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Journey to Consciousness: The Symbolic Pattern of Camus's L'Etranger

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

William M. Manly
William M. Manly*
Affiliation:
Simmons College Boston 15, Mass.
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Extract

Although a good deal has been written about L'Etranger in the light of Camus's philosophic insights in Le Mythe de Sisyphe, the verbal similarities between these two works have been used only sporadically in interpreting the novel. Carl Viggiani, whose essay on L'Etranger appears to have dealt most fully with the symbolic undercurrent of the novel and Meursault's relation to Sisyphus has concentrated almost solely on detached archetypal motifs while largely neglecting any sort of progressive or “novelistic” development of the protagonist as he moves from his mother's funeral to his final jail cell. I propose to demonstrate such a consistent development by viewing Meursault's adventure as a parable of mental awakening or coming to consciousness which corresponds in detailed thematic and imagistic ways to the adventure of the mind in Le Mythe de Sisyphe.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 79 , Issue 3 , June 1964 , pp. 321 - 328
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1964

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References

1 Carl A. Viggiani, “Camus's L'Etranger,” PMLA, lxxi (December 1956), pp. 878–886. Jean-Paul Sartre's now classic essay on L'Etranger (“An Explication of The Stranger,” trans. Michelson, reprinted in Camus, A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Germaine Bree, 1962, pp. 108–121), makes considerable use of Le Mythe de Sisyphe in general terms, but pays slight attention to the symbolic artistry and linguistic analogies which the association produces. Sartre's essay is the first to state flatly that Meursault does not achieve absurd awareness until the last page and that “He does not seem to pose himself any of the questions explored in The Myth of Sisyphus” (p. 114). The present study would show that the protagonist's absurd consciousness is a progressive pattern of development and that the “uncomplicated spontaneity” and lack of “self awareness” and “coherence” that John Cruickshank (to cite a more recent critic) finds typical of Meursault throughout the novel is not an accurate description of the Meursault of Part ii, and is only partially accurate regarding the Meursault of Part i. Cf. John Cruickshank, Albert Camus and the Literature of Revolt (New York, 1959), p. 143.

2 Albert Camus, Le Mythe de Sisyphe, 18th ed. (Librairie Gallimard, 1942), p. 27. Page references throughout the text are to this edition. Other page references in the text are to the Librairie Gallimard editions of L'Etranger, 82d ed. (Paris, 1942), and Noces (Paris, 1950).

3 Many students of L'Etranger have made the assumption that Meursault is an absurd hero from the beginning of the novel. Sartre writes of Meursault: “Still his absurdity seems to have been given rather than achieved; that's how he is, and that's that. He does have his revelation on the last page, but he has always lived according to Camus's standards” (p. 114). Albert Maquet writes: “With Meursault, the absurd is like a congenital infirmity and this is what gives such weight of reality to this character. One might say that the absurd is in his blood. And he makes that absurd live, not by the vigilance of the mind but in the abandonment of the flesh.” Albert Camus, The Invincible Summer. trans. Briffault (New York, 1958), p. 53. And Thomas Hanna follows suit with the remark that from the beginning Meursault “shows the absolute indifference of the absurd hero, but at the same time does not possess the absurd hero's consciousness of the absurdity of his life and the revolt against it.” The Thought and Art of Albert Camus (Chicago, 1958), p. 39.

A distinction that must be made, and that only Hanna of the above writers makes with any precision, is that between the absurd as a state of being and the absurd as a state of consciousness. The Algerians in Noces and Meursault in part i of L'Etranger are absurd objects to an outside mind (such as Camus's own when he returns as an adult to the scenes of his boyhood in Algeria), but they are not absurd subjects who are aware of their participation in an absurd world. The true absurd hero is the conscious hero: “The ideal of the absurd man,” Camus writes in Le Mythe, “is the present and the succession of present moments before an ever conscious spirit.” The confusion which Camus's parable appears to present in terms of his philosophy of the absurd is clarified when we see that Meursault partakes of both absurd objectivity and absurd subjectivity, and that his adventure is a progressive journey from one state to the other.

4 Viggiani, p. 882.

5 “Image and Symbol in the Work of Albert Camus,” French Studies, ix (January 1955), 47. John goes on to note that Camus's symbolic use of the sun is a key to “the metaphysical intention that animates Camus's work. The entire novel is an allegory of that absurd universe which Camus has described elsewhere—Le Mythe de Sisyphe (1942)—in philosophical terms.” Further, this critic feels that the sun in L'Etranger “absolves man from responsibility—and hence from guilt—by reducing him to something less than man, to the status of an irresponsible element in nature” (pp. 47–48). The present essay supports the idea that the sun's effect both at the funeral and on the beach is to make Meursault an instrument of an absurd universe, but would maintain that the real importance of this fate lies in its effect on Meursault's subjective awareness of his metaphysical condition. From this perspective, the sun “absolves” Meursault from guilt only technically and superficially; in terms of the parable it begins a realization of his complicity in an absurd world.

6 The fated—almost predestined—quality of Meursault's rendezvous with the Arab is in keeping with the underlying archetypal movement in this novel from innocence to responsibility. The Arab encounter is a rite de passage brought about by subtle maturation rather than deliberate decision, and the sun—as a traditional symbol of ripening time—is thus an appropriate aegis for part i (the novel's dominant

imagery moves from the sunshine of Meursault's carefree youth to the prison cell evening of his maturity). Meursault's early disinterest in death and marriage suggest the child's unwillingness to take up those burdens of participation that attempt to wrest meaning out of meaninglessness. The beach encounter is Meursault's symbolic initiation into the adult world of understanding.

7 The striking metaphorical richness of the entire beach encounter, which contrasts to the straightforward prose that precedes and follows it, has been noted by several critics. John Cruickshank writes: “The point at which Meursault's language becomes fanciful and metaphorical is also the point at which he wrongly interprets experience—as distinct from simply failing to understand it—and becomes a murderer” (p. 158). I suggest that the richness of the passage is more appropriately understood (I am unable to see what Meursault “wrongly interprets” in Cruickshank's explanation) as a dramatization of Meursault's mental agitation at a moment when he is symbolically experiencing the destruction of mental equilibrium that accompanies a consciousness of the absurd.

8 With this new sense of self comes a new understanding of his mother and his father, whose conduct was viewed without interest by the earlier Meursault, but who take on deeper meaning in the progressive pattern of awakening in part ii. His mother's desire to take a “fiancé” in old age (linked symbolically with the old ones' “difference” at the wake) is now understood by Meursault as a response of integrity to the absurd negation that death implies. So too, his father's interest in capital punishment, which had earlier disgusted Meursault, is at last understood: “Comment n'avais-je pas vu que rien n‘était plus important qu'une exécution capitale et que dans un sens, c‘était même la seule chose vraiment intéressant pour un homme!” (p. 155).