The Stranger's Secrets

Abstract

To do justice to Camus requires an indifference to literary fashions in the light of which Camus is likely to appear quaintly archaic, as well as to the appeal of a life and a work pervaded by an apparently unassailable integrity. Tough-mindedness would seem to demand that we ignore those claims to sympathy which made Camus something of a moral hero to many of his readers: the struggle against poverty and illness, Camus' tortured conscience, his suspicion of political theories and positions which might promote or justify human suffering, the simplicity and intensity of his attachment to life, and the accident which brutally vindicated his impressive and useless protest against the unacceptable fact of death. Camus' work has profited from the quietly glamorous nobility of his life. More than that: his urgently sincere tone has obscured the presence in his work of some of the habits of thought and of feeling against which he argued most eloquently. He is a comparatively uninteresting writer, and the quality of his achievement is, for me, all the more vitiated by an indulgence in abstraction, a secretly prideful reticence of feeling, and an easy cynicism, all of which he constantly, and rightly, attacked for their dehumanizing effects on life. I find the moraliste of Le Mythe de Sisyphe and L'Homme revolte a dull and vague thinker; as a playwright, Camus strikes me not only as less inventive or radical than Beckett, Arrabal, and even Ionesco, but also, within the conventions of a more traditional theater of linguistic and psychological coherence, less successful than the Sartre of Huis clos and Les Sequestres d'Altona. Camus' fiction-especially L'Etranger and a couple of stories in L'Exil et le royaume-is another matter, however, and L'Etranger deserves to be discussed as an impressive if flawed exercise in a kind of writing promoted by the New Novelists of the 1950s to the dignity, and occasionally narrow rigor, of doctrine. The doctrine is not Camus', but the refreshed novelistic techniques we find in L'Etranger could nonetheless be thought of as an example and an inspiration for what has now become an excessively theoretical determination to re-structure the relation between language and psychology in fiction.