Feature
Departed or Converted?
Two Tales of God-Talk on Death Row by Peter Maurice
He started talking to me about God again, but I didn't have much time left. I didn't want to waste it on God.
—Albert Camus, The Stranger
The words of a man on the eve of execution have a way of claiming attention. Albert Camus, in his famous first novel, The Stranger,certainly knew how to exploit the drama inherent in a condemned man's final musings. Many readers of this magazine who have encountered the novel in high-school and college literature courses will recall the fictional Meursault's soliloquy as he awaits the guillotine. Few, if any, will have heard of the real Spanish priest Pedro Tarres (1905–1950) and his visit to three anarchists condemned to death in Barcelona shortly after the Spanish Civil War. The anarchists, unlike the anti-hero of The Stranger, died repentant. Such an ending in an age of all but absolute secularism is something of a plot spoiler, not the stuff of fictive apotheosis.
Three-quarters of a century since the French publishing house Gallimard issued its first edition, The Stranger remains a staple of literature courses and an international best-seller. It tops Le Monde's "100 Books of the Century"and routinely figures in similar rankings in the United States. Even today, with multicultural competition from every school and clime, The Stranger shows no sign of receding from the classroom or the public consciousness. There are many reasons for this entrenchment, one of them being the winning role it has played in a political and moral controversy: perhaps more than any other work of fiction, Camus' novel helped harden sentiment against capital punishment.
Aside from being on the right, or at any rate, winning side of the death penalty debate, there are other reasons for the novel's fame. Like few other works of fiction,
The Stranger has been embraced by the media culture. There is a shot in any number of films (Jacob's Ladder, Talledaga Nights, The Life of Pi, and others) when the camera closes in on a copy of The Stranger in a character's hands, and the audience "gets it." The character is alienated, at odds with "hypocritical" society, and—despite Camus' disavowal of the term—existential. In an episode of the TV series The Sopranos, Anthony Jr. informs his parents that there is no God, that life is absurd, and that the death of his friends would be "interesting." The rather old-fashioned mafia mom and dad wonder where junior picked up these crazy notions; his English teacher, it turns out, had assigned a book called The Stranger. Pop musicians, too, have certified their seriousness by referencing Camus' greatest hit. To cite just one: "I'm alive / I'm dead / I'm the stranger"(The Cure).
As for Pedro Tarres, outside of his Catalonian birthplace, his name remains unsung. There have been no movies made of his life, no rock groups promoting his cult. The capital punishment debate is untouched by the story of those three anarchists who confessed to him in a Barcelona jail. Unlike the fictional Meursault, those real-life condemned prisoners did not eject the presumptuous priest with a curse. Wonderfully concentrated by the imminent prospect of death, they repented of their sins and hoped for a better world. Maybe in the 1950s a scriptwriter could have rendered such material fit for the screen—but would it draw an audience today?
A Work of Power
Its popularity notwithstanding, The Stranger is a novel of undeniable power. A first-person narrative crafted by a skilled writer—and Camus is more than that—assures sympathetic identification with the hero or, in this case, the anti-hero. In his essay "Camus Between God and -Nothing" (First Things, January 2014), Robert Royal regrets that The Stranger is the sole work of Camus routinely assigned to students of French, for this results in a distorted image of the writer-philosopher. Camus conceived The Stranger, The Myth of Sisyphus, and Caligula as a unity. According to Royal, ignorance of two thirds of this "trilogy of the absurd" makes it impossible to grasp where Camus was headed.
It seems inevitable, however, that this debut novel would be the one work chosen for explication du texte. Its expounders find it a storehouse of those resonant ideas that lend themselves to classroom gab-fests: man alone in an absurd world; religion as flight from reality—especially Death; bourgeois justice as class-based hypocrisy; and the arbitrary nature of acting in an absurd world devoid of inherent meaning: "to stay or to go amounted to the same thing." (The latter choice led to murder, arrest, and execution—but how is one to know in advance?) In addition to these congenial themes, The Stranger appeals on the level of other classroom favorites like The Catcher in the Rye and To Kill a Mocking Bird: as "serious" lit, it is an easy read. While there is a lot for the exegete to dissect and deconstruct, Meursault's constricted moral and mental universe need not furrow the brow of the casual reader.
The stark scaffolding of Camus' prose and a wariness of "value judgments" owe an acknowledged debt to the American avant-garde of the twenties and thirties, especially to Ernest Hemingway.Like Lieutenant Henry in A Farewell to Arms, Meursault distrusts abstractions. Words like justice, honor, and courage never escape his lips. But while we suspect a tense, masculine-stoical effort behind the Hemingway character's reserve, Meursault's laconic utterances point only to an interior vacancy. We know that Meursault likes café au lait and cigarettes, and that he enjoys wine and sausages with his neighbor and accomplice, Raymond. We feel his torpor in the heat of an Algiers afternoon; we blink in the blinding whiteness of the funeral parlor at the nursing home; we hear the sniffling of a mourner and feel the rhythmic beating of Marie Cardona's heart as Meursault lies with her on the beach.
"It's All the Same to Me"
Peter Maurice is a retired teacher of French, English, and humanities, at all levels from elementary through university. He is the recipient of several fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities. His writing has appeared in The Wanderer, Chronicles, Touchstone, Crisis, New Oxford Review, and Gilbert magazines.
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