Anu Kumar - The stories behind the story of Albert Camus’s ‘The Stranger’
Albert Camus and the Making of a Literary Classic
Alice Kaplan
Reviewed by Anu Kumar
Alice Kaplan
Reviewed by Anu Kumar
When Albert Camus’s L’Etranger was
published in France in early 1942, no one, least of all its 29-year-old author,
could have guessed the impact the book would have, then and in the future. The
Outsider / The Stranger (Stuart Gilbert’s English
translation, published in 1946, had different titles in different countries)
wasn’t exactly a best-seller in its early years. It came to have a life of its
own, but oftentimes, there was no separating the book from its writer.
It wasn’t just how the
book came to be written, or the fact that Camus wrote it as the Second World
War broke out, but because of the aura that surrounded Camus soon after the
book’s publication. It coincided with the recognition of Camus as a key figure
of the French resistance.
The Stranger continues to have a vivid afterlife. It
became synonymous with existentialism, to Camus’s own chagrin, and it won its
author fame and notoriety in equal measure. Henri Cartier-Bresson’s photos of
Camus – the most enduring one with Camus in a trench coat, looking sideways at the camera, a
cigarette dangling from his lips – were all taken between 1944 and 1945, after
the War, and after the book was published (when Camus’s favoured Gauloises were
once again available).
Intriguing in its
contradictions: The Stranger, that sparest of novels, retains its ambiguity
75 years after its publication. It’s a novel born of its times and yet
enduring. It has been analysed at various levels: for its characters and the
motives – baffling and intriguing – that drive them. What drives Meursault in
his life, and what makes him commit the act that condemns him; the disbelief on
the part of the magistrate and the chaplain, their (absurd) entreaties in the
name of religion; its unidimensional female characters, not just Marie, but
even Meursault’s dead mother; and then, the silent Arab in the novel, whose
passivity has, however, in recent times, evoked a reaction, especially a
novelistic one.
In her book on The
Stranger, Alice Kaplan doesn’t attempt to answer every question. It
can, almost like the very book it seeks to unravel, be read in many ways. As a
biography of a book, and of its author during the time of its writing. It’s
also a primer on what makes a great classic, or what makes a writer, write a
great classic. It is also about how a book comes into being. As Kaplan
demonstrates, a classic is never created in isolation; it is propped up by its
admirers, its supporters and an entire team of adherents. Camus, in this sense
was fortunate. It was fortune, hard-earned, and richly deserved.
In mid-1940, when
Camus finally completed the manuscript in a lonely hotel room in Paris, it was
the book he just had to write. The Stranger “was a book he
found in himself, rather than writing a book about himself.” It was fiction
that was in him, Kaplan writes, waiting to be discovered.
The Stranger was not a straightforward book by any
measure. It came out of Camus’s heartbreak and disappointments, within himself,
and his own creative life. Both his lungs had already been affected by
tuberculosis, his first marriage to Simone Hie had failed, and he faced a life
without the prospect of a steady job. Camus had been published twice already, but
he was an Algerian writer and this made him somewhat “provincial”. Paris was
the scene of literary activity and recognition, but Paris seemed farther away
than ever at that time.
Despair and hope: For all this, in early
1939, Camus set out to write an oeuvre; to fashion a literary legacy for
himself. The Stranger would form the first of his writings:
part of a trilogy that included the play Caligula and the long
essay, The Myth of Sisyphus. These emerged out of Camus’s concerns
with the philosophy of the absurd – that freedom is meaningless, and doesn’t
signify anything for the universe remains essentially indifferent, his interest
in writing “negative fiction”, and his own life, growing up in a working-class
neighbourhood, Belcourt, in Algiers. Algeria was a French colony till its
independence in 1962.
Kaplan maps out the
influences on Camus – literal and personal. His childhood was largely “silent”,
and spent with his mother and uncle, both deaf, and so language was reduced to
a minimum, largely referencing objects, never abstractions. But it was
precisely this period of disappointments that gave him reason for hope. A
lifelong idol, Andre Malraux, writer, activist, spoke against the growing
threats of Fascism while on a visit to Algeria. Camus’s mentors, besides his
teacher of philosophy, Jean Grenier, also included Pascal Pia, a radical
journalist and editor. Camus went to work for Pia’s leftist newspaper, Alger-Republicain;
and this was the beginning of a lifelong friendship between them.
Camus reported and
wrote of the criminal trials he witnessed in court, a couple of which Kaplan
details, such as the trial following the murder of a conservative Islamic
theologian. The trials and the courtroom scenes gave Camus several insights
into ethnic tensions that prevailed in Algeria, and the absurdity of the
justice system; French justice only appeared to heighten the injustices of
colonialism… read more:
see also
Download a copy of Camus' famous essay: Reflections on the Guillotine
