In May 1940 ‘The Outsider’ is finished. Camus is a mere 27 years old. It is a quite remarkable achievement which outstrips his own understanding of it which he maintained throughout his life. In 1955 for instance in a preface to a college edition he would write:
I summed up The Outsider a long time ago by a remark which I agree was highly paradoxical: “In our society any man who does not weep at his mother’s funeral runs the risk of being sentenced to death". All I meant was that the hero of my book is condemned because he does not stick to the rules. In this respect he is foreign to the society in which he lives, he wanders about on the fringe, in the suburbs of private, solitary, sensual life. And this is why readers have been tempted to look upon him as a piece of social wreckage. A much more accurate idea of the character, or at least one much closer to the author’s intentions, will emergeif it is asked just how Meursault refuses to conform. The reply is a simple one: he refuses to lie. To lie is not only to say what is not the case.
The authors intentions are in the case of genius a frail barrier between his work and the active imagination which takes the writer past a conscious aim. Mersault you see begins to get into the trouble which will cost him his head by composing a letter for Raymond, a violent pimp. The aim is to lure an Arab woman to him to chastise her. Which is what happens. But Raymond gets off by Mersault’s explaining to the cops that the lady had cheated on the pimp which makes it a crime of passion as it were and a mitigating factor.
Above the majority settler French town of Algiers are the white poster blocks of houses where dwell the les indigènes known as Arabs throughout the book. As though a beach of the metropolitan France were translated to the other side of the Mediterranean. And with extra added exoticism, the same sand, sex, sea, swimming and a midday heat that fries your brains and causes you to empty your pistol into the body of a generic Arab. Bringing a knife to a gun fight would warrant one shot but four seems vicious intent.
In a series of essays published in 1939 ‘Nuptials’ there is presented a portrait of the innocent pagan who lives in the moment unburdened by a categorical imperative. How can the weight of an act move past the moment to affect a future state which is not here yet. Why that’s absurd, there is only the present moment. Take it while you can. Carpe Diem:
The hallmark of youth is perhaps a magnificent vocation for easy pleasures. But above all, it lies in a haste to live that borders on extravagance. In Belcourt, as in Bab-el-Oued, people marry young. They start work very early, and exhaust the range of human experience in ten years. A workman of thirty has already played all his cards. He waits for the end with his wife and children around him. (from ‘Summer in Algiers’.
That’s right babes, trust non one over thirty. Its that fatuous, a young man’s philosophy. Camus added to this the religion of ‘The Absurd’, a class of paratheism in which nothing matters. The imponderable gravity of Dr. Guillotin’s invention will sort that out.
Its a good novella to be read without the author’s prompts.
