Camus's Pulp Fiction

Abstract

Camus’s Pulp Fiction Jack I. Abecassis (bio) The second half of L’étranger simply does not work. It is as if Camus were trying to fuse together into a single novel two incongruous sorts of narratives. At the beginning the reader struggles with a minimalist description, dry and flat, of an existence devoid of sense, culture, history, and dominated by sun, heat, sweat. But in the second half the reader is plunged into the story of a trial, now recounted through a narrative voice overcome by incomprehension and resentment. Two stories, two modalities, one shaky articulation. But of course this is not how we, the “informed” readers—as op-posed to our naive students—interpret the novel. In the “informed” reading (to use Girard’s terminology), the trial figures prominently. 1 It be-comes the metaphor through which an ethical and moral interpretation becomes unavoidable. In the preface to the American edition, Camus certainly endorses this reading in summing up the novel with the now famous statement that “Dans notre société tout homme qui ne pleure pas à l’enterrement de sa mère risque d’être condamné à mort.” 2 Within this perspective, then, the first half is but the sun-drenched background whose chief function is to describe and, more importantly, to prepare and explain, the events which are about to unfold. The subsequent murder and trial thus occupy the foreground, while the description contained in the first part recedes into a motivational background. Whatever remains from the first half [End Page 625] figures only in the judicial debate concerning Meursault’s moral character. Vague echoes of a closed casket, café au lait, sex, cinema and a festive beach are all that remain from the beginning. The first part is genetic in nature, while the second appears consequential. Classical analysis tends to stress the unity of the two parts, with hierarchical deference to the more theoretical, self-conscious and reflective ending. This “informed” ethical reading guides our pedagogical bias. We professors of literature, informed about existentialism, prefer to go through the first half rather quickly, concentrating our exegetical efforts on the more familiar grounds of the trial and the quasi-philosophical dialogues with the magistrate and the priest, climaxing with the pre-execution interior monologue. Yet in my experience our better students seem to be reluctant to be cornered into this reading. They prefer the first half, not because of its lack of apparent conceptual complexity, but rather because of the uncompromising description of the visceral sensation of the absurd. These students recognize something uniquely essential at the beginning of the novel which resonates with elements or hints of elements embedded in their own daily experience. After all, novels replete with the inequity of the “system” and the resentment of a romantic hero abound. Crime and punishment, a protagonist’s struggle with injustice, the weight of tradition and custom upon the shoulders of a naive or rebelling hero form the stock themes of an entire tradition ranging from Voltaire to Dostoevsky to Kafka. But a novel whose very textual surface is the description of mundane, banal daily life, entices us with that uncanny, tingling blend of pleasure mixed with horror—seductive fascination not unlike that inspired by certain scenes from Pulp Fiction—that stimulates the student’s imagination with a deeply felt experience. Here, then, lies the source of the fascination so specific to this particular novel. After initially resisting such a “naive” interpretation of L’étranger, I now embrace it. Here is why. That the two parts of the novel do not mesh well was already a concern in the early critical assessments of L’étranger. Blanchot remarked that “Il y a un changement de ton assez gênant entre l’objectivité presque absolue du récit, objectivité qui est sa vérité profonde, et les dernières pages de L’étranger.” 3 More recently, sifting through Camus’s Carnets, written during the period preceding the composition of the novel (1936–8), Pingaud speculates that “. . . à [End Page 626] cette époque . . . Camus songe á deux histoires distinctes et relativement brèves, du type de celles qu’on peut lire dans L’Envers et l’endroit.” 4 The novel contains...