Leo Bersani

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The Stranger's SecretsAuthor(s): Leo BersaniSource: NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, Vol. 3, No. 3 (Spring, 1970), pp. 212-224Published by: Novel Corp., Brown UniversityStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1344914Accessed: 21/10/2008 21:06

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TheStranger's ecretsLEO BERSANITo do justice to Camusrequiresan indifference o literaryfashions in the lightof which Camus s likely to appearquaintlyarchaic,as well as to the appealof alife and a workpervadedby an apparentlyunassailable ntegrity.Tough-minded-ness would seemto demand hatwe ignorethose claimsto sympathywhichmadeCamussomethingof a moral hero to many of his readers: the struggle againstpoverty and illness, Camus'torturedconscience,his suspicionof politicaltheo-riesandpositionswhichmight promoteor justifyhumansuffering,the simplicityandintensityof his attachment o life, and the accidentwhichbrutallyvindicatedhis impressiveanduseless protest againstthe unacceptable act of death. Camus'workhas profited romthe quietly glamorousnobilityof his life. More than that:his urgentlysincere tone has obscured the presencein his work of some of thehabits of thought and of feeling against which he arguedmost eloquently.Heis a comparativelyuninterestingwriter, and the quality of his achievementis,for me, all the morevitiatedby an indulgence n abstraction,a secretly pridefulreticenceof feeling, and an easy cynicism,all of which he constantly,andrightly,attackedfor theirdehumanizingeffects on life. I find the moralisteof Le Mythede Sisyphe and L'Hommerevolte a dull and vague thinker; as a playwright,Camus strikes me not only as less inventive or radical han Beckett,Arrabal,andeven Ionesco,but also, within the conventions of a more traditionaltheater oflinguistic and psychologicalcoherence,less successful than the Sartreof Huisclos and Les Sequestresd'Altona. Camus' fiction-especially L'Etrangerand acouple of stories in L'Exil et le royaume-is another matter, however, andL'Etranger eservesto be discussed as an impressive f flawedexercise in a kindof writing promotedby the New Novelists of the 1950s to the dignity, and oc-casionallynarrow rigor, of doctrine. The doctrine is not Camus', but the re-freshednovelistictechniqueswe find in L'Etrangerouldnonethelessbe thoughtof as anexampleand aninspiration or what has now becomean excessivelytheo-reticaldeterminationo re-structure he relationbetweenlanguageandpsycholo-gy infiction.

Camus'title has been, for criticism,an unfortunatechallenge.What exactlyis the qualitywhich makes Meursaulta stranger ?Some early readingsof thenovel-most notably, those of Sartre and Blanchot-inspired dozens of essaysin supportof the idea that Camus'hero lives only by sensations,that he neversynthesizeshis experience nto feelings, that he is uncontaminatedby any ofthe psychological and moral fictions by which society attempts to make lifecoherentandsignificant.Camushimselfmighthavehelpedto check this tendency


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in criticism when he remarked, in a 1945 interview for Les Nouvelles litteraires,that he had intended to describe in Meursault un homme sans conscienceapparente. In many quarters, much has indeed been made of that apparente,and it can be the point of departure for critical praise or critical blame. The blamehas perhaps been expressed more impressively, and Camus' sharpest readershave been disappointed by all the consciousness lurking behind the stranger'sdeceptively blank prose. Nathalie Sarraute, in a few pages of L'Ere du soupqon,has brilliantly unmasked the intellectual behind Camus' sensualist; and Robbe-Grillet points out that . . . the book is not written in a language as filtered asthe first pages may lead one to believe. In fact, only the objects already chargedwith a flagrant human content are carefully neutralized, and for moralreasons.... Camus the humanist does not reject anthropomorphism, he uti-lizes it with economy and subtlety in order to give it more weight.Literary communities tend to wait for certain literary events; they knowwhat they want, and, in their impatience to see it appear, they may mistake falsegoods for the real thing. Sartre's tricky underemphasis of those anthro-pomorphic elements in L'Etranger which he recognizes perfectly well, andBlanchot's praise of a portrait without false subjective explanations certainlyhave something to do with their determination to free literature from the psycho-logical schemes of La Princesse de Cleves or La Cousine Bette. But to anticipateis happily not entirely to renounce discriminations, and to do Sartre justice, itmust be added that he never hailed the non-anthropomorphic novel in the fictionof Francois Mauriac. In other words, however necessary Mme Sarraute's cor-rective view may have become, L'Etranger produced a shock, and if its innova-tions were exaggerated, the exaggerations testify to a certain originality in thework itself. To locate that originality now, however, requires a perhaps unat-tractively austere critique of what made L'Etranger an immediately appealingrevelation.

The first paragraph of the novel is justly famous: Today, maman died. Ormaybe yesterday, I don't know. I received a telegram from the old people'shome: 'Mother passed away. Burial tomorrow. Sentiments distingues.' Thatdoesn't mean anything. Maybe it was yesterday. The point of view is unde-niably peculiar. But why? We are disoriented, quite simply, by the narrator'sconcern with time. His emotional originality appears to consist in his choosingto develop only the least emotionally charged element in the first sentence:today. But is it enough to say that maman died awakens only his chrono-logical consciousness? The words most strikingly devoid of the feelings conven-tionally associated with a mother's death are not Meursault's at all; they are inthe telegram. And there's some ambiguity in Meursault's comment about thetelegram. The last sentence suggests that that doesn't mean anything refersonly to the fact that the day of maman's death can't be guessed from the tem-porally cryptic message, but we may have already read more than this in Meur-sault's judgment. Indeed, the telegram doesn't mean anything from the pointof view of human emotions; its only response to the drily noted fact of deathis a bit of practical information ( burial tomorrow ) and a ready-made formula

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with which people fill the void of a non-relationby appealingto an enigmaticclass of feelings somehow distinguished. s Meursault's ingeringover thequestionof when his motherdied stranger, more alienated han the sociallyacceptableformulaswhich announce her death? We may in fact feel that hisinterest n datesis usefulas a pretextfor drawingour attentionto the inadequacy,even the absurdityof the telegram.Insteadof saying explicitlythat such formu-las are a mockeryof the personal,solemn natureof death, Camus'hero reactsjust peculiarlyenough to justify his quoting the message he has received and,perhapsabove all, to save himself from being chargedwith too obvious a com-ment about the insignificanceof that message. The point has been made aboutthe telegram-it's not a very interesting point, and it presupposes a normalsense of and respectfor humanfeelings-but it has also been effectivelyunder-emphasizedby being attributed o a mindapparentlybizarre n its own right. Inother words, a mildly mystifying concernwith the aspect of death having theleast obvious human appeal is the narrative medium through which Camusfilters,and gives an airof originalityto, a piece of social satire.The satire,it could be objected,may be partof Camus' ntention,but nothingtells us that the largercriticism mplicit n that doesn'tmeananything belongsto Meursault'spoint of view. Nothing, that is, except the rest of the novel, ex-cept the numerouspassages where Meursaultdrops hints of all the attitudesand decisions behind a perspective on experience which only hints at suchthings as attitudes and decisions. Thereis ample supportfor Nathalie Sarraute'sremarkabout the intellectualparti pris discernible n Meursault'spointedlyneu-traldescriptionsof objects and behavior. He acts on some extremelydefinite,ifteasingly presentedideas. When Marie asks him if he loves her, he tells herthat her questiondoesn't mean anything,and he opposes a pregnant No toher remark about marriagebeing a serious matter. To his boss's suggestionthat working in Paris would provide a welcome change of life, Meursaultsententiouslyanswers that one never changedhis way of life, that anyway onelife was as good as another and the one I led here wasn't at all unpleasant.Meursaultdoesn't believe in God;he doesn't like policemen;and he has observedothers closely enough to regretnot having told his lawyer that there's nothingstrangeor inhumanabout him at all: I wanted to make it clear to him that Iwas like everyone else, absolutely like everyone else. And although he issurprised by the lawyer's asking him if he felt grief on the day his motherdied,Meursaultmanagesto comeup with a comparatively ophisticatedanswer:In all likelihood, I was fond of maman,but that didn't mean anything. Allnormalpeople had more or less desired the death of those they loved.The principal nterest of the portraitwe have of Meursault s that it is unde-veloped. Psychologicalor intellectual significancedoesn't lead us any furtherin one directionthan a questionaboutwhether mamandied yesterdayor today.Nothing arrestsMeursault's attention longer than anything else, and the factthat he has found ambition to be futile, or-to judge from the number ofsympatheticallusions to her throughoutthe novel-that he loved his mother,makes all the morestrikingthe equalattention he gives to everything.His non-

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analytical sequences are peculiarbecause of their provocativedenials of theirown suggestiveness.And it's as if he were defying us to take up that suggestive-ness. The style of L'Etrangers an exercise n setting traps:by his emphasesandby his omissions,Meursaulttemptsus to makemistakesanalogousto those theprosecutingattorneywill makein the second half of the novel, to say moreabouthim than he says abouthimself.I'm inclinedeven to think of Meursault's mpressivesensitivity to visual de-tail as another element in Camus'strategy of provocation.What, for example,is the function of the exquisitelyrefinedperceptionsin the following passage?Meursaulthas spent much of the Sundayfollowing his mother'sdeathwatchingpeoplecomeandgo on the streetsunderhis terrace:

Then the street lights abruptlycame on, and they dimmedthe stars whichwere beginningto appear n the night sky. I felt my eyes grow tiredfrom look-ing at the sidewalks laden with men and with lights [les trottoirs avec leurchargementd'hommeset de lumieres].The street lights made the wet pave-ments glisten, and, at regular intervals, the reflections from a trolley werecaught by a girl's glossy hair, a smile or a silver bracelet[les tramways,aintervalles reguliers, mettaient leurs reflets sur des cheveux brillants, unsourire ou un braceletd'argent].Shortlyafter,when there were fewer trolleysand the night sky was alreadyblackabove the trees and the lights, the neigh-borhood,almost imperceptibly,grew empty, until finally the first cat slowlycrossed the now deserted street. Then I thought that I should have dinner.My neck hurt a little becauseI had been leaningfor a long time on the backof my chair. I went out to buy some bread and spaghetti.I mademy meal andI ate standing up. I wanted to smoke a cigaretteat the window, but the nighthad becomechilly and I felt a little cold. I closed my windows and, as I cameback into the room,I saw in the mirrorpart of a table with my alcohol lampstanding next to some pieces of bread. I said to myself that I had gottenthroughanotherSunday, that maman was now buried,that I was going backto work and that, all things considered,nothing had changed.

The effects here are various and manipulated with great skill. From then Ithought I should have dinner to the end of the paragraph, we have a monotonyof structure (all the sentences and clauses beginning, in French, with je anda passe compose)and a succession of brief, unembellishednotations which tendto counteract the ampler rhythms and the richer language of the first half ofthe paragraph. The style is rather abruptly simplified; the narrator checks amovement toward more eloquent phrasing, and by the end of the paragraph hehas, I think, succeeded in partiallysmotheringour sense of his having a tasteand a capacity for verbal organizations more complex and more seductivelylyrical than I went to buy some bread and spaghetti and I closed mywindows.But he has nonetheless revealed a range of expressive resources which maymake us wonder why, on the whole, he seems to be deliberately limiting thatrange. Can it really be the supposedly benumbed, average clerk Meursault who

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noticeshow les tramways,a intervallesreguliers,mettaientleurs refletssur descheveux brillants,un sourireou un braceletd'argent ?The observationis im-probable,to say the least; the imaginationthat makes it is not simply fanciful,but also ratherpainfullyfancy. The still life towardthe end of the paragraph smore successfully poetic-but what could be more peculiar than our makingsuch discriminationsamong Meursault'smore or less successful ventures intopoetic prose?It's peculiar,of course,only because one strain of L'Etranger, be-ginning with Today, mamandied. Or maybe yesterday, I don't know, hasbeen such a loud announcement hat he is not a poet. If, on the other hand, wesimply granthim his more eloquentstrain, the Meursault of I made my mealand I ate standing up requiressome explanation.Of course, the most urgentexplanationis requiredby the Meursaultwho, apparentlyunconscious of thepeculiarsequencehe thus makes, inserts mamanwas buried between I hadgotten throughanotherSunday and I was going back to work. Is the thinker,the feeler, the poet reallyconvincingwhen he speaks as if those three thoughtswereidentical n theiremotionalneutrality?Meursaultprofitsfrom the ambiguityof nothinghad changed. If he meansthat he will go backto work on Monday,he's right; is that what the puzzling all things considered ( somme toute )is supposedto convey, or is his parentheticalremarka way of teasing us witha glimpse of some withheld and perhapscomplexwisdom? His sensitivity hasbeen amplydemonstrated,and it's arbitrarily chematicto say that he is sensi-tive only to appearancesand surfaces.His failureto see certainthings is shock-ing because he in fact sees so much. As a result, when he closes up we aremystified, and his sudden insensitivities strike us as evidence of a purposefulreticenceratherthan as examplesof a natural gnoranceof familiaremotionalreactions.L'Etrangeris a mysterystory. What is the key to Meursault'spose asa stranger?

The function of the crime in L'Etranger is to provide us with that key. Itallows, ultimately, for the angry outburst in prison which reveals everything:Meursault's ndifference s the form takenby a passionfor life when one realizesthat death makes all human experienceequally unimportantand yet equallyprecious.

I had been right, I was still right, I was always right. I had lived in a certainway and I could have lived in some other way. I had done this and I hadn'tdone that. I hadn't done a particular thing but I had done something else. Sowhat? It was as if I had waited my whole life for this moment and for thatdawn when I would be executed and justified. Nothing, nothing at all wasimportant and I knew why. He [the chaplain] knew why too. From the depthsof my future, during all the absurd life I had led, a dark wind had been blow-ing toward me, crossing over years that were yet to come, and that windlevelled out everything people proposed to me during the equally unrealyears I was living through. What did I care about other people's deaths, amother's love, what did I care about his God, the lives people choose, the

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fates they elect, since a single fate was to elect me and with me billions ofprivilegedmen who, like him, called themselvesmy brothers.Whatcan this possiblymean?I realizethatL'Etrangers not reducible o a logicalargument,but this finalpassage, for all its passion, is an argument,and it's pre-sented as crucialfor an understandingof Meursault's ife. His execution,as heclearly says, justifies his life, which also naturally means that Meursault'simminentdeath vindicates the way in which he has relatedhis story to us. Hislogic is simple,and mystifying: since all men die, everythingthat men do is ofequal value. The connectionbetween these two clauses escapes me. From thefact of a commondestiny, Meursault-and Camus-jump to the impossibilityof preferringanything in life to anything else. It's as if the propositionwerebeing put to us that if two plays had similarendings,everythingthat goes on inboth plays would thereforehave to be equallyuninteresting.Does Meursault really believe this? Salamano's dog, he goes on to say, wasas good as his wife . . ., but Celeste was better than Raymond. And swim-ming in Algeriais apparentlybetter than workingin Paris (a dirty city where

people have white skins ), just as certain convictions appear to be valid enoughto justify the stranger'sstubbornlyresisting the religious bullying of the ex-amining magistrateand of the prison chaplain.To the extent that death reallyhas levelled out everythingpeople proposed to Meursault,we get a hint ofthe missing logicalconnectionI referred o a momentago when he speaks of hisangry outburst as having purged him of evil and emptied him of hope.Indeed,deathmakeshope absurd.It's not simplya questionof Meursault'shopefor a reprieve,or at least not in a limited sense. The point of the book is that welive, all the time, under a death sentence, and (Le Mythe de Sisyphe confirmsthis) to be fully aware of that impliesan ability and a willingness altogethertoabolishhope from life. But since it seems to me very theoretical ndeed to arguethat since I may die at any time it's absurd for me to hope intensely for some-thing I want to happen next week or next year, we can only say that death hashad such a devastating effect on the stranger's life because the only thing hecan conceive worth hoping for is immortality. Without a belief in God, deathdoes of course make that hope absurd. That is, Salamano's dog is worth as muchas Salamano's wife only for a man interested neither in the dog nor in the wife,but only in his own life everlasting.A metaphysicallydisappointed,bitter manadoptsa pose of defiant ndifferencetoward the world. The indifferenceseems all the more theatricaland defiant ifwe try to reconcile it to the concluding, somewhat wilfully optimistic affirmationof life as happy after all in L'Etranger. As if my fit of angerhad purgedme ofevil, emptiedme of hope, in front of this night heavy with signs and with stars,I openedup for the first time to the tenderindifferenceof the world. In feelingthe world so similarto myself, in short so fraternal,I felt that I had been happy,andthat I was still happy. Certainly here is in Camus,fromNoces to L'Hommerevolte, a kind of felt accord with the world (expressedbest as the pleasureofswimmingunder the Mediterranean un) which he writes about with a moving

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if occasionallystilted eloquence.The problem s that he is also so determined obe a thinker, and in spite of his constant polemic against dehumanizingsys-tematizations of life, Camus himself never ceases to offer some philosophicalaccount for both an invincibleneed to detach himself from human affairs andan innocent,lazy sensualitywhich of course needs no justificationat all.The end of L'Etrangerllustratessome of the resultingconfusions.We couldprobably go along with the assertion,impliedin L'Etranger nd explicitlymadein LeMythe de Sisyphe, that the passion for beauty and the capacityfor enjoy-ment can be intensified f we cure ourselvesof the temptationto penetratethesurfacesof things in the hope of findinga universesympatheticto man's condi-tion, a universeof reassuring ranscendental ignificances.The final ambitionofune pensee absurde, Camuswrites in Sisyphe, is simply to describe ;andthe work of art-as well as the joy of life-is born of a willingness to give upattempting o findmeaningsand depthsin the concrete.( L'oeuvred'artnait durenoncementde l'intelligencea raisonner le concret. )But is a night heavywith signs a descriptionof somethingconcrete?Is a fraternal world whoseindifference s tender one that has genuinelylost the transcendencewe wish-fully projecton it? And, finally,we come back, in anotherform, to the first andmajor difficultyI've indicated. The indifferenceof the universe to our desiresmay, logically,inspireeithersuicidaldespairor a sort of passion,cleansedof theneed for transcendentalreassurances,for the strictly natural and the strictlyhuman. But how can that renewed passion for life not be full of explicit dis-criminations?With nothing more to know and to hope for than what wecan know and hope for here, the necessity for an art of exclusionsand commit-ments becomes all the more immediate and urgent. It's precisely the disap-pearanceof transcendence n the universe which makes indifferencespirituallyobsolete, and its persistence n Camussuggests an unconfessednostalgiafor thecomfortsof transcendence,or the comfortsof anabsolute.I don't want to judgeL'Etranger y the philosophicaldeficienciesof LeMythede Sisyphe,andthe objectionsI'veraisedseem to me justifiedby a readingof thenovel, which, perverseas it may now seem to say it, is far moreinterestingthanthe essay. The weaknesses in Camus' more or less philosophicalwritings havebeen competentlyspelled out by John Cruickshank,an admirer of Camus; hehas, in Albert Camus and the Literatureof Revolt, some very good things tosay about the different meanings of the word absurd in Le Mythe de Sisyphe,the confusion about how logic is to be interpretedat the beginning of theessay, and the ambiguities in Camus' use of the word revolt in L'Hommerevolte. I would simply add that the entire argumentin Le Mythe de Sisyphedepends on the nostalgia I just mentioned for the securitiesof religious faith.The absurd n Camuspresupposesa need for cosmicunities and ultimatemean-ings which Camuspresentsas an unarguable act of humannature. The absurdis born of this confrontationbetween what men call out for and the irrationalsilence of the world. And Camussets out to examinewhether life's absurditydemands that we escape from life by either suicide or hope, both of which hewill judge to be unsatisfactorysolutions. But these unacceptableconsequences

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arereally premiseswithout which the argumentwouldnever have gotten startedin the firstplace. It's preciselythe meeting of hope and suicidaldespairwhichcreatesthe sense of the absurd,and the silence of the world is neither rationalnor irrationalunless we take for grantedthe desire for happinessand reason,the need for unity and transcendentalorder which Camus would present asindependentof his descriptionof the world. That is, there is no confrontationbetween l'appel humain and the world's irrationalsilence, but rather asingle, emotionallyprejudiceddescriptionof the world. The absurdman, Camusannounces,doesn't believe in the profound or hidden meanings of things. Butof course-and it's impossibleto break out of the circle-there wouldn't be anyabsurdityunless man thought it inconceivable hat the world should be withoutprofoundand hiddenmeanings.Absurdity,as Robbe-Grillethas seen, is a formof tragichumanism ; t is a metaphysicalromancebetween man and the uni-verse, a lover's quarrel,which leads to a crimeof passion.Camus, ess reticent n his essays than his heroes are in his novels and stories,reveals a schematic,abstract mind which, finally, it's impossible to penetrate.Meursault'sand Rieux'stemperamental eticence s paralleledby an undoubtedlyunconsciousphilosophicalobfuscation n Camus the moraliste.Perhapshis mostadmirablesentence is a plea for verbal directness and honesty: Every ambigu-ous expression,everymisunderstanding ives rise to death;only a clear anguage,the use of simple words, can save us from that death. It's extraordinary hatthis warningshould be madein L'Hommerevolte,a book in which experience sso desiccated by abstract dualisms-revolt versus revolution, totality versusunity, natureversushistory, Germandreams versus the Mediterranean radi-tion -that it makesno sense at all exceptas a bizarreandunsuccessfulstylisticexercise n the lyricismof abstractantinomies.Camus is an ideal exampleof thewriterunable or unwilling, to use Proust'sphrase, to express the fundamentalnotes of his personality.His writing is, on the surface, a marvelof discipline:so much rigorwould seem to be necessary to maintain the equilibriumof sen-tences structuredby contrapuntalabstractions.But these balanceseasily becomea habit, a tic, and we find a stylistic versionof Meursault'sapathy in the torporwith which Camus seems to float on the surfaces of his linguistic vaguenessesandconfusions.The Proustian criterion for judging literature-according to the depths ofself sounded by style-is not, as we can see in Roussel, Robbe-Grillet,Pinget,and Beckett,the only imaginablebasis for criticalappreciation.And Prousthim-self subverts his own theoreticalnotion of a kind of monotonously profoundself-expressivenessas the sign of genius in art by his avid exploitationof localnarrativeoccasions in A la Recherchefor unexpected and unpredictableself-renewals.But with Camuswe don't have the impressionof a fundamental re-vision of the very notion of self-expressionin art. He in no way contests theassumptions about personality in traditionalfiction, and he even complainedabout the fact that modernnovelists had lost the secret of portrayingcharactersin depth.Camus is not moving away from a center of psychological pressuresor fixedpatternstoward either the liberatinglyevasiveironiesof Stendhal,or the

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self-multiplications f Proust,or the attemptedecritureblanche of psychologicalneutrality n Robbe-Grillet ndBlanchot.He is, on the contrary,a classicalwriter-a writer, that is, whose sentences tend to be portentousunderstatementsofimplieddepthsin the self and in the world. The classicalstyle refers us to unex-pressedandperhaps nexpressiblerealitiesbeyondlanguage; t closes in on thoserealitiesand, as it were, picks up their echoes without ever claimingto embodyadequatelythe realitiesthemselves. Mon mal vient de plus loin, Phedresug-gestively says; the subjectsin Racine and Mme de La Fayette are, in effect, ata certainremovefrom the works which treat them, at a distancenever crossedby the language which ceremoniously points at them. But whereas Racinianverse picks up the echoes, Camus' language merely seals off the accesses toopinionsandfeelings easily articulated, r it createsa smoke screen of systematicthoughtwhich smothers all psychologicalresonance.It is, in otherwords, a kindof parodyof classicalpudeurand of the classical itote.With Meursault,we havea mystifying characterwho is finallyrevealed to us as having no mystery at allbutonlyalogicallydubiousphilosophicalposition.

He is, alas, also the occasion for a shallow social polemic.A crude attackonsupposedlyconventionalhabits of thought allows Camus to exaggeratehis ownimaginativecapacityfor the psychologicallyunexpected.Superficially,L'Etrangerseems to expose the emptiness of psychological and moral fictions by whichsocietyattempts o controland makecoherentan individual'sbehavior.The novelappears o attacktheveryactivityof novelizing,evento subvert ts own existence,by demonstrating he irrelevanceof any stories one might invent about Meur-sault's life. We could think of the trial as a novelistic competitionbetween theprosecutingand the defense attorneys. The raw material is provided by whatMeursault does in the first half of the book; using that material,each of thelawyers tries his hand at spinning a yarn about Meursault's soul. We knowthat they areboth wrong:Meursault s neither the insensitive monster describedby the prosecutornor the tireless, faithful employee and compassionatespiritsketchedby the defense.Butthe satireagainstsuchsimplificationsurnscuriouslyagainst itself. For Camustakes the risk of making the prosecutor'sversion ofMeursault's behavior an immensely probable one. It's not the true story, but,for anyone who, unlike the reader,is living outside Meursault'smind, it cer-tainly represents an intelligent and wholly plausible deduction. Meursault's be-havior at his mother's funeral, the affair he begins with Marie just two dayslater,his testifying for Raymond,and his returningto the beach with a gun: ittakes, actually, very little ingenuity to interpretso many coincidencesas fittinginto a consistent pattern of heartless, deliberately criminal behavior. WhenMeursault tells the judge that he killed the Arab because of the sun, peoplein the courtroomaugh-but why shouldn'tthey laugh?The fact that Meursaultpulledthe triggerprobably n orderto shake off an unbearablephysical discom-fort in no way detractsfrom his being a man about whom a fairly intelligibleand definitive story can be told-a story to which his remark about the sunhardlydoes justice. If the people at Meursault'strial are ridiculous, t's just be-

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cause they have the disadvantageof being outsiders,and not because anythingin the novel has convincingly shown us that human experience can be livedfragmentarily,without unifying intentions,conceptions,and feelings.It's therefore not the story-telling process which is being satirized inL'Etranger,but rather a certain class of fictions, and they are of course theeasiest fictions in the world to make fun of. Camushas a very crude view ofthe taboos,expectations,andidealswhichorganize ife in society. The examiningmagistrateandthe prosecutorareparodiesof religiousfervor and socialmorality,and Camus' failure to imagine any better alternatives to Meursault suggeststhe kind of cynical simplificationsabout humanbehavior which will occupy al-most the entirefield in La Chute.Now Camusis, at his best and at his worst,profoundlymistrustful of speech. I say at his best because, whatever functionverbalreticencemay serve for Camus,it works, in his fiction, to createhis mostmovingscenes, such as the communion n silenceor nearsilencebetween Tarrouand Rieuxas they swim, and between Daru and the Arab in L'Hote. But thesedramaticsuccesses are too infrequent,and in contexts too ambiguous,to makeus forget the imprecisenature of the critiqueof languagewhich they presuppose.Camus' distrust of speech often seems to serve as an excuse for not being clearandexplicitwhen we feel that he needs most to be clearand explicit.In LaPeste,what does Tarroumean by peace ?What does Rieux mean by sympathy ?What is the exactpersonalmeaningof that hope which makes Rieux differentfrom Tarrou?Does anything in La Peste satisfactorilyrefute Cottard's conten-tion that the only way to bring people together is to send them the plague ?Perhapsthe saddest thing in Camus' fiction is the end of the plague-the end,that is, of a fraternitywhich Camus clearly has difficultyimagining except inthe midstof crisis. With a languagefrequentlysentimental,evasive,andabstract,Camuscontrolsandmaskswhat seemsto be a desperatelycynicalview of humanpossibilities.His reticencekeepshimfromdeveloping,andoverexposing,a tritelydisabusedstrain in his work which we catch a glimpse of when Caligula (andCamus?)stupidly thinks it clear and logical to say that human life can'tbe importantif money is important;a strain of bitterness which explains theobscurebut crucialrole of Cottardin La Peste, and which is supportedby anintellectual mediocrity most embarrassinglyevident in Clamence's facile ex-posureof humanegotismin La Chute. Camus s explicitly suspiciousof languageas a source of misunderstandings,and misunderstandings,as he writes inL'Hommerevolte, can lead to death; to this admirablecaution, however, weshouldperhapsalso add a suspicionof self in the light of which Camus'crypticstyle may appearto apply the brake to a spontaneousflow of cynicalmockery.The trickwhich I see L'Etranger ttemptingto carryoff consists in makingusattribute he value of a fundamentalcritiqueof fictions to an easy satire of someofficialmoral cliches. Meursault is as much an interpreteras the prosecutingattorney,but his quietness creates the illusion that he lives unreflectively,andhis purelymoraladvantageover the other characterscan be confused with theepistemologicalsuperiorityof being able to live a naturally insignificantlife,of being able to resist the impulse to fictionalize which conveniently simplifies

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who seems to kill becauseshe can't standliving in a countrywithout a coastline.Camus'attractionto the subjectof Le Malentendu s the most interestingthingabout the play; the work itself, on the other hand, illustrateshow unpreparedhe is to treat such an anecdote without offering a moral and intellectualjusti-fication for it. The incident is much more successfully taken up in L'Etranger,where, except for Meursault's final remark about it, it's simply a gratuitous, un-illuminating,and inexplicablebit of narrative.But, from a certain point of view, that's exactly what L'Etranger itself is.Knowingas we do that Meursault s not a criminal,what could be more bizarrethan the accumulation of circumstances which make it inevitable that he bejudgedas a criminal?L'Etranger,ike the Czech'sstory, is an anecdoteof freakishcoincidence.It says nothing at all about the absurdityof life, as Camusdefinesthat in Le Mythe de Sisyphe; rather,the novel is such an ingenious concoctionof chanceevents that we canhardlynot feel how exceptionalMeursault'sdestinyis. Insteadof dramatizinga confrontationbetween the human need for unity andsignificance and the unreasonable silence of the world, L'Etranger studies oneof those rareoccasions in life in which there does seem to be a perverse,non-human intention which deprivesus of our freedomby makingeach of our ges-tures fit into a rigorously significantpattern.Le Malentenduand L'Etranger redreams of coherence,or rathernightmaresof coherence.They satisfy, in a cruelparody, the nostalgia for unity; their horror is not the horror of insignificance,but rather of an inescapable significance which organizes separate gestures intoan unintended and tragic unity. Indeed, L'Etranger is, like Oedipus Rex, atragedy of chance; but whereas Oedipus's unintentional crimes are written inthe book of a more than human fate, there is nothing to account for Meursault'simprisonment in his chain of coincidences. Nothing except Camus' intention,as this unhappily atheistic author plays the role, in L'Etranger as in Le Malen-tendu, of a demonic unifier of experience. The random is perversely transformedinto the significant,and our interest in such stories could be explained by thetemporaryguarantee hey offer, their catastrophiccontent notwithstanding,of akind of orderand logic in the universe.The order, however, is a mock one, and the elaboration of such stories asMeursault'sand Jan'sis of course meant to draw our attention to the lack of asensible order in life. But the stories are too peculiarto lend themselves to gen-eralization;their very improbabilityundercutsthe ingenious but deceptive co-herence they unconvincinglycelebrate. What we are left with is a test of thefrankly bizarre as a legitimate inspirationfor literary fictions. The watertightcase which coincidencebuildsagainstMeursault s coherentbut meaningless,andthe very writingof L'Etrangeruggests an interestin literatureas an exercise inthe improbableand the irrelevant.As I've shown, Camus was undoubtedlyalsointerested n what he took to be serioussocial andphilosophical ssues in writingL'Etranger. utthe novel is originaland liberating,I think, to the extent that wecan neglect those issues and respondto the provocativeamountof space givento the trivialand to the bizarre.In its veiled ambition to be a profound novel, L'Etrangers mediocre.But

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NOVELJSPRING970

the curiouslymeticulousdescriptionsof gestures and appearances; he partiallysuccessfuldisplacementof emphasisfrom psychologicalprobingto such novel-istically light details as Meursault'swondering if his mother died today oryesterday,or his tellingus why he prefersto wash his hands at noon ratherthanin the evening (the officetowels aredrier at noon); the narrativeallowancemadefor the little mechanicalwoman and for the story of the Czech; and, more gen-erally, the weirdness of the plot itself-we can easily see how all this mightstimulatefiction into new directions.At its best moments,L'Etrangerllustratesthe appeal and the workabilityof the irresponsible.A Balzaciandigression isalways illustrativelyresponsibleto the story which it only appearsto interrupt;and Marcel'sanalyticaland descriptive wanderingin A la Recherchedu tempsperduis after all part of the experiment n self-expansionwhich is the novel'ssubject. L'Etranger, n the other hand, hints at what a literatureof psycho-logically inexpressive ngenuitieswould be like.Camus would certainlynot have been satisfied with being remembered orthat. He saw L'Etranger s the first stage in a kind of difficultprogressiontoward a saintliness of negation-a heroism without God-in short, towardhumanpurity. Meursault s the point zero on the roadof a perfectionwithoutany reward. n 1955, Camusagain spoke of Meursaultas an image of a truthwhich is still negative, the truth of being and of feeling, but without which noconquestover the self and over the worldwill ever be possible. Nothing, how-ever, prevents us from ignoring such morally precious pretensions, and fromseeing in L'Etranger n interestingillustrationof both the persistenceand thesubversionof personalityin modern literature.Even in the much more radicalexperimentsof Robbe-Grilletand of Beckett, the psychologicalneutralizingoflanguage (in the former)and the desperatemockeryof language'sexpressiveness(in the latter)are somewhatunderminedby the transparentand ironicallyreas-suring presenceof psychologicalcontinuities.On the other hand, to the extentthat the thrust of contemporary ictionis away from secure and limitingcentersof self-definition,Camusdeserves to be mentionedfor those strategiesof psy-chological dislocation which L'Etranger mperfectly exploits. Les Gommes,Robbe-Grillet's irst publishednovel, is an exquisitelyprogrammed xploitationof the literarypossibilities of extravagantcoincidence-possibilities which, aswe have seen, L'Etrangerlreadyplots. But whereasCamus'narrativeoriginalityappears o be almostthe accidentalvirtue of an attemptto obscurea conventionalmetaphysicalprotest, techniquessimilarto Camus'will be used by later writersin an effortto escapefrom the assumptionsaboutrealityimplicitin that protest.The artificial,he arbitrary, nd the psychologically nexpressive n contemporaryart are ambitiouswagers in the name of a range of being even more uncon-strainedby the given or by the past than the continuousself-re-creationof A laRecherchedu temps perdu. The very bareness of the FrenchNew Novel, itsapparently limited, even specialized vision of the real, is first of all a dismissalof any predefinedrangeof being, and,most excitingly,it is the sign of a literary-and more than literary-availability to the possible and to the new.

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