Anomie and The Stranger

Roger Cohen is not one of my favorite columnists in the New York Times, but today he had a piece about a new novel based on Camus's The Stranger, and that book has always meant something to me. 

Cohen notes the protagonist, Meursault, "does not love, he does not pretend, he does not believe in God, he does not mourn his dead mother, he does not judge, he does not repress desire, he does not regret anything, he does not hide from life's farce or shrink from death's finality." 

I've always admired the capacity to summarize, and Cohen does a nice job there. 

I read L'Etranger freshman year in college, in French class. I was a terrible student of French, but I was required to take a foreign language and qualify as having a reading competence in a foreign language, so there I was. We read Camus because Camus used simple words and constructions and also because the French Department thought he would appeal to freshman and because existentialism and ennui and alienation were all the rage in the mid 1960's.  So I read the Stuart Gilbert translation and then I read it in French and then I read it in English again and I was smitten.

Theses have been written about the famous first sentence:  "Aujourd'hui, maman est morte," which, as I read it reads, "Today, mama is dead," or as Gilbert had it: "Mother died today."  But that whole debate strikes me as silly. It is not the first sentence but the first paragraph which captivates:

Camus

"Mother died today. Or, maybe, yesterday. I can't be sure. The telegram from the Home says, 'Your mother passed away. Funeral tomorrow. Deep sympathy.' Which leaves the matter doubtful. It could have been yesterday."

To this day, I'm not sure why this book so thoroughly moved me. Part of it was that I reserved reading it for a break between calculus and inorganic chemistry homework, so it was a treat for an hour or two, between stuff for which I had no enthusiasm, and by comparison, it was lively and engaging. 

It may have had something to do with my  awareness of my own  mother's impending mortality--she would die five years later of a disease she had then. I wrote her about the book and she wrote back she would read it and discuss it with her faculty friends at the high school where she taught and would get back to me. I'm not sure she ever did.

But mostly it was the unblinking honesty, the refusal to say and do what polite society demands, the insistence we show contrition so others can say, "Aw, he's sorry," or to say the expected things about love. 

Meursault picks up a girl at the beach so soon after his mother's funeral, he is still wearing his black tie, and after he sleeps with her she asks him if he loves her and he says he's not sure what the expression even means, but he describes the beginning of love when he talks about the salty smell her head had left on the pillow in his bed, and the tawny, healthy wonder of her body.  He may not "love" her yet, but he has started that process of what most of us would call love, in his physical and sensual response to her. He just simply does not want to trivialize what he is feeling by packaging it into a pre wrapped sentiment. 

Some have argued the French word, "L'Etranger" is closer to "outsider" than "stranger" and that may be true. Meursault is strange, and he is someone others do not know, and some today might call him autistic, because he cannot say the formulaic thing, cannot exchange the expected standard responses and he is indifferent to the effect of his refusal to say what is expected has on other people.

I have not read the book recently, but as I remember it, as Meursault is drawn inexorably toward his own death, the meaning of losing his life, the sadness in it,  was connected to the feelings he had developed for his girlfriend, Marie.  In her, he actually found someone he looked forward to seeing, someone he enjoyed being with and someone he cared about.  

van Gogh

As he observes his own trial, he is fascinated by the picture the lawyers create of him and he knows that picture is unrelated to who he really is, what he thinks and feels. It is all just convention and phony and he cannot bring himself to be phony, even to save his own life. He'd rather go to the guillotine with the crowds screaming for his blood.

Years later, trying to describe the dehumanizing effect medical training had on me and my fellow interns, I came back to The Stranger because it seemed the closest thing to the experience of desensitization, of anomie, I had seen during internship. Through fiction, Camus, had gotten closer to reality than anything I had known. 

I guess that's why they call it "art."