Abstract
This paper demonstrates that L'Étranger, Camus's famous novel about an outsider, had by as early as 1946 become just as much of an 'insider' in terms of its affiliation to the Parisian literary tradition. More than an insider simply by virtue of its contemporary place in the French canon, then, the novel is also intertextually bound to a tradition of oxymoronic poetics dating back to Charles Baudelaire's Paris Spleen (Les Petits poèmes en prose). I shall examine the way in which L'Étranger performs its prose poetics, thereby establishing it as exemplary of a Parisian model of modernity. Additionally, the famous scene on the beach will be considered as a liminal space and as a literary translation of Paris into the desert, which, once a joke for Paris's relationship to provincial France, became after the Second World War a new allegory for the capital's self-alterity.
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Notes
Boris Vian, L’Automne à Pékin, in Gilbert Pestureau (ed), Boris Vian. Romans, nouvelles, œuvres diverses (Paris: Le Livre de Poche/La Pochotèque, 1991), pp. 207–421 (p. 230). Vian’s collected works have since been republished by Fayard (1999) in a 15-volume set, edited by Gilbert Pestureau, Marc Lapprand and Nicole Bertolt of La Fondation Boris Vian. As I write this article in September 2010, Vian’s consecration in Gallimard’s prestigious La Pléiade series is imminent. Paul Knobloch’s translation of these lines is as follows: ‘I’m leaving now,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing to do now but wait. I’ll try to do my best for you but you really haven’t been a great help.’ […] Once again, he felt the heat in his arms and legs.’ Boris Vian, Autumn in Peking (California: TamTam Books, 2005), p. 24. Henceforth this translation will be used for quotes when most appropriate, and references will be included in the body of the text as ‘Vian.’ The page reference for the French version will be left in square brackets for those wishing to compare the original French with Vian’s text.
L’Etranger was first published in Paris in 1942. Camus left Oran in the spring of 1940 to take up a job on the newspaper, Paris-Soir. The novel was written in Paris. For a more detailed time-line, see Bernard Pingaud, ‘L’Étranger’ d’Albert Camus (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), especially pp. 18–20.
For a detailed analysis of Claude Léon’s excursion through Paris, see Alistair Rolls, The Flight of the Angels: Intertextuality in Four Novels by Boris Vian (Amsterdam; Atlanta: Rodopi, 1999), pp. 133–40. ‘Érostrate’ is one of the short stories of Sartre’s anthology Le Mur (The Wall), published by Gallimard in 1939.
The series opened in 1945 with Duhamel’s own translation work on Peter Cheyney’s La Môme vert-de-gris (Poison Ivy) and Cet homme est dangereux (This Man is Dangerous), and James Hadley Chase’s Pas d’orchidées pour Miss Blandish (No Orchids for Miss Blandish). I have elsewhere demonstrated how the Série Noire’s translation practice is geared towards the target-language, and indeed, psychologically, to a historically specific target audience. See Alistair Rolls and Deborah Walker, French and American Noir: Dark Crossings (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
Pingaud (p. 62) sees a deal of American influence in the work of Albert Camus, notably Hemingway and James Cain, whose novel The Postman always Rings Twice, he claims, had made a strong impression on Camus in 1939.
In addition, Léon sees stars after the bar falls on his head. For his part, Meursault is famously left gazing at the stars from his prison cell as he awaits his execution.
See Rolls 1999; also Alistair Rolls, ‘L’Art de voyager sans quitter Paris: Du Passage de l’Opéra jusqu’au désert de l’Exopotamie,’ New Zealand Journal of French Studies, 25.1 (2004), 26–40.
See J.-F. Gravier, Paris et le désert français (Paris: Portulan, 1947).
I use the word ‘haunt’ advisedly. For an excellent account of the way in which the encounter with the modern metropolis is a double experience played out simultaneously in real time and through memory, and thus where the city before us is always already haunted by the city of our past; see Ross Chambers, Loiterature (Lincoln; London: University of Nebraska Press, 1999).
We might think particularly of Louis Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris (Paris: Gallimard, 1926), in which the powerful alienating effect exerted by Paris’s streets reduces the passer-by to a peasant or, we might suggest, an outsider.
France’s ambivalent relationship to the United States marked the popular culture of the Fourth Republic and beyond, into the cinema of the Nouvelle Vague, with a new paradoxical allegory of France, where every instance of hesitation could be read in terms of France-US relations and every female protagonist as Marianne.
David Harvey, Paris, Capital of Modernity (New York; London: Routledge, 2003), p. 1.
As Ellen Lee McCallum notes, fetishism represents ‘the unique intersection of desire and knowledge.’ Ellen Lee McCallum, Object Lessons: How to do Things with Fetishism (New York: State University of New York Press, 1999), p. xii.
For a more detailed and applied reading of this, see Alistair Rolls, ‘Throwing Caution to the French Wind: Peter Cheyney’s Success Overseas in 1945,’ Australian Journal of French Studies, 43.1 (2006), 35–47.
Unsure at first of how to categorize this ‘new poetry-mocking poetry,’ Jacques Poujol finally decides that ‘Prévert’s texts are poetry and not prose.’ Jacques Poujol, ‘Jacques Prévert ou le langage en procès,’ French Review, 31.5 (1958), 387–95 (391; 392) (my translation). While I do not wish to disagree with this position, which can be as easily defended now as it was 50 years ago, I should simply suggest that the way Prévert’s Paroles make poems out of language’s failure to make poetry constitutes their fundamental prose poetics: they are non-self-coinciding and thus carefully auto-differentiated.
Sartre himself certainly suggests as much in his ‘Explication de L’Étranger’ published in 1943. The translation of this essay referred to here is by Carol Macomber and is published as ‘A Commentary on The Stranger’ in Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2007), pp. 73–98.
This and all other secondary material originally written in French that is cited in this article is translated by me.
Peter Cryle, ‘Pause et rupture dans l’imagination camusienne,’ in Raymond Gay-Crosier and Jacqueline Lévi-Valensi (eds), Albert Camus : œuvre fermée, œuvre ouverte?, Cahiers Albert Camus 5 (Paris: Gallimard, 1985), pp. 309–27 (p. 320–21).
This quotation is taken from Albert Camus, L’Étranger (Paris: Gallimard, 1942 [2010]), p. 9. Joseph Laredo’s translation is as follows: ‘Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don’t know.’ See Albert Camus, The Outsider (London: Penguin, 1983 [2000]), p. 9. Henceforth, references will be made to the French and/or English versions as necessary in the body of the text; the text will be referred to as L’Étranger and the page number of the French version will be given first and that of the translation afterwards in square brackets.
While it is still tempting to read the repetition of this rupture over the course of the novel as a continuity of discontinuity, it is my aim to show that the overall effect is to introduce discontinuity into a novel that appears to dress itself in all the trappings, at the macro level, of linear development of character and clear binary opposition of structure.
While I do not have the time to do so here, I have elsewhere analyzed La Nausée as a Parisian, fetishistic and thus prose poetic novel. See, for example, Alistair Rolls, ‘Baz Luhrmann’s William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet: The Nauseous Art of Adaptation,’ in Jean-Pierre Boulé and Enda McCaffrey (eds), Contemporary World Cinema: A Sartrean Perspective (Oxford; New York: Berghahn, 2011).
Françoise Bagot, Albert Camus. ‘L’Étranger’ (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1993), p. 9.
Memory, of course, adds the objectivity of distance (of time and, often also, space) to events to which one has been directly present. This poetic distance, which he terms ‘belatedness,’ is at the heart of Chambers’s concept of loiterature.
Charles Baudelaire, Le Spleen de Paris : Petits Poèmes en prose, first published in Paris in 1869. The version cited here is Louise Varèse’s translation, Paris Spleen (New York: New Directions, 1970), p. ix. ‘The Double Room’ covers pp. 5–7. Henceforth, references will be made to the English version in the body of the text.
As such, Baudelaire’s choc closely resembles the supreme point that will later drive the Surrealists in their quest for Love, the successful result of which must and can only be both fleeting and fatal. Thus, the radical difference between the two—Baudelaire’s shock voices the brashly ‘unpoetic’ impossibility of synthesis in the presence of a forced union of binary opposites; the Surrealists desire, search and, often, find the erasure in synthesis of such opposites—produces much the same outcome in reality: the shock, be it of synthesis or non-synthesis, is momentary and convulsive.
Michel Covin, L’Homme de la rue : Essai sur la poétique baudelairiennne (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2000).
If Baudelaire has a preferred movement, even in these prose poems that are predicated on paradoxical and balanced double movements, it is for the descent of poetry into the mean streets of the city. This anti-poetics, which rails against the verse that has been his own vehicle of choice until this time (and which has seen him depict the poet’s plight in the real world as that of, inter alia, a misunderstood albatross), can again be compared to the later automatic writing of the Surrealists, whose paralleling of the dream and the real world did not prevent them from privileging the former.
Jacqueline Lévi-Valensi, ‘La relation au réel dans le roman camusien,’ in Albert Camus: œuvre fermée, œuvre ouverte?, op. cit., pp. 154–85 (p. 162).
In his study of the recurring figure of the woman with the ‘robot-like movements’ in L’Étranger (69–70 [45–46]), Jean Gassin notes the presence of a comparable figure in La Chute, who becomes at one point, by metonymy, a ‘point noir’ on the ocean. We should note that the black spot created by Dorothea against the sunlight also follows the metonymic replacement of ‘blue sky’ by the word ‘blue’ alone. Cf. Jean Gassin, ‘À propos de la femme ‘automate’ de L’Étranger,’ in Albert Camus: œuvre fermée, œuvre ouverte?, op. cit., pp. 77–90 (p. 85–86).
Jacques Prévert, ‘Rue de Seine’ and ‘Le Cancre’ (‘The Dunce’), Paroles (Paris: Gallimard, 1949), pp. 60–62 (p. 60); p. 63. The parallel translation offered here is by Lawrence Ferlinghetti and is taken from Jacques Prévert, Selections from ‘Paroles’ (London: Penguin, 1965), p. 21, 27.
We should not forget that the very first word of the novel is ‘today,’ which sets the novel very firmly in the reader’s present, while the second word is ‘mother.’ Mother will always, therefore, be the third element of an unbreakable ménage à trois: protagonist-narrator, reader and mother. Even her death (declared in the third and fourth words of the novel) can do nothing to destabilize a compact that is already the virtual underside, or nihilistic textuality, of the actual words on the page (the fixed work of literature).
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Rolls, A. Camus’s Algerian in Paris: A Prose Poetic Reading of L’Étranger . SOPHIA 50, 527–541 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-011-0272-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-011-0272-2