This article explores Albert Camus’s philosophy of absurdity and his masterpiece The Stranger, which explores the nature of human existence and life and sheds light on his literary world.
Albert Camus and his philosophy of absurdity
There are few people who don’t recognize the name Albert Camus, and everyone knows that his works are based on absurdity and rebellion. We can see the philosophical background of Camus’s literature in his essays “The Myth of Sisyphus” and “The Rebel”. It is difficult to summarize “absurdity” and “rebellion” in a few words, but their fundamental nature is clear. Camus sees human existence in the world as contradictory. Existence in the human world, in other words, is life. What then are the two fundamental terms that make up the contradictions in life?
We could call them ‘despair of death and joy of life’, ‘loneliness and love’, ‘evil’ and ‘good’. But the lucid perception of “contradictory life,” the basic idea that Camus developed in The Myth of Sisyphus and The Rebel, was not only a basic idea, but also a basic truth from his experience (the testimony of which was Betwixt and Between), which he consistently and faithfully upheld from beginning to end. It is significant that his maiden work is titled “Betwixt and Between,” two opposites, and his last work is titled “Exile and the Kingdom,” two opposites.
According to Camus, human beings, as rational beings, want to recognize the will of the world because they have a rational desire. However, the world has no meaning for man to recognize. The contradiction between the two opposites, the “rational desire” of man and the “irrationality” of the world, and the contradiction that arises from this betrayal of reason, is Camus’s absurdity, the inescapable fate of man, the human condition.
But not everyone feels it. Those whose consciousness is drowsy do not feel it; they simply go through the motions of daily life mechanically, out of habit, and do not question whether life has a meaning or not. Such a dozing consciousness cannot be the consciousness of a being, so it is only when consciousness is fully awake and clearly recognizes absurdity that a human being can be human. Therefore, according to Camus, the recognition of absurdity is also human dignity. And the attitude of facing this absurdity, not trying to resolve the contradiction, but accepting it as it is and affirming life, is ‘rebellion’.
“The Stranger” is set in Algeria. Camus was born in Mondovi, Algeria in 1913. Perhaps Camus loved the beaches and sun of Algeria. His father was a laborer and his mother was a woman of Spanish descent. The family was poor, so he studied until he graduated from the National University of Algiers. It was during this time that he got a job at a local newspaper, and from then on he often worked as a journalist.
She joined the Communist Party in 1934 and defected the following year. She was fascinated by theater and organized a theater company called Théâtre du Travail, which adapted and staged several works, most notably The Brothers Karamazov, in which she played the role of Ivan. In 1938, he wrote an article in the Algerian Republican criticizing Sartre’s Nausea, saying that it “emphasized the ugly side of humanity.” This shows one side of Camus’s humanity.
In 1940, at the beginning of the Second World War, he took The Stranger and the first part of The Myth of Sisyphus and published them two years later. The fact that The Stranger in question was published at the beginning of World War II, during a time of turmoil, may have special significance. In 1942, he became the Parisian director of the anti-Vichy magazine Combat, which became a leading voice in the resistance movement, and a year later became a weekly. He first became friends with Sartre in 1951, when he published the essay “The Rebel,” and then isolated himself from Sartre the following year when Sartre criticized “The Rebel” in his weekly magazine “The Modern Times” by publishing an “Open Letter to the Editor of The Modern Times” in the same magazine. He published The Fall in 1956 and won the Nobel Prize in Literature the following year.
After nearly 20 years of writing, Camus had won the Nobel Prize for Literature and had readers all over the world. The Stranger is his masterpiece and is the most read of his works. As mentioned earlier, The Stranger shows how drowsy consciousness inevitably leads to absurdity when it encounters false contradictions. Let’s take a look at how this is manifested in The Stranger.
The Stranger by Camus: Man in the midst of absurdity
The protagonist, Meursault, kills an Arab “because of the sun” the day after his mother’s death, after “swimming in the sea, having relations with a woman, laughing at a comedy movie.” The night before his execution, he says, “I was happy in the past, and I am happy now,” and wants a crowd to gather around the guillotine “to watch his execution with cries of hatred.”
Meursault, an office worker in Algiers, lives a very ordinary life. But underneath it all, a world of deception unfolds.
“It was the same depressing Sunday as always. My mother is already buried. I have to go back to work. In the end, nothing has changed.”
This shocking statement, that nothing has changed despite his mother’s death, leads Meursault to have an affair with a typist named Marie the next day. He meets a thug named Lemont and they go to the beach together, where he shoots an Arab who has an argument with Lemont because of the hot sun.
When he is brought to trial, the lawyers, judges, and prosecutors focus on his demeanor on the day of his mother’s funeral. The fact that he slept through his mother’s funeral without shedding a tear was important to them. But Meursault was just tired and dozed off on the day of his mother’s funeral, not that he didn’t love her. “At length he (the trial judge) asked him if he loved his mother: ‘Yes, I loved her as much as anybody else’ – he replied”. Meursault sees no connection between loving his mother and the fact that he fell asleep on the day of her funeral, or that he had sex with a woman, and he thinks it has even less to do with killing an Arab. And so Meursault is sentenced to death. Meursault’s defense is not a good one.
He doesn’t really care about his work. He is not conscious of his crimes, which are staged by coincidence, and so he is not troubled, but rather bewildered by the death sentence. He is not troubled, but rather bewildered by the sentence of death, because nothing in this world is really “foreign” to him, except the pleasure of swimming by the sea, the softness of an Algerian afternoon, and physical love. But in the eyes of others, his behavior is sinful, and he is identified with it. He is, in other words, a cold-hearted man who did not love his mother, a deviant who mixed with thieves, engaged in indecent behavior, and killed a man. He is sentenced to death.
From this point on, he feels an infinite attachment to life, but the world is already indifferent to him. Because of this indifference that the world showed him for the first time, he was for the first time “open to the affectionate indifference of the world, feeling that the world was like me, like a brother, and I was happy, and I am happy now.” The novel ends with him exclaiming, “My only wish now, in order that all may be fulfilled, and that I may feel that I am not alone, is that on the day of my execution a large crowd of onlookers may greet me with cries of hatred.”
Just as he wrote The Rebel as a commentary on The Plague, Camus wrote The Myth of Sisyphus a few months later as a commentary on The Stranger. In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus describes this novel of boredom and futility as “the same rhythm: wake-up, tram, four hours in the office or factory, meal, four hours of labor, meal, sleep, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday.” In the unchanging repetition of the same life, the human mind becomes mechanized and life becomes monotonous. We have no hope, no illusions, only physical truths and fleeting pleasures.
In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus writes: “In a world suddenly devoid of illusion and light, man feels himself to be a ‘stranger’. There is no salvation in this banishment, for he has no memory of his lost homeland, no hope of the promised land.” The ‘stranger’, then, is the human being in relation to the world.
Meursault’s actions, such as his affair with Marie the day after his mother’s funeral, or his murder of an Arab who had no stake in the matter, are not understood by others, as illustrated by the following passage from The Myth of Sisyphus “A man is calling from the other side of the window. Of course, you can’t hear him from this side. But you can see his meaningless gestures. The person on the other side wonders why he is doing that.” The behavior of the person in the window is absurd. To borrow Sartre’s phrase, “He belongs to a broken line. When he opens the door and listens to the receiver, the line is connected and human activity becomes meaningful.”
Camus inserts a pane of glass between his characters and the reader. The person behind the glass is seen as incompetent. The pane lets everything through, but there is one thing it doesn’t let through: the meaning of the action. This lack of meaning creates a disconnect between Meursault and others.
This disconnection of consciousness represents the destruction of order in human society. Camus’s treatment of this theme in The Stranger is therefore the deepest insight into this absurdity and the most poignant denunciation of it. In the words of Sartre, “The Stranger” is “a dry and clean work, a work that is apparently disordered, but well organized, and all too human.
At the time of its publication, the Second World War was a time of social and spiritual turmoil in France and around the world, and the two world wars had changed human values. People were dying as if human life was not so precious. When this work was published, it was considered a literary triumph of existentialism, and although he was not an existentialist, he belonged to that trend.
It was thanks to Camus’s The Stranger and Sartre’s series of philosophical theories that existentialist works became popular in the world before and after World War II, and it was no coincidence that he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957. He was recognized for his literary contribution to the establishment of new values in a chaotic and disordered mental climate. His literary spirit, which sought to realize social justice based on self-sincerity and human dignity, led him to be referred to as a sincere writer rather than a great French writer.
In 1945, after the end of World War II, Camus’ ideas of absurdity and rebellion, which recognized the crisis of the human spirit in the desolate ruins and proposed to overcome it, touched and influenced his readers with more power than medieval religion. What some countries have passed off as conventional nihilism is because Camus has not been understood correctly. Camus’s literature was powerful and influential, at least until the nouveau romance that emerged in the 1950s became the prevailing literary tide.
Camus’s unfortunate death in 1960 prevented the publication of another The Stranger, but his 1942 version of The Stranger will never lose its significance, at least in terms of literary history before and after World War II, as well as in terms of representing and dominating the psyche of a generation.
