rel="nofollow" href="#ulink_c1a4eecc-c8b3-54e8-ad93-6fc537387f60">6 and never really lives, but rather as a starting point that can shed more light on the concept of the absurd as presented in The Myth and even go further. From this perspective, The Myth branches out from The Stranger as its “philosophical twin,” transforming images into thoughts (Golomb 2005: 130). I choose to take this approach not to protect The Stranger’s literary independence, but because I believe that it is more faithful to Camus’ own intention, as well as the nature of Camus’ absurdism. As such, it can generate the most insightful reading of the two texts.
In the introduction I contended that as far as Camus’ absurdism is concerned, the right order is from art to the “phenomenology of the ‘notion of the absurd’ ” (Golomb 2005: 120–121). This cannot be otherwise, because in a universe devoid of abstract realities and Platonic essences, the “concrete signifies nothing more than itself” (MS, 94) and therefore all thought can do is cover “with images what has no reason” (ibid., 95). Nowadays philosophy serves appearances and not the other way around: While universal concepts bend before life’s particularities and pluralities, reason cannot “comprehensively explain,” but it can “lucidly describe” (Sharpe 2015: 43–45), as well as imitate, life and duplicate its experiences (MS, 92). Camus’ 1952 praise of Melville’s writings reflects his own approach of absurd creation: “In Melville the symbol grows out of reality, the image springs from perception” (Dunwoodie 2007: 162).
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As well as recognizing that in an absurd universe a philosophical novel communicates more of the feeling and experience of the absurd than an essay does, Camus believes that fiction is better able to combat the immanent nihilism of such a universe.7 To promote the “ideal of authentic life,” which transcends “rational discourse,” one requires concrete images rather than abstracts – emotionally engaging images that effectively arouse sufficient pathos and “existential anguish,” which enable readers to transcend nihilism and grow in authenticity (Golomb 2005: 120). The philosophical novel frees the universe from illusion and populates it instead with “truths of flesh and blood” to entice the reader to revolt without hope (MS, 99).
By first grounding ourselves in the novel, considering it a more capable vehicle for the feeling and experience of the absurd – and accordingly reading The Myth as its conceptual extension and transformation into thought – we may arrive at an interpretation that differs from those offered by most commentators. The Stranger has engendered a great deal of social, cultural, political, and psychological readings.8 Indeed, it was Camus himself who insisted that the novel possessed a “social” meaning too (Foley 2008: 21), explicitly encouraging the reader to focus on the main character’s refusal to “play the game” and subject himself to collective untruthfulness (Ohayon 1983: 189). Yet even a commentator such as Foley (2008: 21), who follows Camus’ advice, recognizes that the social intention is suffocated by the “sheer metaphysical weight” of the novel’s wish to convey the inner and intimate journey of the absurd mind.9
This reading reveals the novel to be the description of the step-by-step process of the awakening of a dormant consciousness to the reality of ←20 | 21→the absurd: its initial failure to respond to it; the methodical approach it employs in order to embrace it, and the inner liberation it consequently achieves. As Zaretsky (2013: 45–46) puts it, The Stranger is, above all, a portrayal of a man “forming a mind”: the emergence of a genuine self-reflection. Thus, deciphering the novel’s symbols extricates and sheds light on the very same methodology applied by Camus in The Myth, with its first part corresponding to the first 26 pages of The Myth (capturing, conceptually rather than phenomenologically, the feeling of the absurd), its second part to pages 27–114 (the persistent negation of all hope), and its ending to pages 115–119 (the absurd elevation). I contend that at the heart of The Stranger lies the same principle that guides the journey of The Myth – that limits, whether they are The Stranger’s concrete prison walls or The Myth’s abstract absurd walls, not only define human nature, but also hold a surprising redemptive power, which is the crux of the absurdist enlightenment.
Part I: An initial awakening
Much of The Stranger’s first part is narrated in a literary style that directly expresses the climate of the absurd. As Sartre observed, its “atomistic sentences in the present tense,” of “arbitrary facticity” and with no rational connection to bind them, isolate each moment from all others, emptying life of any “meaningful context” (Golomb 2005: 131–132). Devoid of past or future, Meursault slides through “an endless procession of present moments” (Zaretsky 2013: 23), embodying what The Myth later captured as “that series of unrelated actions which becomes his fate” (MS, 119).
Yet this style, which describes but never explains, establishes more than the feeling of the absurd: The broken reality reflects a disjointed consciousness, which does not yet exist as a self-reflective mind.10 The hollow narrative nearly caricatures Hume’s “bundle” theory of the self; ←21 | 22→its use of language allows us to penetrate into Meursault’s “innermost life” only to realize that there is nothing there (Golomb 2005: 131–132). Not only is Meursault devoid of any interiority; he is literally incapable of self-awareness. When he glances at the mirror, all that is reflected in it is “a corner of my table with my alcohol lamp next to some pieces of bread” (TS, 24); there is simply “not yet a self to be seen” (Zaretsky 2013: 25). It is a “truly transparent” consciousness (Brombert 1948: 120), which requires other people and objects to mirror its own moods, like self-judgment, the need to cry, apathy and the inner voice that troubles it (TS, 10–11). As Golomb (2005: 130) states, the Meursault of the first part is far from a paragon of authenticity: His inability to lie reflects not courage, but rather a purely “spontaneous” and “uncomplicated” mind, which lacks any duality or struggle within itself (Dunwoodie 2007: 157).
This barely existent consciousness, nevertheless, is pushed to awaken by two elements: death and the light of truth. Death, the most unrejectable limit of consciousness and life, opens and concludes The Stranger. The confrontation with life’s ultimate limit unconsciously ignites in Meursault the “Why?,” the protest against meaninglessness. For the first time, consciousness opens one eye to regard reality, but it manages to fall asleep again (TS, 4, 7). That is because the death of another – even the death of a dear one – is not necessarily enough to shake one up completely. As Scherr (2014: 170, 176) suggests, in his Freudian reading of the novel, it may be that in the unconscious none of us believes in our own death, since we are unable to conceive of the death of our ego; only a fully conscious awareness of the frontiers of our life (as direct as Meursault’s confrontation with death in the second part of The Stranger) has the potential to do that. This is echoed in The Myth when Camus argues that the death of others is but an unconvincing rumor and that there is no way to prepare for death, since all we know is life and consciousness (MS, 14).
Yet, as soon as death pierces Meursault’s sleepy mind and life, light begins to agitate him. In front of his mother’s closed casket, he is “blinded” by the light and the brightness of the room, and only feels more drowsy ←22 | 23→(TS, 8, 9); likewise, in The Myth, physical light turns into the subdued, abstract light of absurdity (MS, 9), which everyone evades, hoping for a “flight from light,” as light provokes a painful lucidity “in the face of experience” (ibid., 3). Light, the second catalyst of awakening, is non-causal and random; it may strike “at any street corner” (ibid., 9), and its most demanding manifestation is the sun.
The sun in The Stranger is the sun of the absurd,11 which has glowed ever since humanity committed the crime of patricide against the heavenly father. It is perhaps not coincidental that Nietzsche – “the most famous of God’s assassins,” according to Camus (MS, 106) – uses the same symbol when exclaiming that, with the murder of God, we have “unchained this