THE OUTSIDER (L’ETRANGER)
By Albert CamusBy Steven Portlock
Meursault is a young Algerian man working in humdrum office based job. Soon after his mother’s death, he starts up a relationship, gets involved with a rather sleazy "warehouseman" - reputedly a pimp - and a chain of events leads to him killing an arab. For this, he is to be executed.
Anyone dismayed find that the ending has just been given away need not worry. Melodrama and tension are not what counts here. Part of Camus achievement with this remarkable work is to convey a world where the narrator is all too aware of his predestined death, but whose life nonetheless feels totally abstract, ruled by blind chance. That Camus also manages in little over a hundred pages to incorporate a harsh critique of the death sentence and an attack on what Sartre called "bad faith" is all the more remarkable. In a world where God probably does not exist and definitely exerts no influence, society still feels the need to hang onto the quasi-mystical. As Camus put it in an afterword: "In our society, any man who doesn’t cry at his mother’s funeral is liable to be condemned to death". Killing an Arab may have got Meursault in the dock, but it is his apparent spiritual void that has him executed.
To Camus, society endorses the absurdly bombast with which the prosecutor condemns Meursault for drinking coffee and smoking a cigarette "beside the body of the one who brought him into the world". It would, however, be a mistake to allow the Catholicism of the culture in which this work was first published, to blind us to its relevance elsewhere.. Anyone who observed the mass hysteria that accompanied the death of "our nations golden child" as Sir Elton John described the Princess of Wales, would be able to draw parallels.
The Outsider came as a follow-up to his original draft A Happy Death (La Mort Heureuse) which shares a superficially similar narrative and a narrator named Mersault. What immediately distinguishes The Outsider is the first person narrative, which might strike the reader as a curious decision. Not only does it not obviously tie in an "existentialist" rejection of the subconscience – although this was a tag that Camus consistently rejected throughout his life - but as a style it immediately invites questions as to the reliability of the narrative. Edgar Allan Poe, for example, regularly used the rather heavy-handed device of having his narrators deny their insanity thereby putting the idea in the reader’s head. Indeed, Meursault is slightly remeniscent of the Man of the Crowd in the Poe short story of that name.
So what makes Meursault disturb ordinary people? Superficially he is no more dangerous than any number of hard-boiled characters from the works of a writer like James M Cain – an acknowledged influence on The Outsider. Patrick Bateman might, however, give a clue. The anti-hero of Bret Easton Ellis’ near unreadable eighties satire American Psycho is as truly evil as Meursault is passive, as angry as Meursault is calm. These differences help to explain why Bateman’s narrative oozes narcissism and self-delusion, whereas Meursault comes across as close as we are likely to get to a wholly reliable narrator. What the two men share is an emotional detachment from their actions and a desire to "fit in".
To Camus, what makes Meursault an outsider is his refusal to lie or even to express unreal emotions. So he expresses indifference about marrying Marie and denies that he loves her. He refuses his lawyer permission to maintain that he concealed his natural feelings "because it’s not true"
What Meursault does relate to is nature and indeed to living in its most active form. It seems likely that the beauty of nature means no more to him than the touch of Marie’s naked body. The pleasure is nonetheless unmistakeable when on the day of his mother’s funeral he observes: "Above the hills which separated Marengo from the sea, the sky was full of red streaks. And the breeze coming up over the hills had a salty tang to it. It was going to be a beautuful day".
Many readers are likely to have known moments of apathy and emotional numbness, and they will not only feel that Meursault does not deserve to die, but will recognise elements of themselves within him. This was certainly the intention, as it was with Bret Easton Ellis’ work, but Camus additionally saw in his creation aspects to be admired and emulated – namely his rigorous honesty – describing him as "the only Christ we deserve". However, it would be a mistake to perceive Meursault as harmless, and not to recognise that the threat he represents to social order is real.
The Outsider, like American Psycho, ends with the narrator acquiring a form of self-acceptance. Confronted by a priest who tells him that " [his] heart is blind", Meursault snaps. In doing so, and in venting his rage, he realises that he is happy. In this world where the only pleasure that exists is that of the senses, where he had rejected both regret and ambition and lived for the present, and where blind chance had been the cornerstone of his existence, he had also been happy. After this anti-epiphany, Meursault embraces his outsider status: "For the final consummation, and for me to feel less lonely, my last wish would be that there should be a crowd of spectators at my execution and that they should greet me with cries of hatred".
Let down by an uncharacteristic lurch into sensationalism at the end of the first half, The Outsider still justifies its classic reputation. Its influence manifests itself not just in post-modern fiction, and in songs like Killing an Arab by the Cure (directly inspired by the novel) but also in the cinematic work of the late great Krzystof Kieslowski – in particular A Short Film About Killing. That the work has been so influential is a testimony to its relevance not just in the forties but also today.
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