The Outsider in Albert Camus
May 29
The Millions have been good enough to provide this great little insight into the life of Albert Camus, whose novel The Outsider (L’Étranger) is one of my favourite reads.
During a tour of North and South America in the later 1940s, Camus kept two notebooks that were later published together as American Journals. According to The Millions’ Andrew Saikali, the entries show a mind ‘teetering on the brink, one minute penning astute observations on human suffering; the next – perfunctory, and seemingly overwhelmed almost to the point of paralysis by the simplest, most mundane, obstacles’. In a strange echo of Meursault, whose inability to act as society expects sees him alienated and eventually executed for murder, Camus expresses a similar feeling of disconnect: ‘Only the mind works on, obstinately. Hideous thought. Unbearable feeling of advancing step by step toward an unknown catastrophe which will destroy everything around me and in me’.
In Canada, Camus wrote that he had ‘for the first time on this continent [seen] a real impression of beauty and true magnitude’. In America, he was impressed by the generosity and spontaneity of the people, but was also struck by its sense of innocence: ‘This [is a] big country, calm and slow. One feels that it has been completely unaware of the war. In the course of a few years, Europe, which was several centuries ahead in knowledge, moved several centuries ahead in moral consciousness’. In Rio, Camus wrote ‘never have I seen wealth and poverty so insolently intertwined’ and my favourite extract relates to his description of a Brazilian poet that he met there: ‘Enormous, indolent, folds of flesh around his eyes, his mouth hanging open, the poet arrives. Anxieties, a sudden movement, then he spills himself into an easy chair and stays there a little while, panting. He gets up, does a pirouette and falls back down into the easy chair’.
Throughout his journeys, Camus suffered regularly from fever and sickness that saw him sink into deep bouts of depression. ‘Sad to still feel so vulnerable,’ he wrote on his return voyage, ‘In 25 years I'll be 57. 25 years then to create a body of work and to find what I’m looking for. After that: old age and death.’ Sadly, this was not even the case – Camus died 14 years later in a car crash near Sens.
The Outsider was made into a film in 1967 by Luchino Visconti, featuring Marcello Mastroianni as Meursault. Here’s a brief clip:
JA
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Comments
29 May 09 at 10:58
Nice profile in the Monash mag BTW.
After reading your blog on Camus I now have The Cure's Killing an Arab running around my head. Might just have to go and my copy of L'Etranger and have a re-read...
...01 Jun 09 at 11:52
I love Camus too, The Outsider, and particularly The Myth of Sisyphus. Great post! Thanks.
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