grammatical remarks

On Albert Camus' L'Étranger

Ø The experiment I am part of consists of writing down thoughts and expectations on L'Étranger before rereading it. This exercise is meant to display the prejudices that a philosophy grad student may have about this text after more or less ten years of reading it for the first and only time. After writing a few remarks, I'll read the book and write down key concepts, ideas, and questions to discuss them with E and A.

1 Although my French is virtually non-existent, let me begin by saying something about the title's translation. In my opinion, the English The Outsider doesn't seem to capture the ideas I relate to Camus' most famous work. Mersault is not just someone that lives beyond the outskirts of French culture. He is also alien to the values that once supported modernity and Western civilization. Because these values and culture represent the period of history he lives in, he doesn't feel at home, or even worse, he cannot be at home. That is why I think the title's Spanish translation, El extranjero, seems to capture the book's spirit better. The Spanish word is related to both the idea of someone who comes from abroad — a foreigner— and someone who, alienated, perceives reality marginally — a stranger, an outsider—.

(Maybe the idea of the English translation not capturing a fundamental aspect of Camus' book comes from having read just the Spanish translation ten years ago.)

2 The book is clearly post-Nietzschean in spirit. I mean by this that Mersault's story exhibits the moment after the collapse of Western values. After God's death, there are no standards left against which we determine truth and falsehood, right or wrong, beauty and ugliness. The course of human destiny is lost in a sea of interpretations and different perspectives, ambiguity, and a lack of values. Despite the number of notable books and artworks postmodernity offers, Camus' L'Étranger remains one of the works that captured the pessimism and hopelessness that characterize the first half of the twentieth century and probably our own times. The book displays a crucial suspicion about progress, civilization, and other values the Enlightenment put forward.

2.1 The absurd. It is unfair of me to write this point as subordinated to the one above, given that this is one of the fundamental concepts in Camus' opus. That being said, we can first approach the absurd, I believe, with the help of an example:

• Imagine a common, middle-aged adult coming back home from having a morning stroll and buying some groceries. She takes out five or six dolls from their suitcase and starts playing with them seriously. She imagines the dolls being alive. She personifies the role of the dolls as if she were a child.

Some of us might say her ritual is meaningless, her actions don't have any point, and there are no reasons she plays with dolls. This is an absurd situation. N.B. A crucial point about it is that what she does is not wrong, but it's not good either.

This nonsensical scenario illustrates that the actions and lives of human beings are not different in nature from the actions of the adult person who plays with dolls without any reason. Reality, in essence, is absurd. In other words, what the example says is that no matter what we do, human actions don't have any meaning. The absurd becomes the common element of reality. Again: this does not mean that good actions were, after all, evil. Worst, the good and the evil acts do not mean anything, and thus, they belong to the same category. The lack of meaning, sense, course, direction pervades human existence. It doesn't matter what you do, think, or believe, “meaning”, “sense”, etc., are empty concepts.

2.2 By being a fervent Nietzsche reader, one of my preconceived ideas takes the form of a critical question: I don't understand if Camus (i) tries to depict how things really are as a matter of fact, or (ii) he takes Mersault as one of the possible outcomes of an absolute lack of meaning.

If Camus doesn't commit to the philosophical thesis that reality is absurd de facto, and takes Mersault's story as an isolated element of reality, I would agree with him. It is indeed possible that someone doesn't find meaning in existence after the collapse of Western values. If Camus believes that reality is absurd, then I think his existentialism misses one of Nietzsche's most important points. The lack of meaning doesn't imply the absurd necessarily. Consider the following quote:

There are heights of the soul from whose vantage point even tragedy stops having tragic effects; and who would dare to decide whether the collective sight of the world's many woes would necessarily compel and seduce us into a feeling of pity, a feeling that would only serve to double these woes? (Nietzsche, BGE, 30)

One can create meaning and give sense to one's life. The creative, improvisational aspect of human action in Nietzsche is what Mersault's story lacks. People indeed provide meaning and purpose to their lives. Human beings are creative creatures. After God's death, it's difficult to argue in favor of absolute values. We know that there might not be any metaphysical meaning in existence. However, the transformative capacity, the mental activeness of human beings, allows us to create meaning concretely.

Now imagine a child playing with dolls. She knows the dolls aren't really alive. She is conscious that what she's doing is playing a game. If her mom calls her attention and says, “Food's ready!” the child will react to her words and, if she's hungry, she won't hesitate to go and eat dinner. Nevertheless, while engaging in her game, she lives what she is imagining. If her little brother interrupts by taking one of her dolls, she will probably react aggressively to her brother's actions. At that moment, the game is everything that exists for her. The child provides meaning to what she does, and the game acquires objective value.

An essential feature of postmodernity is that human activities might not have metaphysical meaning and value. However, by engaging in them, human beings give meaning and value to their practices. Awareness about our creative force should represent an alternative to postmodernity's incurable lack of meaning. We can be conscious about the lack of direction of human existence, but we can still experience life as the child experiences her game. In this regard, Nietzsche writes:

Human maturity: this means rediscovering the seriousness we had towards play when we were children. (Nietzsche, BGE, 94)

(This may be a general preconceived idea I hold towards existentialism, especially the one illustrated by L'Étranger and Sartre's La Nausée.)

3 The book represents one of those strangely blurred limits between literature and philosophy. Though not scarce, the authors that achieve to convey philosophical ideas not only by the resources of philosophy are outnumbered by more academic approaches. In this sense, Camus belongs to one of the richest lists of names in Western literature, including Montaigne, Thomas Mann, Alan Moore, Tolstoy, and Kafka. The mastery of Camus' prose is beyond doubt and displays philosophical ideas about the meaning of human existence through the absurdity of Mersault's deeds brilliantly.