STRANGE STRANGER:

Albert Camus: Camus has overtaken Sartre to become the popular hero of existentialism. Now even his views on Algeria have outgrown Sartre (Paul Barker, December 2003, The Prospect)

Camus's first and best-known novel, L'Étranger, written in his twenties, is a short moral tale, in the tradition of Voltairean contes, about a meaningless ("absurd") murder. Its flat short sentences have a permanent appeal to adolescent angst. It was first published by Gallimard in 1942, in a Paris under German occupation. L'Étranger is Gallimard's all-time bestseller; the revenue helps them continue to dominate French literary publishing. Far more people read the novels of Camus than those of his contemporaries - friends, rivals and eventual enemies - Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. One grubby piece of evidence is Plateforme, a novel by France's pornographer-in-chief Michel Houellebecq. This tale of sex tourism opens with a parody of L'Étranger's plot and its deadpan, much-quoted first sentences: "Today my mother died. Or perhaps it was yesterday, I'm not sure." Houellebecq's anti-hero is called Renault; Camus's outsider was "Meursault." The clunky automobile cross-reference is intended to show, I suppose, how robotic western man has become since Camus became known, to his annoyance, as "existentialism's No 2 man," tagging along behind Sartre. [...]

Camus's taste for moral fables means he is often compared with Orwell. They admired each other's work and had friends like Koestler in common. The comparison with Orwell became closer after Camus published La Peste in 1947. He began work on this novel during the war, but broke off to edit the resistance newspaper Combat. The spread of plague through Oran, and the betrayals and compromises it brings, parallel French behaviour under the Germans. As the plague ebbs, Dr Rieux notes that this is no tale of "final victory" against "terror and its relentless onslaughts." Watching the celebrations, "he knew what those jubilant crowds did not know but could have learned from books: that the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good." It only bides its time, as the first years of the 21st century have demonstrated.

In his long-running postwar battle with the French Communist party and its innumerable fellow travellers, Camus said, "It's better to be wrong by killing no one than to be right with mass graves."

I confess never having understood how The Stranger can be read as a moral fable when it effectively argues against the existentialism that Camus espoused.

Posted by Orrin Judd at December 18, 2003 9:04 PM