“Mother died today. Or, maybe, yesterday; I can't be sure.”
- The Stranger, Albert Camus (1942)
When Libraire Gallimard published L’Étranger in 1942, it couldn’t possibly have grasped the permanent chaos that the book would create in human understanding of the world and its own self. In the background of the raging war that engulfed powerful nations, Camus shelled our existence to rubbles. The violence was far greater, yet silent. Life and livelihood became absurd, from which death was the only deliverance.
History is marked by conflict between the individual and the collective. At times, the individual won and changed the course of history, but mostly it succumbed to the profanity of the commonplace, the pluralistic morality. The idiotic status quo sheltered the masses for centuries from the onslaught of reality seen with clarity lent by strangeness. But all that was about to change, L’Étranger turned out to be the waterloo of the collective. You are now no more a character, neither a plot. You are simply page numbers of a torn book of Hadith, the nth narration of a fable of sand, devastation and possibly a kind of jaundice, also known as love.
I insist, at this point, that I do not intend to write a discourse on the Meursault phenomenon, but to comment on the evolution of the stranger who has come to be a part of each one of you, like the fungus in your gut. To start with, let us go back to Arthur Conan Doyle, who’s Sherlock Holmes held a pathologic interest in crime, not as something deplorable, instead as an achievement of creative ingenuity. Though he worked as a detective, his admiration laid with the criminal Moriarty rather than the Scotland Yard. This stranger is laden with eccentricity, which justifies his isolation and you can feel safe to be at a distance. The ‘stranger’ next evolved in the hand of a sick Czech, into Gregor Samsa, who famously turned into an insect. Gregor was an ordinary salesman, who wished to be nothing more than a salesman, yet found himself on the wrong side of life. Your danger is now imminent, the distance that separates you and the insect has grown perilously thin. However, Gregor is not good enough to challenge you, your marriage and the careers of your children, as he himself longed to get back into the fold, and finally died an anonymous death.
On the other hand, Meursault, the provincial, affronts you with his detach-ment. He creates an outrage by standing up to all of you, the Arab that died an absurd death on the beach could have been any of you, even me. He refused the essentially plural ideas of governing law and religion and faced death like an ordinary toast.
Yet, Meursault is no hero. His natural distance lends him a distinctive clarity that allows him to see through the oligarchy of the collective life, where laws are made by few and the rest obey. It is the inability to bear with the fact that life and death are equally absurd, that leads to voluntary stupefaction. Nobody wants to carry the weight of existence as an absolute in itself. Therefore, we need the stranger to remind what we essentially are.
Sixty-seven years on, he has ‘infected’ all of you. A danger now lurks in every possible corner. The innocuous drive to office, the weekend party, the summer vacation in college can uneventfully lead to a fork in the path. The world suddenly seems to shine with brilliant clarity, an afternoon without a trace of meaning, or purpose, or beauty. And you are left without a choice!
