Camus, Albert. The Outsider. Trans. Joseph Laredo. England: Penguin Classics, 1982.
(Spoiler alert.)
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This is a story about a very emotionless young man. Consequently, despite the fact that this is also a story about sex and murder, it isn’t a particularly stimulating story. The drama, tragic as it is, is merely the backdrop to the protagonist’s existential crisis, which Camus goes to some length to explicate.

Pretentious enough, right?

But I loved the book. It’s compelling and believable. The writing isn’t forced. It moves with a light touch through topics (eg. dying mothers and capital punishment) that would otherwise invite a lot of straining at genius. The quietness of the writing is in keeping with Meursault’s self-possession. Meursault is the kind of person who can’t muster up much in the way of grief at his mother’s funeral and who doesn’t particularly regret accidentally killing a man. More importantly, he can’t be bothered to try to feel or to fake these emotions. He’s not regretful, he’s annoyed. He’s not sad, he’s tired. And he’s not going to pretend otherwise, however much this lack of emotion horrifies the people around him, even when his life depends on the performance.

In his afterword, Camus writes that Meursault’s indifference is a threat to society. His refusal to “play the game,” as Camus puts it, makes life difficult for others, inviting first their confusion and eventually their anger, until they finally decide he must “be decapitated in a public square in the name of the French people” (103). Camus argues that Meursault’s “passion for an absolute and for truth” (119) makes him Christ-like. I think the analogy is exasperatingly pretentious (not to mention cliche), but I’m willing to overlook it, partly because Camus scales back the excessiveness a little by excusing the description as an expression of “the somewhat ironic affection” (119) he feels for Meursault as his creator.

The other thing I enjoyed about this novel is that it provides a really biting depiction of the criminal justice system. Camus describes, among other things, how the accused becomes incidental to his own case.

So that’s an overview of the general philosophical gist of the novel. However, it’s also worth paying attention to how Camus’ treatment of the secondary characters in this novel inform his analysis of truth-telling. My thoughts here are still a little unformed, so bear with me.

First, I’m curious as to why every time Raymond’s lover or her brother come up in the novel, Camus/Meursault takes care to note they are Arab or “Moorish” (the former for the men, and the latter for the woman; I don’t know why Camus makes this distinction). Note that this novel takes place in Camus’ native Algeria. There is therefore a history of racism in the country that locates this novel and its author. The reason I highlight this is because these characters, in a book where pretty much everyone is expendable to the protagonist, are the most disposable. Quite literally, these are the people who are killed or beaten off. These are the ones who have the least agency, whose appearances are most fleeting, and who exist only to move the plot. They do not speak and they do not have names. And yet, were it not for their presence, this story could never have happened. In light of their purely functional use, then, the constant re-identification of them as Other has the effect of underscoring their disposability. This subtle fixation on their ethnicity serves absolutely no practical purpose in the book, so the only reason I can think that Camus would choose to insert it in this brief and carefully-worded novel is because that obsession emerges out of a culture that routinely dehumanises minority communities.
And, I shouldn’t need to add, this culture remains mainstream 40 years later.

Second, I’m concerned with the treatment of sexual violence in this novel. It gets largely glossed over, but of all the things Meursault does, the only thing I actually found morally offensive was his involvement in Reynold’s abuse of his (Moorish) lover. What is curious and troubling is that that incident is never picked up as a potential reason for societal disapproval. It’s as though it’s trifling. My argument, then, is that her dehumanisation (unlike the other women in this book, she is never given a name) is not just a function of Meursault’s extreme disaffection, but a structural component of the novel itself. In other words, it’s a mistake made not necessarily by the character, so much as the author.

In conclusion, at a macroscopic level, the story is a cogent treatise on the limits of honesty. Zoom in a bit, however, and some of its ethics start to unravel, revealing the complicated hierarchies of power that limit its generalisability (which isn’t a word, oh gosh).

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Reposted on my Goodreads account.