French Literature: A Very Short Introduction (18 page)

Springtime

Published in the midst of the Second World War, The Stranger
(L'Etranger, 1942) belongs to what the author, Albert Camus
(1913-60), called his `cycle of the absurd' along with his essay The
Myth ofSisyphus (Le Mythe de Sisyphe) and his play Caligula. A
simple glimpse of the titles of the three works shows an emphasis
on central characters who do not fit into positive heroic positions
within their society but are outsiders, failures, monsters - or all
these at once. French literature, at mid-century, was certainly
itself not marginalized. The generation of authors who lived as
adults during the Second World War produced six winners of
the Nobel Prize in Literature (Francois Mauriac, 1952; Albert
Camus, 1957; Saint-John Perse,196O; Jean-Paul Sartre, who
refused the award, 1964; Samuel Beckett, 1969; Claude Simon,
1985). This was a time, clearly, when French writers had captured
the attention of the world. In some ways, they were all either
themselves outsiders (four of them born outside of European
France) or wrote memorably about outsiders (Mauriac in Therese
Desqueyroux,1927; Sartre in La Nausee, 1938).

An unlikely hero

The title of L'Etranger designates its protagonist Meursault, a
young man of modest condition and education, who works in
an office in Algiers, and who, for no particular reason, shoots and kills a young Arab. The story, told in simple language in
the first person singular, shows Meursault gradually growing
in awareness of his distance from the society around him. The
text is not formally a diary, but seems to be written from time to
time, sometimes to note what has just happened and at others
to present what the protagonist plans to do. There is a rather
affectless quality to Meursault, particularly at the outset, though
perhaps it is not so much a lack of emotion per se as a lack of the
conventional dramatization and expression of emotions in their
usual social form. The first sentence offers a good example:

Today, Mama died. Or maybe yesterday. I don't know. I got a
telegram from the nursing home: `Mother deceased. Burial
tomorrow. Respects: That doesn't mean anything. It might have
been yesterday.

(Anjourd'hui, maman est morte. Ou peut-titre bier, je ne sais pas.
J'ai re(u an telegramme de l'asile: Mere decedee. Enterrement
demain. Sentiments distingues.' Cela ne veut rien dire. C'etait
peut-titre hier.)

In the simple declarative sentences, there is much attention to
detail and especially sensation, with little explanation. We see the
world from Meursault's point of view, that of a kind of Candide,
like Celine's Bardamu, without a philosophy to follow or to combat
(Meursault's narrative does make one wonder what Voltaire's conte
would have been like as a first-person narrative). Meursault enjoys
swimming, smoking, sunbathing, and sex with his girlfriend Marie.
At an outing at the beach, Meursault, playing the peacemaker,
takes a revolver from a friend who is threatening to kill an Arab
with whom he has had a run-in, but later Meursault uses the gun
to shoot the Arab. His account gives no place to fear or hostility,
but rather to the heat, the blazing brightness of the sun.

The most remarkable moment of the novel is Meursault's
discovery of himself just before his execution. Throughout the narrative, the protagonist-narrator seems to record what happens
without thinking about it. There is such neutrality and such a lack
of affect in his view of the world that he himself seems sometimes
to be a person who is not there, almost a recording device. But
his imprisonment and trial - he is tried for who he is rather than
for the death of the Arab - make him aware of his difference from
others, and in his revolt he becomes somebody, a self: `Even when
you're in the dock, it is interesting to hear people talking about
yourself' (Mime sur an bane d'accuse, it est toujours interessant
d'entendreparler de soi). He discovers his existence within the
`tender indifference of the world' (la tendre inderence du
monde), and he concludes by hoping that there would be many
spectators when he is guillotined and that they would greet him
with shouts of hatred. A personage almost without characteristics
finally conceives of himself in a heroic dimension.

The drama of just waiting

If Meursault becomes heroic only by affirming his status as
outsider, Samuel Beckett's protagonists clearly occupy the outsider
position from the start. Beckett (a truly bi-national and bi-lingual
author, both Irish and French) differed, however, from Camus in
distancing his characters from the everyday social world. Often,
the unsympathetic central characters and their consciousness
constitute the entire text, like the voice of The Unnameable, a
novel (1953). The most accessible and best-known of Beckett's
works is no doubt his two-act play Waitingfor Godot (1952),
with its tragicomic tramps or clowns, a play that for some critics
typifies the `theatre of the absurd', a term that was applied also to
the plays of Beckett's contemporary Eugene Ionesco (1909-94),
author of The Bald Soprano (La Cantatrice chauve, 1950) and The
Chairs (Les chaises, 1952). Beckett manages the feat of making
riveting drama out of two men waiting, in a bare landscape next
to a tree, for the arrival of a certain `Godot' whom they have never
met. Where does all this happen? Could these two characters
simply be described as inhabiting the author's consciousness?

15. Lucien Raimbourg and Pierre Latour in Samuel Beckett's En
attendant Godot, a photograph from the 1956 Paris production by
Roger Blin

The whole work has about it an air of barrenness and desolation
that is accentuated by the simplicity of the language. Beckett
said that he wrote in a foreign tongue to `impoverish' and to
`discipline' himself, so that there would be no style or poetry to the
text. Whether or not this was Beckett's actual reason for writing
in French rather than in English, the argument could be made
that throughout history poetry distinguished itself from ordinary
discourse precisely by the acceptance of linguistic constraints.
For most of the millennium of French literature, lyric poetry has
been written in fixed forms of verse length and rhyme scheme that `disciplined' the writer. In a similar vein, significant works like
the medieval Roman de la Rose stripped away concrete secondary
characteristics from its personae to concentrate both on what is
most central to their story and what is most universal. Although
the actors of Waitingfor Godot cannot easily be interpreted as
allegorical abstractions - into terms like `hope', `despair', `reason',
and so forth - their dialogue conveys a darkly comical version of
human existence reduced to its most schematic.