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| Photo: Wikimedia |
It is is easy to
understand how in this dark room, “ one feels like a stranger, hearing the
sounds of a city that has suddenly become strange. I am not from here—not from
anywhere else either. And the world has become merely an unknown landscape
where my heart can lean on nothing”, so he wrote on his notebook.
That morning he
looked relaxed and greeted me with a warm handshake. The television broadcasted
loudly the celebration of France World Cup Team at the Champ Elysees. The crowd
seemed to be excitedly drunk in paradise with France flag waving seen
everywhere. It seemed that he had been watching the celebration on the
television before I knocked on his door.
Knowing him as a
passionate football fan, I then said to him:
“ Congratulations
for France winning the World Cup for the second time, you must be very excited
about it.”
His big eyes
gleamed and he smiled broadly:
“Indeed I am so
proud of them. I can see the diligent planning, the hard work, the relentless
discipline and the brilliance of the young striker Kylian Mbappé, the fast
midfielder Paul Pogba and the unwavering defense of N’Golo Kanté, Raphaël
Varane and Samuel Umtiti. Great team work, that’s what football is all about. And also as what their trainer Deschamps
said: “We did not play a huge game but
we showed mental quality, and we scored four goals anyway.” Good job.”
I said:
“ I heard of your
great enthusiasm with football, once you were asked to choose Football or Theatre,
you answered football without hesitation.”
Albert:
“Yes when I was
young I played as goal keeper for the Racing University of Algiers, we won the
North African Champion Cup that time. I learned from football about the sense
of team spirit, fraternity and common purpose, it is a great way to learn.
After many years which I saw many things, what I know most surely about
morality and duty of man I owed to this sport.”
I said:
“Well said
Albert, I can feel your intense enthusiasm
and engagement with football, your great
appreciation of football, which is in such a striking contrast with the feeling
of emptiness, alienation, indifference in most of the novels you wrote. For
instance in contract with your euphoria
of the World Cup, listen to what you wrote in the opening of The Stranger which
became one of the famous opening in literature: “Mother died today, or maybe
yesterday, I don’t know.”
Albert:
“I spent many
summer days at the popular beach Les Sablettes, in Algiers. I lived in
destitution during my childhood but also in a kind of sensual delight, enjoying
swimming, sunshine, sand and football. I am a Mediterranean man, with a healthy
body worshipping beauty and the body like the ancient Greeks. I was placed
midway between misery and the sun. Misery stopped me from believing that all is
well under the sun. and in history; the sun taught me that history isn’t
everything.
My teenage
exciting life were cut short when, at the age of 17, doctors diagnosed
tuberculosis. Constantly short of breath, I was forced to abandon a promising
football career, and would suffer relapses throughout my life.
At the age of 27
I left Algiers for Paris after losing my job when the Alger républicain
newspaper ceased publication. I had a job at Paris-Soir newspaper that paid
three thousand francs a month for five hours of work a day, all in an unfamiliar
setting. My work at Paris-Soir newspaper was uninteresting, I was in charge of
laying out page four, organizing a mish-mash of columns and typeface. Whether I
worked a day or a night shift, I would come back to my dark hotel room in
Montmartre. One day, from atop Montmartre I saw Paris as a monstrous fog
beneath the rain, a city that felt both crowded and empty, and where my heart
could lean on nothing. I would always look at Paris with a stranger’s eyes.”
I said:
“ Nevertheless in
that dark hotel room in Montmartre you wrote your famous novel The Stranger,
the novel with the famous opening, about Meursault who experiences the detached feeling
from reality making him feel as a stranger in his home town in Algiers. The story
has a very strong absurdism flavour, the
feeling of entirely cut-off from others, listless, affectless, alienated, and
the lack of meaning of life. What is absurdism to you?”
Albert:
“On the day of
his mother’s funeral procession in Marengo, the most intense feeling he has is
the strong heat, the unbearable glare from the sky, which made him feel the
blood veins pounding in his temples. His mother’s funeral itself does not have
any meaning, he doesn’t weep, he doesn’t care to see the body of his mother in
the casket for the last time.
The return
journey to Algiers after the funeral seems almost like a relief for him. Back
in Algiers he decides to go to swimming and met Marie Cardona at the pool, then
they swim together, in the evening they watch
a Fernadel comedy movie and make love in bed later in the night.
However, the next
evening he says from his balcony: “Another Sunday gone, mother buried, tomorrow
back to work, and, really, nothing at all has changed.”
I said:
“This “Mediterranean”
outlook anchors your views to the place you grew up and to evoke its sense of
harmony and appreciation of physical life. Sun tanned bodies enjoying the beaches and the
sun of Algeria, swimming, playing football, drinking and girls. In contract to that sunny life of Algiers, Meursault says about Paris as “a dingy sort of
town, to my mind. Masses of pigeons and dark courtyards. And the people have
washed-out, white faces.”
Yet the same blinding
sun as on the day he buried his mother, which gave him pain especially in his forehead
, and all of the veins pulsating together beneath the skin, the same brightness
and heat of the sun like that caused him to shoot an Arab to death for no other
apparent reason than the unnerving brightness and heat.
It gives the
impression that while Meursault while enjoying life under the Mediterranean
sun, on the other hand the intense
blinding sun caused him to fail to make him make sense of his mother’s funeral,
and the same blinding sun gives him no other reason to shoot the Arab to death.
Is this why you
titled the novel as The Stranger, living the Mediterranean life intensely, enjoying
the sun, brown bodies naked on beaches, dancing girls with perspiration, yet detached, indifferent and outcast from
life? ”
Albert, citing his
novel The Fall:
“ I am here
without being here: I was absent at the moment when I took up the most space. I have never
been really sincere and enthusiastic except when I used to indulge in sports,
and in the army, when I used to act in plays we put on for our own amusement.
In both cases there was a rule of the game, which was not serious but which we
enjoyed taking as if it were. Even now, the Sunday matches in an overflowing
stadium, and the theatre, which I loved with the greatest passion, are the only
places in the world where I feel innocent.
But who would
consider such an attitude legitimate in the face of love, death, and the wages
of the poor? Yet what can be done about it? I could imagine the love of Isolde
only in novels or on the stage. At times people on their deathbed seemed to me
convinced of their roles. The lines spoken by my poor clients always struck me
as fitting the same pattern. Whence, living among men without sharing their
interests, I could not manage to believe in the commitments I made. I was
courteous and indolent enough to live up to what was expected of me in my
profession, my family, or my civic life, but each time with a sort of
indifference that spoiled everything.
I lived my whole
life under a double code, and my most serious acts were often the ones in which
I was the least involved.”
I said:
“At the closing
of the The Stranger, Meursault facing his death penalty under the guillotine acknowledges that
existence is meaningless, yet he now rejoices in the sheer sensation of being
alive.”
Albert, citing
Meursault:
“ And I, too,
felt ready to start life all over again. It was as if that great rush of anger
had washed me clean, emptied me of hope, and, gazing up at the dark sky
spangled with its signs and stars, for the first time, the first, I laid my
heart open to the benign indifference of the universe. To feel it so like
myself, indeed, so brotherly, made me realize that I’d been happy, and that I
was happy still. For all to be accomplished, for me to feel less lonely, all
that remained to hope was that on the day of my execution there should be a
huge crowd of spectators and that they should greet me with howls of
execration.”
THE END
This is an
imaginary interview in memory of Albert Camus.
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