Camus' L'EtrangerAuthor(s): Carl A. ViggianiSource: PMLA, Vol. 71, No. 5 (Dec., 1956), pp. 865-887Published by: Modern Language AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/460515 .Accessed: 12/01/2011 20:22

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PMLA PUBLICATIONS OF

THE-MODERN-LANGUAGE-ASSOCIATION-OF-AMERICA Issued Five Times a Tear

.VOLUME LXXI D)ECEM UBER 1956 NUrMBE R 5 VOLUME LXXI DECEMBER 1956 NUMBER 5

CAMUS' L'ETRANGER

BY CARL A. VIGGIANI

M OST of the critical writing on L'Etranger has been focused on the world view or philosophy that it expresses. This is certainly

legitimate, especially since Camus himself sees the novel as an incarna- tion of "a drama of the intelligence."' As a result, however, some of the formal and imaginative aspects of L'Etranger have been neglected, with the further result that the full meaning of the novel has remained hidden. On the surface, L'Etranger gives the appearance of being an extremely simple though carefully planned and written book. In reality, it is a dense and rich creation, full of undiscovered meanings and formal qualities. It would take a book at least the length of the novel to make a complete analysis of meaning and form, and the correspondences of meaning and form, in L'Etranger. My purpose here is less ambitious. I should like first to take up aspects of the novel that have not yet been studied sufficiently, principal among them (and in this order), the use of time and structure as thematic devices, myth, names, pat- terns of character and situation, and symbols, and then, in conclusion, to use the knowledge gained as the basis for an explication of the mean- ing of the novel as a whole. Frequent and fairly lengthy references will be made to others of Camus' books, simply because the novel is incom- prehensible except in the context of all his works; it is hoped that what may appear to be digressions will be justified by the light they throw on the novel.

Camus formally divided L'Etranger into two parts, the first ending with the shooting of the Arab, and the second with Meursault's tirade against the prison chaplain. Underlying the formal division, there is a

1 Le Mythe de Sisyphe (Paris, 1942), p. 134. The editions of Camus' other works referred to in this article, all published in Paris, by Gallimard, are the following: Noces (1950); L'Etranger (1953); Letfres d un ami allemand (1948); Le Malentendu, Caligula (1944); La Peste (1947); L'Etat de Siege (1948); L'Homme rvoltd (1951); L'Etd (1954).

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narrative division into three parts, the middle part ending with the con- viction and death sentence. This tripartite division is marked not only by the nature of the events and the development of the hero in each part, but also by the time plan of the novel, which gives it its structure. The last chapter of the book will hereafter be referred to as Part III.

The events are narrated by the main character, Meursault, a clerk in what seems to be an export-import firm located in Algiers. We are given no positive information about his age; he is a young man, and like most of Camus' heroes, he is probably around thirty. In Part I, the events are narrated day by day, as if Meursault were keeping a journal. The shoot- ing takes place on the eighteenth day, a Sunday. Part II covers a period of a little over eleven months, and the whole period is narrated retro- spectively. No time references are given in Part III: the narrator talks of his meditations and of one event, his interview with the chaplain. This is a personal chronicle. Like Rieux and Tarrou in La Peste, Meur- sault is writing a chronicle of death, but with one important difference: whereas in La Peste time is only a necessary and convenient framework that finally disappears, in L'Etranger it is part of the essence of the chronicler's story.

The events of L'Etranger are few in number and easy to recall. The principal ones are repeated here for reference purposes and in order to make the time-structure-theme relationship clearer. The sequence of events is as follows:

PART i

CHAP. i

First day: Thursday. News of mother's death. Arrival at Marengo. The wake. Second day: Friday. The funeral procession and burial.

CHAP. ii

Third day: Saturday. Meursault's meeting with Marie at beach. They spend night together. Fourth day: Sunday. Marie has left. Meursault spends a restless day.

CHAP. iii

Fifth day: Monday. Meursault agrees to help Sintes punish sweetheart. CHAP. iv

Eleventh day: Sunday. Day at the beach with Marie. CHAP. V

?th day: weekday during third week. Meursault accepts Raymond's invitation to spend following Sunday at friend's beach house. Agrees to marry Marie.

CHAP. vi

Eighteenth day. Sunday. The murder.

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PART II

CHAP. i

No precise time given. Meursault is interrogated by prosecuting attorney. CHAP. ii

No precise time given. Meursault relates prison experiences and meditations, Marie's visit. (Eleven months have elapsed since murder.)

CHAP. iii

First day of trial. (June, a year after murder.) Witnesses heard.

CHAP. iv

Second day of trial. Meursault sentenced to death after final speeches of at torneys.

PART III

CHAP. V

No precise time given: sometime after trial. Meursault's meditations on death and possibility of escape. The chaplain's visit.

In all of Part i the time references are numerous and precise. The opening paragraph of every chapter except Chapter v has some refer- ence to time, such as "c'est aujourd'hui samedi," or "Le dimanche . . " Each major and minor event within the chapters takes place at a care- fully specified time of the day: "J'ai pris l'autobus a deux heures"; "En principe, l'enterrement est fixe a dix heures du matin." "Le soir etait tombe brusquement." Even when it is given indirectly, the time is precise: "J'ai pense aux collegues du bureau. A cette heure, ils se levaient pour aller au travail." "Le soleil tombait presque d'aplomb sur le sable." Camus is so careful in the preparation of his timetable that in at least one place he trips himself up: in narrating the events of the eleventh day (the second Sunday), he begins with "Ce matin" and the next to the last sentence in the chapter reads: "Mais il fallait que je me leve t6t le lendemain" (my italics), where one would expect ilfaut and demain. The time of the year is implied in passing: Meursault reports that he, Masson, and Raymond talked about spending the month of August together at the beach and sharing expenses. Either the events are taking place during that month and the men are making plans for the following year, or they are taking place in June or July. What is important, in any case, is that what happens takes place during the summer. The shooting occurs on a Sunday, a day Meursault says he does not like.

In Chapters i and ii of Part II Meursault relates the events of eleven months ("Et au bout des onze mois qu'a dure cette instruction .. ."), principally his interrogation by the prosecuting attorney and the experi- ence of prison life. Chapters iii and iv are an account of the two-day

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trial. In the whole of Part II the precise day by day account gives way to a rapid flow of time whose events are narrated by a character for whom time is rapidly becoming meaningless. Occasionally, precise time references are made ("A sept heures et demie du matin, on est venu me chercher"), but no day is ever given. All this takes place during the fall, winter, and spring months. The trial begins with the summer heat, during the latter part of June.

In Part II the significance of time, implicit in the whole of the first part, becomes explicit. For example, the time of the mother's death, which the narrator, in his opening paragraph, said was a matter of no importance, becomes crucial at the trial. One of the most damaging pieces of evidence against Meursault at the trial is that he began his liaison with Marie "le lendemain" of his mother's funeral. This is part of the ironic recapitulation of his career during the trial, of which more will be said below. More important, for the moment, is the fact that Meursault himself begins to talk about time, at first ironically but finally in plain terms. In prison, he dwells on memories of sexual ex- periences. He says that in a sense these memories unbalanced him, but, "dans un autre, cela tuait le temps" (p. 111). One page later, he repeats the phrase: "Toute la question, encore une fois, etait de tuer le temps." And again on the following page: "Il me restait alors six heures a tuer." We realize, as we encounter the expression the third time, that like so many of the characters, images and statements in Part I ("Cela ne veut rien dire," "I1 n'y avait pas d'issue," the petite automate, etc.), it has a meaning that transcends the banal notion it seems to convey. For the whole concept and meaning of time are literally being killed in and by the hero's experience. Soon after the third ironic restatement of the theme it appears undisguised: "J'avais bien lu qu'on finissait par perdre la notion du temps en prison. Mais cela n'avait pas beaucoup de sens pour moi. Je n'avais pas compris a quel point les jours pouvaient etre a la fois longs et courts . . . tellement distendus qu'il finissaient par deborder les uns sur les autres.... Pour moi, c'etait sans cesse le meme jour qui deferlait dans ma cellule" (pp. 114-115). That time has spun practically to a standstill is indicated by the opening sentence oc Chapter iii of Part II: "Je peux dire qu'au fond l'6te a tres vite remplace l'ete" (p. 117). After the two days of the trial, time stops.

In Part iii there are no precise time indications. Only one event oc- curs, Meursault's violent interview with the prison chaplain. The re- mainder of the chapter is devoted to Meursault's speculations on death, and the meaning given to life by death. References to time are replaced by symbols of eternal return and permanence: day and night, sky, and stars. Whereas the first paragraphs of chapters in Part i contained time

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references, the first paragraph of the last chapter speaks of the sky and the recurrence of day and night: "De celle-ci [his cell], lorsque je suis allonge, je vois le ciel et je ne vois que lui. Toutes mes journ6es se passent a regarder sur son visage le declin des couleurs qui conduit le jour a la nuit" (p. 152). As he meditates, he contemplates the sky: "Je m'etendais, je regardais le ciel, je m'efforgais de m'y int&lesser" (p. 158). And when finally, after assaulting the chaplain, his calm has been re- stored and he feels ready to face his execution, he awakens "avec des 6toiles sur le visage" (p. 171).

Time, then, has stopped with the conclusion of the novel. The struc- ture of the novel, the development of the hero's career, and the time-flow in which the development takes place move along together from the particular to the most general and universal: In Part I, a chapter for each major event, six chapters for the account of eighteen days, a de- tailed, if laconic, narration of even trivial incidents, parts of each day carefully specified; in Part ii, four chapters for the narration of the events of about a year; in Part II, one chapter in which time has vanished and in which virtually nothing happens. The development of the structure is paralleled by the metamorphosis of the hero from a purely sentient consciousness into a man who begins to reflect upon himself and his relations with men in the second part of the novel, and who finally transcends the self and society in speculations concerning the ultimate meaning of life and death. That time, then, informs and is an integral part of both structure and theme in the novel is clear. The precise role that the concept of time plays in the development of L'Etranger will be discussed when we take up the theme, in the concluding portion of this study.

The point of view in L'Etranger is only slightly different from that in La Peste. In both, the events are narrated by the principals: Meursault in L'Etranger, Rieux and Tarrou in La Peste. The difference lies prin- cipally in the greater objectivity of Rieux's account, for Tarrou's journal is as personal as Meursault's. Camus' seeming predilection for this narrative device is revealing. Despite his fundamentally romantic na- ture, Camus has tried to become, and to a certain extent he has succeeded in becoming "un ecrivain objectif."2 His first works, however, gave him away. L'Envers et L'Endroit and Noces are autobiography. There is abundant evidence that the rest of his works are equally autobio- graphical, that his heroes are fictional projections of his own developing self. Gradually, however, Camus has drawn further away from his fictions. In La Peste, for example, the hero is a composite of several char-

2 "J'appelle objectif un auteur qui se propose des sujets sans jamais se prendre lui-meme comme sujet" (L'Et, p. 132).

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Camus' "L'Etranger"

acters, and thus the distance between creator and character is increased. A similar development has taken place in his plays: Les Justes is far more "objective" than Caligula. L'Etranger, however, is midway between the lyricist and the semi-objective novelist and playwright; it is a personal confession made in a thinly disguised journal by a fic- tional surrogate of the author.

Camus transforms this personal confession into a relatively im- personal fiction by means of a set of ironic devices, principal among them, the reconstruction of myth in a modern idiom, multivalent names, characters, images, and language, and occasionally, literary allusiveness, of which only the main features will be touched upon here.

The central ironic device in L'Etranger is its reconstruction of the Sisyphus myth. The irony arises out of the transformation of the hero- antagonist of the gods into an office clerk who spends his days working on bills of lading and the rest of his time in a variety of dull and sordid adventures. The eternal punishment of Sisyphus is expressed in a con- temporary image of absurdity: the deadening routine of the life of an office worker. As Camus puts it in Le Mythe de Sisyphe: "Lever, tram- way, quatre heures de bureau ou d'usine, repas, tramway, quatre heures de travail, repas, sommeil et lundi mardi mercredi jeudi vendredi et samedi sur le meme rythme ... " (p. 27). This is not the whole image; to it is added the final awareness of the mortality and meaninglessness of life, and the immortality and senselessness of death. What interests Camus most in the Sisyphus myth is the moment when Sisyphus reaches the top of the hill and watches his stone roll down. That moment, says Camus, is "celle de la conscience." In his awareness of his eternally futile task Sisyphus is superior to his destiny and stronger than his stone. What makes the myth tragic is the condemned man's awareness (p. 165). The counterpart of this in L'Etranger is the last chapter, in which the hero achieves absolute lucidity.

Grafted onto the Sisyphus myth in L'Etranger are two more tradi- tional mythical figures, the doomed man (CEdipus) and the sacrificial God-man, or, as Camus prefers to put it, the man-god. That Camus had these figures very much in mind when he wrote L'Etranger is in- dicated by his discussion of them in Le Mythe de Sisyphe, in which they and Sisyphus are represented as prototypes of the absurd hero. The CEdipus myth is reflected in the complicated trap set for Meursault by chance, the sea, and the sun, and in his final attitude of reconciliation. The man-god figure appears to have been suggested to Camus by (or associated in his mind with) the careers of Christ and of Dostoevski's Kirilov, the first, a symbol of divine self-sacrifice, the second, a sacrificial hero who rejects God, thereby becoming himself God, and who affirms

870

Carl A. Viggiani 871

his liberty and his love of humanity by what Camus calls a "pedagogical suicide."3 It can be argued that these archetypes are found in hundreds of works since antiquity and that their reappearance in Camus' novel is not particularly significant. The answer to this objection is the novel itself and Le Mythe de Sisyphe, where the author's preoccupation with them is explicit and clear. His use of myth is not unlike that of Joyce and Eliot, that is, deliberately ironic and intended to bring together in the reader's mind the mythical figure and the contemporary hero; and like Eliot, Camus provides his reader with a commentary that reveals the connection.

This central ironic device has its counterparts in the names of the characters in the novel, which are for the most part multivalent. For Camus, the naming of characters seems to be both a conscious and an unconscious way of adding dimensions of meaning to the world he creates. There are four main classes of names in his works: historical names; allegorical names, like Nada and La Peste in L'Etat de Siege; common nouns that indicate profession, trade, family relationship or the like, such as the juge d'instruction, the aumonier, and La Mere in Le Malentendu; proper names, some of which Camus may have invented, but most of which can be found in a dictionary of names. Many of the latter seem to have some special meaning for the author. In what follows I should like to suggest some of the possible meanings and uses of the names borne by Camus' characters. Obviously, what will be said can only be tentative and inconclusive; I avoid all the necessary qualifications only for the sake of brevity.

The first category of names needs no comment. The second two cate- 3 A few quotations from the chapters on Kirilov and Sisyphus will make clear the links

that connect Meursault with these figures: "En ce sens seulement, Jesus incarne bien tout le drame humain. Il est l'homme parfait, etant celui qui a realise la condition la plus ab- surde. II n'est pas le Dieu-homme, mais l'homme-dieu. Et comme lui, chacun de nous peut etre crucifie et dupe-l'est dans une certaine mesure" (p. 146). "On apergoit desormais le sens de la premisse kirilovienne: 'Si Dieu n'existe pas, je suis dieu.' Devenir dieu, c'est seulement etre libre sur cette terre, ne pas servir un etre immortel . . . Kirilov se sacrifie donc. Mais s'il est crucifie, il ne sera pas dupe. I1 reste homme-dieu, persuade d'une mort sans avenir, penetre de la melancolie evangelique" (p. 147). In the chapter on Sisyphus, Camus brings together and blends the 3 figures: "J'imagine encore Sisyphe revenant vers son rocher ... c'est la victoire du rocher .... L'immense d6tresse est trop lourde a porter. Ce sont nos nuits de Gethsemani. Mais les verites ecrasantes perissent d'etre reconnues. Ainsi. CEdipe obeit d'abord au destin sans le savoir. A partir du moment oil il sait, sa tragedie commence. Mais dans le meme instant, aveugle et desesper6, il reconnalt que le seul lien qui le rattache au monde, c'est la main fraiche d'une jeune fille. Une parole demesuree retentit alors: 'Malgre tant d'epreuves, mon Age avanc6 et la grandeur de mon Ame me font juger que tout est bien.' L'CEdipe de Sophocle, comme le Kirilov de Dostoev- sky, donne ainsi la formule de la victoire absurde. La sagesse antique rejoint l'heroisme moderne" (pp. 166-167).

Camus' "L'Etranger"

gories reflect the allegorizing tendency of Camus' imagination; in the third category the characters designated are not only realistic characters but types as well. The largest and most important category of names is the last, most of which are traditional. The following are among the prin- cipal men's and women's given names and surnames in Camus' novels and plays (with the exception of Caligula): Meursault, Salamano, Mas- son, Othon, Thomas Perez, Le Juge Casado, Raymond Sintes, Raymond Rambert, Bernard Rieux, Joseph Grand, Cottard, Castel, Pere Paneloux, Emmanuel, Celeste, Jean Tarrou, Jan, Ivan Kaliayev (called Yanek in Les Justes), Diego; Marie Cardona, Maria, Martha, Victoria, Jeanne.

A number of patterns and correspondences can be noted. First of all, a predilection for certain names: Jean, its non-French equivalents, Jan, Ivan (Yanek), and its feminine counterpart, Jeanne4; Raymond (Sintes and Rambert); Thomas and its derivative, Masson; Marie (Cardona) and Maria. Second: certain names are intended to communicate an idea, image, or feeling, in some cases with an ironic overtone; Masson is "un grand type, massif [my italics) de taille et d'epaules" (L'Etranger, p. 75); Othon, the name of a judge, one of the many symbols of au- thority who populate Camus' works, has a distinctly harsh Germanic ring; Le Juge Casado means 'the married judge'; Joseph Grand is of course the very opposite of great, and there is nothing very heavenly about Celeste; the name Cottard has a touch of baseness that is ap- propriate to the demented black marketeer who rings down the cur- tain of La Peste with an explosion of unmotivated violence; Castel (OF and It. 'castle,' 'fort') is another healer, or secular saint, whose name suggests the virtue of a man who develops a serum against the plague bacillus. Third: Camus seems to be intent on using names that have a peculiarly New Testament character or that are in some way important in the Christian tradition: Marie, Martha, Jean, Thomas, Diego, Joseph, Emmanuel (Manuel in Noces) are all New Testament personages of the first importance, as all but one are in Camus' works; Victoria denotes a virtue traditionally associated with Mary, the mater gloriosa, and in Christian art Mary is frequently represented as the "Santa Maria della Vittoria"; Bernard is the name of one of the greatest Christian saints, known for his devotion to the Virgin Mary, and in La Peste it is the name of the principal secular saint. Fourth: the names Le Vieux and Rieux seem to be slight phonetic deformations of dieu. In Le Malentendu Le Vieux, described as "sans Age," is a grotesque surrogate of God, as

4 Jean is the name of one of Camus' children. The name of the hero of La Chute, Camus' latest book, is Jean-Baptiste Clamence. It might be added that, according to Camus, Ivan Karamazov begins "l'entreprise essentielle de la revolte, qui est de substituer au royaume de la grace celui de la justice" (L'Homme rvoltt, p. 77).

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the last scene of the play makes abundantly clear. That Rieux is also a disguised form of dieu is perhaps more conjectural; evidence for the assertion lies mainly in Camus' preoccupation with the figure of the homme-dieu, manifested in most of his works, in the fact that in La Peste Rieux plays the role of an homme-dieu, and lastly, in Camus' constant name-punning and allegorizing, as in the name Le Vieux. Fifth: if one can assume that Camus' dramatic and novelistic heroes are fictional projections of his own developing self, and that in La Peste those who fight with Rieux against death are features of a composite portrait, then it is probably not a coincidence that the names Rambert, Castel, Tarrou, and even Paneloux (a character who has taken the existential leap but who is an extension of Camus' ideal of the sacrificial saint) are names that echo (with slight distortion) the phonemes of the name Albert Camus.

From what has been said it becomes clear that in the names that Camus uses one can often find meanings that clarify the whole of a par- ticular work. This is true of L'Etranger, although apparently not of the name of its hero. Because of the suggestivity of the name, it has excited the interest and curiosity of more than one reader. However, in discussing this study with me, M. Camus said that he found the name at dinner one evening when a bottle of Meursault wine was served. He added that, de- spite the suggestivity of the name, he did not consciously associate it with any particular idea or feeling. He did say, however, that Salamano was more than just a name to him, and it is, of course, not an inappro- priate name for a character whose dog is covered with brown scabs and spots, who resembles his dog, and who has "[des] mains crouteuses" (p. 61). The idea of 'dirty hands' that the Italianate name evokes reinforces the feeling of disgust produced by both man and dog.

The names of three more characters in L'Etranger require some com- ment: Thomas Perez, la mere (maman), and Marie. As we shall see, the mother, the absent or dead father who appears in a variety of disguises, and the son constitute the matrix of Camus' fictional world. The other characters in his books and plays, sweethearts, wives, mistresses, sisters, and sea on the one hand, and judges, prosecuting attorneys, policemen, old people and sun on the other, tend to be subsumed by the central figures of the mother and the father. In this light, Thomas Perez, the name of Meursault's mother's "fiance," becomes more than a common Franco-Spanish name. If one disregards the z of the surname, it becomes the French word for 'father,' which on one level is precisely the role played by the character. In la mere we have one of the two or three key words in Camus' vocabulary. There is a great deal of internal evidence in Camus' works that suggests the identification on an unconscious level

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Camus' "L'Etranger"

of mother and sea, of la mere and la mer, which are as omnipresent in his works as the sun and father figures, and as intimately involved in the hero's fate. It is perhaps only coincidence that the names of the sister, mistress, and wife in Le Malentendu and L'Etranger are named Martha, Maria, Marie, all of which suggest mere and mer, and that the old people's home in L'Etranger is located at Marengo (an actual place name), and that they also give a slightly distorted echo of part of the hero's name, and Camus' obsessive theme, la mort. But it is the kind of coincidence that is profoundly revealing, and particularly for an under- standing of L'Etranger.

"Etre classique," said Camus, "c'est en meme temps se repeter et savoir se repeter." His dictum applies not only to the way in which he names many of his characters but also to the types of characters and basic situations in his novels and plays. In L'Etranger, Meursault, the main character, murders and is condemned to death; and in some way, all of Camus' heroes and heroines suffer or watch others suffer a similar fate. Caligula commits wholesale murders and sexual crimes and is assassinated. La Mere and Martha drown Jan and then commit suicide. Yanek assassinates the Grand Duke and is condemned to death. Diego struggles against La Secretaire and La Peste but dies after gaining a

momentary victory. The heroes of La Peste either suffer death them- selves, or they witness the death of loved ones, or they fight against a universal death sentence, the plague. The obsessive image of the con- demned man (or woman) dominates even Camus' short essays and

philosophical treatises. Noces, for example, which is informed by a pas- sion for life, has as its epigraph a quotation from Stendhal that refers to an execution, and the idea of death regularly breaks into this orgy of life. The opening sentence of Le Mythe de Sisyphe declares that there is only one really serious philosophical question, suicide. In L'Homme revolte, the main theme is murder. The obsession is everywhere in Camus' writ-

ings, coupled with an intense passion for life. In his novels and plays, the characters constantly re-enact his grim preoccupation in a ritual of homicide and suicide. In the works that followed Caligula, however, and

beginning with L'Etranger, the role played by the main character or characters is that of the sacrificial hero who suffers death for the love of others, that they may live or live better in some way. Diego, Rieux, Tarrou, Rambert, Grand, and Castel are literally healers who sacrifice themselves in a fight against death. Yanek gives his life so that his

compatriots will have a chance for a better life. This development be-

gins, as it will be seen, with the opening of Meursault to the "tendre indifference du monde."

The other principals of L'Etranger are the mother, the deceased father,

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Marie, and the sea and the sun. This can be put in a more revealing, though awkward, way, by saying that the other principals are the mother-sea-Marie and father-sun-judge-prosecuting attorney figures. One need have no psychoanalytical bias to recognize the identity of the three female forms. The names of two of them are homonyms, and the third name not only resembles the first two phonetically but is the name of the type of the mother, who has traditionally been associated with the sea, But Camus' other works are themselves the best proof of the oneness of the three. The figure of the mother appears in some form in all of Camus' creative works, even if only in a passing reference, as in Noces. In Le Malentendu she murders the son by drowning him; in L'Etranger she is ultimately responsible for the son's death; she replaces the dying wife in La Peste; she is the long-suffering mother of Victoria in L'Etat de Siege; in Les Justes she appears as the wife of the Grand Duke, whom Ivan has blown up. Only for Caligula is it necessary to invoke the benevolent shade of Freud to find the mother, this time in the figure of Drusilla, Caligula's sister, with whom he has had incestuous relations, and whose death sends him into a homicidal frenzy. The figure of the young sweetheart-wife-sister is also omnipresent, and plays as important a role in the recurring death ritual as the mother, either suf- fering death or its consequences, as in La Peste and Le Malentendu, or deliberately or otherwise bringing the hero closer to death, as in L'Etran- ger where the bathing and movie episodes help seal Meursault's fate, and in Les Justes, in which Dora makes the bomb that Kaliayev throws. The sister appears in one of Camus' works, Le Malentendu, and is men- tioned as the cause of the hero's madness in Caligula. In both plays she is intimately associated with the mother, consciously in the first play, where she shares with her the role of murderess, and unconsciously in Caligula, in which she is the object of incestuous desires.

The last of the trinity of characters that dominate Camus' works is the usually deceased father and the many figures who appear in his stead. The fathers of Meursault and Tarrou are both dead but they remain (because they are associated with capital punishment) to haunt their sons' memories and influence their careers. In L'Etat de Siege, Le Juge Casado, 'the married judge,' is one of Diego's antagonists, and he insists on turning Diego out of the house and denouncing him as a bearer of the plague. Elsewhere the father takes the various shapes of the symbol of authority, principally as a judge or prosecuting attorney (L'Etranger and La Peste), as police officers (L'Etranger, Les Justes, and La Peste, where, like Meursault, Rieux dislikes the police), or as priests (L'Etranger, La Peste). These characters either condemn the hero to death, or are explicitly associated in the hero's mind with the death

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sentence, or they are somehow instruments of imprisonment or death. The priest is of course the surrogate of the ultimate death-dealing judge. With the exception of Pere Paneloux, all of these figures range from unsympathetic to base in character from the hero's or author's point of view. Almost all the older men in Camus' works, as a matter of fact, possess a generally unpleasant character. Among the minor ones: the patricians in Caligula; the old asthmatic in La Peste who spends his life counting peas, and the old man in the same novel who lures cats to his apartment building and then spits on them from the balcony; the old people at the wake in L'Etranger, who make sucking sounds with their cheeks and who appear to be there to judge Meursault.

Thus the basic character and situation pattern can be summarized as follows: the young hero (twenty-five to thirty-eight years of age) who murders and/or suffers violent death; the mother-wife-sweetheart-sister who is either directly involved in the hero's death and/or is killed, or dies, or remains to suffer the consequences of the hero's death; the father or father-figure who directly or otherwise condemns to death or helps to bring about the condemnation. The other characters, few in number, are of relatively little importance, with the exception of the figure of the nihilist (Nada, Stepan, Cottard, and Caligula), whose significance will be taken up in connection with the shooting in L'Etranger.

The main impulse in Camus' creativity and the shape that it takes in his works thus seems to belong to a classic psychological category. Embedded in the character and plot structure of his works is the fatal attraction of the mother, the condemnation by the father, and the rebellion of the son. The incest leitmotiv that threads discreetly through most of Camus' works breaks out into the open in Caligula and finds its most regressive expression in Le Malentendu, in which the son returns to the mother's house, is put to sleep and then drowned by her. Casual remarks made by Camus or one of his characters take on new meaning when seen in this light: in Noces, for example, he says of Italy: "Je ne m'etonne plus que l'Italie soit la terre des incestes, ou du moins, ce qui est plus significatif, des incestes avoues. Car le chemin qui va de la beaute a l'immoralite est tortueux, mais certain" (p. 84). When he wishes to give an example of a monstrous crime in Le MIythe de Sisyphe he thinks of incest first (p. 47). In "L'Enigme" (L'Ete) it comes up again.5 And Camus lets Meursault give us, in his innocent way, a key

6 "Mais enfin, on peut aussi ecrire sur l'inceste sans pour autant s'6tre prcipit6 sur sa malheureuse sceur et je n'ai lu nulle part que Sophocle eit jamais supprim6 son pbre et d6shonor6 sa mere" (p. 132). Camus' protest is perfectly justified. No attempt is being made here to psychoanalyze Camus. I am simply pointing out what I consider to be an important fact, and one that helps to understand Camus' symbolism.

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to character, novel, and creator when he makes him say that "tous les Etres sains avaient plus ou moins souhait6 la mort de ceux qu'ils aimaient" (p. 94). It is part of the ironic joke in L'Etranger that Meur- sault is convicted not only for matricide but also for parricide. One last point in this connection: Camus' heroes go to their deaths with almost absolute willingness, and even a certain obstinacy; when they struggle innocently against death, as in the case of Rieux, Tarrou, and Diego, it is with the knowledge that they are sacrificing themselves. They give life for life. We recall that this, according to Camus, is the condition of remaining faithful to the idea of revolt. Thus, out of an

essentially (Edipal impulse arises not only the center of Camus' fictional world, but one of the most creative concepts of our times, the idea of revolt outlined in L'Homme revolte.

A link between this psychological impulse and the fictional world and world view of Camus is to be found in his use of two ancient mythic religious symbols, the sea and the sun, which are clearly associated in his mind-perhaps even consciously-with the mother and the father. In most of Camus' works sea and sun are constant and dominant sym- bols. A recent article on Camus by S. John makes it unnecessary to state the main features of Camus' use of these symbols. As he says, they come naturally to a writer raised on the shores of North Africa. In Camus' essays "allusions to the sun constantly evoke a tonality of violence" (this has to be qualified); "the sea features... as the con- stant solace.... "6 John examines briefly the role of the symbols in

L'Etranger, La Peste, Le Malentendu, and L'Etat de Siege, and he points out one of the symbolic overtones of the bathing episodes-the longing for freedom. John's study leaves only one thing unsaid, the nature of the relation of these two symbols to character patterns in Camus' works, and to the mythic and religious tradition out of which these symbols arise.

It hardly needs to be said that sea and sun are religious symbols of great antiquity. In most religious myths water symbolizes the pri- mordial substance out of which all forms arise and to which they even- tually return. It possesses magical purifying powers: in it one is healed and reborn. Through immersion in water everything is dissolved, all forms disintegrate, all history is abolished; nothing subsists from what had existed before immersion. It is the equivalent of death on the human level, and of catastrophic events (the deluge) on the cosmic level. He who is immersed in water arises free of sin, without history, worthy of receiving a new revelation and of beginning a new life. While the sun does not enjoy the same prestige and antiquity in religious myths as water and sea, it is nonetheless an important and recurrent symbol in

6 FS, ix (Jan. 1955), 42-53.

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most of them. It is the male principle, guaranteeing fecundity. It is also a symbol of God and true knowledge. It is assigned both destructive and fecundating powers. It has been worshipped as the "Lord of Judgment," and it is believed by some that a simple look at the setting sun can cause death.7

This is not meant to imply that Camus' use of sun and sea symbolism stems from an a priori knowledge of their ancient religious history. On the contrary, Camus employs these symbols in a simple, natural, some- times almost primitive way. Furthermore the feelings inspired by these phenomena, and the psychological and dramatic functions of the sym- bols in Camus' works closely parallel those associated with them in religious myths from their very beginnings. In Noces, sea, sun, earth, wind are all personified by Camus; through the richness of the sensual excitation they provoke in him he has "un jour de noces avec le monde" (p. 21). Plunging into the sea is a means of satisfying the longing that earth and sea feel for each other (p. 18). He belongs to a race born of the sun and the sea (p. 26). This sexual union is paralleled by that of sun and earth and of man and earth (p. 64). For the author of Noces, Plotinian Unity is expressed in terms of sun and sea (p. 61). In general, cosmic phenomena inspire him with sensations of love, fertility, youth, in short, with the glory of natural life.

In Le Malentendu, Martha's nostalgia for a land close to the sea and under the sun causes Jan's death-by drowning. (This is the only clear instance of the mortal effect of water in Camus' works, but it is essential for a complete understanding of its role in L'Etranger.) In La Peste the plague hits Oran under the hot sun of spring and summer and the beaches are inaccessible to the quarantined Oranais. As autumn and winter come, the plague spends itself under "un soleil sans force" (p. 335). It is at precisely this moment that Rieux and Tarrou consecrate their "heure ... de l'amitie" in a sacramental swim in the Mediterranean. In general, however, mythic symbolism plays a minor role in La Peste. This is not true of L'Etat de Siege, in which the sea is represented as the mother and signifies freedom; the comet (a sun symbol) is a sign of the plague, and the wind from the sea brings final liberation from it. There is no cosmic symbolism in Les Justes, but in L'Ete, Camus' latest volume of essays, it reappears in numerous pieces ("Le Minotaure ou La Halte d'Oran" [1939], "L'Enigme," "Retour a Tipasa," and "La Mer au plus pres."). Here the sun symbolizes the ultimate intuitive vision of the artist: "Chaque artiste, sans doute, est a la recherche de sa verite. S'il est grand, chaque ceuvre l'en rapproche, ou, du moins, gravite encore plus pres de ce centre, soleil enfoui, oiu tout doit venir bruler un jour" (p. 138).

T M. Eliade, Traite d'histoire des religions (Paris, 1948).

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Many of the sea themes of Noces are repeated and developed: "La riviere et le fleuve passent, la mer passe et demeure. C'est ainsi qu'il faudrait aimer, fidele et fugitif. J'epouse la mer" (p. 174). "Grande mer, toujours labouree, toujours vierge, ma religion avec la nuit! Elle nous lave et nous rassassie dans ses sillons steriles, elle nous libere et nous tient debout" (p. 187).

As in traditional religious and mythic symbolism, then, in Camus' works the sea bears the attributes of the mother: it signifies fertility, life, freedom, love, sexuality, and regeneration; it also stands for death, however. The sun, on the other hand, has the characteristics of the father: it weds sea and earth, it is the image of truth, it overpowers and destroys. Together, they are symbolic representations of the forces which dominate the fictional heroes and heroines of Camus' novels and nonhistorical plays.

What has been said thus far makes it clear that any reading of L'Etran- ger that approaches it as if it were a piece of realistic fiction is bound to fail. What the defense attorney says of the trial is an apt description of the novel: "Voila l'image de ce proces. Tout est vrai et rien n'est vrai!" Its language tends to be realistic, and its characters and setting are drawn from the real world; but as a whole, the novel is a parable and must be so interpreted. The main theme developed in the novel is death and the meaning of life that comes out of a confrontation with death. Linked to the main theme are a number of subsidiary themes, which, like the theme of death, run through most of the works of Camus: the absurd, revolt, time, lucidity; isolation, estrangement, imprisonment; the dignity and divinity of man; fraternity and solidarity, love; innocence, justice, humiliation. At one point or another in L'Etranger all of these subsidiary themes are developed as variations on the main theme.

The hero and narrator of L'Etranger has an occupation given him by the author expressly to universalize the man and his situation. He is a clerk, the clerk of Le Mythe de Sisyphe who one day discovers the ab- surdity of his existence. The choice of a clerk as hero is ironic; the face- less, almost anonymous office worker, characteristic of contemporary Western society, plays the role of the traditional hero who faced death on the path to a new life and revelation.

Part I depicts the condition of absurdity without consciousness. Meursault is "l'homme quotidien," or "l'aventurier du quotidien," as Camus calls the absurd hero in Le Mythe de Sisyphe. Being a "quotidian adventurer," every day, indeed every moment, is important to him; and thus, the daily account, the precise time schedule; thus the style, in which, as Sartre has pointed out, each sentence is a present.8 He is

8 "Explication de l'Etranger," Cahiers du Sud (fevrier 1943).

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almost pure sentience: he hears, touches, sees, tastes, smells; each sense is acute, and his reports are vivid, but while he has vague intuitions and premonitions, he knows nothing. His pleasures are a succession of sensual experiences: smoking, eating, swimming, sexual love. For the absurd hero all experiences are equivalent, so long as the subject is aware; the present, and the succession of presents before a sensitive consciousness is his ideal. Like Don Juan, one of the four types of the absurd man, Meur- sault lives according to an ethic of quantity, "au contraire du saint que tend vers la qualite."9 It can be objected, of course, that Meursault is neither a Don Juan, nor a conqueror, nor an actor, nor a creator, and that his experiences in Part I are hardly worth making a fuss about. But that is just the point. In a world in which everything and everyone is privileged and therefore equivalent, smoking a cigarette and clipping mineral salts advertisements rank with the ecstasy of loving, or reading Shakespeare. In an absurd world not only all sensations, but all acts are equivalent. Writing a letter for a pimp who wants to punish a cheat- ing prostitute-mistress is no better and no worse than any other act, including marriage. No hierarchy of values exists in a world in which one can deny anything but "ce chaos, ce hasard roi et cette divine equiva- lence qui nait de l'anarchie."10

In Part I Meursault is surrounded by what Camus calls "[des] murs absurdes."1' The exterior world is dense, foreign, and hostile. It refuses to be known, although it can be described. In addition, there is some- thing inhuman and mechanical about what Meursault perceives. In Le Mythe de Sisyphe Camus uses the image of a man seen gesticulating through the glass window of a telephone booth to communicate this idea. In L'Etranger the idea is expressed not only by the succession of events in the narrator's life, but also more directly in the character of the petite automate, who appears suddenly for no apparent reason and then disappears, only to return during the trial. She sits opposite Meursault at Celeste's restaurant: "Elle avait des gestes saccades .... Elle s'est assise et a consulte fievreusement la carte.... Elle... a commande immediatement tous ses plats d'une voix precipitee ... " She takes out a radio program twelve pages long and checks every single program listed. She finishes her meal. "Puis elle s'est levee, a remis sa jaquette avec les memes gestes precis d'automate et elle est partie.... J'ai pens6 qu'elle etait bizarre... " The word bizarre appears two or three times in this novel: the first time, it is used by Marie to describe Meur- sault, two pages before the appearance of the odd lady. In an author as

9 Le Mythe de Sisyphe, pp. 88, 100-101. Camus had already remarked (p. 86) that the absurd hero "par la simple quantite des exp6riences battrait tous les records.!!

10 Ibid., p. 73. u Ibid., p. 24.

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careful as Camus, this is probably intentional, his aim being to mirror Meursault in the image of the petite automate.

Three events occur in the "succession of presents" in Part I that add new dimensions to the absurd condition of Meursault's existence: the death and burial of the mother, the meeting with Marie at the seashore, and the shooting of the Arab, each of which occurs under a broiling sun. We have already seen how, on the level of the unconscious, sea, mother, sweetheart, and sexuality, and on the other hand, sun, father, and death, are linked in Camus' works. We have also seen that sea and sun are transformed into symbolic entities that control the actions and lives of

many of Camus' characters. In L'Etranger sea and sun lead directly to the shooting of the Arab, attracting or pushing him at every turn toward the isolated stretch of beach where Meursault says the sun made him kill the Arab. When the prosecuting attorney hears Raymond Sintes say that it was by chance that Meursault was on the beach on that Sunday, he says that "le hasard avait deja beaucoup de mefaits sur la conscience dans cette histoire." Like so many of the statements in L'Etranger this one is ironic. The man who makes it obviously does not believe it. The author, however, intends it to be a true statement of fact. For in sea, sun, and chance we have Camus' equivalents of the Greek notion of doom. Putting it baldly, one can say that it is the irresistible attraction of the sea which brings Meursault to the beach, where he meets Marie Cardona, and where under the impact of the sun's violent heat and light he murders the Arab. Thus the sea is not, as it would appear to be, only sensual pleasure, or a symbol of freedom or rebirth, but also an instru- ment of death. The fact that Marie and Meursault go to the beach the day after the mother's burial is one of the items of evidence that leads to the conviction. So the Mother, Marie, the sea, and the sun and the various symbols of authority and avenging justice join forces to produce the murder of the Arab and the death sentence for Meursault. This is a trap as neatly laid as the one that finally brings CEdipus to the cross- roads before his return to Thebes. The murder of the Arab is what Camus calls a "meurtre de fatalite."2 XWhat precedes the shooting is natural and logical; why it should terminate in murder remains a mystery that Camus does not try to explain, except by symbolic representations of unknowable forces. Similarly in the (Edipus story: up to the meeting at the crossroads everything is understandable. Why, however, (Edipus should be there at the precise moment when Laius goes by is unfathom- able.

The murder episode has puzzled and annoyed many readers: they 12 "Un esprit p6entr6 de l'idee de l'absurde admet le meurtre de fatalite, il ne saurait re-

cevoir A aucun titre le meurtre de raisonnement" ("Le Meurtre et l'absurde," Emp6docle [avril 1949], p. 22).

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have either declared the act unmotivated or tried to find some rational

psychological motive to explain it. The truth may be that we ask the wrong question when we ask, "Why did Meursault kill the Arab?" and that it would be more worth while to ask, "What does the murder mean?" Camus, one of the most self-conscious and intelligent writers of our times, was certainly aware of the mystery that surrounds the murder. He could easily have chosen, for example, to make Meursault kill in obvious self-defense. But he did not. Instead, at the moment of the act he blinded both hero and reader in an explosion of metaphors. (After using only fifteen metaphors in eighty-three pages Camus uses twenty- five in four pages.)13 It is a hallucinatory and cataclysmic event that takes place: time stops, the world shakes, the sky opens up and rains down fire. After eighty pages of plain prose, Camus suddenly resorts to poetry because in the confrontation with death the hero encounters what is for Camus the ultimate mystery of the universe.

If one asks, "Why did Meursault kill the Arab?" only one answer is possible: because of the sun, the answer given by Meursault. Chance brought him to the beach on that particular day and the sun made him pull the trigger. If one asks, "What does the murder mean?" then a different order of answers can be found, in the context of the novel as a whole as well as in the context of Camus' thought and works in general. In terms of the structure of the book, it means that the climax has been reached; everything that precedes prepared the act, and everything that follows is an epilogue-a judgment (the trial episode) and an interpretation of the act (the last chapter). The sudden transformation of the style at the moment of the act is intended to bring the intensity of the episode to maximum pitch. In terms of the development of the hero, it is the moment at which consciousness begins. The experience of death is the catastrophe that illuminates the human condition. From this point on, Meursault is no longer a purely sentient consciousness. He begins to understand, to reflect. He no longer feels; he also knows. "J'ai compris," he says, "que j'avais detruit l'equilibre du jour. ."; comprendre, in that sense, is an uncommon term in the first part of the novel. Camus' use of the sun as the symbol of the ultimate vision of truth in L'Ete makes it probable that here too the sun, with its terrible brilliance, is what lights the central truth, that is, death. Each of the three meetings with death-the burial of the mother, the murder, and the trial-takes place under the hottest sun of the year. (In the trial episode Camus plays ironically with the idea when he has the prosecut- ing attorney say that Meursault's guilt will be proved under "l'aveu- glante clarte des faits d'abord et ensuite dans l'eclairage sombre" of his

13 W. M. Frohock, "Camus: Image, Influence and Sensibility," YFS, lr, iv, 93-94. This count was made in the unrevised edition of L'Etranger.

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criminal mind.) Why Meursault kills and why he dies remains a mys- tery, however, just as for Camus, the universal and eternal murder of men, i.e., the reality of death, is a humiliating and incomprehensible phenomenon. In social terms, for Camus, murder, or death, is the door through which man enters history. Without death there would be no human history: "L'injustice, la fugacite, la mort se manifestent dans l'histoire. En les repoussant, on repousse l'histoire elle-meme" (L'Homme revolte, p. 357). The same idea is expressed in the Lettres a un ami alle- mand, written shortly after L'Etranger: "Mais vous avez fait ce qu'il fallait [the Germans went to war], nous sommes entres dans l'Histoire" (p. 80). In other words, without death men would simply be part of an eternal natural order; with death and the awareness of death human history and tragedy begin. This is the paradigm of Meursault's devel- opment. In metaphysical terms the murder is an explosion of revolt against the very forces that bring him to his act, and in particular, against the sun. Everything that Camus has said about deicide, the implicit identification of sun and divinity in his works, all the sun symbolism in L'Etranger and most of his other works, and the imagery of the murder episode, in which the sun, and not the Arab, is the enemy, suggest this meaning. It is further suggested by the fact that, according to the time- table, the act takes place on Sunday, the Lord's day, a day which-we have been told before the murder-the murderer does not like. In this respect, the act is similar to one that Camus finds particularly striking in Les Chants de Maldoror, in which Maldoror-a revolte, according to Camus-attacks the Creator. On the realistic level, the act is repeated in prison, when Meursault assaults the chaplain. Finally, in the moral terms of Le Mythe de Sisyphe, the murder is the logical consequence of what Camus calls a "mal de l'esprit," the absurd sensibility. If all acts are equivalent then murder is inevitable and an indifferent matter.

With the murder Meursault becomes a revolte. It is the fate of the revolte to kill both God and men.l4 According to Camus, revolt in the twentieth century has been betrayed and transformed into uncreative nihilism; Stalinism, Fascism, Dadaism, Surrealism, Formalism are some of its illegitimate progeny. This type of nihilism, which issues in indis- criminate murder, is incarnated on the social level in Camus' works by Nada, Caligula, Stepan, and Cottard, whose final act is meant to be an illustration of Breton's declaration that the simplest Surrealist act con- sists in going down into the street, revolver in hand, and firing at random into a crowd.15 (On the artistic level, Camus typifies nihilistic formalism

14 "Tuer Dieu et batir une eglise, c'est le mouvement constant et contradictoire de la revolte" (L'Homme revolte, p. 131). "II hait la peine de mort parce qu'elle est l'image de la condition humaine et, en meme temps, il marche vers le crime" (p. 83).

15 A. Breton, Les Manifestes du surrealisme (Paris, 1946), p. 94.

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in Joseph Grand, who is so obsessed with the formal aspects of com-

position that he is unable to complete more than the first sentence of his novel, which he finally burns.) The true rebel, however, is distinguished from the nihilist by his willingness to give life for life.16 Ivan Kaliayev is the key: "Celui qui accepte de mourir, de payer une vie par une vie, quelles que soient ses negations, affirme du meme coup une valeur

qui le depasse lui-meme en tant qu'individu historique ... Kaliayev et ses freres triomphaient du nihilisme."'7 Like Kaliayev, Meursault af- firms this fundamental value by accepting from the start the necessity and logic of paying with his life: "J'etais coupable, je payais, on ne

pouvait rien me demander de plus" (p. 166). To this value is added another, the growing and finally absolute lucidity of the hero.

The last two parts of L'Etranger act out the creation of these values. There are two distinct developments in Part II: the first is in Meursault, who begins to examine himself and his relations with others at the same time that the official interrogation begins; the second is the trial. Meur- sault tells the prosecuting attorney at the beginning of the interrogation that he had lost the habit "of questioning" himself, that he never had

very much to say. This is the Meursault of Part I. In Part II the cir- cumstances compel him to examine himself; the very thing that brings him death forces him into the state of lucidity in which he awaits his execution. And at one point in the interrogation he says: "II me semblait que je n'avais jamais autant parle" (p. 97), which is absolutely accurate. He begins to reflect; reflichir, a verb that appears rarely in Part I, turns up numerous times in Part II. He becomes interested in himself: "Meme sur un banc d'accuse, il est toujours interessant d'entendre parler de soi" (p. 139). He begins to attach some value to his being and objects when his attorney follows the tradition of speaking in the first person for the accused: "Moi, j'ai pens6 que c'etait m'ecarter encore de l'affaire, me reduire a zero et, en un certain sens, se substituer d moi" (p. 147). He begins to feel at home in his prison cell, something he could not do in his apartment. He even feels that he could easily live in the trunk of a tree. As time-called "[le] pire ennemi" in Le Mythe de Sisyphe- begins to thin out in the structure of the book, he literally kills it in prison by losing his sense of time. With his growing ability to see things under the aspect of eternity, time evaporates. Reflection, however, is accompanied by the development of feelings which, up to the murder, Meursault had not experienced. He says of his attorney: "J'aurais voulu le retenir, lui expliquer que je desirais sa sympathie, non pour 6tre mieux d6fendu, mais, si je puis dire, naturellement" (p. 95). He has

"nl tue et meurt pour qu'il soit clair que le meurtre est impossible" (L'Homme rvoltt, p. 348).

17 Ibid., p. 216.

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"une envie stupide de pleurer" because he knows how detested he is by court and public (p. 127). When Celeste has finished his ineffectual testimony Meursault says that it is the first time in his life that he has wanted to embrace a man. He wishes to explain to the prosecuting attorney "cordially, almost with affection" that he was incapable of feeling regret (p. 143). These are not expressions of overpowering love, certainly, but they are as close as one gets to them in a book consisting in great part of ironic understatement.18 They are the first steps toward the feeling of the "tendre indifference du monde."

The trial itself is an ironic recapitulation of everything that happens in Part I. Like the burial and the murder, it takes place under a violent sun that seems to seek him out: "Les d6bats se sont ouverts avec, au dehors, tout le plein du soleil" (p. 117); "le soleil s'infiltrait par endroits et l'air etait deja etouffant" (p. 118). Every insignificant thing, person, and act of Part I returns with the sun and the mother's burial to con- demn Meursault. The "Cela ne veut rien dire" theme of Part I is turned upside down: everything that happened to him becomes supremely meaningful: the exact time of his mother's burial, the fact that he smoked a cigarette and had a cup of coffee at his mother's wake, that he saw a Fernandel movie, that he agreed to be Raymond's pal, every- thing and everyone form part of the trap set for him. In the end Meur- sault is actually convicted and sentenced to death for matricide and parricide, not homicide. Camus would probably admit that the trial episode is derivative, and that its Kafkaesque quality is not an accident. The crazy logic of the legal proceedings, while more realistic perhaps than what happens in Kafka's book, nevertheless has similar overtones of meaning. Like the problems of death and time, which operate in Camus' works at several levels at once, justice is a theme that he deals with in social and metaphysical terms. In L'Etranger the trial is a par- able of the universal and eternal sentence inflicted on men. It is the supreme injustice committed against men, and, like the illogic of the trial episode, it is incomprehensible.

The last part of the book is an interpretation of what has preceded, a summing up of the knowledge gained. It differs radically from what has preceded. There is practically no irony in it; it is almost all meditation; even the style goes through a partial transformation.19 One new charac- ter, the prison chaplain, appears. Aside from this, nothing happens. Time has stopped completely. Meursault's speculations on death and

18 As Camus says in L'Homme rivoltd (p. 375), "la rEvolte ne peut se passer d'un trange amour" (italics mine).

19 This should be the subject of another paper. It is incorrect to speak of the style of L'Etranger. Much of the style of what I have called Part m differs substantially from that of Parts i-n.

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the meaning of life, and his final rejection of divinity constitute the bulk of the last chapter. Some of the things he has learned are among the commonplaces that Western tragedy has exploited since they were first expressed in Greek tragedy. There is no way out, there is no escape from "la mecanique," there is no "saut hors du rite implacable." We are all condemned to death, and yet there is no more important event in a man's life than death: "rien n'etait plus important qu'une execution capitale ... " (p. 155). There is no God. Life has no transcendent mean- ing, and it is not worth living, but it is all that we have; the only worth- while afterlife would be one in which life on earth could be remembered. If these truths hold him and others prisoner, he in turn possesses them: "Mais du moins, je tenais cette verite autant qu'elle me tenait." In this paraphrase of the Pascalian dictum the novel and the career of the hero express their final meaning. The mood of the last page is tranquil. Having discovered the link of solidarity with all men-death-Meursault opens up "pour la premiere fois" to the tender indifference of the world: "De l'eprouver si pareil a moi, si fraternel enfin, j'ai senti que j'avais ete heureux, et que je l'etais encore" (p. 171). Through death he breaks out of the "murs absurdes," and is no longer a stranger. The "je l'etais encore," as Camus would put it, echoes the "All is well" of Greek tragedy. Murder, injustice, condemnation to death, lucidity: this is the route of Camus' tragic hero, whose career, in its understated, plebeian way is patterned after that of tragic heroes of antiquity. The fate of Meursault is the universal condition of men, whose history is precisely death, injustice, and their awareness of them.

The novel ends with what seems to be a paradox. Having finally ex- perienced the tender indifference of the world and discovered his bond with men, that is, having finally experienced love, in his last sentence the hero expresses the hope that crowds of spectators will witness his execution and greet him with cries of hatred. This does not make sense unless it is seen in the light of the concept of the homme-dieu that Camus defines in Le Mythe de Sisyphe. By the end of the novel, Meursault is an homme-dieu: to use Camus' terms, he has been duped (the trial), will be "crucified" (the guillotine), he does not serve an immortal being, he has denied (killed) God, and thus become God himself, he is persuaded of a death without an afterlife, and thus he has realized the life eternal of which the Gospel speaks.20 His death, like Kirilov's suicide, will be a pedagogical act. "Kirilov doit donc se tuer par amour de l'humanite. II doit montrer a ses freres une voie royale et difficile sur laquelle il sera le premier "(Le Mythe de Sisyphe, p. 147). But this is also the role of

2O See the chapter on Kirilov in Le Mythe de Sisyphe.

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another sacrificial hero, the Dieu-homme who dies for the love of men and who, by his death, shows them a new path. And it is Camus who reveals the connection between the two figures. Christ, he says, is in a sense (if there is no Paradise) "celui qui a realise la condition la plus absurde. I1 n'est pas le Dieu-homme, mais l'homme-dieu" (p. 145). Essentially, then, his fate is like that of Meursault. And it is only this essential simi- larity that can explain the last words of L'Etranger. We are invited, in other words, to recall the last moments of the Christ, whose crucifixion was preceded by cries of hatred from the crowds. This is the consumma- tion of the homme-dieu's career, Meursault's as well as Christ's. Through his death, Meursault gains and exemplifies a new vision of life, indeed a new life. And either consciously or unconsciously, Camus, in the last paragraph, alludes to the notion of rebirth in death when he has Meur- sault say, "Si pres de la mort, maman devait s'y sentir libere et prete a tout revivre." This is precisely how Meursault feels. Thus Camus was not being as paradoxical as he claimed when he wrote: "I1 m'est arrive de dire aussi, et toujours paradoxalement, que j'avais essaye de figurer dans mon personnage le seul Christ que nous meritions."21 Meursault is a Christ figure, just as he is an CEdipus and Sisyphus figure. And this brings us back to the starting point of this study, the relationship of time, theme, and structure in the novel. For part of the historic mission of Christ was precisely the transformation of time and death into eternity and a new life. It also brings us back to names, characters, and symbols: one may well ask, for example, whether the predilection for the name Marie and names that echo Marie, whether the centrality of the mother, the ritualistic bathing episodes, the concept of the secular saint, are not related to the Christ figure. In short, is it not Christ-an absurd Christ, it is true-and not Sisyphus, who is hidden behind the developing hero of Camus' fictions? But this is a question that can only be answered by Camus himself.

This study leaves unsaid much, perhaps most, of what can be said about L'Etranger, and if it suggests anything, it is that Camus' slim novel is a rich and complex work, whose artistry and thought we have not yet fully appreciated. It is not only one of the most significant books of our times in the ideas and feelings that it incarnates, but it is also, despite its exterior simplicity, an intricate artistic mechanism, which reveals more of its wealth of meaning and complexity each time it is read.

WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY

Middletown, Conn. 21 L'Etranger (New York, 1955), Avant-Propos, p. viii.

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