
University

Summary
Camus's life
Genre of The Outsider
Reading The Outsider: realism
Reading The Outsider: ethics
A note on tense
Reading The Outsider: racism
UrOutsider and postmodern Outsider

Periodically, some trial, and not necessarily fictitious like the one in
Camus's The Outsider, comes to remind you that the Law is always prepared
to lend you a spare brain in order to condemn you without remorse, and that,
like Corneille, it depicts you as you should be, and not as you
are.1 Barthes, Mythologies

Camus's life
unknown date: Father watches public execution by guillotine (Cf. 1983: 106 2)
7 November 1913 Albert Camus born
1914 11 October Father died at the Battle of the Marne
1930 December, aged 17, tuberculosis: told he was going to die. (Cf. 1983: 115 3)
1934 … [first] marriage … lasted only two years … ended with Camus's
discovery that his wife, a morphine addict, was sleeping with one of his
friends in order to obtain money to buy drugs. (Thody 1989: 3)
1935 Sets up Théâtre du Travail in Algiers. His 'passion for the theatre never
left him, and in January 1960, at the time of his death, his 1959 stage
adaptation of Dostoevsky's The Possessed was on tour in northern France.'4
1936-38 A Happy Death His first completed novel, La mort heureuse (A Happy
Death), written between 1936 and 1938 but not published until 1971, eleven
years after his death, dwells in some detail on the advantages of being rich. 5
1937 He was expelled from the Communist Party, because he maintained his
opposition to French colonialist policies in Algeria (an agreement between
Russia and France involved a moderation of this opposition in the French
Communist Party).
1939-40 Camus's work on Alger Républicain on behalf of the nine million or so
Arabs who lived side by side, but not on an equal basis, with the nine
hundred thousand European settlers in Algeria … (Thody 1989: 7)
1940 It is true that his second marriage, in 1940, to Francine Faure, had not
always been a happy one. His twin children, Catherine and Jean, were born in
1945, but Camus did not enjoy domestic life. He was something of a
womaniser, and in 1955 went to live in a bachelor flat. In 1953, his wife had a
nervous breakdown.6
1942 The Myth of Sisyphus In 1950, Camus said that he thought of himself as a
writer whose works were so closely related to one another that none of them
could be fully understood in isolation from the others.7 (Thody 1989: 5)
1942 Outsider8 His three major works of fiction … are all what the French call
'les romans de la condition humaine,' novels of man's fate. (Thody 1989: 3)
1947 Plague
1956 Fall
1954 Algerian War
1957 'I must also denounce a terrorism which is exercised blindly, in the
streets of Algiers for example, and which some day could strike my mother or
my family. I believe in justice, but I shall defend my mother above justice.' 9
16 October 1957 Nobel Prize
1960 Killed in car accident 4 January, aged 46
1962 Algerian independence

Genre of The Outsider

The issues raised in L'Étranger are highly complex, but the story told is a
direct and simple one. Meursault goes to his mother's funeral, takes Marie
Cardona as his mistress, becomes involved in the affairs of his somewhat
dishonest neighbour, Raymond Sintès, shoots an Arab, is tried for murder and
sentenced to death. By 1989, L'Étranger had sold almost five million copies.
The Outsider is not, strictly speaking, a novel as such. L'Étranger, like La chute,
is a 'récit,' a long short story or a novella. (Thody 1989: 14)
Like L'Étranger and La chute, the Gidean récit concentrates on one issue and
one group of characters. Camus called his third major work, The Plague, a
'chronicle.' Gide called only of his works a 'roman' or 'novel': Les Faux-
Monnayeurs, The Counterfeiters. (I take the opportunity to mention The
Counterfeiters, by the way, because it is the work in which Gide gave us the
concept of the 'mise en abyme' to literary theory.) So: L'Étranger is a 'récit' or
'tale'—rather than anything so complex as a novel.

Camus evidently like the kind of concentration that came with this form, and
even, it seems, saw it as characteristically French. 'In July 1943, he published
in a review called Confluences an article entitled "L'intelligence et l'échafaud"
("Intelligence and the scaffold").10 In it, he argued that what characterised the
French novel was first and foremost a constant attention to the matter in hand.
… There is, maintains Camus, a kind of "passionate monotony" in the way
that Madame de La Fayette, Benjamin Constant, Choderlos de Laclos,
Stendhal and even Proust bring everything back to the single idea which
dominates the novel they happen to be writing.'11

On the other hand, if you are going to write a novel, it must have a unity of
style. 'In 1943, Camus made an entry in his Carnets … "What attracts many
people to the novel," he wrote, "is that it is apparently a genre which has no
style. In fact it demands the most difficult style, the one which subordinates
itself completely to its subject."12 He then continued: "one can thus imagine an
author writing each of his novels in a different style," and this is exactly what
he did. The sharp, isolated, individual notations of immediate items of
physical experience which characterise Meursault's perception of the world
in L'Étranger …'13 are unique to that work: the others are different.

'In another of his early comments in the Carnets, Camus wrote that anyone
who was going to set out to write novels ought to learn to think in images,
and he repeated the idea in one of the first literary articles he published
in Alger Républicain, a review on 20 October 1938 of Sartre's La Nausée. "A
novel," he then wrote, "is never anything but a philosophy put into images.
And, in a good novel, the whole of the philosophy has passed into the
images.'14 It's interesting that it was in a review of Sartre's novel that he wrote
this, as it was Sartre himself who made the 'famous remark that "the technique
of a novelist always presupposes a metaphysic. The task of the critic is to
bring out the latter before appreciating the former."'15 You might like to take
this as one of your entry points into L'Étranger: if this is a basis for judgement,
then what is your judgement of The Outsider on this basis: how successful is it
in fact in passing the whole of the philosophy into the images?

Reading The Outsider: realism

'Like a natural object, L'Étranger seems to be inexhaustible in the different
ways in which it can be analysed. For when it was first published, in June
1942, it was seen as a depressing example of a rather pessimistic type
of realism. André Rousseaux, [a] well-known Catholic critic, went so far as to
interpret it in Le Figaro Littéraire for 17 July 1942 as a study of the moral
decadence of France which the new Vichy regime, with its 'Révolution
Nationale' and slogan of 'Travail, Famille, Patrie,' was trying to remedy. The
central character of L'Étranger, he wrote, was a man "without humanity,
without human value, and even, in spite of the ambition to be realistic which
provides the sole framework to the book, without any kind of human truth."

'The review in the influential Nouvelle Revue Française for October 1942
saw L'Étranger primarily as a novel of social revolt, aimed at denouncing a
society which had prevented Meursault from looking after his mother
properly and had thus virtually compelled him to place her in the nursing
home where she died.'16

'In another approach which takes the book as realistic, it is possible to read
'some aspects of Meursault's attitude and behaviour which justify …
following Aimé Patri's example, in L'Arche for 1944, of thinking of him as a
schizophrenic.17 For what characterises Meursault throughout the first part of
the novel is what is popularly seen as a characteristically schizophrenic
tendency: he is obsessed with trivial minutiae while remaining totally
indifferent to matters which most other people would regard as being of
considerable importance.'18

Another way of viewing this as a novel of social protest is to see it as an attack

on the death penalty or at least on 'the way in which criminal courts reach
their verdicts.'19 Consider the way in which Meursault's 'sheer animal
terror'20 is described in this passage.

The most difficult part was that in-between time when I knew they usually
operated. Once it was past midnight, I'd be waiting, listening. Never before
had my ears picked up so many noises or detected such tiny sounds. I must
say though that in a way I was lucky throughout that period in that I never
once heard footsteps. Mother often used to say that you're never altogether
unhappy. And lying there in my prison when the sky turned red and a new
day slid into my cell, I'd agree with her. Because I could just as easily have
heard footsteps and my heart could have burst. For even though the faintest
rustle would send me flying to the door and even though, with my ear
pressed to the wood, I'd wait there frantically until I could hear my own
breathing and be terrified to find it so hoarse, like a dog's death-rattle, my
heart wouldn't burst after all and I'd have gained another twenty- four
hours.21 1983: 108-109

So that's another kind of realism.

Reading The Outsider: ethics

It is however, more common to consider L'Étranger as a work with a
philosophical kind of meaning, a 'philosophy put into images,' to take an
ethical view of the book. Without a sense of a deeper meaning of some kind,
one may come away with only a sense of 'irony and waste,' a puzzling
'impression of a man who discovers the immense importance and value of life
on the very evening before he is about to lose it.'22 One way to solve this
puzzle is take Camus's hint that 'none of [his works] could be fully
understood in isolation from the others,' and read together with L'Étranger the
other book that he was after all writing at exactly the same moment: The Myth
of Sisyphus. This philosophical essay begins with the basic premise that life is
absurd, and, rather in the manner of a Cartesian Meditation, proceeds to
develop an ethic on this sceptical basis. Camus's conclusion, in a nutshell, is
that although the absurd starting-point immediately poses the problem of
suicide, that we should neither kill ourselves nor follow other thinkers who
started from a similar premise into what Camus calls 'philosophical suicide':
the leap into religious faith. We should on the contrary be like those 'absurd
men' celebrated in The Myth of Sisyphus—the Don Juan, the actor, the
conqueror and the artist. (By the way, leaving aside the conqueror, the other
three are avatars of Albert Camus: he says himself he is an 'artist,' 23 he had a
passion for the theatre, and was apparently also something of a Don Juan—
unfortunately for his second wife.)

You will have noticed that Camus's hero in The Outsider is a man who
strenuously resists the invitation to accept the consolation of religious faith: a
man whom Camus himself, in his 1955 Preface (which is printed as an
Afterword in the 1983 Penguin edition) praises for his authenticity, for his
eschewal of hypocrisy: 'he refuses to lie.' 24 As Céleste, one of Camus's three
favourite characters,25 says: 'he is a man.' (The Laredo translation gives this as
'man of the world.'26) That is, he is a man who respects the 'very well defined'
'code of morality' of the 'men' 'of Algeria'—and Camus sets it out like this, in
one of his essays.

'You "don't let your mother down." You see to it that your wife is respected in
the street. You show consideration to pregnant women. You don't attack an
enemy two to one, because "that's dirty." If anyone fails to observe these
elementary rules, "He's not a man" and that's all there is to it. This seems to me
[writes Camus] just and strong.'27

This then is Camus's rather macho version of existentialist good faith. Camus
clearly relies a lot on an Algerian way of life for the appeal of his tale, and I'm
sure that many of you will have responded, as I did, to the evocation of life
under the sun and near the sea, and to the descriptions of the simple pleasures
of the body and of the senses. 'The men in Algeria,' [he once said] 'live like my
hero, in an absolutely simple manner. Naturally you can understand
Meursault, but an Algerian will understand him more easily and more
deeply.'28 Sounds a bit like some of the Australian men we know, doesn't it?
The 'delights and values to be found on the sundrenched beaches of the
Mediterranean world'29 are not really all that different from those found on
the sundrenched beaches of Perth, are they?

A note on tense
I'll return to the question of ethics in a moment, but I'd just like to mention in
passing something about the form of The Outsider which makes it quite
unusual and which you will not have been able to notice, reading it in
translation: it was apparently 'the first French novel to be written without
using the normal narrative tense, the passé simple.'30 This is, as its name
implies, the past tense which consists simply of one word. When I first learnt
about this tense I was told it was the passé historique, the tense in which one
learnt about the 'facts' of history. The tense used mostly in The Outsider is
the passé composé, the two-word past tense used in speaking about the past, as
opposed to writing, and therefore having making a weaker claim to be stating
the truth. This aspect apparently made quite a considerable impact in 1942. 31 I
find this interesting in the context of the distinction between what we've been
calling modernism and its deconstruction—and I hope to return to this point
later.

Reading The Outsider: racism

I return now to questions of ethics and to Camus's attitude to the Arabs.

'Look at the events from [an Arab] point of view … An Arab girl is brutally
beaten up by a European. The European police refuse to do anything about it,
relying on the unsupported evidence of another European that the girl had
been guilty of so serious a misdemeanour that she somehow deserved this
treatment. When the girl's brother tries to avenge her, he is shot dead by the
same European who supplied the evidence which had earlier helped to justify
the police in their connivance with the brutal treatment of his sister. The
European legal authorities then try to do everything possible to avoid
applying the full rigour of the law. They are nevertheless forced to do so by
the pig-headed obstinacy of the European murderer in not agreeing to
conform with a particular set of social customs. Throughout the trial, no
mention is made of the Arab who was killed.'32

How do you find this view squares with the view of Camus's 'hero' who, he
says in his 1955 Preface, 'agrees to die for the truth,' and who is 'the only
Christ that we deserve'?33 There seems to be a suggestion here that this
attitude to the 'truth' can be found both in Meursault and in Camus himself.
Or is Camus simply drawing a portrait of a typical North African male who
only becomes a hero by interpretation and after the fact? And that the racist
attitudes are not those of Camus, but of his creature? 'It would [therefore] on
this reading, be Meursault the typical North African male who does not mind
arranging for an Arab woman to be beaten up. It would be Meursault, and not
Camus, who describes the Arabs crouching on their heels as looking at the
Europeans 'à leur manière' (in their own special way).34 It would be Meursault
who feels no guilt at shooting an Arab, and who provides detailed
descriptions of the European visitors to his prison while relegating all the
Arabs, women and men alike, to an anonymous mass. It would be Meursault
who gives names to all the Europeans but who never says what any of the
Arabs are called; and it would be Meursault whose killing of the Arab would
be interpreted as the outward and individual sign of the genocidal instincts
which are said, by critics such as Henri Kréa, inhabit the breast of every
colonising European.35

As it is, however, Camus's later presentation of Meursault as a truth-telling,

Christ-like figure makes the distinction between narrator and author difficult
one to sustain.'36 It is only when Camus asks us to admire Meursault for a
consistency in his moral attitudes which he does not in fact possess that
problems arise, and from this point of view the 1955 preface to L'Étranger is a
perfect illustration of why the approach to literature which Wimsatt and
Beardsley call 'the intentional fallacy' is indeed a fallacy.'37

As Conor Cruise O'Brien writes in his book on Camus, 'We may indeed accept
the fact that Camus's work is a notable expression of the Western moral
conscience. But we should not ignore the fact that it also registers the
hesitations and limitations of that conscience and that one of the great
limitations lies along the cultural frontier, in the colony.38 And another Albert,
Albert Memmi, a Tunisian writer, called Camus 'le colonisateur de bonne
volonté'39: the well-intentioned coloniser. (This was in 1957, at the time of the
Nobel Prize.)

'Camus, you then find yourself thinking, wanted to write a book in which a
harmless but unconventional young man was sentenced to death primarily for
his failure to observe the social convention of crying at his mother's funeral.
But he had to acknowledge that however imperfect the workings of the legal
system may be, this kind of thing does not happen very often. So he sets up a
plot in which something relatively unimportant happens: one in which an
Arab gets shot in a brawl. He then wrote the story in such a way as to
minimise the importance of such an event, and was able to do so primarily as
a result of his own racialism. It would have been fairly unusual in such a
situation, as Conor Cruise O'Brien observed, for a European to be sentenced to
death for shooting a native. He would have to do something else, such as
defying one of the more important of his own society's taboos.'40

The Outsider as postmodern

Finally, I want to read The Outsider against the concepts of Modernism and
Postmodernism, as I promised I would do in the first lecture in this unit. In
order to do this I shall present deliberately simplified versions of these
concepts, because the point is not to present a correct version of the relevant
intellectual history—of the history of ideas—but to highlight two contrasting
aspects of Camus's novel, and I'll be using the notions of Modernism and
Postmodernism to do that, and in so doing I'll be continuing an analysis
which I began in the first lecture in this unit.

My argument is that this novel is usefully to be thought of as poised on the

cusp between Modernism and Postmodernism, having some of the
characteristics of both. For the present purpose Modernism is seen a mode of
thought which employs what Lyotard calls grand narratives, or meta-
narratives, and I've previously suggested examples such as those of Freud,
Karl Marx, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Durkheim, Bergson, and so on. Also for the
present purpose Postmodernism, on the other hand, is a mode of thought
trying to come to terms with the loss of a sense of direction and a unified
sense of identity and purpose.

In my first lecture I set up an opposition between modernism and

postmodernism and I used Ihab Hassan's table (as did Daniel Narbett in his
tutorial paper)41 as a preliminary organising device (not because it's in any
sense 'true'). Here's a selection from the Hassan table—with my addition from
Bakhtin.42

Table 1.1 Schematic differences between modernism and postmodernism 43

modernism postmodernism

purpose play
design chance
hierarchy anarchy
mastery/logos exhaustion/silence
art object/finished work process/performance/happening
monoglossia heteroglossia
passé simple passé composé

The second-last pair of terms—monoglossia/heteroglossia—which I have

added to Hassan's list—derive of course from Bakhtin.44 The last pair I've
referred to earlier.

At the level of the énoncé, or the 'represented'—or the 'presented world,' in

Horst Ruthrof's terms45—the place where these concepts are most starkly
opposed is in the courtroom scenes, in a place which is often where ethical
and related verbal disputes are engaged. Here the discourse of Meursault is
opposed to that of the officials, and the prosecutor in particular, who at one
point says, for example (in the Stuart Gilbert translation):

'For though in the course of my long career I have often had occasion to
demand capital punishment, never before have I felt this onerous task so fully
compensated and counter-balanced, not to say enlightened by a sense of
urgent and sacred duty as well as by the horror which I feel at the sight of a
man in whom I see nothing but a monster.' … I was so hot and so surprised
that I felt dizzy.'46 (99)

The French text here is even more deliberately rhetorical.

'… jamais autant qu'aujourd'hui, je n'ai senti ce pénible devoir compensé,

balancé, éclairé par la conscience d'un commandement impérieux et sacré et
par l'horreur que je ressens devant un visage d'homme où je ne lis rien que de
monstrueux.'47 1958: 120

The prosecutor's opinion of Meursault's ethical being, that he is 'nothing but a

monster,' is based on a view of his behaviour, which is read like a text and
then interpreted as having a certain meaning. The two strings of behavioural
text, the one to do with the death of his mother, and the other with the death
of the Arab, are related, and the one is seen as indicating the meaning of the
other. In the terms of the official discourse—Monoglossic, Modernist,
Magisterial—Meursault is seen as a profoundly evil person because he is also
seen as a person who did not love his mother enough: therefore he must have
intended to kill the Arab. Because he smoked and drank coffee in the presence
of his mother's dead body, he can be said to be a criminal. As Camus has
written: 'In our society any man who doesn't cry at his mother's funeral is
liable to be condemned to death.'48 1983: 118.

When Meursault speaks, because of the first-person internal narrative

situation, or what these days we might call 'Meursault-cam,' we are aware that
he is always at least telling the truth—even though what he expresses appears
to others to be unfeeling, and therefore deviant and transgressive.

Coming almost immediately after the prosecutor, Meursault's way of

speaking contrasts strongly.

I stood up and since I felt like talking, I said, rather haphazardly in fact, that I
hadn't intended to kill the Arab. The judge replied that this was a positive
statement, that so far he hadn't quite grasped my system of defence, and that
before hearing my lawyer he would be happy to have me specify the motives
which had inspired my crime. Mixing up my words a bit and realizing that I
sounded ridiculous, I said quickly that it was because of the sun. Some people
laughed. 1983: 99.

Inserted into Meursault's speech we hear the judge's voice, again providing
the contrast between the official mode and that of the outsider. The judge uses
the vocabulary, lexicon, terminology of the courts and by so doing indicates to
some extent his opinion of Meursault and also of his chances in the present
trial. Once again, the original text gives the judge a rhetorically better-
proportioned speech.

Le président a répondu que c'etait une affirmation, que jusqu'ici il saisissait

mal mon système de défense et qu'il serait heureux, avant d'entendre mon
avocat, de me faire préciser les motifs qui avaient inspiré mon acte. 49
I believe we are intended to hear in his smooth way of speaking—even
though it is in reported speech—an ironical pretence of a momentary interest
in this miserable accused whom the judge is soon to have the pleasure of
condemning to death. Meursault's account of his own inadequate speech, and
the comments that accompany it, as well as the indications of the reception of
what Meursault has to say, indicate that it is the general view that he has an
inadequate and amoral explanation for the killing. It also appears that he is
also incapable of expressing himself in the conventional rhetoric of the
courtroom, and it is elsewhere indicated that the French he uses is not
standard 'educated' French. He employs a stylistics and a lexicon which is
apparently neither cosmopolitan nor bourgeois. He shares the gangster slang
of Raymond, for example: 'Je le descends?' ('Shall I drop him?') 50 ('Shall I let
him have it?' 1983: 57.) That is, as far as we can tell from the few hints we are
given. As he says himself, to the examining magistrate: 'C'est que je n'ai jamais
grand-chose à dire. Alors je me tais.' 51 ('It's just that I never have much to say.
So I keep quiet.' 1983: 66.)

The monoglossic discourse of official culture requires that people behave in

certain ways in certain circumstances, and particularly in what have been
called 'boundary situations'—in this case, in relation to the death of one's
mother, and in a courtroom. Meursault's awareness of his inability to conform
in this regard is signalled by his overwhelming awareness of his physical
being, and in each case by excessive heat and light. At the burial he narrates,
among other things: 'But soon I lost interest in his [Perez's] movements; my
temples were throbbing and I could hardly drag myself along.' 52 (1961: 26)
[1983: 22.] In the courtroom he tells us: 'I was feeling a bit dizzy too with all
these people in this stuffy room. I looked at the public again and I couldn't
pick out a single face.' (1983: 81.) And after the summing-up for the
prosecution: 'Moi, j'étais etourdi de chaleur et d'étonnement.' (1958: 120)
'Personally I was quite overcome by the heat and my amazement at what I
had been hearing.'53 (1961: 103) [1983: 99] However, the most significant
moment of being overpowered is, of course, the moment at which Meursault
pulls the trigger: 'Je ne sentais plus que les cymbales du soleil sur mon front
et, indistinctement, le glaive éclatant jailli du couteau toujours en face de moi.
Cette épée brûlante rongeait mes cils et fouillait mes yeux douloureux.' (1957:
90; 1958: 80) 'All I could feel were the cymbals the sun was clashing against
my forehead and, indistinctly, the dazzling spear still leaping up off the knife
in front of me. It was like a red-hot blade gnawing at my eyelashes and
gouging out my stinging eyes.' 1983: 60.54

For me, as someone who has read and been impressed by Camus's non-fiction
writing, and particularly The Myth of Sisyphus, the most striking thing about
the evocation of Meursault's world is its physicality, the strong sense—as also
found, perhaps, in Baywatch, Echo Point, etc.—of the body in relation to the
elements, the sun and the sea, and in phases of tension and relaxation. And is
it not the case that in many of Meursault's actions—running after the truck
with Emmanuel, playing water spouts in the sea with Marie, helping
Raymond in his dealings with his woman and his underworld colleagues,
and, finally, killing the Arab—all these actions are characterised by the terms
in the right-hand column of Hassan's schema?

With regard to 'purpose': we might recall the interview between Meursault

and his boss, in which 'He then asked me if I wasn't interested in changing my
life. I replied that you could never change your life, that in any case one life
was a good as another and that I wasn't at all dissatisfied with mine here.'
1983: 44. And when Marie asks him to marry her: Meursault 'said I didn't
mind; if she was keen on it, we'd get married.' (1961: 48)55 Which suggests to
me 'chance' in the matter of planning one's affairs, rather than 'design.'

With regard to the pair 'hierarchy/anarchy,' I suggest one could consider the
reversal of relationship between Salamano and his dog, between Meursault
and his mother—his patronising attitude towards her 'boyfriend,' Pérez, for
example.

'Exhaustion and silence' characterise the situations in which Meursault

follows and kills the Arab, and in which he fails to deal very effectively with
his defence in the courtroom—he is always being overwhelmed by the heat
and light, and is rarely in a situation of 'mastery.'

The end of the novel is characterised by a certain openness, as Meursault

anticipates a kind of 'performance,' or 'happening' on the day of his public
execution, rather than the kind of closure in which the narrator might have
summed up his life as a 'finished object' and taken his leave. In fact he is
'ready to live my life over again,' as though the novel could have another lease
of life, were it not for the fact that the central character is about to lose his.
(1983: 117) This kind of analysis, I freely admit, is a bit too mechanical, but it
does provide a fresh context in which to read the novel, rather than, say, in the
existentialist context of its own time, which is perhaps less relevant now than
it was in 1942?

Last week, in her lecture on To the Lighthouse, Claire Colebrook introduced the
notion of the line. I have since come to see this as the leitmotif of this unit—
well, either the line or perhaps better—the slash! In the Lighthouse, the line was
symbolically drawn by Lily Briscoe, and was also seen by Claire Colebrook as
being the central episode which divides the two parts of the book. And Brian
McHale has suggested that a line can be drawn through the middle of Ulysses.
Well: where is the line to be drawn in The Outsider? Well, you might say it's
drawn between him and everyone else—but I hope to surprise you when I
suggest that the line on this occasion is drawn between The Outsider and
the UrOutsider—'Ur' meaning 'original.'

This involves telling you about another narrative you probably hadn't heard
of until today. La mort heureuse was published in French in 1971 and
immediately translated and published in English as A Happy Death in 1972.
The Penguin edition came out the next year.56 It was written by Camus in two
complete drafts, but never published in his lifetime—mainly because it was
superseded by The Outsider. The main character is called Patrice Mersault57;
his mother has recently died, he runs after a truck with a clerk called
Emmanuel, he eats at Céleste's restaurant, from his balcony he watches people
going to the movies and coming back from a football match, he has a
girlfriend called Marthe, and the central action in the novel is a deliberate
murder. And although the results of the murders are quite different—in A
Happy Death the main character has committed a perfect crime from which he
benefits, while in the later work the clumsy murderer becomes the victim of
his judges—the problem that is solved in both is the same: how to die happy.
One of the manuscripts of The Outsider was subtitled 'A Happy Man.'

Stylistically, though—and philosophically—there is a marked difference

between the two narratives, despite the fact that the earlier one was conceived
and composed between 1936 and 1938, and Camus was working on The
Outsider as early as January 1939. In the earlier novel there is a tendency to try
to explain everything. Not only is there much more detail of a descriptive
kind than in The Outsider, not only are many more of the feelings and
perceptions of the central character indicated, but there is a more noticeable
effort to provide interpretation also, to direct the attention to the kinds of
meaning intended to emerge from the effect of the reading. Let me read you
just this one passage, which may serve as an example of each of these
characteristics. I think you will be able to notice not only each of them, but
also the similarities and differences between this writing and that in The
Outsider. If you think of the last paragraph of your text, the one with the idea
of the 'benign indifference of the universe,' you will be able to see what I
mean. The piece I shall read is also from almost the very end of A Happy
Death.

The blanket slipped from Mersault's shoulders, and when Lucienne stood up
to cover him, he shuddered at her touch. Since the day he had sneezed in the
little square near Zagreus' villa to this moment, his body had served him
faithfully, had opened him to the world. But at the same time, it lived a life of
its own, detached from the man it represented. For these few years it had
passed through a slow decomposition; now it had completed its trajectory,
and was ready to leave Mersault, to restore him to the world. In that sudden
shudder of which Mersault was conscious, his body indicated once more a
complicity which had already won so many joys for them both. Solely for this
reason, Mersault took pleasure in that shudder. Conscious, he must be
conscious without deception, without cowardice—alone, face to face—at grips
with his body—eyes open upon death. It was a man's business. Not love, not
landscape, nothing but an infinite waste of solitude and happiness in which
Mersault was playing his last cards. He felt his breathing weaken. He gasped
for air, and in that movement his ruined lungs sneezed. His wrists were cold
now, and there was no feeling in his hands at all. Day was breaking.58

I suggest that there is less sense in the last paragraph of The Outsider of a
desire to comprehensively cover all the ground, and to account for everything.
Indeed there is this surprising opening-up, I suggest, in the desire of the
condemned man, in the last hours of his life, not only to feel 'ready to start life
all over again,' but also hopeful of being greeted on the day of his execution
with 'howls of execration.' This ending certainly surprised me the first several
times I read it, though thirty years later the effect has softened somewhat. But
even now I find as I read it again in French, and to make this point, try to
work out my own fresh translation, I feel the crude directness of the
paradoxical desire: 'For everything to be perfect, and so that I felt less alone,
the only thing left to wish was that there be many spectators on the day of my
execution, and that they welcome me with cries of hatred.'59 Camus wrote in
one of his notebooks about The Outsider that 'the end [was] ; a drawing-
together of different themes, a privileged place in which the very disjointed
character whom I described finally took on some form of unity.' 60 This may be
true about his sense of the character 'Meursault,' but, I suggest is not of the
effect of the narrative, which reaches a peak of energy as the novel breaks off,
as if silenced before its natural end.

I use the term 'natural' advisedly because of the fact that 'Natural Death' is the
title of the first part of A Happy Death, that part that describes the
very unnatural murder which makes Patrice Mersault rich. In a consciously
ironical twist the second part of the earlier novel is called 'Conscious Death'
although it ends with the natural death—due to pleurisy—of the protagonist,
he is conscious of it coming to him. As you have heard in the passage I read,
he is ready and waiting for the death that ascends like a stone making its way
from his stomach to his throat. The novel in fact ends, in a consummately
Modernist way with a notion of 'the truth.' Here is the very ending—and with
it the ending of this lecture!

"In a minute, in a second," he thought. The ascent stopped. And stone among
the stones, he returned in the joy of his heart to the truth of the motionless
worlds.61

Footnotes
1 Barthes, Roland 1972, 'Dominici, or The triumph of literature,' in Mythologies,
Cape, London: 43-6; this quotation: 44.

2 Camus, Albert 1983 [1942], The Outsider, Penguin, tr. Joseph Laredo: 106.

3 Camus 1983 [1942]: 115.

4 Thody Philip 1989, Albert Camus, Macmillan, London: 4.

5 Thody 1989: 3.

6 Thody 1989: 11.

7 Interview in La Gazette des Lettres, 15 February 1952, repr. Jean-Claude

Brisville, Camus, La Bibliothèque Idéale, Gallimard, Paris, 1952; and in volume
2 of the collected works: Pléiade Series, Gallimard, Paris, 1965: 1919-1924; as
cited in Thody 1989: 5. The two volumes of the Pléiade collected works are
henceforth cited as PI, PII.

8 Camus 1983 [1942].

9 Lottman 1979: 618; as cited in Thody 1989: 9.

10 PI: [pp.] 1887-1893 and Lyrical and Critical (LC), Hamish Hamilton, London,
1967: 153-157. See also Selected Essays and Notebooks (SEN), Penguin, 1971: 185-
191.

11 Thody 1989: 16.

12 Carnets vol. I, 1935-42, 1962; vol. II, 1942-51, 1965, Gallimard, Paris.
The Carnets are henceforth cited as CI, CII … This quotation: CII: 89.

13 Thody 1989: 17.

14 See PII: 1417; LC: 145 and SEN: 167. Cited in Thody 1989: 17-18.

15 Sartre, Jean-Paul, Situations I: 71; as cited in Thody 1989: 43.

16 Thody 1989: 18-19.

17 Patri, Aimé, 'Sur le sentiment d'étrangeté,' L'Arche, 5: 115-117.

18 Thody 1989: 19.

19 Thody 1989: 35.

20 Thody 1989: 35.

21 Camus 1983 [1942]: 108-109.

22 Thody 1989: 22.

23 Camus, Albert 1983 [1955], 'Afterword' [originally a 'Preface'] to The

Outsider, Penguin: 119.

24 Camus 1983 [1955]: 118.

25 Brisville, Jean-Claude 1952, Camus, La Bibliothèque Idéale, Gallimard,

Paris: 258.

26 Camus 1983 [1942]: 89.

27 P II: 72; LC: 67.

28 Albert Camus, in an interview with Gaëton Picon in Le

Littéraire (subsequently Le Figaro Littéraire), 10 August 1946; as quoted in
Thody 1989: 24.

29 Thody 1989: 25.

30 Thody 1989: 32.

31 Thody 1989: 32.

32 Thody 1989: 41-42.

33 Camus 1983 [1955]: 119.

34 Or, 'in that way they have.' (GMG)

35 Kréa, Henri 1961, 'Le malentendu algérien,' France-Observateur, 557, 5

January: 16.

36 Thody 1989: 39-40.

37 Thody 1989: 38, citing W. H. Wimsatt 1967 [1954], The Verbal Icon,
University of Kentucky Press.

38 O'Brien, Conor Cruise 1970, Camus, Fontana/Collins, London: 27.

39 Memmi, Albert 1957, [article in] La Nef, November: 95; quoted in Thody
1989: 41.

40 Thody 1989: 41.

41 Narbett, Daniel, 'Apocalypse then and now,' unpublished tutorial paper, 2

August 1995, H237 Narrative Fiction II, Murdoch University.

42 Hassan, Ihab 1975, Paracriticisms: Seven Speculations of the Times, Illinois

University Press, Urbana, Ill. Hassan, Ihab 1985, 'Schematic differences
between modernism and postmodernism,' in 'The culture of
postmodernism,' Theory, Culture and Society, 2, 3, 119-32.

43 Hassan 1985: 123-4.

44 Bakhtin, Mikhail M. 1981, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael
Holquist, trs. Caryl Emerson & Michael Holquist (from Voprosy literatury i
estetiki, Moscow, 1975), University of Texas Press, Austin and London: 262-3.

45 Ruthrof, Horst 1981, The Reader's Construction of Narrative, Routledge &

Kegan Paul, London.

46 Camus, Albert 1983 [1942], The Outsider, Penguin, tr. Joseph Laredo: 99; an
earlier translation in Penguin, from 1961 was by Stuart Gilbert. Further page
numbers in the text are from the Laredo translation.

47 Camus, Albert 1958 [1942], L'Étranger, ed. Germaine Brée & Carlos Lynes,
Methuen: 120.

48 Camus 1983 [1955]: 118.

49 Camus 1958 [1942]: 120.

50 Camus 1958 [1942]: 76; Camus, Albert 1957 [1942], L'Étranger, Gallimard
(Livre de poche) edition of 1957: 85. 'Shall I plug him one?' —Stuart Gilbert
translation, Penguin, 1961: 61. 'Shall I shoot him down?'—Editors of the
Methuen edition, 1958: 76 n. 'Shall I drop him?' is my own literal suggestion.
'Shall I let him have it?' is from Joseph Laredo, 1983: 57.
51 Camus 1958: 87. 'It's just that I never have much to say. So I keep quiet.'
1983: 66. 'Well, I rarely have anything much to say. So naturally I keep my
mouth shut.' Stuart Gilbert translation, Penguin: 70.

52 This is Stuart Gilbert's 'explanatory' translation; 1961: 26. Laredo gives us

'He cut across country once more and so it went on. All I could feel was the
blood pounding in my temples.' 1983: 22.

53 I was so hot and so surprised that I felt dizzy. 1983: 99.

54 Stuart Gilbert's version: 'I was conscious only of the cymbals of the sun
clashing on my skull, and, less distinctly, of the keen blade of light flashing up
from the knife, scarring my eyelashes, and gouging into my eyeballs.' (1961:
64)

55 'I said I didn't mind and we could do if she wanted.' 1983: 44.

56 Camus, Albert 1973 [1971], A Happy Death, Penguin; trs. Richard Howard
from La mort heureuse, Gallimard, Paris.

57 Note that it has been suggested that this character's name homophonically
combines the sea and the sun: la mer, le soleil; whereas in the other name,
Meursault, the first element suggests death, from 'je meurs' = 'I die,' and so the
sun in the second syllable seems to have given place to the idea of a leap, for
which 'sault' is a perfect, not a partial homophone. This is, however, perhaps,
trivial conjecture - but I doubt it.

58 Camus1973 [1971]: 105.

59 'Pour que tout soit consommé, pour que je me sente moins seul, il me
restait à souhaiter qu'il y ait beaucoup de spectateurs le jour de mon exécution
et qu'ils m'accueillent avec des cris de haine.' 1957: 179; 1958: 138. The French
'consommé', which I have suggested by conveyed by 'perfect', also means
'consummated', 'accomplished' (Stuart Gilbert's choice), and has associations
of having been 'consumed', 'used up.' A consummate performer, in both
languages, has nothing left to do to improve his performance. The kind of
soup called 'consommé' is a clear liquid, the meat and any other solid
ingredients having been used up in the preparation.
60 Carnets IV, 1942.

61 Camus 1973 [1971]: 106.

Garry Gillard | New: 28 September, 2009 | Now: 11 April, 2019