CLASSICS REVISITED
Inside The Outsider
RAVI VYAS
A long time ago, I summed up The Outsider in a sentence I realise is extremely paradoxical: `In our society any man who doesn't cry at his mother's funeral is liable to be condemned to death.' I simply meant that the hero of the book is condemned because he doesn't play the game. In this sense, he is an outsider to the society in which he lives, wandering on the fringe, on the outskirts of life, solitary and sensual. And for that reason, some readers have been tempted to regard him as a reject. But to get a more accurate picture of his character, or rather one which conforms more closely to his author's intentions, you must ask yourself in what way Meursault doesn't play the game. The answer is simple: he refuses to lie. Lying is not saying what isn't true. It is also, in fact, especially saying more than is true and, in case of the human heart, saying more than one feels. We all do it, every day, to make life simpler. But, contrary to appearances, Meursault doesn't want to make life simpler. He says what he is, he refuses to hide his feelings and society immediately feels threatened. For example, he is asked to say that he regrets his crime, in time-honoured fashion. He replies that he feels more annoyance about it than true regret. And it is this nuance that condemns him.
So for me Meursault is not a reject, but a poor and naked man, in love with a sun which leaves no shadows. Far from lacking all sensibility, he is driven by a tenacious and therefore profound passion, the passion for an absolute and for truth. The truth is as yet a negative one, a truth born of living and feeling, but without which no triumph over the self or over the world will ever be possible.
So one wouldn't be far wrong in seeing The Outsider as the story of a man who, without any heroic pretensions, agrees to die for the truth. I also once said, and again paradoxically, that I tried to make my character represent the only Christ that we deserve. It will be understood, after these explanations, that I said it without any intention of blasphemy but simply with the somewhat ironic affection that an artist has a right to feel towards the characters he has created.
Albert Camus: Preface to the American University Edition of The Outsider, January 1955 and now published as an Afterword in other editions.
WAY back in 1938 when Camus reviewed Sartre's Nausea — the two had not met till then — he had said that "a novel is never anything but a philosophy expressed in images. And in a good novel the philosophy has disappeared into the images...A work that is to endure cannot do without profound ideas. And this secret fusion of experience and thought, of life and reflection on the meaning of life, is what makes the great novelist". The Outsider is a novel in which this balance is beautifully maintained, where the theories give meaning to life: an exceptional case is turned into an everyday story.
The story revolves around Meursault who is neither good nor bad, neither moral nor immoral. These categories do not apply to him. But he belongs to a very particular species for which Camus reserves the word "absurd". The famous opening lines set the contours of the story: "Mother died today. Or may be yesterday. I don't know. I had a telegram from the home: `Mother passed away. Funeral tomorrow. Yours sincerely.' That doesn't mean anything. It may have been yesterday."
What kind of a creature is Meursault? He is a simple man, sensual and well meaning, profoundly in love with life, whose least pleasures from a swim in the sea to a yawn, afford him complete and silent gratification. He lives without any anxiety in an "everlasting present, slightly tinged with smiles and indifference." But he is a man who does not belong anywhere, who lives by a blind, profound instinct for his physical happiness which makes him immune to all conventional feelings. He lives among outsiders, but to them too, he is a stranger. That is why some people like him — for example, his mistress, Marie who is fond of him "because he's odd".
So, he is an extreme individual, one whose life is governed by a total lack of conscience. The misfortunes into which he is led by his lazy desire to please everyone around him gets him involved in a violent murder and placed on trial. Will he now, with his life in danger, give in to society's demands and "play the game"? His stubborn truthfulness refuses to give in and he is condemned to death. All the same it forces the felt but unspoken philosophy of his existence to emerge into the open, and finally to express itself in words in a last outburst with the chaplain whom he had persistently refused to see:
`Why do you refuse to see me?' he said. I replied I didn't believe in God. He wanted to know whether I was quite sure about that and I said I had no reason for asking myself that question: it didn't seem to matter. He then leant back against the wall, with his hands flat on his thighs. Almost as if he were talking to himself, he remarked that sometimes you think you're sure when really you aren't. I didn't say anything. He looked at me and asked, `What do you think?' I replied it was possible. In any case, I may not have been sure what really interested me, but I was absolutely sure what didn't interest me. And what he was talking about was one of the very things that didn't interest me.
He looked away and, still without changing position, asked me if I weren't talking like that out of utter despair. I explained to him that I wasn't in despair. I was simply afraid, which was only natural. `In that case, God would help you,' he said. `Every man that I have known in your position has turned towards Him.' I remarked that that was up to them. It also proved they could spare the time. As for me, I didn't want any one to help me and time was the very thing I didn't have for taking an interest in what didn't interest me.
Meursault isn't interested in bourgeois ethics with its decaying Christian morality, and bureaucratic self-righteousness which condemns the Outsider just because he is so foreign to it. To understand this last outburst, we need to turn to Camus' attitude to death. He admires the fortitude of pagan ending, even as he shares the pagan passion for the good life. "What does eternity matter to me? To lose the touch of flowers and women's hands is the supreme separation." And "everything that exalts life adds at the same time to its absurdity."
The philosophy of Camus is a philosophy of the absurd, but for Camus the word "absurd" takes on two very different meanings. The absurd is both a state of fact and the lucid awareness that some people acquire of this state of fact. The "absurd man" is the man who does not hesitate to draw the inevitable conclusions from a fundamental absurdity. As Sartre said in his analysis of The Outsider, "chance, death, the irreducible pluralism of life and of truth, the unintelligibility of the real — these are extremes of the absurd." What is meant by the absurd as a state of fact, as a primary condition? It means nothing less than our relations to the bourgeois world.
Many of Meursault's adventures are intended chiefly to bring out some aspect or other of the basic absurdity of things. He is even not shown rebelling at his death sentence. His very indifference seems like indolence, as for instance, that Sunday when he stays at home (instead of going out to see his mother) out of pure laziness, and when he admits to having been "slightly bored". He has a basic opacity, even to the absurd-conscious observer. He is there before us, he exists, but we can neither understand nor quite judge him. Is it possible to understand or judge the bourgeois world that, as Camus said elsewhere, is "neither (completely) rational, nor quite irrational either?" Given bourgeois contradictions, can the Outsider be accused of his "nothingness, forlornness, his inadequacy, his impotence and his emptiness from himself?" May be the Outsider is the sane man in a mad world!
The Outsider, Albert Camus, first published in French, 1942, translated by Joseph Laredo in the Penguin Edition, 1962, Special Indian price £3.99.
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