i was in ninth grade when i popped my dubbed copy of the cure’s standing on a beach…the singles into the cassette player as my dad drove me somewhere i don’t remember now. this was a little act of rebellion because, as the son of two preachers, i was supposed to be a role model for the church kids by listening to only christian rock. but robert smith’s lyrics were obscure enough to me that i didn’t think my dad would notice. i was wrong. when smith sang that line about it all meaning “absolutely nothing,” my dad said:
“this is existential crap.”
i didn’t know what existential meant so i asked him and he told me kierkegaard.
within a week i had read the sickness unto death, and not long after that i figured out, with the help of the guy at my local used bookstore who eventually became my first employer, that it was camus’ the stranger that had inspired the lyrics that provoked my dad’s outburst, and with that, kierkegaard and camus were my favorite writers, at least until tenth grade when i discovered dostoyevsky, nietzsche, and kafka.
in other words, albert camus was my adolescent rebellion. i even learned to read him in french.
i always thought my adolescent rebellion was pretty tame, a reflection, i guess, of how much i liked my parents and how little desire i had to go against there wishes for me. but then last week i reread the stranger for the first time in probably 10 years, and it occurred to me that i might have been more of a rebel than i thought, because i realized while rereading it that i had devoted my adolescent rebellion to a book that was not very good.
my french is now way too rusty, so i read it in a new-ish american translation i hadn’t read before, and i think it’s a good translation, so i’m not blaming that, though i’m not thrilled with the rendering of the first line:
Aujourd’hui, maman est morte. Ou peut-être hier, je ne sais pas.
becomes
Maman died today. Or yesterday, maybe, I don’t know.
i’m not a translator, but i don’t understand why it can’t just be:
Today, maman [or even my mom] died. Or maybe yesterday, I don’t know.
my version functions fine in english and reflects the structure of camus’ sentences. but it isn’t a fight i would get into. what we can all agree on is that it is, and remains, a great first line. what we can’t agree on is what the hell it has to do with the book.
of course, it has to do with the plot of the book and whatnot, but i mean the structure. that first line is in the present tense, and then everything else in the first chapter is in the past. the same thing happens with the second chapter. and then all the rest of the chapters in the first section are past tense. in the second section it goes back to veering erratically.
the only modes i can think of where this structure makes sense are diaristic and epistolary (or some variation thereon). but this book can be neither, one because there’s a very long lapse between his arrest and his account of imprisonment and trial, and two because the trial hinges on the contents of the first, and if the first had existed in fact, it would have been damning.
a minor quibble, for you maybe but not for me. it makes me wonder what this book is doing in my hands. it’s like the book itself begins with bad faith.
speaking of bad faith — a quibble we can both agree is major:
my dad thinks i'm the next cs lewis
the second half.
i don’t know what i was thinking back when i was liking it. sure, there are passages of real beauty and insight, but these seem even more contrived in light of the most contrived thing of all — camus turns mersault into a simpleton. i could point out a few dozen examples, but here’s one:
“Everything was so natural, so well handled, and so calmly acted out, that i had the ridiculous impression of being ‘one of the family.’”
this is a description of his months of interrogation in prison. now, maybe the interrogations were less bad than he might have imagined they’d be prior to committing murder, but no reasonably bright person would really get the impression, ridiculous or not, of being “one of the family.”
it’s possible that we’re meant to read mersault’s reactions as manifestations of socratic irony, but this raises two questions:
- who is the audience for this irony?
- what is camus’ purpose in using this irony?
see, the minor quibble about form comes back to haunt us, because if the audience is us, how, as in, in what form (how does he presume an audience?), is he addressing us, and if the audience is mersault himself, why the hell would anyone be socratically ironic with himself? although that’s funny.
with regard to the latter question, i can see no purpose for camus to be socratically ironic here. socrates was socratically ironic in service of a truth he really believed in. mersault believes in nothing, and socratic irony in the service of nothing isn’t absurd, it’s ridiculous.
but i was being a little bit socratically ironic there, because i can see one reason for camus to be socratically ironic there — it’s because he doesn’t want to make mersault an ideologue. the problem is, a person who goes to his death for the sake of nothing (in a positive sense) is an ideologue inherently. either that or stupid. to me he just comes across as stupid.
you painted yourself into a corner camus, but i still think you wrote some good lines, had some great ideas, and were way better than sartre.
as for my adolescent rebellion — that shit backfired badly. my parents encouraged me to read anything i wanted — even tropic of cancer — and i ended up painting myself into my own corner of being a writer when i could have been, like, a rapper or something. and also, many years later, i was going through my father’s papers from seminary and found a long essay he had written on kierkegaard’s attack upon christendom. was my dad being socratically ironic in the car that day? thanks, dad.
