[Book] The Stranger by Albert Camus
The Myth of Sisyphus was the first Albert Camus book I read, albeit that was ten years ago. The Stranger was published mere months before the Myth of Sisyphus. In some sense, reading the Stranger after the Myth of Sisyphus was like sitting on an open-book exam, as chronologically these two books are twins among Camus’ works.
Afterward, I discovered “An Explication of The Stranger” by Jean-Paul Sartre. Reading Sartre’s review of The Stranger in relation to the Myth of Sisyphus was a humbling experience. It was contemporary, all-encompassing, and original. So much so I felt there was nothing left for me to say. Heidegger regards silence as also a genuine form of discourse. Perhaps I should have chosen silence, as I was afraid my writings were only echoes of what Sartre had put forth.
In the end, I decided to write about the Absurd’s notion of time. Meursault is an absurd man and Camus invites the readers to the Absurd’s notion of life. It then occurs to me that, there must be an absurd notion of time in juxtaposition. For time is the most naive measure of life. What’s life if not the years I’ve lived, the year I am living in, and all the years that I may have the chance to keep leaving? So brace yourself, because the Stranger is a disorienting discussion about the future, the present, and the past.
A cure to hope – the Absurd’s notion of the future
Camus reserves the most intense dialogues in the book to the argument between Meursault and the chaplain. The chaplain asked “Have you no hope at all? Do you really think that when you die you die outright and nothing remains？“ Meursault said: “Yes.” This is a debate about God, about the afterlife as the ultimate future, about hope.
So goes the famous myth of Pandora’s box: Zeus, seeking revenge on men, made Pandora the wife of Epimetheus and let her bring a box containing myriad evils disguised as a beautiful gift. Pandora opened the box and let out all evils except hope. Hope did not escape. In many popular versions nowadays, hope was what mankind held on to in order to battle the evils, but in another version closer to the original, hope was the evil of all evils. According to Nietzsche, hope was evil since Zeus “did not want man to throw his life away, no matter how much the other evils might torment him, but rather to go on letting himself be tormented anew.”
Hope tormented Meursault when he knew was sentenced to death:
“This problem of a loophole obsesses me; I am always wondering if there have been cases of condemned prisoners’ escaping from the implacable machinery of justice at the last moment, breaking through the police cordon, vanishing in the nick of time before the guillotine falls. …. Naturally all that hope could come to was to be knocked down at the corner of a street or picked off by a bullet in my back. But all things considered, even this luxury was forbidden me; I was caught in the rat trap irrevocably.”
The first stage of grief is denial. A man who was sentenced to capital punishment must start grieving for the loss of his own life in his remaining time. During the stage of denial, hope lingers like a phantom limb. Only after Meursault got past denial, when he has forsaken hope, could he move on to proper grieving, to acceptance: “It was as if that great rush of anger had washed me clean, emptied me of hope, and, gazing up at the dark sky sprinkled with its signs and stars, for the first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe.”
This transition appears at first very strange because it is contradictory to the way our brains are wired. Neurology shows that we can generate “happiness molecules” just by imagining things we are looking forward to in the future. For example, I can be happier imagining an upcoming vacation, more than when I am on it. Recent research also seems to show that people’s viewing their future brighter than the present fulfills an important purpose of giving life a sense of meaning. It is then clear why Meursault’s transition is essential to the Absurd because searching for the meaning of life is impossible for the Absurd. If for Roman Rolland the true heroism is to see the world as it is and still love it, then for Meursault, his true heroism as a protagonist is to see life as meaningless as it is and still live it. Live it with no future, no hope.
Zu den Sachen selbst! – the Absurd’s notion of the present
If memory serves, Camus parted way with Husserl’s phenomenology in The Myth of Sisyphus not because he was no longer fascinated by it but because the term had deviated from what it originally intended, which was “zu den Sachen selbst” or “to the things themselves.” In The Stranger, Camus managed to adhere to phenomenology’s core, where he observed and described raw experiences, objects, and consciousness for Meursault. During Meursault’s days of imprisonment, his phenomenological study comes to him as a new revelation.
I could spend hours merely in listing the objects in my bedroom. I found that the more I thought, the more details half-forgotten or malobserved, floated up from my memory. There seemed no end to them. So I learned that even after a single day’s experience of the outside world a man could easily live a hundred years in prison. He’d have laid up enough memories never to be bored. Obviously, in one way, that was compensation.
Meursault’s indifference is towards other fields of philosophy, for example, to logic (the study of reasoning). He thinks he killed the man just because of the sun! Or to ethics (the study of right and wrong action). He has no objection to Raymond’s plan to abuse his ex-girlfriend. In contrast, his sensitivity to phenomenology is so positive. He so affectionately and romantically describes the “warm smells of summer, my favorite street, the sky at evening, Marie’s dresses and her laugh.”
That makes Meursault again a stranger to readers. In an age where we talk so much of logic and ethics, Meursault’s experience bears resemblance to meditation. In meditation, we forsake the impulse to analyze every stream of our thoughts and focus on our breath, so that we can be in the present moment, to experience again the “here and now”. If you think of it, it is crazy that nowadays we have phone apps to practice mindfulness, as if it is so hard for us to grasp what has come to Meursault rather naturally – phenomenology’s powerful concept of intentionality.
Disillusionment with reason – the Absurd’s notion of the past
There are many reasons why the Stranger may be an uncomfortable read, in terms of both form and content. Among them, Sartre made one observation that the sentences in this book “are not, of course, arranged in relation to each other; they are simply juxtaposed. In particular, all causal links are avoided lest they introduce the germ of an explanation and an order other than that of pure succession.”
After going through the first half of the book with Meursault’s first-person narrative relatively deprived of logical connections, the abrupt reappearance of “logic” in the words of the lawyer during the trial is alarming. Mother’s funeral, his dates with Marie soon after, the movie that he watched, and his act of murder are suddenly connected, jointly outlining a heartless Meursault that was not in my mind previously due to the scattered narrative. What’s more, the lawyer draws on the mere fact that that there would be another trial for a son’s murder of his father tomorrow to conclude that, “you will not find I am exaggerating the case against the prisoner when I say that he is also to be tried tomorrow in this court. And I look to you for a verdict accordingly.”
From a legal perspective, that statement would be nonsense. Therefore it might be another way that Camus crafted to mock human psychology. It seems to be human instinct to recognize patterns and make connections of disjoint events. At times, I was obsessed with finding a coherent story for what happened to me, and I was accustomed to doing it for others to understand them. From the perspective of the Absurd, such efforts for rationality is only futile, driven by our urge to understand the world and take comfort in our superficial understanding, just like one’s irresistible urge to search for the meaning of life will lead only to the same futility.
To use Camus’ own words in The Myth of Sisyphus:
“I said that the world is absurd, but I was too hasty. This world in itself is not reasonable, that is all that can be said. But what is absurd is the confrontation of this irrational and the wild longing for clarity whose call echoes in the human heart. The absurd depends as much on man as on the world.”
Concluding thoughts
Meursault is so at odds with our innate psychology that to understand him almost means rebelling against the programming of our brains. How can one live happily without the hope for the future, be so tuned in for the consciousness at present, yet care nothing about making sense of all that had happened?
Time is the linchpin to logic, making life a continuum. Without the connection between past, present, and future, it is impossible to find any meaning in life. Perhaps it is for this reason that Camus must shake the conventional conception of time so much in the Stranger. I am in complete awe that Camus was capable of such disruptive thinking.