The Stranger By Albert Camus- Meursault’s Character Perspective Assignment.

Albert Camus’s Critical Reception: From Celebration to Controversy

Matthew H. Bowker

Much as Walt Whitman’s poetry captured the tumultuous spirit of democracy and change in mid-nineteenth-century America, Albert Camus’s ambitious work articulated the moral and intellectual crisis that tested mid-twentieth-century Europe. And like Whitman, Camus contained multitudes, for while his fiction plumbed the depths of ab- surdity, his philosophical essays and journalistic writings defended ethical action, meaningful dialogue, and a cosmopolitan ideal of jus- tice. In nearly all areas of his life and work, Camus met with both ac- claim and condemnation: While some praised his original literary voice, many protested his sentimental style, his inexact philosophiz- ing, and his unconventional political message. All of these forces have come to define contemporary critical debates about Albert Camus: his celebrity, his complexities, and the public controversies in which he found himself embroiled.

Absurdity is undoubtedly Camus’s central concept, and although the idea of “absurdity” may be traced back to Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, or even the Book of Ecclesiastes, Camus’s writ- ings were the first serious attempts to explore absurdity’s meaning in a systematic way. Camus’s early triad of works, The Stranger, The Myth of Sisyphus, and Caligula, all confronted absurdity, but not in the man- ner of Surrealists or dramatists of the absurd. As Martin Esslin pointed out in his landmark study of the latter: “If Camus argued that in our dis- illusioned age the world has ceased to make sense, he did so in the ele- gantly rationalistic and discursive style of an eighteenth-century mor- alist” (24). This stylistic choice alone may help to explain why Camus is remembered equally as a philosopher and a writer of literature, and why Camus’s plays are among the least celebrated aspects of his oeuvre.

In addition to The Stranger and The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus’s

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novel of occupation and resistance, The Plague, his essay on revolt and revolution, The Rebel, and his introspective novel about guilt, vanity, and vice, The Fall, spoke to shared experiences of struggle, loss, and meaninglessness set off by the terrors of the mid-twentieth century. In fact, Camus’s “actualité” (a French word meaning both relevance and current-ness) was very much a part of his early success. In 1945, Camus was considered “France’s leading public intellectual . . . the moral voice of his era” (Judt 88), partly for his fiction and philosophy, partly for his writing in the French Resistance journal Combat. In the 1940s and 1950s, the publication of a new book by Camus was a worldwide literary event (Brée 4). In 1952, the Jewish German philos- opher Hannah Arendt wrote that Camus was “undoubtedly, the best man now in France . . . head and shoulders above the other intellectu- als” (qtd. in Judt 87). In 1957, the Swedish Academy agreed, and, at the age of only forty-four, Camus was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Such victories, however, almost always were accompanied by con- troversy and critical setbacks. Particularly damaging to Camus’s repu- tation were his rejection of communist doctrine, his public rift with Jean-Paul Sartre, and his profoundly unpopular stance on Algerian in- dependence. Beside Camus’s “actualité,” therefore, we must place his “inactualité”: the degree to which he was out of step with the political movements and intellectual fashions of his time. Especially near the end of his life, critics from all sides “fell over one another to bury [Camus]” for his “philosophical naïveté” (qtd. in Judt 88), while his moralistic tone, once the source of his esteem, ultimately earned him mockery as a “secular saint” (qtd. in Todd 374). Jacques Laurent de- scribed Camus’s Nobel Prize as the crowning of “a finished oeuvre” (qtd. in Judt 87), while Lucien Rebatet wrote cruelly that “this prize which falls most often to septuagenarians is not at all premature in this case, because since his allegorical La Peste, Camus has been diag- nosed with an arteriosclerosis of style” (qtd. in Todd 373).

Further muddying Camus’s reputation was a persistent confusion of

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his work with that of famous existentialists, such as Jean-Paul Sartre. In response, Camus made several public comments, such as: “I am not an existentialist. Sartre and I . . . have even thought of publishing a short statement in which the undersigned declare that they have noth- ing in common with each other. . . . It’s a joke, actually. Sartre and I published all our books . . . before we had ever met. When we did get to know each other, it was to realize how much we differed” (Lyrical and Critical 345). In fact, one would not be wrong to consider The Myth of Sisyphus a direct attack upon existentialism. Sartre recognized this, be- ing among the first to insist that Camus belonged not in the tradition of existentialist philosophers but alongside moralists such as Michel de Montaigne, Blaise Pascal, Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and André Gide. In 1952, the weight of political events proved too much for Camus’s and Sartre’s fragile friendship, and the differences between the two men erupted into a bitter public quarrel.

Today, Camus’s books have been translated and read throughout the world. His novels are taught regularly in French and Francophone schools, where they have earned him the status of a modern master. Even in Germany, the nation whose intellectual and political culture Camus often denounced, no foreign writer of the postwar era “achieved a greater or more immediate popularity” than Camus (Ziolkowski 132). And Avi Sagi has noted that, in Israel, a country contending with extraordinary violence and conflict, Camus’s thought has “found paths to the hearts of young men and women thirsty for a human voice at once consoling and demanding” (3). Yet, Camus’s work remains relevant not because it is universally adored, but because it addresses, and sometimes raises, troubling ethical and political ques- tions. Indeed, the posthumous (1994) publication of Camus’s unfin- ished autobiographical novel, The First Man, reignited debates about Camus’s colonial and racial politics, in part because it coincided with a period of renewed Western political and military intervention in Mus- lim countries. Insofar as questions of occupation, colonialism, terror- ism, and cultural misunderstanding are at the forefront of contempo-

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rary consciousness, even half a century after his death, Camus seems to have something significant, and often controversial, to contribute to the discussion.

But to understand contemporary debates in context, we must begin with the earliest questions posed by Camus’s critics and readers. This chapter does not attempt to answer these questions definitively, but rather to trace the evolution of critical attention to Camus’s work across three domains: the meaning of absurdity in Camus’s early work; the reception of Camus’s political message in the second “cycle” of his career; and the controversy over Algerian independence that survived Camus’s tragic death in 1960.

The Meaning of Absurdity While many writers struggle in obscurity for decades or even entire

lifetimes, fame came quickly and abundantly to the young Camus upon the 1942 publication of The Stranger. When Jean-Paul Sartre, certainly among the world’s most respected intellectuals at the time, wrote a favorable review of the novel, Camus was welcomed into Eu- ropean literary and philosophical circles as something of a new hero.

Like much of Camus’s work, The Stranger seemed to captivate readers’ imaginations because it addressed questions both timely and eternal. In the wake of the violence and terror of World War II, Meursault’s absurd behavior evoked a familiar feeling of shell-shock, but it also recalled a more distant, Eastern quietism. Meursault’s clear estrangement from his society invited both lofty philosophical reflec- tion on the nature of humanity and political commentary about the ef- fects of modernity and alienation. Perhaps readers were equally curi- ous about Camus, himself: a young man educated in the French system, but a foreigner born and raised in the North African colony of Algeria. Camus’s unique voice was both youthful and weary of the trials of poverty, war, and suffering.

These complexities in Camus’s life and work, coupled with the im-

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mensely conflictual political events of Camus’s era, most notably the rise of the Nazi Party and the German occupation of France, seemed destined to produce in Camus what John Cruickshank called an “inevi- table attitude” of absurdity (6). Camus described his own writing as an effort to contend with the absurd experience of his generation, one that had seen “too many contradictory, irreconcilable things” (qtd. in Cruickshank 4). Germaine Brée understood Camus’s absurd art as a di- rect reflection of the cultural, intellectual, and moral crisis of the day, a crisis she boldly compared with the end of the Roman Empire. Brée therefore found Camus’s notion of absurdity to be representative of “a whole trend of twentieth-century European thought which grew out of a painful awareness of the impossibility of finding a rational justifica- tion for any system of moral values” (26).

Yet, in spite of its powerful moral and emotional resonance, many readers found Camus’s notion of absurdity to be unfortunately ambig- uous. John Cruickshank claimed that Camus’s theory of absurdity con- tained circular arguments, and that Camus’s “different meanings of the term ‘absurd’ involve three different kinds of relationship and are both confused and confusing” (63). In his authoritative biography, Olivier Todd agreed that Camus’s thought-process in The Myth of Sisyphus was most often “rapid, punchy, and fluid. [Camus] sought a certain lucidity without quite attaining it” (144).

Over the years, vastly different interpretations of Camus’s “absur- dity” have been offered, from Robert de Luppé’s claim that absurdity is “the meaninglessness of life,” indeed, the meaninglessness of “ev- erything” (5), to Jean Onimus’s explanation of absurdity as the condi- tion represented by the life of Christ, but only if “the final pages of the gospel are ripped out” (49). To be fair, Camus, himself, was not terribly clear about the scope and application of the concept. In the first essay of The Myth of Sisyphus alone, Camus described absurdity in an as- tounding variety of ways, including: “a feeling that deprives the mind of sleep” (6), an “odd state of soul in which the void becomes elo- quent” (12), “the confrontation between the human need and the un-

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reasonable silence of the world” (28), a “contradiction” (18), a “pas- sion” (22), a “revolt” (25), an “equation” (50), and a “wager” (52).

Thus, critics have often infused Camus’s vision of absurdity with their own. Sartre’s influential review, “An Explication of The Stranger,” praised Camus for having articulated the “facts” of absur- dity: that “the world is chaos,” that “tomorrow does not exist,” and that “man is not the world” (110, emphasis in original). This reading drew heavily upon Sartre’s own philosophy in which human consciousness is superfluous in a non-rational world. It also drew upon Sartre’s argu- ment that The Myth of Sisyphus was Camus’s “precise commentary upon [The Stranger]” (108). Sartre’s linking of the two texts together has likely guided more interpretations of Camus’s work than any other.

Roger Quilliot’s study, The Sea and Prisons, saw Meursault as sim- ple, indifferent, and even primal, yet “born to duplicity,” for “between that smile that he tries to express and the grimace that his tin plate flashes back to him, there is a kind of rift; already, a fall from inno- cence” (81-82). Quilliot saw in Meursault a moral complexity that is a source of much critical disagreement. For instance, Donald Lazere ar- gued that “Meursault is not in the least disturbed by his subjectivity . . . he is more an object than a subject” (154). In his description of Meursault as a “distorting mirror held up to us” (83), Quilliot’s charac- terization of Meursault may be equally appropriate to Clamence, the hero of The Fall, who so memorably struggles with duplicity and self- consciousness.

Although Sartre’s and Quilliot’s interpretations were influential, Camus was particularly upset by critics such as Wyndham Lewis, Pi- erre Lafue, and Aimé Patri, who saw Meursault as “‘a schizophrenic,’ or ‘a moron,’ or . . . an example of the mechanization and depersonal- ization of modern life” (Lyrical and Critical 336n). Such approaches to Meursault have remained common. For instance, Arthur Scherr has argued that Meursault had “low self-esteem” and “thwarted ambition” attributable to his unloving mother (150), while Colin Wilson recently described Meursault as “basically a brainless idiot” (qtd. in Scherr

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150). Camus replied to this sort of criticism in his Preface to the Amer- ican University Edition of The Stranger: “Meursault is not a piece of social wreckage, but a poor and naked man enamored of a sun that leaves no shadows. Far from being bereft of all feeling, he is animated by a passion that is deep because it is stubborn, a passion for the abso- lute and for truth” (Lyrical and Critical 336).

Most critics today understand Meursault’s absurdity, and the idea of absurdity in general, as the lack of correspondence between human culture and the natural world. John Cruickshank’s seminal work, Al- bert Camus and the Literature of Revolt, attempted to clarify Camus’s absurdity in just this way, as “something which arises from a confron- tation between the human desire for coherence, for understanding, and the irrationality, the opacity, of the world” (xiii). Cruickshank’s inter- pretation of absurdity as a kind of intellectual disappointment has in- fluenced many, if not most, subsequent critical readings of Camus.

Yet, debates about the meaning of absurdity were not, and are not, merely academic. At stake has been the question of absurdity’s conse- quence: To what type of action does absurdity lead? Thus, while the ambiguity of Camus’s idea of absurdity certainly impacted his critical reception, disagreements about the appropriate moral and political consequences of absurdity have played an even more significant role in shaping Camus’s legacy.

Resistance, Revolt, or Rebellion? No single argument in Camus’s life was more widely publicized

than the quarrel between Sartre and Camus that began with the 1952 publication of an unsparing critique of The Rebel in Sartre’s literary journal, Les Temps modernes. If, in our day, it is difficult to imagine great popular interest in a squabble between two philosophers, at the time it had something of a tabloid attraction, perhaps not entirely un- like the fever surrounding a scandalous Hollywood divorce.

The review, written by Sartre’s disciple, Francis Jeanson, accused

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Camus of being “separated from reality” and of having become “an un- repentant idealist” who had lost touch with history (qtd. in Aronson 143). Against these charges, Camus wrote a bitter reply defending his book and accusing Jeanson and Sartre of intentionally misreading it. Sartre then retorted by “publicly flay[ing] Camus in the most personal terms,” by “explain[ing] Camus’s anti-communism as an evasion of personal growth and a refusal to fully live in the changing and de- manding real world,” and by leveling charges that Camus’s response evinced “a racism of moral beauty” (qtd. in Aronson 148-149). “You rebelled against death,” Sartre wrote, “but in the industrial belts which surround cities, other men rebelled against social conditions that raise the mortality rates. When a child died, you blamed the absurdity of the world and the deaf and blind God that you created in order to be able to spit in his face. But the child’s father, if he was unemployed or an un- skilled laborer, blamed men. He knew very well that the absurdity of our condition is not the same in Passy as in Billancourt” (qtd. in Aronson 153).

Here, it is possible to see how a disagreement about the scope and meaning of absurdity informed a much more heated debate about the appropriateness of moral and political action. In The Rebel, Camus had attacked the practice of historical revolution and the justifications of violence offered by revolutionary thought, while Sartre and his com- panions, especially those in the Communist Party, championed “the revolutionary . . . [who] is actively concerned to change the world of which he disapproves” (Cruickshank 103), even if that change de- manded violence. Sartre and the Communists held great influence over progressive opinion in France at the time, and their advocacy of violent means to achieve a communist end was, at least momentarily, the or- thodoxy of the radical Left. Thus, Camus’s refusal of this position, which concerned first the legitimacy of communist revolution, and later, the proper course of action in Algeria, was shocking to his con- temporaries, and has since become one of the most significant topics of critical attention to Camus’s work.

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Camus’s hesitancy to endorse revolutionary violence was at times attributed to a secret conservatism on Camus’s part, at times to a loss of nerve. Camus’s second novel, The Plague, had drawn criticism along the same lines because its explicit subject was a natural occurrence, a disease, rather than a war or military occupation. Conservative voices praised the book, while many of Camus’s allies were confused if not dismayed by its message (Zaretsky 79-80). Since the novel clearly re- ferred to the recent war and to France’s occupation by Germany, critics such as Roland Barthes and Simone de Beauvoir found its symbolism dangerously misleading. Why write an allegory of a plague, they asked, which denounces no historical evils and which oversimplifies the dilemmas of resistance and revolution? Camus defended his novel in a well-known letter to Barthes that claimed that The Plague was ap- plicable to “any resistance against any tyranny” because “terror has several faces” (Lyrical and Critical 340).

At issue here was whether Camus’s philosophy of absurdity could support a strong ethical and political stance, or whether it condemned one to indecisiveness, passivity, or bourgeois complacency. There is a valid theoretical debate at the heart of this issue, one clarified by John Cruickshank, Herbert Hochberg, and others who have fairly criticized Camus for confusing his descriptive account of the absurdity of the hu- man condition with his normative account of the ethic appropriate to absurd individuals. Yet some critics have offered solutions, such as Donald Lazere’s postulate that absurdity suggests the supreme impor- tance of individual life. “Once we affirm every individual conscious- ness as an absolute value,” Lazere wrote, “we become bound to seek a social system that promotes maximal length, intensity, and freedom for each individual’s life. Hence we must oppose war, capital punishment, and any ideology that subordinates human flesh and blood to abstrac- tions such as nationalism or bourgeois property” (138).

Fred Willhoite Jr.’s Beyond Nihilism: Albert Camus’s Contribution to Political Thought remains a greatly influential interpretation of Camus’s work in which Camus’s political aim is defined as “dialogic

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communion,” drawn in part from Martin Buber’s ideas of dialogue and intersubjective relationships (64-69). The appropriate attitude of the absurd person, according to this view, is that of the “genuinely free dialogic attitude that exalts and enhances life” as opposed to the “monological hardness and fanaticism that leads to death” (66).

Jeffrey Isaac’s well-known Arendt, Camus and Modern Rebellion argues that Camus’s goal was to find a way between all or nothing, to discover a relative ethical stance that could withstand the pressures of both absolutism and nihilism. Isaac’s book contends that Camus en- dorsed democratic politics, dialogic communities, and a posture of eth- ical reflexivity. “Absurdity involves, then, not just the absence of an ultimate answer, but a question, as well as a questioner, whose inquiry attests to the value of human life and to the importance of the freedom to ask elusive questions and dream elusive dreams” (120).

Some attempts to resolve Camus’s ethical and political dilemmas have been even more complex. As we explore absurdity, says the phi- losopher Avi Sagi, we are elaborating a kind of self-knowledge, which is “ethical, in the sense of a return to concrete existence moulded by ac- quaintance with its foundations” (282). Other critics, however, have seen in absurdity only an evil to be combated. For example, Thomas Merton claimed that “[Camus] wants his reader to recognize ‘the ab- surd’ in order to resist it” (182). Absurdity, for Merton, was “simply one face of ‘the plague’which we must resist in all its aspects” (182).

Curiously, the question of which absurdities to reject and which ab- surdities to accept was the question that defined Camus’s career. Most recently, this question has been examined in the context of French co- lonialism and the Algerian War for independence (1954-1962). Al- though a child of Europeans and a citizen of France, Camus was deeply connected to Algeria, the land of his birth. So when the longstanding conflict over independence erupted into full-scale violence, Camus found himself in an extremely difficult position.

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The Algerian Controversy: What If Camus Was Wrong? Today, it is not uncommon for discussions of Camus to pass over his

most celebrated fiction and essays, concentrating instead on his jour- nalism, his letters and reports on Algeria, and his unfinished novel, The First Man. But these seemingly unusual points of focus are not without justification, for Camus’s position on Algerian independence was complex and, by most contemporary standards, lamentable. At various points in his career, Camus both criticized the idea of complete Alge- rian independence and sought to rectify the deplorable conditions of Arab Algerians living under French rule. He denounced the use of ter- rorism as a tactic of the National Liberation Front (FLN), but also criti- cized the repressive methods of the French administration (Resistance 115). He advocated moderate steps toward peaceful resolution, but also desired to keep the French colonial system intact, even claiming that it was necessary for Algeria to be “conquered a second time” (Hughes 2). What Camus meant by this most unfortunate phrase, how- ever, was that the full rights of French citizenship should be extended to all Algerians: Europeans, Arabs, and Berbers.

For several decades, critics have decried Camus’s position as vacil- lation, collaboration, even racism. Raymond Aron’s lament that Camus was simply unable to escape the attitude of a “well-intentioned colonizer” (Judt 119), has become a common contemporary assess- ment of Camus’s writings and speeches of the time. In 1957, after sev- eral passionate editorials, speeches, and failed attempts to intercede, Camus refused to make any more public statements about Algeria at all. Of course, critics then took issue with Camus’s silence. Simone de Beauvoir at first denounced Camus’s “hollow” language on the Alge- rian conflict, then later declared herself “revolted by [Camus’] refusal to speak” (qtd. in Zaretsky 140-142).

The question that informs critical fascination with Camus’s Alge- rian politics is really the question of how Camus, hero of the French Resistance, untiring advocate of justice, and passionate moralist of The

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Plague and The Rebel could reasonably defend colonization and the permanent occupation of a foreign land. If Camus was “wrong” on this matter, then what are readers to make of his moral intuition, his politi- cal writing, and his overall contribution? On his own account, Camus had been “wrong” before, particularly in supporting the capital punish- ment of Nazi collaborators such as Robert Brasillach (Zaretsky 63-74; Foley 34). In Camus’s later retraction of his position on Brasillach, one may remark the beginnings of Camus’s developing political stance, from his immoderate demand for justice on behalf of the liberated French nation to his measured and arguably timid solution to the war for Algeria’s independence.

Many critics take issue not only with Camus’s political writings on Algeria, but with his novels and stories for their treatment of colonial problems of power, race, and identity. Albert Memmi and Pierre Nora argued that colonialist racism and sadism could be read between the lines of Camus’s fiction, and since then, numerous critics have fol- lowed suit. While it is true that critics tend to read Camus quite se- lectively on this issue, many have found Camus’s fiction to be em- blematic of a Eurocentric mindset unable to confront the realities of inequality, systematic violence, and racism in North Africa and, by extension, elsewhere around the globe.

Conor Cruise O’Brien’s Albert Camus of Europe and Africa has made the greatest impact in examining issues of colonialism with re- spect to Camus’s life and work. Like many others, O’Brien was puz- zled that Camus could recognize the injustice of Germany’s invasion of France, and the injustice of the plague’s invasion of Oran, while ig- noring the French invasion and colonization of North Africa. Few would maintain that Camus consciously sought to perpetuate injus- tice, but O’Brien argued that Camus was blinded by his proximity to the French/Algerian issue, perhaps even resorting to a willful self- delusion to justify his colonial stance.

More than anything else, it was Camus’s idea of an Algeria to which he belonged that was the source of O’Brien’s and, later, Edward Said’s

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famous indictments. Said’s Culture and Imperialism accused Camus of being an oppressor of indigenous Algerians and, effectively, a usurper of their homeland, while O’Brien argued that Camus drew the wrong conclusions about Algeria because he suffered from the colo- nial hallucination of a shared cultural heritage. Subsequently, and rather cleverly, referred to as his “nostalgérie” (Carroll 2007 15), Camus’s “idealized . . . fantasy of ‘Mediterranean man,’” has been crit- icized often as a dangerous delusion, one Camus should have dis- carded amidst the extreme desperation and violence of the Algerian War (Apter 508).

Critics have noted that Arabs are often depicted as little more than “stick figures holding up the scenery” in Camus’s fiction (Apter 503). O’Brien went further, describing Camus’s treatment of Arabs in The Plague as Camus’s “artistic final solution of the problem of the Arabs of Oran” (56). In The Stranger, it is true that Meursault’s victim, “l’Arabe,” is given no other name in the text; like many other Arab Al- gerian characters in Camus’s work, he is little more than a ghost. Simi- larly, in The Plague, the Arab quarter is ravaged by pestilence but is al- most completely ignored; even the heroes of the tale, Rieux and Tarrou, do not carry their struggle against the plague that far.

Although O’Brien, Said, and others have been correct in claiming that Camus was unable to imagine an Algeria without him (and other European settlers) in it, there has been a recent attempt to rescue Camus from the condemnations of postcolonial criticism. Notably, Da- vid Carroll has described Camus’s vision of a unifying Algerian iden- tity more generously as one of “an original sharing and being-together before separation, difference, and conflict” (“Camus’s Algeria” 529). And Carroll’s recent book, Albert Camus the Algerian, both departs from and extends this effort by examining Camus in terms of his “Algerianness.” John Foley’s recent book Albert Camus: From the Ab- surd to Revolt also lays out a fair critique of O’Brien and Said, defending Camus against many of their accusations.

Perhaps surprisingly, in spite of his controversial stance, Camus

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now is claimed by Algerian writers such as Assia Djebar as a national literary hero and one of their own (Djebar; Kelly). At the same time, French President Nicolas Sarkozy led a controversial effort to move Camus’s body to the Pantheon, Paris’s mausoleum for the greatest con- tributors to French life and culture. At the time of this writing, it seems doubtful that Camus will be memorialized alongside Voltaire, Rous- seau, Zola, and others. But the controversy itself serves as a reminder that, even amid vocal criticism of his work, possession of Camus’s leg- acy is still sought after by the many traditions, cultures, and ideologies in which his complex work took part. Perhaps the most one can say about the future of Camus’s critical reception, therefore, is that the controversies of his life and death have not detracted from his celebrity but have become an integral part of it, attracting new generations of readers to Camus who are likely to discover in his work the same origi- nality, complexity, and actualité that has engaged readers for nearly seventy years.

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Willhoite, Fred, Jr. Beyond Nihilism: Albert Camus’s Contribution to Political Thought. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1968.

Zaretsky, Robert. Albert Camus: Elements of a Life. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2010. Ziolkowski, Theodore. “Camus in Germany, or the Return of the Prodigal Son.”

Yale French Studies 25 (1960): 132-37.

Critical Reception 97

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