The Story In Brief:
A French Algerian office worker in his 20’s, Mersualt, learns his mother has passed away. He goes out to the retirement home where she spent her last days and attends the funeral. Later, he makes friends with a petty white criminal, Raymond, who lives in the same apartment block as himself. This man beats his Arab girlfriend up and the girlfriend’s brother seeks revenge. There is a fight on the beach. The brother has a knife, and cuts Raymond, who seeks to retaliate with a gun. Things cool down. Mersault is walking alone along the beach some time after the initial confrontation when he spots the brother, lying in the sand. Mersault remembers he still has the gun, given to him by Raymond for safekeeping. He shoots and kills the brother. Mersault is arrested, tried, found guilty and sentenced to death.
The novel has two parts: events leading up to the shooting; and events subsequent to Mersault’s arrest.
I’ve been reading A Dying Colonialism by Frantz Fanon at the same time as The Outsider. The two authors have much in common. Camus was born in Algeria in 1913 and spent his formative years there. Fanon was born in 1925 in Martinique and spent time in Algeria as a doctor. Camus was active in the French Resistance to the German Occupation. Fanon was active in the Algerian Resistance to the French Occupation.
Some of the riddles of The Outsider: Why did Mersualt kill the Arab? Why is he so calm about the consequences afterwards? Why does he not better his defence by pretending the death of his mother affected him profoundly – boost his chances of avoiding the death penalty by being more emotional about it?
The Outsider is a short book, only 120 pages, written in a plain, easy to read language. The world of the book is seen through the consciousness of the main character, Mersault. The text is written in the first person ‘I’. Its innovation at the time was to set down on paper aspects of human consciousness and feeling that were would not at the time of publication have been conventional. The character Mersault displays an emotional honesty that can shock: examples range from Mersault not dwelling particularly on his mother’s death to being relatively unperturbed by the thought of his impending execution, to killing the man and not dwelling particularly on the act nor feeling particularly guilty about it. In thinking in this manner Mersault moves ‘beyond the pale’ of conventional society around him – he makes himself a stranger to these conventions.
Camus seemed to want to arrive at a point in the novel where a man faces death by execution and to suggest that, if life is an infinite ‘now’ then we are most alive who understand how precious each day, each moment, each sensation in each moment is.
Reservations:
The Outsider seems to elevate Mersault, other characters are erased. The girlfriend of the Arab hardly features. There seems thematic maladroitness to Camus’ lack of engagement with her plight or that of her brother, respectively beaten and killed. (I accept the counterweight to this argument is that the character, Mersault is similarly disengaged at the death of his own mother). In contrast, Fanon’s discussion of the veil in A Dying Colonialism and his brilliant description of the changing role of Arab women in the resistance movement and how the veil was used by them as part of that resistance is magisterial.
I would argue that there is an implied judgement rendered by the author that today would be impossible: the causal sidelining of the world of the Arab in Algeria and the use of the two Arabs- the brother and sister – as plot devices for whom no sympathy is lent by the author would not work for today’s global literary audience.
That said, The Outsider is a great work. Thought-provoking. Poetic in its ordinariness. Here are some of my favourite lines from it:
P115 [ On the priest visiting prior to Mersault’s execution] The priest was beginning to bore me.
P117 [On belief in the afterlife] Everybody had that wish at all times, but that had no more importance than wishing to be rich, or to swim very fast, or to have a better-shaped mouth. It was in the same order of things.
P118 [ On the priest visiting prior to Mersault’s execution] None of his certainties was worth one strand of a woman’s hair.
P119 All alike would be condemned to die one day.
P120 [thinking about his mother’s last days] Mother must have felt like someone on the brink of freedom
P120 I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe.