It was not until 1961, almost nineteen years after its first publication, that any critic suggested in print that Camus's L'Etranger could be read as a 'racialist' novel. (p. 61)
Camus himself insisted that he saw L'Etranger first and foremost as a book about a man who is a martyr to truth…. Throughout the novel, the reader is invited to sympathise with Meursault and see his cult of physical sensation—his delight at the crisp dryness of a hand-towel at midday, his love of swimming and making love, his appreciation of the sights and sounds of Algiers—as infinitely superior to the conventional values which are always being offered to him. Meursault, we feel, is right not to exchange the sun-drenched beaches of Algiers for the cold courtyards of Paris, right to prefer straightforward sensuality to Marie's sentimentalised idea of 'love', right to place the reality of this life higher than the hypothetical consolations of eternity, right to persist in his vision of the truth as he sees it even if this does lead him to the guillotine. How, then, can a novel with so attractive and honest a hero be seriously interpreted as embodying so unpleasant and life-denying an ideology as racialism? How, moreover, can so conscientious and self-conscious an artist as Camus have written a book which so contradicts the values which he officially defended in his lifetime? For he was not only the first French writer seriously to concern himself with the Algeria problem, campaigning as early as the 1930s in favour of equal treatment for Arab and European alike. He was, in 1945, virtually the only French journalist to warn of what was going to happen in Algeria if France did nothing to change its basically colonial status.
This is a free excerpt of 289 words. There are 2,082 words (approx.
7 pages at 300 words per page) in the full critical essay.
Read the rest of this Criticism with our Camus, Albert 1913–1960: Critical Essay by Philip Thody Access Pass.
