Entertainment, amusement, diversion: many modern writers would be annoyed if they were reminded that these are also the responsibility of literature. When the Seven Gothic Tales appeared, fashion demanded that a writer should be the critical conscience of society or explore the possibilities of language. Commitment and experimentation are very respectable, of course, but when a fiction is boring, nothing can save it. Isak Dinesen’s stories are sometimes flawed, sometimes too precious, but never boring. In this she was also an anachronism: for her, telling a tale was a form of enchantment, and boredom had to be avoided by any means – suspense, terrifying revelations, extraordinary events, sensationalist details, unlikely apparitions. Fantasy can suddenly submerge a story in a sea of other stories or else causes it to take a more unlikely direction. The reason for all these juggling acts is to surprise the reader, and this she never fails to do. Her tales take place in an imprecise realm, which is not the objective world, but nor is it the world of the fantastic. As happens also in Julio Cortázar’s best stories, her reality draws from both these worlds and is different to each of them.
One of the constants features of her world is the changing identity of characters, who hide behind different names or sexes, and who often lead simultaneously two or more parallel lives. In this world of ontological instability, only objects and the natural world remain the same. Thus, for example, the Renaissance Cardinal in ‘The Deluge at Nordeney’ turns out at the end of the story to be the valet Kasparson, who killed his master and took his place. But the apotheosis of this switching of identities is Pellegrina Leoni, nicknamed Lucifera or Donna Quixotta de La Mancha, whose story appears among myriad of other stories in ‘The Dreamers’. An opera singer who lost her voice through shock in a fire at La Scala in Milan during a performance of Don Giovanni, she has her admirers believe that she is dead. She is helped in her plan by her admirer and her shadow, the fabulously rich Jew Marcus Coroza, who follows her throughout the world, forbidden to speak to her or be seen by her, but always on hand to help her escape should an emergency arise. Pellegrina changes name, personality, lovers, countries – Switzerland, Rome, France – and profession – prostitute, artisan, revolutionary, aristocrat guarding the memory of General Zumalacárregui – and dies, finally, in an Alpine monastery, in a snowstorm, surrounded by four abandoned lovers who knew her at different times and in different guises, and only now discover her peripatetic identity thanks to Marcus Coroza. The Chinese box – stories within stories – is a technique used with admirable skill in this tale to piece together, like a jigsaw puzzle, through accounts that at first seem to have nothing in common, the fragmented and multiple existence of Pellegrina Leoni, will-o’-the-wisp, perpetual actress, made – like all Isak Dinesen’s characters – not of flesh and blood but of dream, fantasy, grace and humour.
Isak Dinesen’s language, like her culture and the topics she deals with, does not correspond to the models of the time; it is also a case apart, an inspired anomaly. When Seven Gothic Tales was published, its language disconcerted Anglo-Saxon critics with its slightly old-fashioned elegance, its exquisite, irreverent nature, its word play and sudden displays of erudition and its divorce from the English language spoken on the streets. But it was also disconcerting because of its humour, the delicate, cheerful, irony with which these tales refer to indescribable cruelty, vileness and savagery as if they were trivial, everyday occurrences. Isak Dinesen’s humour is the great shock absorber of all the excesses of her world – be they human or spiritual – the ingredient that humanises the inhuman and gives a kindly appearance to what, without it, would cause repugnance or panic. There is nothing like reading her to prove the adage that anything can be told as long as one knows how to tell it.
Literature, as she conceived it, was something that writers of her time found horrifying: an escape from real life, an entertaining game. Today things have changed, and readers understand her better. By making literature a journey into the imaginary, the fragile Baroness de Rungstedlund was not evading any moral responsibility. On the contrary, she helped – by being distracting, bewitching and amusing – to placate that need that in human beings is as old as eating and clothing themselves: the hunger for unreality.
Paris, April 1999
L’Étranger
The Outsider Must Die
Along with L’Homme révolté (The Rebel), L’Étranger (The Outsider) is Camus’s best book. It seems that the project was born in August 1937, albeit in a very vague way, when Camus was convalescing in a clinic in the Alps from one of the many relapses that he suffered following his attack of tuberculosis in 1930. In his Cahiers (Notebooks) he points out that he finished the novel in 1940. (But it was only published in 1942, by Gallimard, thanks to the support of André Malraux, who had been one of the literary models of the young Camus.)
The time and circumstances in which The Outsider was conceived are significant. The icy pessimism that pervades the references to society and the human condition in the story clearly stems in great part from the illness that weakened his fragile body over decades, and the anguished climate in Europe at the end of the inter-war years and at the outbreak of the Second World War.
The book was interpreted as a metaphor of the injustice of the world and of life, a literary illustration of that ‘absurd sensibility’ that Camus had described in Le Mythe de Sisyphe (The Myth of Sisyphus), an essay that appeared shortly after the novel. It was Sartre who best linked both texts, in a brilliant commentary on The Outsider. Meursault was seen as the incarnation of a man hurled into a senseless existence, the victim of social mechanisms that beneath the disguise of big words – The Law, Justice – were simply unjustifiable and irrational. Like the anonymous heroes of Kafka, Meursault personified the pathetic situation of the individual whose fate depends on forces that are uncontrollable as well as unintelligible and arbitrary.
But soon after there emerged a ‘positive’ interpretation of the novel: Meursault was seen as the prototype of authentic man, free from conventions, incapable of deception or self-deception, whom society condemns because he cannot tell lies or fake what he does not feel. Camus himself supported this reading of the character, writing in a prologue to a US edition of the novel:
The hero of the book is condemned because he doesn’t play the game…he refuses to lie. Lying is not only saying what isn’t true. It is also, in fact especially, saying more than is true and, in the case of the human heart, saying more than one feels. We all do it, every day, to make life simpler. But, contrary to appearance, Meursault doesn’t want to make life simpler. He says what he is, he refuses to hide his feelings and society immediately feels threatened…So one wouldn’t be wrong in seeing The Outsider as the story of a man who, without any heroic pretensions, agrees to die for the truth.25
This is a perfectly valid interpretation – although, as we shall see, it is incomplete – and it has come to occupy almost canonical status in studies on Camus. The Outsider thus becomes a denunciation of the tyranny of conventions and of the lies on which social life is based. A martyr to the truth, Meursault goes to prison, is sentenced and presumably guillotined for his ontological inability to disguise his feelings and do what other men do: play a part. It is impossible for Meursault, for example, to pretend to feel more grief than he actually feels and to say the things that, in these circumstances, one expects a son to say. Nor can he – despite the fact that his life depends on it – pretend in court to feel remorse for the death that he has caused. This is what he is punished for, not his crime.
The critic who has developed this argument most convincingly is Robert Champigny in his book on the novel entitled Sur un héros païen (Gallimard, 1959). In it he states that Meursault is condemned because he rejects ‘theatrical society’, which he defines as a society not made up of natural beings but rather one in which hypocrisy holds sway. With his ‘pagan’ – that is, non-romantic, non-Christian – behaviour, Meursault is a living challenge to the ‘collective myth’. His probable death by guilloti
ne is, therefore, that of a free man, a heroic and edifying act.
This view of the novel seems to me partial and insufficient. There is no doubt that the way in which Meursault’s trial is conducted is ethically and legally scandalous, a parody of justice, because what is condemned is not the killing of an Arab, but the antisocial behaviour of the accused, the way in which his psychology and morality is at variance with the norms of society. Meursault’s behaviour shows us the inadequacies and defects of the administration of justice and allows us glimpses of the dirty world of journalism.
But to go from there to condemn the society that condemns him as being ‘theatrical’ and based on a ‘collective myth’ is really taking things too far. Modern society is no more theatrical than any other; all societies, without any possible exception, were, are, and will be theatrical, although the show that they put on will be different in each case. There can be no society, no form of coexistence, without a consensus that everyone in that society should respect certain forms or rituals. Without this agreement, there would be no ‘society’ but rather a jungle of completely free bipeds, where only the strongest would survive. With his behaviour, Meursault is also playing a role: that of a free individual in the extreme, who is indifferent to entrenched forms of sociability. The problem that the novel poses to us is rather: is Meursault’s behaviour preferable to those that sit in judgement on him?
This is debatable. Despite what the author has implied, the novel draws no conclusion on this issue: it is left to the readers to decide.
The ‘collective myth’ is a tacit pact that allows individuals to live in a community. This has a price that men and women – whether they know it or not – must pay: they must relinquish absolute sovereignty, cut out certain desires, impulses and fantasies that could endanger others. The tragedy that Meursault symbolises is that of an individual whose freedom has been impaired to make life in society possible. It is this, the fierce, irrepressible individualism of Camus’s character, that moves us and awakens our inchoate solidarity: in the depths of us all there is a nostalgic slave, a prisoner who would like to be as spontaneous, frank and antisocial as him.
But, at the same time, it is necessary to recognise that society is not wrong to identify Meursault as an enemy, as someone who would break up the community if his example were to become widespread.
His story is a painful but unequivocal demonstration of the need for ‘theatre’, for fiction, or, to put it more crudely, for lies in human relationships. Fake feelings guarantee social coexistence, for however empty and forced they might seem from an individual perspective, they are both substantive and necessary from a communitarian point of view. These fictitious feelings are conventions that cement the collective pact, like words, those sonorous conventions without which human communication would not be possible. If men were, like Meursault, pure instinct, not only would the institution of the family disappear, but also society in general, and men would end up killing each other in the same banal and absurd way that Meursault kills the Arab on the beach.
One of the great merits of The Outsider is the economy of the prose. When the book appeared, it was said that it emulated Hemingway’s purity and brevity. But the Frenchman’s language is much more premeditated and intellectual than the American’s. It is so clear and precise that it does not seem written but spoken or, better still, heard. The absolute way in which the style is stripped of all adornments and self-indulgence is what contributes decisively to the verisimilitude of this implausible story. And here the characteristics of the writing and those of the character become intertwined: Meursault, too, is, transparent, direct and elemental.
What is most terrifying about him is his indifference to others. The great ideas or causes or issues – love, religion, justice, death, freedom – leave him cold, as does the suffering of others. The beating that his neighbour Raymond Sintes inflicts on his Arab lover does not provoke any feelings of sympathy; quite the opposite, he is prepared to offer him an alibi for the police. He does not do this out of affection or friendship but, one could say, out of mere negligence. By contrast, small details or certain daily episodes interest him, like the traumatic relationship between old Salmadano and his dog, and he gives his attention and even his sympathy to this. But the things that really move him have nothing to do with men and women, but rather with nature or with certain human landscapes that he has stripped of humanity and turned into sensorial realities: the hustle and bustle of his neighbourhood, the smells of summer, the beaches of burning sands.
He is an outsider in a radical sense, because he communicates better with things than with human beings. And, in order to maintain a relationship with humans, he must animalise them or objectify them. This is how he gets on so well with Marie, whose clothes, sandals and body strike a chord in him. The young woman does not awaken feelings in him, something durable; at best she awakens a string of desires. He is only interested in what is instinctive and animalistic in her. Meursault’s world is not pagan, it is dehumanised.
What is curious is that, despite being antisocial, Meursault is not a rebel, because he has no concept of nonconformity. What he does is not tied to a principle or a belief that might lead him to defy the established order: that is just the way he is. He refuses the social pact, transgresses the rituals and forms that underpin collective life, in a natural way and without even any awareness of what he is doing (at least, until he is condemned). For those that are judging him, his passivity and lack of interest are clearly more serious than his crime. If he had ideas or values to justify his acts and behaviour, then perhaps the judges would have been more lenient. They could have contemplated the possibility of re-educating him, of persuading him to accept the norms of society. But, as he is, Meursault is incorrigible and cannot be reclaimed for society. Faced with him, all the limitations, excesses and absurdities that comprise the ‘collective myth’ or social pact are thrown into relief – everything that is false and absurd in communal life from the standpoint of an isolated individual of any description, not only someone as anomalous as Meursault.
When the attorney states that Meursault has nothing to do with ‘a society whose laws he is unaware of’, he is absolutely right. Obviously, from where the judge is sitting, Meursault is a kind of monster. But his case also reveals the monstrous, limiting aspects of society, since all societies, however open, always put obstacles and punishments in the way of the absolute freedom that each individual, deep down, aspires to.
Within the existential pessimism of The Outsider, however, there burns, albeit weakly, a flame of hope. There is a moment not of resignation but of lucidity that occurs in the beautiful final paragraph. Here, Meursault shakes off his anger towards the chaplain who had tried to domesticate him by offering to pray for him, and embraces, with serene confidence, his destiny as a man open to ‘the tender indifference of the world’.
Camus’s pessimism is not defeatist; on the contrary, it is a call to action or, more precisely, to rebellion. The reader leaves the pages of the novel probably with feelings for Meursault, but certainly convinced that the world is badly made and should change.
The novel does not conclude either explicitly or implicitly that since things are the way they are we should resign ourselves to accept a world organised by fanatics like the judge or pettifogging histrionic lawyers. We feel repugnance for both these characters. And we even find the chaplain disagreeable due to his inflexibility and lack of tact. With his disturbing behaviour, Meursault shows the precariousness and dubious morality of the conventions and rituals of society. His discordant attitude reveals the hypocrisy, lies, errors and injustices that social life entails. And at the same time it shows how the demands of living in a community lead to the mutilation or – to quote Freud, the great discoverer and explorer of the concept – the repression of individual sovereignty and certain instincts and desires.
Although the influence of Kafka is very apparent and although the philosophical novel or novel of ideas which were fashionable
during the vogue of existentialism have now fallen into disrepute, The Outsider is still being read and discussed today, a time that is very different to the one in which Camus wrote. For this to be the case, there must be a more compelling reason than the fact that it is impeccably structured and beautifully written.
Like living beings, novels grow, and often age and die. Those that survive change skin and being, like snakes, or caterpillars that turn into butterflies. These novels say different things to new generations, very often things that the author had never thought of expressing. For readers today, above all in a Europe that is so much more prosperous, confident and hedonistic than the fearful, stunned and cataclysmic Europe in which The Outsider was first published, the solitary protagonist of this fiction can be appealing as an epicure, as a man at ease with his body and proud of his senses, who embraces his desires and elemental appetites without shame or pathos, as a natural right. The one seemingly lasting legacy of the revolution of May 1968 – that movement of idealistic, generous and confused young people at odds with their time and their society – is that human desires are now emerging from the hiding places where they had been confined by society, and are beginning to acquire acceptability.
In this new society that seems to be dawning, where desires have more freedom, Meursault would also have been punished for having killed a man. But no one would have condemned him to the guillotine, that obsolete museum piece, and, above all, no one would have been shocked by his visceral lack of interest in his fellow human beings or his rampant egotism. Should we feel pleased at this? Is it progress that the Meursault dreamed up by Camus half a century ago should appear to prefigure a contemporary attitude towards life? There is no doubt that Western civilisation has torn down many barriers and is now much freer and less repressive, with respect to sex, to the status of women, and to attitudes in general, than the society that (perhaps) cut off Meursault’s head. But at the same time we cannot say that the freedom that has been won in different spheres has led to a marked increase in the quality of life, to an enrichment of culture for all or, at least, for the great majority. Quite the reverse, it would seem that in so many cases these barely won freedoms have been turned into forms of behaviour that cheapen and trivialise them, and into new forms of conformity by their fortunate beneficiaries.