This month features: The Outsider (L’Ètranger), Albert Camus, translated Joseph Laredo, Penguin Modern Classics, 0144182504, £6.99 |
|
It is a famous opening sentence, one of the best-known in twentieth century fiction:
‘Mother died today.’
And from it, everything in The Outsider ramifies. But not for the immediately obvious reason: that the grief of the speaker, the son, causes his life to alter, degenerate.
In the chapters which follow the description of mother’s funeral, Camus makes it clear that Mersault’s life – his hero’s life – is carrying on much as it did before.
Mersault is described, at one point, as a ‘man of the world’. The day after the funeral, he begins an affair with an attractive young woman. But it is a coming-together that might just as likely have happened before:
‘In the water I met Marie Cordona, who used to be a typist at the office. I’d fancied her at the time, and I think she fancied me too. But she left soon afterwards and nothing came of it.’
Mersault is relentlessly non-commital, in love as in everything. It is worth quoting this next passage at length, to give some sense of the teasingly approaching-retreating rhythms of Camus’ simple declarative sentences, of Mersault and Marie’s engagement:
‘That evening, Marie came round for me and asked me if I wanted to marry her. I said I didn’t mind and we could do if she wanted to. She then wanted to know if I loved her. I replied as I had done once already, that it didn’t mean anything but that I probably didn’t. “Why marry me then?” she said. I explained to her that it really didn’t matter and that if she wanted to, we could get married. Anyway, she was the one who was asking me and I was simply saying yes. She then remarked that marriage was a serious matter. I said, “No.” She didn’t say anything for a moment and looked at me in silence. Then she spoke. She just wanted to know if I’d have accepted the same proposal if it had come from another woman, which whom I had a similar relationship. I said, “Naturally.”’
Lack of affect, along with simple declarative sentences (often in intimate mutual accompaniment), is one of the distinguishing features of twentieth century fiction. Mersault is deadpan – even after committing a murder.
‘I said, rather haphazardly in fact, that I hadn’t intended to kill the Arab… 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.’
Mersault is being honest. The sun, or more accurately the light, is one of the most important presences, if not characters, in The Outsider.
Although only mildly affected by his mother’s death (tired, irritated), Mersault is always hypersensitive to effects of light.
(In his Afterword, which oversimplifies the novel in many ways, Camus describes his hero as ‘a poor and naked man, in love with a sun which leaves no shadows’.)
One of the book’s great refusals is any metaphysicalizing of light. If it is a symbol, it is not of a secular transcendence. In the end, Mersualt rejects God explicitly, directly and in response to a Chaplain, God’s representative on earth.
Light, for Mersault, is what makes Algiers (where this short novel is set) the place it is: hot, dry. His light has the effect on him that it has on all of us (apart from Michael Jackson), not religious illumination but tanning.
In one of this ascetic book’s most sensual moments:
‘I held her to me as we hurried to catch a bus, get back home and throw ourselves onto my bed. I’d left my window open and it was good to feel the summer night flowing over our brown bodies.’
When he meets Marie, on the beach, she mentions this link and also division between them:
‘On the quayside, while we were drying ourselves, she said, “I’m browner than you.”’
And later, Mersault describes Paris to Marie:
“It’s dirty. Full of pigeons and dark courtyards. The people have all got white skin.”
This has nothing to do with morality. Camus makes no argument, as say E.M.Forster does, for the superior and sunburnt, the more heartfelt, more brutal Mediterranean morality. The bright sun is a fact which becomes a reason. Here is the murder, the most excessive passage of writing in the book:
‘All I could feel were the cymbals the sun was clashing against my forehead and, indistinctly, the dazzling spear still leaping off the blade in front of me. It was like a red-hot blade gnawing at my eyelashes and gouging out my stinging eyes. That was when everything shook. The sea swept ashore a great breath of fire. The sky seemed to be splitting from end to end and raining down sheets of flame. My whole being went tense and I tightened my grip on the gun. The trigger gave…’
But it is the moment before this that gives the motive:
‘It was still the same sun, the same light and the same sand as before. For two hours now the day had stood still, for two hours it had been anchored in an ocean of molten metal.’
It is an apocalypse. And Mersault commits murder to put the earth back in orbit, to shift it in relation to the sun, to give everyone the gift of time – in which to attend their mother’s funeral, commit murder, or merely go to the beach, swim, meet a man or a woman, get a tan.
|
Author interviews
