Colonial Anonymity
Colonization creates the colonized just as we have seen that it creates the colonizer.
—Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized
In his celebrated study of colonialism, The Colonizer and the Colonized, Albert Memmi describes how the colonial system deprives colonized peoples of their history, culture, rights, dignity, identity, and their very being:
The colonized enjoys none of the attributes of citizenship; neither his own, which is dependent, contested, and smothered, nor that of the colonizer. He can hardly adhere to one or claim the other. Not having his just place in the community, not enjoying the rights of a modern citizen, not being subject to his normal duties, not voting, not bearing the burden of community affairs, he cannot feel like a true citizen…. Nationally and civically he is only what the colonizer is not.
(96 [116–117])
To be what the colonizer is not only to be reduced to a state of political and cultural inferiority, both in the everyday lived reality of colonialism and in the colonialist imagination. To be what the other is not is in fact not to be.1
Postcolonial critics have for some time focused on examples of negative, stereotypical representations of colonized peoples in the literature of the colonial period in order to emphasize the nefarious effects of colonialism. But the absence of developed, individualized Arab characters in French colonial literature has also been considered symptomatic of colonialist values and prejudices. Militantly anticolonialist critics such as Connor Cruise O’Brien have in the case of Albert Camus treated the absence of individualized Arab characters in his novels and stories that take place in Algeria as indications of Camus’ alleged colonialist sympathies and evidence that in his fictions he “implicitly denies the colonial reality and sustains the colonial fiction” (O’Brien, Albert Camus, 23). In the few instances when Arab characters do appear in Camus’s novels or short stories, they function as insignificant elements of the décor, faceless, nameless, and anonymous, providing a small amount of “local color” to the stories but nothing more. Blending into the North African landscape, they are all easily ignored or forgotten, given no more importance in Camus’ fictional universe than they had for French colonialists in colonialist society in general.
Camus’ alleged literary failure to give an individual voice or identity to Arab characters in his novels or short stories or present them as autonomous human beings on a par with the French characters is thus taken by O’Brien and critics who have followed his lead to be a serious political fault as well. This is because the anonymity of the admittedly few Arab characters that appear in Camus’ work—the two most important examples being “the Arab” who is murdered by Meursault in The Stranger and the unnamed “Arab prisoner” in Camus’ short story “The Guest”—is treated as proof that in Camus’ fictional universe Arab characters are not just other but also inferior to the point of being almost nonexistent. Or, as O’Brien succinctly puts it, readers are encouraged to consider the Arab character in The Stranger as “not quite a man…. The reader does not quite feel that Meursault has killed a man. He has killed an Arab” (25–26). Such criticisms, no matter how sweeping, cannot be simply dismissed, however, since even though the literary and political significance of the “evidence” used to indict Camus can be debated, the facts themselves seem undeniable.
The fundamental question raised by O’Brien’s attack is thus whether the anonymity of the very limited number of Arab characters in Camus’ fictions should be considered the sign of Camus’ deep-rooted colonialist sympathies and prejudices, of his own acceptance of the inferior status of Arabs within French colonial society. Can it legitimately be used as proof that Camus supported both the myth and reality of colonialism and that he thus believed that the French political, economic, and cultural domination of Algeria and Algerians was legitimate and should continue? In order to answer this question, at the very least it would seem necessary first to analyze the specific place and function of the Arab characters in the fictional contexts in which they appear before drawing general conclusions about their political significance. Hastily drawn conclusions and sweeping generalizations about elements of a novel taken out of context risk distorting or simply missing the most important political implications of the work itself—perhaps even in some cases sufficiently distorting the work to make it representative of a political position it in fact opposes.
O’Brien does acknowledge that there are important differences between Camus’ political journalism and his fictions: “Camus never did come to terms with the situation in question [colonialism in Algeria], and his journalistic writings are the record of his painful and protracted failure to do so… imaginatively he comes much closer to it” (26). To “come to terms with the situation” in Algeria, especially after the FLN’s organization of armed resistance in 1954, does not for O’Brien, however, mean denouncing colonial injustices or advocating democratic reforms, which Camus regularly did in his many journalistic essays and editorials on Algeria from 1939 until 1958. It means for him rather something very different: actively supporting the FLN and its armed struggle for Algerian independence, which, it is true, Camus categorically refused to do.2 What is missing from O’Brien’s argument, however, is a sustained analysis of either what Camus actually wrote in his political essays or of how Camus’ fictions “come closer” to doing what Camus’ political essays allegedly never do. In fact, O’Brien’s brief summaries of Camus’ fictions tend rather to emphasize how they too “failed” and ultimately also constitute expressions of colonialist ideology.
O’Brien was not the first critic of colonialism, however, to claim that Camus’ first published novel was in some way symptomatic of pied-noir attitudes toward Arabs. The celebrated historian Pierre Nora had already made such a claim about The Stranger in his study of Les Français d’Algérie, published in 1961, shortly before the end of the Algerian War.3 In this early work, Nora analyzes—and given the terminology he uses, it would not be exaggerated to say “psychoanalyzes”—what he characterizes as the “delirium” of the entire European or pied-noir population of Algeria (46). The basis for this delirium is what he claims to have discovered in each and every member of the pied-noir community: the same deep-rooted, violent, racist hostility toward all Arabs. All pieds-noirs, without exception, are thus presented by Nora as being profoundly racist, even if their true feelings toward Arabs, he also argues, remain for the most part deeply repressed in their individual and collective unconscious, unacknowledged and unacknowledgeable because of their violent nature. But they are nonetheless sufficiently evident in their behavior traits for Nora to observe and analyze them while he was in Algeria teaching and compiling evidence for his study.
Nora makes a forceful case for the existence of all pieds-noirs’ repressed racist hatred of Arabs, and his own portrait of the typical Algerian colonialist, a portrait that in many ways makes Memmi’s portrait of even the most militant of the colonialists who accept colonialism seem tame, provides the evidence to support his sweeping claim. For example, Nora treats the generally recognized openness and generosity of pieds-noirs as the opposite of what it appears to be. For him, it is not generosity at all, but rather a symptom of a latent hostility directed against all internal and external outsiders, not just the Arabs living in Algeria, but also the French of mainland France. Surface traits of warmth, generosity, and hospitality, therefore, are considered by Nora to be nothing more than screens, symptoms of the desire to win the outsider (including the Parisian historian/analyst) over to their cause, a way of hiding under their apparent generosity and good will their true violent feelings and an entire reactionary political agenda.4
The picture of pieds-noirs that emerges from Nora’s study, then, is of French men and women living a deeply divided life. In reality, they live in a French colony in which the overwhelming majority of inhabitants are Arab or Berber, but in their imaginations they live in a world inhabited exclusively by French pieds-noirs. Rather than confront what he claims are their deep feelings of racial hatred, Nora alleges that pieds-noirs flee from them: “Victims of troubled affectivity, Europeans have repressed the violence of their feelings through a collective decision not to recognize the Arabs. Because of the colonial situation, they act simply as if Arabs did not exist” (184). They thus relate to Arabs not as individuals but as anonymous, interchangeable components of the collectivity referred to as “les Arabes” or “les Musulmans,” which Nora treats as being symptomatic of their racism and hatred of the colonized Other.
The anonymity of Arabs in the pied-noir world is thus in Nora’s analysis the screen for an even more violent, genocidal hatred, from which he claims no pied-noir is exempt:
There is not one Frenchman who does not caress in the shadows of his unconscious this idea [genocide] as the extreme point of sadistic perversion. But they do not dare admit their desire…. Realizing this dream is impossible. As soon as the idea barely scratches the surface of consciousness, immediately the respect of metropolitan values of liberty, equality, and fraternity takes over. The French civilizing mission and French grandeur censor the desire for genocide that survives only as an absurd and amusing hypothesis.
(187)
Nora does not explain how he has been able to penetrate this deeply into even “the shadows of [each French Algerian’s] unconscious,” especially since he acknowledges that the desire for genocide he claims to have discovered there, as soon as it begins to move toward the surface of consciousness, is immediately repressed by a French super-ego that represents the equalitarian values and ideals of Republican France. For Nora, the repressed desire for genocide nevertheless constitutes the horrible hidden truth of both colonialism in general and the desires of every French colonialist in particular. His study of the French of Algeria thus describes the profound identity crisis of a pied-noir community torn between the high equalitarian ideals of the French Republic and the repressed primitive colonialist desire for genocide.
Nora’s study has a strong anthropological dimension and constitutes in large part an exploration of the customs and thinking of a people he presents as being completely “foreign” to the authentic French republican community of mainland France. Pieds-noirs appear in his study as a strange, exotic, and extremely dangerous tribe. They are a people with a smile on their face but murder in their hearts. They may claim to be participating in the “civilizing mission” of the “natives” of Algeria, but they are the ones who in fact lack civilization. They may be “French,” but in name only. His condemnation not just of the colonialist system but of the pied-noir community in general is thus sweeping and uncompromising. Pieds-noirs in Nora’s description are as barbaric and uncivilized as he claims “Arabs” are in the minds of the racist pied-noir community whose deep racist hatred he repeatedly brings to the surface and analyzes. Pieds-noirs are, in fact, everything the French are not—or at least everything they should not be—just as “the Arabs” are allegedly represented in the collective psyche of pieds-noirs as either nonexistent or the hated other, the opposite of what the pieds-noirs imagine themselves to be.
Near the end of his book, Nora presents what could be considered the most important piece of “evidence” for his case study of French Algerians: Camus’ The Stranger. Nora claims that Camus’ “genius” in The Stranger is to have succeeded in revealing what Nora rediscovered almost two decades later: the hidden desires of an entire pied-noir community, of all French Algerians without exception. Camus is treated in this way as a kind of “native informer,” not just because of his modest birth, which makes him both economically and politically more disinterested in colonialism than the rich and powerful colons who benefit enormously from their privileged status in colonial Algeria. But it is also because Nora considers Camus to be a talented writer who is “exceptionally sensitive and cultivated” and thus “predisposed to sense the truth that his compatriots masked from themselves” (190).
The Stranger, which Nora characterizes as “the only great work written in Algeria by the only great French writer of Algeria,” represents for him nothing less than “the exact reflection of the lived feelings of the French presence in Algeria” (190). Nora, like Freud, for whom poets delineated the “royal way to the unconscious,” thus treats this literary work as a dream—or rather, a nightmare—that reveals the repressed truths of colonialist desire. And it is precisely because the work is a product of the author’s imagination that it avoids the repression of the French-Republican super-ego. It is thus under the cover of fiction that the truth of colonialist desire and the colonialists’ collective unconscious comes to the surface. What is most real is what is most imaginary, and thus the truth of the political is discovered in the fiction and literary imagination of the most sensitive and talented French-Algerian writer of his era.
For Nora, the most important “lived feeling” expressed in the novel is the desire for murder, which he finds just under the surface of almost every aspect of life in colonialist Algeria. By narrating the murder of an unnamed Arab by a French Algerian, Nora claims that Camus’ novel serves a collective therapeutic function and succeeds in “liberat[ing] a latent aggressiveness” appropriate to “every Frenchman in Algeria” (191). Nora also argues that The Stranger constitutes a collective admission of guilt, “the troubling confession of a historical culpability which takes on the appearance of an anticipation” (191)—a phrase quoted by O’Brien to support his indictment of Camus as a colonialist writer, which is not Nora’s purpose in his own study. Camus, it would seem, because of his rich imagination and talents as a writer, succeeds in Nora’s estimation in expressing in his novel a generalized guilt that would only be felt long after the novel was in fact written—not until the very end of or after the Algerian War, and perhaps not then or even today.
O’Brien and Nora thus agree on the clinical/political evidence the novel provides, even if each uses the same evidence for different purposes. O’Brien uses it to indict Camus for being a colonialist writer who accepts the myth of and chief justification for colonialism, the superiority of the colonizers over the colonized. Nora finds in the novel evidence that allows him to indict an entire pied-noir community for its violent hatred of the colonized, while at the same time praising Camus’ “genius” and honesty for expressing the blood lust of his people and portraying their guilt for their unjust treatment of Arabs—and even worse, for their repressed desire for genocide. But whether it is to Camus’ credit or detriment, Nora and O’Brien agree that The Stranger, given the centrality to its plot of the murder of an anonymous Arab character, conveys in one form or another colonialist values and desires. It is for both of them a profoundly colonialist novel, with Meursault, the stranger, the embodiment of the colonizer, and his situation and actions in the novel representative of the attitudes and desires of an entire pied-noir community. The question that needs to be asked of such interpretations, however, no matter how much one might agree with their powerful denunciations of colonialism, is whether the novel as a whole really sustains them. Everything depends on what it means in the novel to be a stranger to society, an Other—and perhaps even more important, on the significance of the fact that Meursault is condemned to death in the novel not for the murder of an anonymous Arab but for occupying the place of the Other.
The Stranger Retried
Given the serious nature of the claims made by Nora, O’Brien, and numerous other critics who follow their lead, it would be impossible today to read Camus’ novel and ignore the problem of how it relates to the colonialist context in which it was written and which it portrays.5 In their haste to indict Camus, however, critics have tended to underplay or simply ignore the devastating picture The Stranger provides of what Memmi has called the “colonial relation,” a hierarchical relation of oppression, forced dependency, and violence that is as evident in the microstructures determining everyday relations between colonizers and colonized as in the macrostructure determining the political, economic, and cultural domination of the colonizers over the colonized.6 This banal, everyday violence is abundantly evident, for example, in the first part of the novel, in the growing hostility between Meursault’s French friends and the Arabs who are following them. It culminates in Meursault’s murder of an unnamed Arab on the beach. The murder may be depicted in the novel from Meursault’s perspective as an unplanned, spontaneous, uncontrolled act, but without the sequence of violent events between two opposed groups, clearly identified in the novel as French and Arab, which sets the stage for the murder, it would never have occurred. And if it had not taken place, then Meursault would not have been arrested, tried, convicted, and himself condemned to death. To focus almost exclusively on the fact that in the novel a pied-noir named Meursault kills an unnamed Arab is to seriously reduce the complexity and interest of the novel and distort what it actually reveals about colonial Algeria—which in fact turns out to be quite different from what Nora, O’Brien, and others influenced by their interpretations have claimed.
The trial itself is one the most famous of all literature and has been analyzed repeatedly; the legal issues are as clear as they could be. An Arab with a knife in his hand is shot on a beach outside of Algiers and dies. There is no doubt that the main character and first-person narrator of the novel, Meursault himself, pulled the trigger of the gun that killed the man, or that after shooting his victim once, he shot him four more times after he had fallen. These are facts no one can dispute, whatever Meursault’s motives and whatever the extenuating circumstances might have been, since we learn these facts from Meursault himself. We have no reason not to believe him, since his honesty and directness have been well established in the novel long before the shooting is narrated. Meursault is as reliable a first-person narrator as could be imagined, a trustworthy witness with no reason to lie about what happened. We thus accept his words as true, especially since he clearly admits his responsibility for the crime.7
The death of an anonymous Arab is of course crucial to the plot of the novel, but not because it is central to Meursault’s interrogation both before and during his trial, which makes up the second half of the novel. Even though the shooting is the reason for Meursault’s arrest, the victim of the crime and the crime itself are largely ignored or forgotten during the legal proceedings. And for decades, this paradox or inconsistency—the relative unimportance of the murder itself for Meursault’s trial and conviction—has either simply been ignored by critics or explained away in various and conflicting ways. It would seem undeniable, however, no matter how the murder is explained, that Meursault would never have been arrested and tried had he not shot and killed another man. It is equally true that he would never have been considered a victim of the judicial system had the murder of “the Arab” not been largely ignored during the trial and if he had been judged and convicted for the crime he actually committed.
The more innocent Meursault is, in the eyes of the readers of the novel, the more guilty the society that condemns him to death must be, for only a petty, hypocritical, repressive, and unjust society could sentence a man to death for something as trivial as not crying at his mother’s funeral. As far-fetched as it might seem when the reason for his condemnation is phrased this starkly, Camus himself strongly encouraged such a reading, when in his 1955 preface to an American translation of The Stranger he wrote:
I summarized The Stranger a long time ago, with a remark that I admit was highly paradoxical: “In our society any man who does not weep at his mother’s funeral runs the risk of being sentenced to death.” I only meant that the hero of my book is condemned because he does not play the game…. He refuses to lie…. One would therefore not be much mistaken to read The Stranger as the story of a man who, without any heroics, agrees to die for the truth.”8
To refuse to play the social game and to die for the truth could of course be considered commendable, even noble, acts, certainly far different than not expressing emotion at one’s own mother’s funeral. But it is still necessary to ask what truth Meursault actually dies for. The answer to this question will turn out to be very different both from what Camus’ own statements would lead one to believe and from what most critics have alleged.9
It is crucial first of all to recognize that the narrative logic (or illogic) of the novel demands that the murder be committed and then ignored. For the murder is only a pretext for Meursault being arrested, interrogated, tried for a capital offense, convicted, and sentenced to death. Without the murder, his monotonous life, no matter how honest he was and how many social games he refused to play, would never have come to the attention of the police and never provided sufficient material for a novel. The murder once committed must then be forgotten, however, since it is only by having his crime ignored during his trial that Meursault, who is responsible for the death of another man, can be convicted for other, more superficial reasons and transformed into a victim of the judicial system and society as a whole. This is how an inconsequential clerk with few if any ambitions, only the most uncomplicated natural desires, and nonthreatening behavior becomes, in the eyes of the court, a serious threat to society and then, in Camus’ words, a martyr to the truth, a rebel, and the very symbol of authentic revolt. This narrative (il)logic and legal absurdity, however, disguise (which is also a way of revealing) a historical-political insight of a very different nature and one that concerns not just the hypocrisy of modern society in general but more specifically the crimes and injustices of French colonial Algeria (and, as we shall see, of Vichy France as well).
Meursault’s is a strange trial. During the proceedings, the judge and jury have to be reminded that a crime has been committed. But this is not done by the prosecutor, but rather by Meursault’s own defense lawyer, who evokes the murder as a central part of his defense of Meursault. It is as if Meursault would have had a better chance of winning his case, or at least of not receiving a death sentence, if he had been tried for having killed a man, rather than for the crime for which he is in fact judged. As if Meursault could only be condemned to die if the crime he actually committed was largely ignored. And vice versa, that he could be declared innocent only if the crime of murder was the central issue in his trial. This is the strange and perverse logic of justice that the novel presents, and it is one of the principal points the novel makes about the fundamental injustice of the law—especially in a colonialist context.
The law has its own story to tell, and it silences or simply ignores the stories it does not want to hear, stories that do not conform to its protocols, stories that complicate proceedings and thus cannot be used to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. These are stories that reveal guilt and innocence at the same time, not just of the defendant, but also of the prosecutors, the judge, the jury, the witnesses called to testify, the journalists covering the trial, and the spectators present in the courtroom. As Camus wrote in his essay “Reflections on the Guillotine,” every society has the criminals it deserves, and no one is ever absolutely guilty or absolutely innocent. This is one of his arguments against capital punishment. The Stranger is already an indication of his conviction that no system of justice can be considered just or legitimate if it has recourse to this ultimate form of punishment, which Camus calls “the most premeditated of murders.”10
The Function of Anonymity
As O’Brien observes, Arab characters in The Stranger are not given names other than the generic “Arab” and are portrayed as menacing enemies of the French characters in the novel—if not enemies of society as a whole, or at least the fringe Meursault and his friends represent. Arab characters remain nameless throughout the novel, both in life and, as concerns the murder victim, in death as well, since the victim’s name is never revealed during the court proceedings. O’Brien is thus right to insist on the fact that Meursault does not kill a man with a name and identity; he rather kills “an Arab.” This obvious point cannot and should not be ignored or denied, even if the sweeping conclusions O’Brien draws from the Arab character’s anonymity need to be analyzed more carefully than they have been by the critics who have followed his lead.
The general problem of “Arab anonymity” is compounded in the novel by the fact that one of the unnamed Arab characters, the victim, plays an essential role in the development of the plot of the novel. Because he is shot by Meursault, not just once but five times, the murder has all the appearances of being a deliberate, premeditated execution, and not an act committed in self-defense. On the basis of these “facts,” a case could be made that Meursault deserves the harshest punishment the legal system provides for premeditated murder: the guillotine. Meursault, however, describing the incident in the same neutral tone and with the same directness, simplicity, and naiveté as he describes his mother’s funeral at the beginning of the novel, his affair with Marie, and every other aspect of his life, portrays the killing rather as the consequence of a chance encounter and the effects of the burning midday sun on his blurred consciousness.11 So unless the sincerity and reliability of this first-person narrator are questioned in terms of every other aspect of his life, even those observations and admissions he makes throughout the novel that critics generally accept as true, there is no reason to disbelieve Meursault in this instance either. Within the fictional universe of the novel, his testimony has truth value, since he is a man with little to say but who, when he does talk, usually says only what he truly feels. He speaks the truth, as it is defined by his feelings—or by the absence of feeling.
During his trial, the only legally relevant statement Meursault makes in his own defense is to assert that he “had no intention of killing the Arab” (129 [1198]). He tries to explain that it was “because of the sun” that the murder happened, but having said this, he is immediately aware of how ridiculous his words sound when they provoke laughter in the courtroom (130 [1198]). But as ridiculous as it might seem in a court of law, this is precisely how Meursault, first-person narrator, describes the accident/murder in the novel before his trial, as it were, “as it was happening.” He relates that he felt as if the sun was attacking him with its blinding rays of light and that he tried both to flee its attacks and defend himself against them. Thus, as a consequence of an unbearable North African sun, an unnamed Arab tragically dies.12 There are also other, more legally convincing extenuating circumstances—especially the previous scuffle on the beach when his friend Raymond was wounded by the same knife used to threaten Meursault—so it would not be difficult to imagine that such a crime could have and should logically have been treated as manslaughter rather than premeditated murder—and thus not as a capital offense. And this would be true whether the victim of the crime was French or Arab, but in a colonial context, especially in the latter case.13
Meursault’s ridiculous but truthful explanation for the murder is of course laughed at and ignored, even by his own defense lawyer—although Meursault will be condemned to die for even more absurd reasons. It is clear, however, that Meursault’s destiny is to die—not for the crime he actually committed, whatever his motivations for shooting the gun and thus his responsibility for the murder—but for entirely different reasons.14 Meursault’s destiny and that of his Arab victim are in fact both tragic and inextricably intertwined from the moment Meursault wanders back to the spot on the beach where the original fight took place and fires the gun, killing a man whose fault is to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. Meursault’s fault (and guilt) will turn out to be the same as his victims, as will be his fate.
Before the Law: Guilty and Innocent at the Same Time
What a fate, to be condemned to work for a firm where the smallest omission gives at once rise to the greatest suspicion!
—Franz Kafka, “The Metamorphosis”
A crucial reversal occurs in the second part of the novel: Meursault’s political condition and social identity are radically transformed after his arrest. No longer ignored as an inconsequential French clerk living on the margins of society who follows the same routine every day and from time to time enjoys simple pleasures, he discovers that his very identity is being questioned when, as if in a story by Kafka, he finds himself before the law, guilty until proven innocent—and guilty even then. To be before the law is to be the victim of justice, whether one has actually committed the crime for which one has been accused or not. In a colonial society, it is structurally the situation of the anonymous, not the named, of indigenous colonized subjects rather than citizens, of Arabs such as Meursault’s victim rather than Frenchmen such as Meursault. Arrested and accused of murder, Meursault loses his privileged place as a French citizen in colonial society and over the course of the second half of the novel is increasingly identified with and put in the place of the colonized Arab, the anonymous, indigenous Other.
To be before the law and thus subject to the judgment of society, of those who judge rather than those who are judged, is in The Stranger to enter the world populated almost exclusively by Arabs. Not only is this exemplified by the cell into which Meursault is first placed after his arrest, in which he is the only Frenchman. It is also emphasized when Meursault describes his fiancée Marie’s first visit to the prison, when alongside a row of other visitors she is obliged to speak to him through a grill: “On my side of the bars were about a dozen other prisoners, Arabs for the most part. On Marie’s side were mostly Moorish women” (90 [1178]). As a prisoner accused of a capital crime, Meursault loses not just his freedom but has his birthright and identity as a French citizen challenged. He loses the right to be on the French side of the bars colonial society erects not just between free men and prisoners but also between French citizens and Arab subjects. His place behind bars is in a world almost completely populated by Arabs.
Unlike the Arab prisoners and the colonized in general, however, Meursault’s loss of the privilege of being French and thus on the other side of the bars could be temporary, for in principle it would be possible for him to regain his birthright, his identity, his civil rights, his freedom, and his privileges, as limited as they might be, by being declared innocent of murder and either set free or convicted of a much less serious crime, one that would not put his right to French identity into question. All that would have been needed was to show that there were extenuating circumstances for the murder and thus a justification for his act. But then the absurd nature of colonial “justice” would not be exposed as dramatically as it is in the novel. For in The Stranger the most profound change in Meursault’s existence brought about by the murder is not really his loss of his freedom, to which he fairly quickly becomes accustomed. It is rather the loss of his birthright, which he must now prove in a court of law that he truly deserves. He must in court justify his very existence before a judge and jury and prove that he is equal to and of the same nature as those judging him. He must prove nothing less than that he is truly “French.”
The possibility of being declared innocent, released from prison, and returning to French society, the possibility of becoming “French” once again, with all the rights and privileges granted to French citizens but denied to indigenous French subjects, is in fact presented to Meursault by the investigating judge in his attempts to convert him and save him from his fate. Meursault is a subject for conversion (or in colonialist terms, assimilation), which means that were he to declare his belief in the Christian God, he would regain his status as a French Algerian. Meursault’s refusal to express a belief in Christ and accept the repentance offered him by the judge condemns him long before he is actually judged and sentenced in court. In rejecting Christianity, and when he later aggressively attacks a priest in his cell, he is in effect refusing French identity itself and the possibility of being assimilated (back) into French society, the only option, other than the acceptance of anonymity or nonbeing, of those whom the colonialist relation determines to be indigenous foreigners, strangers in their own land—all those who are not French “naturally” but have to prove that they are worthy of becoming French. For if Meursault will not accept Christianity, in the eyes of the judge and colonial society in general he clearly is not and cannot ever be French. He is rather treated like a Muslim (or Jew) and considered the dangerous enemy of Christian France: “Mr. Antichrist” (88 [1176]), as the judge scornfully calls him.15
This is why determining Meursault’s guilt or innocence in terms of the actual crime of murder is not the central issue of his trial. The trial is staged rather to prove that Meursault is not French and in fact is not even human, not in legal terms but, more importantly, in moral, religious, and metaphysical terms. During his trial, Meursault is judged not for what he did but for what he is, for what the judicial system represents him as being or, over the course of his trial, transforms him into being through the prosecutor’s reconstruction of his life and the stories told by witnesses. He is judged for his “soul,” dark as it is claimed to be, for his strange “nature” or inner being, more than for his actions. He is thus not really condemned at all, as Camus claims, “for not playing the game” or for telling the truth—he in fact plays some if not most of society’s games quite effectively, and he does not always tell the truth, lying to the police, for example, to provide an excuse for his dubious friend Raymond after he has beaten his Arab mistress.16 Rather he is put to death for being inhuman, “a monster,” one of “them,” an alien enemy of the collective “us.” It is above all for his threatening alterity, his strange[r]ness, that he dies.
During the trial and before he is sentenced, Meursault’s individuality, whatever little there is of it and whatever it might be argued to be before he is arrested, is usurped. The trial from the start takes place largely in his absence, without his involvement, as if he were a spectator rather than the person on trial. When he is told by his defense lawyer “to shut up” for his own good, he reflects:
It seemed somehow as if the whole case was being treated without me. Everything was happening without my intervention. My fate was being determined without asking for my say. From time to time I felt like interrupting everyone and saying: “After all, who is being accused here anyway? It’s a serious matter to be the accused. And I have something to say.” However, on second thoughts, I had nothing to say.
(124, trans. mod. [1195])
Everyone has something to say about the person being judged except that person himself. And when he has something to say, it is considered irrelevant: no one listens and no one understands what he is saying. His words are given no weight, his explanations, such as they are, are ridiculed and ignored. It is as if he is speaking a foreign language no one else involved in the trial understands. A translated version of his life is put on trial and judged, but without his direct participation. Someone other than him, someone foreign to him, the stranger he has become is judged in his place.
The process of the distancing and even the elimination of Meursault from both his trial and his life is completed when his own lawyer in defending him speaks in his place, using the first-person “I,” the “I” that dominates the entire novel and gives the novel the tone of an authentic, intimate, first-person testimony. Told that it is normal courtroom procedure for lawyers to speak not just in defense of their clients but as their clients, Meursault thinks: “I thought that this was to exclude me further from the case, to reduce me to nothing, and in a certain sense to substitute the lawyer for me. But I think by then I was already very far away from this courtroom. And besides, my lawyer struck me as ridiculous” (130, trans. mod. [1198–1199]). Meursault is condemned and will die as a man deprived by the law of his individuality, of his subjectivity, and even of the right to say “I.” He dies as a man accused of one crime and judged, convicted, and sentenced for an entirely different kind of “crime,” the crime of being Other. He is condemned for what in the context of colonialist Algeria (and Vichy France) is his “race.”
“Race” or the Soul of the Other
When I claim that Meursault is condemned to die because of his “race,” I mean that he is condemned for what the court has decided he is, what “society,” a particular society at a particular time and place, determines he is, no matter what he actually is, what he says, or what he has done. He is what the legal proceedings define him as being, and once defined, what he will continue to be until his death. In the eyes of the court and the general public, he is a monster, society’s other, belonging to a species or race different from the “norm” or the “normal.” “Race” in this sense is thus a construction that is determined by social, cultural, religious, political, and legal institutions, procedures, and authorities, which in the novel are those of colonial Algeria. “Race” is the collective identity that is projected or imposed on individuals and groups, which is then used to explain their behavior and values (or lack of values) and allow authorities to distinguish whether an individual is one of “us” or one of “them.” And this same “fictive ethnicity” is used in courts of law as evidence of the guilt of an accused—who, no matter his crime, is in fact judged to be guilty of existing, of being who he is.17
After being interrogated at length by the prosecutor, not about his crime but about how he acted during his mother’s funeral, Meursault begins to realize that he had become an “object of hatred” for the courtroom, not for having killed another man, whether intentionally or not, but for being the inhuman, immoral monster the prosecutor has accused him of being. He knows he will be found guilty, that he already is guilty in the eyes of the court and society in general, not for what he has done but for what he is, the object of their collective hatred: “I had a foolish desire to cry because I felt how much I was loathed by all these people…. I felt something then that was stirring up the courtroom, and for the first time I understood that I was guilty” (112, trans. mod. [1189]). Because he is feared and loathed as a monstrous Other, the negative of what it is to be French in Algerian colonial society and even the negative of all humanity, he is by definition guilty, no matter what he has actually done. As the extremist nationalist anti-Semite Maurice Barrès wrote concerning Alfred Dreyfus, he did not need to know if or why Dreyfus betrayed France, since Barrès knew “from his race” that Dreyfus was capable of betraying France and thus guilty of the crime whether he actually committed it or not.18 Meursault’s guilt is determined by the same perverse racist logic.
“Race,” according to this logic, can be manifested in “biological” traits such as “blood,” the color of skin, the shape of the nose, the texture of hair, and so on, or, as was the case for Barrès and other French nationalists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in cultural factors such as religion, language, traditions, customs, and beliefs. In fact, with emphasis in different contexts given to either “biology” or culture, race is in fact always characterized by a combination or confusion of both “blood” and culture at the same time. In The Stranger, Meursault’s “race” is constructed during his trial in terms of social-cultural norms, religion, and ultimately metaphysics—by the determination of nothing less than the nature of his soul. Or rather by the absence of a soul. Ultimately, race always comes down to the question not of the blood but of the soul of the Other.
The image of Meursault’s “soul,” which is the foundation on which the case made against him is constructed, is described by the prosecuting attorney in the following way:
I tried to keep listening because the prosecutor began to speak of my soul. He said that he’d studied it closely and found nothing…. He said that in truth I had no soul at all and there was nothing human about me, not one of the moral principles found in human hearts, could be found in me. “No doubt,” he added, “we should not reproach him with this. We cannot blame him for lacking what was never in his power to acquire. But in a court of law, the wholly negative principle of tolerance must give way to the more difficult but loftier principle of justice. Especially when the lack of heart such as is found in this man becomes an abyss into which the entire society can slip.”
(127, trans. mod. [1197])
By demonstrating that he lacks an essential human trait, although through no “fault” of his own but because of a deficiency he was born with and that remains in him, a deficiency that defines him as Other and by nature criminal, the court is called in the name of “justice” (rather than tolerance) to judge this lack as severely as possible. For the well-being of society it is asked to execute him “in the name of the French people” (135 [1201]). For French colonial society to be safe, Meursault can no longer be allowed to exist; it is as simple and grotesque as that.
The Stranger thus exposes the fundamental injustice of any legal system in which the death penalty is imposed and dramatizes what could be called the colonialist or racist dimension of what Camus called absolute systems of justice, where who or what you are, or rather, who society through its legal system defines you as being, ultimately determines your innocence or guilt. Through a tragic twist of colonialist fate, Meursault’s destiny and that of the nameless Arab he murdered on the beach are inextricably intertwined at the end of the novel. For to be condemned to die in the name of the French people for what he is, no matter what crime he actually committed, is in fact to be judged and to die in colonial Algeria not as a French citizen but as an indigenous Arab subject. Meursault thus dies not for the truth and as the fictional embodiment of the absurd antihero who refuses to play society’s games, but because he is judged to have no soul, to be not fully human. He eagerly looks forward to his own execution, though, expressing the desire to be hated by the very people to whose community he once belonged and who have judged him as no longer being worthy of belonging: “For everything to be accomplished, for me to feel less lonely, all that remained was to hope that on the day of my execu0tion there should be a huge crowd of spectators and that they should greet me with cries of hatred” (154, trans. mod. [1211–1212]). Meursault in this way fully assumes the fate assigned to him by the court. He dies and wants to die in the place of the Other, as a stranger to the French, the negative image of what they are or imagine themselves to be. He dies and wants to die in the place of and as an Arab.
The Stranger was published in occupied Paris approximately two years after the Décret Crémieux was rescinded by Maréchal Pétain on October 7, 1940. Article II of Pétain’s proclamation reads: “The political rights of indigenous Jews in the three departments of Algeria are regulated by the texts that determine the political rights of indigenous Algerian Muslims.”19 This meant that Algerian Jews under Vichy law were once again considered to be “indigenous subjects” rather than French citizens. In a novel published in occupied Paris in 1942, Meursault, as a hated indigenous Other, thus also dies as a Jew.