Now that we're done reading and I had some time to gather my thoughts, one of the things I thought was the most interesting in The Stranger was the divide between Raymond and Mersault, and the way people responded to their friendship. It's pretty clear that Raymond is considered a "criminal" - at the very best, he beats his girlfriend and considers shooting her brother. From the very start we know that Raymond is not an upstanding citizen who can be trusted to contribute positively to society as a whole. On the other hand, Mersault is educated, a committed worker, and apparently pretty fun to be around. He's not necessarily "normal," but he seems on the outside to be a fairly decent person. Until the murder, he has presumably never harmed anyone directly.
The thing is, Raymond actually fits a lot better into society than Mersault does. Raymond has a place, and he fills it gladly. He's about as criminal as someone can be. Some people might say that people like him cause or express the problems of society, but no one doubts that they are very much a part of society. Even if Raymond lacks some of the morals people are expected to hold, in that he has no problem beating women or shooting people, he's still driven by his own morals and emotions, maybe more than any character in the book - his morals say that cheating is bad, so when he suspects his girlfriend is cheating on him he gets angry, so he goes out of his way to punish her, even though he risks jail for it. In a way he's just standing up for what he believes, the same way the court is standing up for what it believes in executing Mersault. Raymond could even be seen as a metaphor for the court, as someone who inflicts violent punishment on someone who he suspects may be breaking his personal rules.
Mersault doesn't take anything as seriously as Raymond takes infidelity, but it would still be inaccurate to say he doesn't have any morals. He doesn't like to hurt others, which we see in the way he's afraid of making them uncomfortable, and that includes shooting Arabs - he talks Raymond down when he wants to commit the murder himself. Even if that feeling only exists because hurting others makes him feel bad and not because he objectively thinks hurting others is bad, it's pretty clear that Mersault doesn't want to kill anyone, it's just something that happens in a time where he can't control himself. In a way I see it as similar to the impulses we all have to stand up and yell something at an inappropriate time, or jump off a tall building, or swerve into the wrong lane while driving. People have impulses to hurt themselves or others all the time and sometimes it can feel like you need all of your self-control not to do it. When Mersault is on the beach, everything conspires in a way to make him lose that self-control, and pull the trigger. It's impossible to know exactly what was going through Mersault's head when he pulled the trigger, but it seems pretty likely it wasn't "Good. That'll show him." The court doesn't see that though; they just see someone who committed a murder because of an absolute lack of fundamental moral understanding.
The court's response to Mersault is related to why a book like The Metamorphosis is funny. At it's most basic, humor comes from seeing something that makes you uncomfortable, but feeling safely removed from it. The idea of someone spontaneously transforming into a bug is funny as long as we know it's happening in a book, but if that happened to someone you knew, you probably wouldn't think it was funny. It would probably call everything you thought you knew into question. To the people at Mersault's trial, seeing someone who doesn't care about their mother's death, doesn't believe in God, and doesn't show remorse for murder, is like seeing someone turn into a bug in front of them. He makes them extremely uncomfortable because he calls into question the absolute nature of some of our most basic societal values. This is especially frightening to someone like a judge, who makes a living off of upholding absolute societal values, but it makes the ordinary people of the jury uncomfortable too.
The question is whether or not the people have the right to punish Mersault more because he makes them uncomfortable. It might seem ridiculous that they can condemn him to death because he makes them feel a bit icky, but in a way it makes sense. From their point of view, just having someone like Mersault around who doesn't care about his mother's death or believe in God threatens to make other people question why they do believe in those things. That might be especially dangerous when it comes to criminals like Raymond. In the court's view of things, the only thing that keeps someone like him from running amok and tearing society apart is him thinking about what his mother would think, or what Jesus would do. If a belief in God isn't enough to stop people from murdering (and according to the magistrate, all the murderers he's seen before Mersault do believe in God), who's to say what they would do if they didn't even have that? And to make matters worse, if Mersault isn't executed, where will he go? To a maximum security prison - where he'll be around no one but the kind of people the court really doesn't want him to meet. You can question whether or not letting Mersault live would actually cause anyone to adopt his nihilism without his any of his benign nature, but from a certain point of view, keeping him out of society does makes sense. Of course, the people on the jury probably aren't just worried about the destruction Mersault's beliefs might cause - more likely, they just think the way he makes them uncomfortable is reason enough to kill him, but it's more interesting to think that they might have a better reason for their sentence.
I think part of the wildness of the book is how it calls out people for things unnecessarily making them uncomfortable. At Maman's funeral, Meursault drinks coffee. It seems perfectly normal to us, but to the prosecutor at his trial, it nearly condemns him right there! Why is that? What's wrong with coffee? And who says you have to cry at a funeral anyways? You can be sad without tears. In a way, this notion reminds me of stories I've heard of China, where people hire professional criers to come to people's funerals. They moan and weep very showingly, say a few words about the deceased, and collect a paycheck. And all this is done to be respectful to the dead, when it all seems gaudy and over-dramatic to me. Perhaps part of this is the vast difference in culture between today and the period of the novel, but several things the prosecutor faults Meursault for just don't make sense in today's world.
ReplyDeleteYou make a good point that, paradoxically perhaps, Raymond "fits into society" more easily than Meursault, because he has a defined role to play. Likewise, he cares about and is engaged in his own "plot"--if *he* had shot the Arab, there would be none of these troubling questions about intention and free will. It would have been a distressing example of violence--and probably racially charged, part of the colonial context--but it would be easily *explicable*. It would even suit his role.
ReplyDeleteAs you note, the real discomfort (and, I suppose, the Kafkaesque comedy) comes from Meursault's refusal to write himself into such a narrative. "Fitting into society" thus means something like playing a defined and familiar role in a story. The court's job is to reconstruct that story and judge the players' behavior accordingly. It's this coherence that Meursault denies them.