The Outsider (6 page)

I couldn
’
t remember it was a root any more. The words had vanished, and with them, the significance of things, their methods of use, and the feeble points of reference men have traced on their surface. I was sitting
...
before this knotty mass, entirely beastly, which frightened me. ... It left me breathless. Never, until these last few days, had I understood the meaning
of existence.
I was like the others.... I said with them: The ocean
is
green, that white speck up there
is
a seagull, but I didn
’
t feel that it existed.
...
And then suddenly existence had unveiled itself. It had lost the look of an abstract category; it was the very paste of things; this
root was kneaded into existence.
...
These objects, they inconvenienced me; I would have liked them to exist less imposingly, more
dryly, in a more abstract way
...
¹⁹

He has reached the rock bottom of self-contempt; even things negate him. We are all familiar enough with his experience in the face of other human beings; a personality or a conviction can impose itself in spite of resistance; even the city itself, the confusion of traffic and human beings in Regent Street, can overwhelm a weak personality and make it feel insignificant. Roquentin feels insignificant before things. Without the meaning his Will would normally impose on it, his existence is absurd. Causality—Hume
’
s bugbear—has collapsed; consequently
there are no adventures.
The biography of Rollebon would have been another venture of
‘
bad faith
’
, for it would have imposed a
necessity
on Rollebon
’
s life that was not really there; the events didn
’
t really cohere and follow one another like a story; only blindness to the fact of raw, naked existence could ever produce the illusion that they did.

What then? Is there no causality, no possible meaning? Sartre summarizes life:
‘
L
’
homme est un passion inutile.
’
There is no choice, in Roquentin
’
s reckoning; there is only being useless and knowing it and being useless and not knowing it.

Yet Roquentin had had his glimpse of meaning and order; in
^‘
Some of These Days
’
. There was meaning, causation, one note following inevitably on another. Roquentin wonders: why shouldn
’
t he create something like that; something rhythmic, purposive—a novel, perhaps, that men could read later and feel: There was an attempt to bring order into chaos? He will leave Havre and the life of Rollebon; there
must
be another way of living that is not futile. The Journal comes to an end on this note.

* * *

Roquentin lives like Barbusse
’
s hero; his room is almost the limit of his consciousness. But he has gone further and deeper than the hole-in-the-wall man. His attitude has reached the dead-end of Wells;
‘
Man is a useless passion
’
: that could be taken as a summary of
Mind at the End of Its Tether.
Complete denial, as in Eliot
’
s
‘
Hollow Men
’
: We are the hollow men, we are the
salauds.
Roquentin is in the position of the hero of
The Country of the Blind.
He alone is aware of the truth, and if all men were aware of it, there would be an end of life. In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. But his kingship is kingship over nothing. It brings no powers and privileges, only loss of faith and exhaustion of the power to act. Its world is a world without values.

This is the position that Barbusse
’
s Outsider has brought us to. It was already explicit in that desire that stirred as he saw the swaying dresses of the women; for what he wanted was not sexual intercourse, but some indefinable freedom, of which the women, with their veiled and hidden nakedness, are a symbol. Sexual desire was there, but not alone; aggravated, blown-up like a balloon, by a resentment that stirred in revolt against the bewilderment of hurrying Paris with its well-dressed women.
‘
Yet in spite of this I desire some compensation.
⁵
In spite of the civilization that has impressed his insignificance on him until he is certain that
‘
he has nothing and he deserves nothing
’
, in spite of this he feels a right to ... to what? Freedom? It is a misused word. We examine
L’
Enfer
in vain for a definition of it. Sartre and Wells have decided that man is never free; he is simply too stupid to recognize this. Then to what precisely is it that the Outsider has an inalienable right?

The question must take us into a new field: of Outsiders who have had some insight into the nature of freedom.

WORLD WITHOUT VALUES

T
he outsider tends
to express himself in Existentialist terms. He is not very concerned with the distinction between body and spirit, or man and nature; these ideas produce theological thinking and philosophy; he rejects both. For him, the only important distinction is between being and nothingness. Barbusse
’
s hero:
‘
Death, that is the most important of all ideas/

Barbusse and Wells represent two different approaches to the problem. Barbusse
’
s approach can be called the
‘
empirical
’
. His hero is not a thinker; he accepts
living;
it is its values he cannot accept. Wells goes much further in rejection; his conclusions have been pushed to nihilism; his approach is, like Hume
’
s, rationalist.

In Roquentin
’
s case, the conclusions are reached through an interaction of reason and experience. Again, it is the rational element that pushes him into nihilism; his only
‘
glimmer of salvation
’
comes from a level of experience untouched by discursive thought, from a Negro woman singing
‘
Some of These Days
’
. Reason leads into an impasse. If a solution exists, it must be sought, not in reasoning, but in examination of experience. We must keep in mind the logical possibility that a solution may not exist. In any case, it is the empirical approach that must be examined now.

Albert Camus
’
s Outsider is even more of an empiricist than Barbusse
’
s. He thinks even less; he has
‘
no genius, no unusual feelings to bestow
’
; in fact, he has hardly any feelings at all.

“
Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday. I can
’
t be sure.
’
¹

This tone of indifference persists throughout the novel
L’Etranger
.
Like
L’Enfer
and
La Naus
é
e,
it observes the convention that the hero is keeping a diary. Meursault is an Algerian. The first page establishes his character. When he asks his employer for time off to attend his mother
’
s funeral, he says:

‘
Sorry, sir, but it isn
’
t my fault, you know.
’
Afterwards it struck me that I needn
’
t have said that
...
it was up to him to express his sympathy and so forth.
²

If Meursault had
‘
felt
’
his mother
’
s death he wouldn
’
t have apologized. As the reader soon discovers, he feels very little.

This is not to say that he is disillusioned or world-weary. His type of lightheadedness bears more relation to P. G. Wodehouse
’
s
‘
Young men in spats
’
. He enjoys eating and drinking, sunbathing, going to the cinema. He lives in the present. He tells of his mother
’
s funeral, objectively but unfeelingly; it exhausted him because he had to sit up all night, but did not otherwise affect him. The next day he goes swimming and begins an affair with a girl. In half a page he outlines the development of the relation; they go to see a comic film, then return to his room and sleep together. In the morning, after she has gone:
‘
I slept till ten. Then I stayed in bed until noon, smoking cigarettes.
’
³

This is the atmosphere of Eliot
’
s
‘
Waste Land
’
:

I read much of the night and go south in the winter.

What surprises us, by comparison, is the lack of moral disapproval in Camus
’
s book; there is no suggestion that the author intends us to condemn Meursault as a futile idler.

The unusual quality about Meursault is his honesty. The girl asks him to marry her and he promptly agrees:

Then she asked me again if I loved her; I replied, much as before, that her question meant nothing or next to nothing, but I supposed I didn
’
t.
⁴

This honesty springs out of indifference to issues of feeling; he does not attach importance to anything; why should he lie?

Meursault becomes friendly with a pimp, anc
¹
finds himself involved in a feud between the pimp and an Arab. A day spent lounging on the beach culminates in the shooting of the Arab by Meursault. It was self-defence, but the Arab was unarmed, and there were no witnesses. Meursault finds himself on trial for murder.

And it is now that his strange qualities as an Outsider are against him. A man who has committed a murder should at least show some interest in what he has done; his best chance of acquittal lies in his weeping, protesting, showing himself overwhelmed by this terrible accident. But from the beginning,
Meursault
’
s indifference disconcerts his questioners. They can only put it down to callousness. And then there was the affair of the funeral. Why was he so unaffected by his mother
’
s death? Didn
’
t he love her? Again his honesty is against him:

I could say quite truthfully that I
’
d been fond of my mother, but that didn
’
t mean much.

The magistrate is a humane and religious man who would be only too happy to find grounds for acquitting Meursault, for
‘
There is more joy over one sinner that repenteth.
...
’
With tears in his eyes, he shows Meursault a crucifix and exhorts him to repent. But Meursault looks on with mild surprise. All this is meaningless. It is so completely beside the point. Repent of what?

Finally Meursault is tried. Now Camus no longer bothers to disguise the irony. Meursault, as innocent as Mr. Pickwick, hears the prosecutor summing up in a deeply moved voice:

‘
Gentlemen of the jury, I would have you note that, on the day after his mother
’
s funeral, that man was visiting a swimming pool, starting a liaison with a girl and going to see a comic film. That is all I wish to say.
’
⁵

That is all he needs to say, for Meursault is condemned to death.

In his cell, the chaplain visits him, with more exhortations to repent. Suddenly, Meursault can stand the stupidity no longer; he seizes the priest by the collar and pours out his irritation:

He was so cocksure, you see. Yet not one of his certainties was worth one strand of a woman
’
s hair.

…
Nothing, nothing had the least importance, and I
knew quite well why
…
From
the dark horizon of my future,
a sort of slow, persistent breeze had been blowing towards me
…
and on its way, that breeze had levelled out all the ideas people had tried to foist on me
in the equally unreal
years I was then living through.

…
all alike would be condemned to die one day; his turn too would come like the others. And what difference did it make if, after being charged with murder, he were executed
because he didn
’
t weep at his mother
’
s funeral, since it all came to the same thing in the end.
’
⁶
[Italics mine.]