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This is KZSU Stanford.
Welcome to entitled opinions.
My name is Robert Harrison,
and we're coming to you from the Stanford campus.
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I'm joined in the studio today by a colleague who has come to Stanford
from the East Coast to deliver a lecture on al-Bed Camus.
The topic of her lecture, how Camus lit Honse became the stranger,
literary translation, and the long life of a classic.
Alice Kaplan is the John Musser, Professor of French,
and Chair of the French Department at Yale.
She's the author of several well-known books.
I'll mention just a few here.
Reproductions of banality, fascism, literature,
and French intellectual life.
Also, French lessons, a memoir.
More recently, "Dreaming in French," 2012,
about the Paris years of Susan Sontag,
Angela Davis, and Jacqueline Bouvier,
as in Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy.
And I for one am eagerly awaiting Alice Kaplan's new biography
of Al-Bed Camus novel Lit Honse, or the stranger,
which will be coming out with the University of Chicago Press this coming fall.
It's called "Looking for the Stranger Al-Bed Camus in the Life of a Literary Classic."
We'll be getting a preview of it from our guests shortly,
but first, let me take the occasion to recall some of my treasured quotes
of Al-Bed Camus, which you longtime listeners of entitled opinions
may have heard me invoke in earlier shows.
Here's a rather long one.
I grew up with the sea, and poverty for me was sumptuous.
Then I lost the sea, and found all luxury's grey, and poverty unbearable.
Every artist keeps within himself a single source
that during his lifetime nourishes what he is and what he says.
I know that my source is the world of poverty and sunlight.
I lived in for so long, whose memory still saves me
from two opposing dangers that threaten every artist,
resentment, and self-satisfaction.
Among my many weaknesses, I have never discovered
that most widespread failing envy,
the true cancer of societies and doctrines.
End quote.
Camus had at least that much in common with Dante Al-Yigiri,
who also believed that the true cancer of societies and doctrines is envy.
Dante called envy, and its twin sister, Cupidity,
the Radix Malorum, or Root of All Evil.
For Dante, only Caditas could save us from the ravages of envy.
For Camus instead, it was the sun.
In his words, the sun that rained over my childhood freed me
from all resentment.
That southern Mediterranean world where Camus grew up
was placed halfway between poverty and the sun, as he says.
And he went on to declare, "Poverty kept me from thinking
all was well under the sun and in history."
The sun taught me that history was not everything.
In our day and age, history seems held bent on becoming everything.
It would devour the cosmos if it could.
And maybe the most we can do at this point,
it's to try to make sure that that doesn't happen.
Just how to go about resisting the totalizing drive of history is not clear,
but I for one am convinced that it is precisely in this domain
of indeterminate militancy that comes moral, political, and existential vision remains most relevant to our time.
But that, as they say, is another story.
It's time now to welcome our guests to the program.
Alice, thanks for joining us on entitled "Vinians."
Good to be here, Robert.
So maybe we can start with you sharing with us a little bit.
The book that we'll be coming out in the fall.
Yes, and I also want to talk about that beautiful quotation from the wrong side and the right side that you just read.
Very important in my book, actually, where I tried to account for the very first
sparks and cameras imagination that led to him writing the stranger.
And then follow really the making of that book and the destiny of that book.
So I'm trying something kind of new, which is to write a biography,
not of an author, but the biography of a book, because I do believe that books have a life.
They have a life before they come into being, and of course they have a life after they come into being.
So perhaps we could start with you sharing some thoughts about what the life of that book was in its conception
and as it came to fruition in cameras.
I mean, you said yourself through that quotation, Camu grew up in poverty, in a working-class neighborhood of Algiers, Belkur.
And it was that world he wanted to recreate in the stranger, that street life of Belkur, a noisy place.
He also grew up with a mother who was deaf and mute, who had a vocabulary of something like 400 words.
So he has a special relationship to silence.
He has an uncanny ability to make silence felt in his writing.
That's very important.
In fact, you have a piece of danger.
Yeah, you have a beautiful quote in your introduction to the Algiers and Chronicles that we will hopefully talk about.
In shortly that French was not Camu's native language, that perhaps silence was his native language.
Yes, silence was his mother tongue.
Mother tongue.
In fact, that's even very important.
That's right.
I mean, when you read the stranger, you see that Merso, the main character is someone who hears everything.
And the novel is full of sounds.
And yet, he's also a very silent character.
Yeah.
Do you find that aphasia that you get in Merso has some genetic links to characters in the American fiction that Camu and other French were.
Absolutely.
And intentionally, Camu was very blocked on writing fiction.
He tried writing a book called A Happy Death that he ended up putting in a drawer.
It wasn't published during his lifetime.
But you can read it now. English readers can read it in Richard Howard's translation.
And it's a very kind of lush, overly descriptive book.
It just wasn't working.
He tried and he tried again, and he just couldn't fly with it.
He was talking about his real life.
The women he knew had to carry to tuberculosis.
It was just too autobiographical to work.
And then two things happened to him.
First of all, he started working as a court reporter.
And he saw in the courthouse an incredible theater for fiction.
That was number one.
Number two, he read a single novel, James M. Cane's The Postman Always Rings twice.
It had been translated in France in 1936 with an introduction by Irene Nemarovski, which is another story.
But he was really taken with the narrative set up.
First person, jailhouse confession, really.
A man waiting to die tells the story of a crime.
And he was condemned to death, actually, for not for the crime he did do, but for the crime he didn't do.
Camille was really attracted to that.
But also the racial and ethnic tension in that California novel about the highways.
One of the characters, the victim of the murder in the book, is called The Greek.
And I'm convinced that when Camille read that, he thought, yeah, in a racist society, you call someone that way.
You don't name them.
Hence the Arab.
I mean, he said to somebody in an interview, you know, once I had understood, once I had my little trick, all I had to do was write.
And that little trick was that first person narrator that didn't let you in, even though it's a confessional way of writing.
With short sentences and the kind of Hemingway style of withholding?
Short sentences, but also a weird absence of causality.
So sentences will be linked by words like "and," but there's no reason for the "and."
Yeah, so I'm curious about his experience as being a reporter in the courtroom because that would be the arena for the determination of guilt or innocence,
or guilt or not guilty.
And of course, guilt plays such a huge role in litongier, but also many of his other works.
And the determination of guilt would have given him in the courtroom situation a very concrete sort of stage on which the drama of that determination of guilt or non-guilt plays itself out.
Yeah, for sure.
It's a very complicated question, a very good question about what Camu learned in 1938 and 1939 when he was sitting in on trials, many of which involved Arab accused getting a fair or an unfair trial of violence against Arabs by Europeans going on a lot.
I mean, he said to somebody in the 50s, never would a European man have been condemned to death for killing an Arab.
So he knew he was not writing a realistic fiction, and it's quite interesting that he took these real trials and he did something very, very different.
By having him also condemned to death, not for killing the Arab because the Arab is fairly unimportant in the courtroom, but for not crying at his mother's funeral.
So it was really, it was the hypocrisy of the judicial system that interested him.
The judicial system is all about judging these questions, and of course an intellectual, especially a French intellectual, in these years, felt that it was a prime directive to always be in the tribunal and to judge whatever was happening politically and socially.
And we know that Camu felt compelled later in his life when he became famous in a public figure to always pronounce himself and make judgments about things that were happening around.
Of course Jean-Paul Sast and his crowd were completely uninhibited when it came to providing judgments of others and nations and so forth.
And of course we know that Camu ends up late in life creating another character called Le Jeux Penitant, the judge penitent.
Do you think that Camu was comfortable in the role that was somehow, I don't want to say imposed on him, but was expected of him to be this kind of public intellectual judge of his own...
He always saw two sides to every question, and unlike many French intellectuals he was often willing to say he had been wrong.
So for example, right after the war when collaborators were going on trial when Vaziaque was condemned to death and executed, Camu ended up in a big fight with a Catholic intellectual named François Moiac.
Moiac said that the French society needed to show charity in dealing with these collaborators and Camu said they needed to be justice.
And that if there was a bad, decayed branch on a tree who had to cut it off, well, when it came time for the execution of Vaziaque signed a petition for grace for clemency for Braziac.
And he ultimately said that he thought probably Moiac had been right.
So he was the rare intellectual who was willing to reconsider.
I mean, during the Algerian war, he was not in favor of the Fondadi Baraziaque Nationala, which Sartre supported so strongly.
And yet behind the scenes, he was writing letters to the president of the Republic trying to prevent these FLN militants from being executed.
So he could, I think actually he was very, you know, from his youth when he was in the Communist Party in Algiers, and he was the head of the Cultural Center.
He was going door to door trying to recruit Muslims to the Algerian Communist Party.
Then he left the Algerian Communist Party because he didn't feel they were enough engaged in the questions of Arab rights.
They were too obsessed with the coming war and so on. They didn't like him any better than he liked them.
But he was always speaking out.
Great. So going back to the genesis of litology, he got unblocked or he found a genre of that too.
And he found a voice. He found a right voice for the novel.
And he begins writing the novel in Algeria and then finishes it in France, correct?
That's right. So I actually, I physically followed him in all the places where he was writing.
He was a journalist for a left-wing paper called Algerit Pibbica.
He wrote a series of investigative reports on poverty and Kabelia in the mountainous region that the colonial government hated because he said that France was going to lose Algeria.
They shut down the paper. He was blacklisted. He couldn't get work.
And it's around that time that he's starting the first chapter of the stranger.
Then he moves. He has to leave Algeria. He can't get work.
So he moves to a crummy little hotel in Montmauce.
Way up high in the city. And he gets a job as the layout editor of a big daily newspaper, Paoye Suis.
It's an incredibly lonely life. He leaves his fiance in Orrall.
He's sitting there in this hotel room. Somebody in the other room jumps out the window and commits suicide.
I mean, he's just, it's misery.
And he writes the rest of the stranger in about six weeks.
What's extraordinary is that we have a letter thanks to Kamu's daughter, Kathleen.
We have the letter he wrote to his fiance, the night he finished, where he's both saying, "I think this is really good."
And I don't know what it is. I don't know what it is about this novel, but I know that it was almost as though it was already traced within me.
It was already written within me. I could go off to work for hours, come back and sit down exactly where I left off.
So when he arrived in France, did he know what the story was going to be or did it evolve subsequently?
It evolved in this terrible struggle he was having to make the previous novel work.
So when you read his work in progress, diaries is pretty fascinating.
You actually see the new novel almost emerge out of nowhere, almost despite himself.
Suddenly, you have a vision of a man condemned to death. Well, there's no man condemned to death in a happy death.
There's only a guy who dies of tuberculosis.
So it's like the characters and some of the words suddenly in 1938, he writes the first paragraph of the stranger in his work in progress notebooks.
Nothing changed in the published novel. It was those exact sentences.
Bonjour gi m'am l'imacht.
And how much of it was written before he got to France?
Only a chapter.
And he wrote the whole rest of it in France.
And then he did some very important revision when he was back in Algeria a year later.
And do you think his distance from Algeria and from the Mediterranean and the Sun?
And perhaps some kind of nostalgia for that world intensified the narrative for him.
Absolutely. Absolutely. I don't know if people who are listening to the show who know the novel really well, which everyone does.
There's a moment when Merso is in his cell and he's remembering every inch of his room.
And that's Camus in Paris remembering every inch of his life in Algeria.
Yeah. I mean, I was convinced, at least by Camus, experience that leaving a world of happiness is sometimes a requirement for him.
He was living in this what he called the house above the world with his friends and having fun.
And he couldn't do it.
Alice, can we talk about the role of the Sun plays in his, in the comments that I quoted in the intro, but also in the stranger?
Is there something about the overbearing presence and heat of that Algerian Sun, especially in those songs?
Where he can be like, gets up to 40 degrees. I mean, send a grade we're talking about.
And that it can cancel out, black out so many other elements in your psyche that good.
It blacks out the shadow doesn't it?
Yeah. When there's too much sun, you can't see your shadow side.
Right.
I was working on the biography of the stranger and studying the exchanges that Camus had with Andre Marroz said, "You need to rewrite the murder scene because we don't feel the sun.
We need to feel the sun glinting on the knife."
Marroz, who is just a genius editor for this book.
And Camus went back and you can see in the manuscript where he rewrote that scene.
I think it's one of the most beautiful descriptions of the destructive power of sunlight in all of literature.
So the sun is not just his friend. That's what makes it interesting.
Sure. Yes. Well, in the very first year of this radio show, it's been going on, it's into its 11th year, believe it or not, in title opinions.
We did a show on Camus with my colleague Jean-Marie Aposli, this.
And I'm going to ask you the same question I think that I asked him, which is that every person graduating doing the back in France is also asked about why does Pouquat atil
Triela hab, why does Mersoque kill the air of? And many of them just reproducing what the text says.
And the cliched answer is, "I cause du Soleil." It's because of the sun, which it's not a satisfactory answer on the one hand,
but it's a perfectly precise one on the other. So actually, I didn't know that Malachol was the one who encouraged and go back and give the sun a much more prominent role in the cause if you want to call it causality.
Because it's not really causal in it in it legal sense. But there is a suggestion that had the sun been a bit less overbearing and intense that this moment would not have come about.
You know, you're really asking a question that's so against Camus own thinking because he wanted to construct a book where there is no causality.
He believed in the absurd and in the absurd the world, it's not South cliched psychological definition of the absurd.
It's a definition of the absurd where the world is out there, you know, incontrovertible. You can't get around the world's forces.
So you're just up against its absurdity. Now, if you wanted to construct causality, yeah, he says the sun made him do it.
Partly because he just wants to be a jerk with the examining magistrate. You could say he did it because he had to leave the house while the women were cleaning up. He's with muscle and his friends.
You could say it's some sort of hatred of women that makes him do it. You could say it's the fault of the Moorish woman.
And Reimal, Reimal the pimp who gets him into all this trouble in the first place. I mean, there's a whole chain of events that's both arbitrary and fatal that leads to the murder.
And that's what makes it such a compelling book.
No, I agree. And causality there is not, again, as I said, it's not the technical causality. There are circumstances.
And Camille was really interested in what he called the tragedy of circumstances.
So, for example, if you read his play "The Misunderstanding," there's nothing psychological.
It's just, it's like the story of edipus. I mean, the traveler travels to the inn in Eastern Europe and doesn't know the woman who's the endkeeper doesn't know it's her son and kills him.
Well, in fact, you're a situation. Yeah, I certainly agree that there's not any psychological causality. There's not a probing of the psychology.
So when I read that scene, I find that Camille is very deliberate about describing the way time seems to come to a standstill in a very threatening way.
And that everything is going to be engulfed in a kind of suspension of this dead end that time is precipitating into.
I think he can do that better than anybody. Stop time.
But that may be firing a revolver is the only way to get time moving again. I don't know.
There is something strange because he fires once and then fires four more times and he says, and it was like five blows that I struck, five knocks on the door of unhappiness.
It's one of the only metaphors in the whole novel.
Yeah, so if we were to put much so on trial as readers rather than in the courtroom, I think those extra four shots are very damning evidence for a certain kind of intentional.
Absolutely. Absolutely. It's not manslaughter. It's pre-meditated murder.
So in your book, with this following the life of the novel, now that we're, you know, the novel comes into being and it gets written in six weeks in a kind of moment of inspiration, desperation, inspiration, let's say.
Then it doesn't take long for it to become a real cult novel among the intellectuals, the underground intellectuals for sure.
Chompal sat had a great deal to do in its promotion, I gather. Absolutely.
And can you tell us a little bit about the immediate aftermath of this publication?
One thing that's very difficult to remember is that this novel almost didn't ever exist because they were in the depths of the occupation.
Camu was across the Mediterranean in Algeria when he was sending his manuscript out.
It was a time when France was divided into two parts. You couldn't even get mailed, Paris.
So as far as I could figure out from my calculations that manuscript traveled from Cannes in one of Gaston-Gatti-Mau's cars to Paris where it was read by Jean-Poulon, who wrote a reader's report, and published, you know, at the very worst time for French publishing.
Something like three days after it was published, the Nazis instituted a special board for paper authorizations.
It didn't have to go through that process. It was read by the cultural attaché, the Nazi cultural attaché, who said it was a political, which I think is very funny.
And the story of a French guy killing an Arab is a political. But anyway, it made it through. They were paper shortage problems so severe that Malro wrote to Camu asking if he could find some paper stock in Algeria.
So the novel simply might not ever have happened. If it weren't for a lot of very determined friends, Camu had a genius for finding friends and supporters.
And when his editor from Alé-Re-Pibbean Pascal Pia was really essential, he was the equivalent of a literary agent, getting this thing to the right people, getting it read.
It was immediately read by very important people for French literature by Jean-Poulon, who is the Pope of French literature at Gatti-Mau, by Mar-Rol, by the Nobel Prize winner, Jorge Marte-Martan-Jigar, by Francie-Sporz.
Everyone was talking about it. Now, when it was reviewed, Camu actually didn't even see copies of it for months because he was stuck in Algeria.
It was reviewed both in the Vichy Zone of France and in the Nazi-occupied Zone.
And Vichy really didn't like it so well. It shocked the Catholic sensibilities of the Vichy critics, whereas the people writing in occupied France seemed to like it better, which Camu was amused by that.
And, um, Sartte made the book by writing this very important essay in the Cuyé-Jusud called "Explination of the Stranger." And he's the one who really, he inaugurated a very formalist, very brilliant formal way of understanding Camu's use of verb tenses in the novel for listeners who don't read in French.
There's a past tense in French that's constructed with an auxiliary verb and a past participle. And Camu favored that verb tense over an imperfect.
So, Sartte said he'd like to split up the verb and make each sentence an island.
And that tradition of reading the text formally in very, very, in great, great detail that's continued to this day, thanks to Sartte.
So you'd like Sartte to say on that? I love it. It's my favorite piece of literary criticism ever, and I'm not a formalist, but I find it utterly convincing, especially because Sartte goes on and on about the silence in the novel.
He knows nothing about Camu's family. He doesn't know that Camu was born into a non-hearing family. And I find that just remarkable that he's so attuned to Camu's sensibility that he can know things about him without knowing.
I admire that essay a lot, except for the title.
What would you call it? Well, I think when you explain something, you're actually not doing justice to the deliberate absurdity or what we were talking about earlier, that it does not lend itself to explanation.
I know it's funny to say that because Camu was really irritated by the article. He wrote to his former teachers, Jean-Gwenier. He said, "I know it's a competent piece, but why this acid tone?"
I think he actually felt that Sartte was man-splaining his novel.
It was a man-splainer from my back.
So you said earlier that, or the Nazi guy gave me a hound, "Heller." So I read it as a political book.
That makes, I'm assuming that you do believe it's a political novel.
I mean, I think it's a novel about racism in the streets of Elgiers in the 1930s in some ways.
Yeah, it's about that really tough world that he grew up in. That in a way, you know, in a way it was all the negative stuff he was leaving behind to become the great humanist in France.
It was like the "Pé the Man Who Doesn't Love His Mother," the violence against women, the misogyny, the kind of the life, the short lives ended in murder and violence.
Oh yeah, there's a great deal of social commentary or sociological.
Right, without having an argument, without being in any way, didactic.
Yeah.
I think that's why it's so easy to misunderstand and attribute racism to come in as opposed to the world he's describing.
But another thing about Gerhard Heller and his saying it's not political.
I think in those days, if you were a Nazi apparatic, you didn't read for content.
You just wanted to know if there was a Jewish character or if the author was Jewish or, you know, America or something like that.
It was an a deep content full position he was taking.
But afterwards, in order to ex-book, "Culpade Himself," of course, he made a big deal about how he had recognized the genius of chemos' novel and so on.
So Alice, having heard your lecture, I know that there were, there was one English translation, but with two different titles, one in England and one in the United States.
It's right.
The outsider versus a stranger and the translator was this...
Stewart Gilbert.
And you showed, you know, side by side, the original French with the decisions that Gilbert, the first English translator, made and that you suggested that there was excessive liberties taken with the original and that Gilbert was putting into quotes, into actually direct speech, a number of things that were much more subtle.
And enigmatic in the French text, nevertheless, despite all of the vices of the Gilbert translation, there was something about it that had to be right enough for it to become a real bestseller for many different decades.
That's what I simply do not understand.
And in a way it challenges the Sartrian reading, because Sartte identified the genius of this novel and all its stylistic intricacies about verb tense and indirect discourse and the way chemo was able to establish distance, most of those distance from us as readers.
And here's Gilbert destroying a lot of that and the novel still takes hold.
So maybe there's something about the situation, the setting, maybe there's something that transcends some of that stylistic detail that also makes it a great novel.
I mean, it's a wonderful challenge for formalists.
For sure. I have to say though, and I'm going to declare my heresy here, when I was looking at the English version, I could see the discrepancy between the French and the English, but the English didn't sound too bad.
I mean, I felt like I wanted to go on reading because there were strategic decisions made by Gilbert that maybe were actually in tune with the English speaking reader.
I mean, you know, it's also there's another thing which is the translation's age very quickly. Masterpieces don't age, translations do.
And it could be that Stuart Gilbert was writing for an English language readership of the 1940s and 1950s for whom that degree of idiomatic English was expected.
And that Matthew Ward, who did the brilliant brilliant, by the way, I think former Stanford student, Matthew Ward, did the brilliant re-translation in 1988.
And that is much more our voices.
So, and is that the only other translation of the stranger?
There have been many. There was one in 2013 by Sandra Smith for Viking.
Yeah. So it's only available in England. It's also very good.
Matthew Ward is your favorite. Matthew Ward is my favorite. It's the one I teach.
But I also really like Sandra Smith if I could, you know, if it were available, I would consider it for sure.
Right. So the Anglo-Destiny of the stranger was also quite a story, you know.
And, you know, there was one of the stories I discovered in looking at the publishers archives.
There was a guy in Upper Peninsula, Michigan named Franklin Olson, who started teaching the stranger to students with learning disabilities.
And he was arrested, put in jail, and his job taken away for teaching an obscene book.
The stranger? Yeah. That was in the 1950s. So obviously the publisher was nervously looking to see if this was going to become a wider trend.
And in fact, no. In fact, it's kind of remarkable when you think of how many high school students come of age reading this story about a pimp and a mistress and a murder.
I mean, it's not the most wholesome topic, you know. There's a school edition edited by Jeyomen Gray, who is a great friend of Camu and a great Camu scholar.
And that edition, which sold in the millions, is lacking about five sentences that were deemed inappropriate for high school students.
So many high school students in the United States have read a bolderized version of the stranger. Is that right? Yeah.
But that in French, by the way, not in English.
I was also struck, and this is parenthetical, but when you said that 1200 people showed up for a lecturer or a conference at Columbia University, was it?
That's right.
And here was Camu and the others, they were all speaking in French. That's right.
And that would be hard to imagine today, wouldn't it?
It certainly would.
You have 1200 people at Columbia coming to hear lecture and structure.
It certainly would. And Claude Levy's house, who was the cultural attache at the time, was so delighted he sent this, you know, ecstatic report back to the ministry, saying, can you believe it?
You know, he said 1500 people in the McMillan theater for Camu. We've got to start doing this all over the country.
He said, you know, you think those Americans, they're really kind of their rubes, but in fact, they're quite discerning.
Right.
And they don't like not being taken seriously.
But you know, you really have to imagine what it was like for New Yorkers that spring of 1946.
I mean, they'd been so, the whole world had been cut off from France.
And he were these men who represented the resistance, and there was already such a romance about the resistance.
And there they were standing on stage and trying to explain what they had been through.
When Vigo Mortensen re-read the speech this spring, we did a reenactment at Columbia.
It was so in the moment, you know, and he talked about the very theme you mentioned in your early quotations about history.
Camu was fighting the idea that history, he was fighting the totalizing force of history.
And in a way it was his fight with Marxism was Stalinism.
Sure.
I really feel it in that speech.
Yeah.
And against Sash by proxy in the sense that Sash was all about history.
Yes.
And I think it's his exes, he's a Chinese myth, and a new manis, where he says,
"Nusom Suhamplau y nyakudism.
We're on a plane where there are only men.
The only thing that exists is history and men.
Of course, for Adbed Camu, that is exactly not the case.
That is so not.
Because there's the sun and the sun, there's the earth, the world, the cosmos and so forth.
And if history becomes everything, then the nightmare is complete now.
That's correct.
I think it was so powerful hearing it, hearing it spoken in our context, and hearing the
way that Camu was able to talk about terror and the effects of state terror.
What do you make of Camu's, let's say, his reluctant adoption of certain political positions,
especially in the very troubling Algerian war, where he could not really look at it imparcially
or indifferently, but he had a clear vested interest.
And I keep remembering that the statement he made in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech about,
if he has to choose between justice and my mother, I'll choose my mother.
Although, misquoted.
Because actually what he said was people are throwing bombs on the tramways of Algiers.
If my mother is on one of those tramways, I choose my mother over the just cause of those
guys throwing bombs.
So it's one of these...
It's one of these moments...
It's one of these...
Yeah, it has been.
But it does, for me, drive home the idea that when things become specific and particular,
and it's your mother versus the ideal of justice, that I thought...
I think that it was a moment of awakening for him to realize that sometimes you cannot always
be on the side of the right and even on the side of justice.
And that is too easy for the intellectual always to adopt the mantle of the judge who was on
the side of the right.
And that comes...
That's really the heart of that novel, the fall.
And the issue, yeah, for him.
But you know, I think there's another thing with Camus that makes some of these decisions
natural for him, and that's that he has an uncompromising resistance to violence.
That is not complicated for him in any situation, for example, in his position against
the death penalty.
He doesn't care who it is who's going to be guillotine.
He's against the death penalty.
He's going to be against terror in Algeria.
He's against the terror committed by the French Army, he's against the terror committed
by the FLN.
And he was trying for a moderate solution all along.
He went down to Algiers and gave a speech about a civilian truce.
He was booed with death threats by the ultra French nationalists.
It nothing worked.
I do believe that's why he was on the side of rebellion against...
Or rebellion instead of revolution because revolution is de facto violent.
I think that because a lot of the rebels he describes are also somewhat violent, I think that
for him revolution means Marxism and Stalinism in the context of the 1950s.
Whereas rebellion would...
-Reset cut form of resistance, yeah.
-Yeah, a form of resistance, and a creative form of resistance.
-How was I was a struck...
I've always been struck by the fact that he wrote his kind of college thesis on platinus
of all things.
-Augustine and...
-And St. Augustine.
-Yeah.
-Which seems so uncamued like, but it does...
Platinus and Augustine which is a Christian tradition.
And you do have a strong pagan ethos in Cameroon, but you also do have a certain kind
of Christian, it's not Neoplatonic in the platinus sense, but this other tradition that
does...
It seems to have its roots in the sense of guilt.
-That's right.
-Can it turn skilled.
-Forgiveness, the need for forgiveness and...
-That's why so many Catholic thinkers like to claim Camus.
I know a friend was just telling me her memories of reading Camus in Catholic school and
the nun explaining that if he had lived, he would have converted.
He would have become a Catholic.
He was edging, you know?
He was open to thinking with Catholic thinkers, and he spoke in a monastery after the war
about his theme of neither victims nor executioners.
-Yeah, no, I'm persuaded by that.
Of course, going back to the stranger now in the cell, and he has that violent repudiation
of the priest, and that seems a rather complete refusal.
-But at the same time, you've got to realize it's a complete refusal, but it's all
the moment where Merso breaks with his indifference.
It's the only thing he really cares about in the whole novel.
And after that scene, we have a very different Merso.
Camus planned to have a flat first person narrator is gone.
Suddenly, he's all subjectivity.
He opens his heart to the tender indifference of the world.
He feels love for his mother.
The whole thing is shot.
And some critics thought that Camus had, say, "Notally, Sarot, the new novelist," thought
that this was a compromise.
And that Camus had stopped being a new novelist at that moment and just become a psychological
novelist.
And others thought it was really wonderful.
-What do you think?
-I think it's really wonderful.
-Yeah.
I find it dissonant with what precedes it.
-You're more like notally Sarot than.
-Not that I mind that dissonance.
It's just, I never thought that the priest might be the one who precipitates that.
It's an incredible anger at institutions in that book.
-Yes.
And do you think that in that scene that he somehow, at a subconscious level, he feels the
need for forgiveness?
Not for himself to be forgiven somehow.
-You mean Camus?
-No, no, no, no.
So much so obvious.
-I don't know if we can know what Merso feels.
I think we can know what Camus intended with that scene.
I think he wants some kind of a break, some kind of a catharsis at the end of his novel.
He needs it.
He needs it to come to closure in the novel.
-Yeah.
I guess forgiveness was the wrong word.
There's something there at the end that seems to, it's groping for a certain kind
of redemption and affirmation of this world and of life in its moments.
It's the intensity of living and being alive in this gratitude for just that life can be
redeemed, despite all of the absurdity that's already on so forth.
-It's a very powerful experience reading that scene because you realize that he's finally
ready to be happy at the moment he knows he's about to die.
And that you have to have, for Camus, you have to have that feeling of imminent death to
appreciate your aliveness.
-So, if I didn't know the history of the success of the stranger is also in America with
undergraduates who still love Camus' death, I would have found it almost impossible to predict
that that would be a book that would have such purchase among American undergraduates.
We have Truman here, Love's Camus, and Love's that book.
It's not obvious that that would be a book that would have this kind of appeal because
he's not a likable guy.
He's very unpolitically correct, delinquent, murder, whatever.
And yet there is this irresistible appeal of that novel.
What do you attribute that to?
-I have a theory that there's a different Camus book for every phase of life.
And the stranger is the ultimate alienated adolescent novel.
In some ways, the way that Holden Caulfield is an alienated narrator that people can
identify with, but Camus is so much more so.
And then really after that, the plague is much more, I'd say, for committed college
students because it's all about solidarity and fighting for social justice.
The fall is for the alienated midlife crisis, hedge fund guy, right?
-That's right.
-Maybe the startup guy in Silicon Valley.
And the first man, that's for people who are looking back.
That's the Prustian moment in Camus.
I mean, that book you can read it at any time, but it's a good thing to read as you're
growing.
Is you growing old?
-Do you admire the first man?
-I admire it very much.
And I wonder, again, there's such a mystery in that book about what Camus would have done
with it.
I mean, he was a perfectionist in style.
He would have probably strangled some of those sentences into something much more cut down.
There's an unbridled lyricism in those sentences he was never able to edit because the book
was unfinished.
It was found in his briefcase.
And that gives it a real mystery.
You feel like you're watching Camus in the act in action.
-The fall is one of my favorite of his novels.
And can you speak a little bit about the fall?
And especially, let's say, the landscape and mood, which is so other to the stranger,
which is sun drenched and the heat and the elements.
And here we're in an Nordic country with rain and water and it's a very, very different
mood.
-And that weird ironic name of the Mexico City Bar there in Amsterdam.
-And you have a first person, well, I don't know if you technically a first person
narrator, but you do have this voice of Jean-Bati's Clables, who is loquacious to an
extreme the way Marceau is not at all.
So it seems to be in a certain sense the negative image of the stranger.
And yet there are correlations, do you want to--
-I mean, yeah, it's about guilt.
It's so about guilt.
But it's also, I think Camus taking one of the worst things that ever happened to him,
which is the total ridicule he experienced from Satra and Jean-Sul after he published
the rebel, and they wrote those really nasty articles accusing him of having a red cross
morality.
He took actual language from those reviews and used it, turned it around and used it as
fodder for his novel, which I think--
-And guiding them in the process.
-Yeah, I mean, I think it's just so brilliant.
And then the last part of that whole series of funny things is that Satra after Camus
died, Satra wrote this kind of loving obituary and said that the fall was Camus great masterpiece.
-Do you believe that?
-Finally, giving him once again, you know, giving him the bull pla.
-Yeah, yeah, yeah, he's the metra de called who gives--
-Sure, right.
-He's always grading his subjects.
I know.
-Yeah, yeah, what can you do?
-Yeah, yeah.
-Yeah, yeah, yeah.
-Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
-I mean, it was so-- the two of them, the contrast between the two of them is so fascinating.
You know, the student of the Echolno Ma, the philosophy instructor, and then this guy from
the Boonies, right?
El Jears is the Boonies to Satra.
And he's amused.
I found this interview where he says, "Oh, I was so amused by Camus' coarseness in his
Pienoir accent."
-Yeah.
Well, the thing about Jean-Paul Sast is that he never, to the end of his days, ever, flirted
with being a Jewish penitante.
He was never a penitante judge because he judged, you know, with a kind of fanatical conviction
that penitence is not part of his MO.
-I mean, people like to joke that it's better to be wrong with Sarcla than right with
say, "Oll."
Even when he's wrong, he's just so brilliant and convincing.
-Yeah, I'm not one of those.
-Yeah.
-Who would say that.
-I mean, I'm very committed to sat the early existentialist sat, but when he becomes that
very typical intellectual who is under indictment in Leschute in the fall, who has no
self doubt about pronouncing, you know, putting everyone and everything in his own tribunal
of judgment and being, you know, the prosecutor.
That a prosecutorial animus in Jean-Paul Sast, just at the level of personality is so
uncommon like where if Camus was against violence, I think that he also was uneasy with
the whole notion of the prosecutorial role.
And he would be much more the advocate, let's say, you know, the defense rather than--
-He was always on the side of the defense.
-So a young boy who killed one of his classmates in a very famous trial, the J-3 trial in the
1930s.
He claimed that Marcell made him do it.
And so the father of the victim wrote to Camus saying, "Will you help the prosecution
by saying there's no way your book could have made someone commit murder?"
And Camus wrote back a letter that has everything in it you just said.
He said, "Look, I can't be sure Marcell didn't make the guy.
I don't like killer's schoolmate."
And I will never participate in the prosecution.
That's why I wrote the stranger in the first place.
-That's great.
-I'm always on the side of the defense.
It's in the playad edition of Camus.
I can send you the reference.
-Yeah.
-Yeah, it's a really brilliant letter to the father of a boy who was killed by his classmate.
It was leaked to the press.
I don't think he ever intended it to be made public.
-Right.
You know, prosecutors terrify me and people who are very comfortable judging, they make
me extremely uneasy as...
By virtue of the fact that there's not that reflective penitential self-doubt.
And so it's ironic that SaaS would have taken, you know, the fall is the great thought.
-The great masterpiece, yeah.
But with Camus, the idea that you can be committed in terms of resistance, but at the same
time, open to self-questioning and always moderating, you know, your ideological commitments.
Or at least refusing to absolutize them.
That is someone whom I would feel much more comfortable.
-He's a good thinker to have around right now, isn't he?
-So, for sure, we need him.
As I said in the intro, if there's anyone that we could maybe draw inspiration from when
it comes to how can we possibly resist the totalizing drive of history, I think it's
coming.
Certainly, I'm trying to think of others who could help plenty of them.
I would imagine people like Hannah Arendt and so forth.
But not the wholly committed, Angaje philosopher's.
-He has an incredible presence today.
-So, in the minutes that remain Alice, your book is coming out in the fall and you're
spend a lot of the time in that book talking about what the English or an American-
-No, much, not that much.
-No, I just want and I tell the story of Camille arriving in New York in 1946.
That's just one chapter of many.
Most of the book is set in Algeria and in France as Camille is imagining the book, writing
it as he's reacting to the reviews, as he's dealing with life and occupied France, choices
he makes about publishing and occupied France and how the book takes off after the war.
And Camille, in fact, was a little bit uncomfortable.
As you quoted him saying, the two greatest worries for an artist or resentment and self-satisfaction,
and he certainly didn't feel any self-satisfaction about the success of the stranger.
In fact, he thought he really didn't want it out in paperback.
-Why is that?
-He just thought it wasn't for everyone.
It wasn't like the plague was a book for everyone.
That was like a big, kind of best-seller book.
I think he thought there was something kind of dangerous about the stranger, especially
around the time of the J3 murder trial when the guy had said he killed his classmate
because most of them made him do it.
But I mean, such irony, you know, it's the best-selling paperback in the history of French
publishing.
-That doesn't surprise me.
It's also, I think, the number one in those all-time greatest novel lists, it's fascinating
to me to compare those lists in Italy or France, Germany and England and then the United
States because there's a great deal of discrepancy.
Litagie is almost invariably number one or is it a top five?
-In all those countries?
-No, no.
In France.
Yes.
-And what about in the US?
-In the US, I think it's down to Kilomark, and Bird's got to be a Kilomarking.
-Yeah, I think that's way up there.
I don't want to say something that's factually incorrect, but I have a feeling it's in
the '20s if I'm not mistaken.
It's up there.
It's in the top 100 as a rule.
There's different lists, it depends on who they are, but Litagie definitely way up there.
So, the last thing on Litagie because it has an afterlife now in a book that was published
recently by Camille Dauoud, the Algerian writer who does a kind of, it's not a sequel, but
he tells the untold story in the stranger about the nameless anonymous era, who is the
victim of the murder and of his family.
And that is quite a compelling retelling, and it's not a retelling, but what he calls an
investigation.
And I know that you were supportive of the publication of that book and so forth.
-He does something really ingenious.
He takes a situation where he's really talking in the voice of the main character of
the fall, that kind of angry self-recriminating voice.
This guy, Haroon, whose brother was killed in a book, as he says, it's kind of funny.
And he's looking for the guy who did it.
He's looking for maybe he's the author, maybe he's the narrator, we don't quite know.
And you read the first half of the book and you think, wow, this guy's really got a
bone, this Algerian writer's really got a bone to pick with Camille, he thinks Camille
was so awful for writing a novel where the Arab doesn't have a name.
And then right in the middle of the book, the same moment, the very same number of pages
when Mursou commits the murder.
This guy, Haroon, kills a European, right during the battles of the liberation of Algeria
1962.
And suddenly, after killing this European and going to jail and being interviewed by a
colonel and so on, he has a total identification with Mursou.
He says, "Mursou and I are brothers."
And that to me is just a very wonderful, generous gesture on the part of Daoud to identify
with Camille's anti-violence stance.
And that says a lot about, and he's making an intervention in contemporary Algerian society.
So he's got a very different mission than Camille had.
He also feels very close ideologically to come from the interviews that he's given and
laments the takeover of Algeria by fundamentalist Islam forces.
He's got a fight with the kind of conformism of Islam.
The way Camille did was conformist Catholicism.
So he identifies there as well.
Also it's quite interesting.
The fact of writing in French today in Algeria means something.
Daoud calls it, there's a famous phrase in Algeria, "Bian vacal."
It's when all the French left, the Algerians, when an occupied the real estate that
had been left empty.
And Daoud says, "That's what the French language is for us.
It's our real estate.
We're going to live there now."
Fantastic.
Well thank you, Alice Kaplan.
I want to remind our listeners we've been speaking with the French professor from Yale
University, Alice Kaplan, and the book is looking for the stranger, Alberca Miro and the
life of a literary classic coming our way in the fall, right?
That's correct in September.
In September, and it's been a pleasure to have you on entitled "Pengian's Alice."
We hope next time you're in town, you'll join us again.
Thank you Robert, a pleasure for me as well.
All right, stay tuned.
Bye bye.
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