This year I read a series of Works by Camus, and the ones that impressed me the most were The Myth of Sisyphus and The Outsider.
The Myth of Sisyphus is Camus's most important masterpiece, and The Outsider is the beginning of Camus's transformation from an ordinary man into a worldwide classic writer.
Marcel Arlang, a member of the Académie française, regarded The Outsider as "the birth of a true writer"; the critic Henri Hale called The Outsider "standing at the forefront of contemporary fiction".
The Outsider is a surprising work. It is not very large, only 50,000 or 60,000 words, and it can be read in two hours. Its content is also relatively flat, there is no magnificent historical and cultural background, nor a complex and tortuous plot, Camus just wrote about an ordinary clerk in a society in an extremely mediocre life, confused and involved in a murder case, but did not defend himself, and was finally sentenced to death by the court. How did such a work become an important work in the literary history of France and the entire 20th century?
With such a question in mind, I read the translations of Mr. Liu Mingjiu and Mr. Li Yumin respectively, and in these two readings, I found a more satisfactory answer.
This novella is indeed unsettling. But what it contains
We can find many famous works related to justice in the history of world literature, such as Hugo's Les Misérables, The Diary of a Death Row Prisoner, and Stendhal's The Red and the Black (some of which are chapters).
Justice is the key to demonstrating the process of a nation's civilization. We find that many works on law and other depictions of social reality in history are mostly critical, which in turn embodies humanitarian values. These works can not only arouse strong resonance among readers, but also become a booster for the progress of human society.
In the 19th century, when unjust, false and wrongly decided cases were rampant, people were devastated, and the law was not so much a means of ensuring social order as a trampling on the bottom of the society by the upper class. In Hugo's Les Misérables, the encounter between Jean Valjean and Fantine deeply shocked the reader, who were the spokesmen for the miserable people at the bottom of the 19th century.
With the continuous improvement of the law, by the 20th century, Camus found that the shortcomings of the judicial system were no longer the frequent occurrence of unjust, false and wrongly decided cases, but the destruction of human nature and spirit was more tyrannical. As a result, moral trials of the judicial system became the subject of The Outsider.
Let me take stock of what crimes Meursault, the protagonist of The Outsider, has committed.
Meursault actually committed manslaughter, but the focus of the whole work is not on this, but on meurso and prosecutors, and even judicial personnel, including lawyers, who focus almost all of their energy on Meursault's humanity and personality. Ironically, all of these (those with the right to judge) see not the truth, but the mantle they themselves imposed on Meursault through all kinds of speculation and speculation.
From the beginning of Meursault's sending his mother to a nursing home, Meursault was forcibly labeled "filial piety". Then, beginning with the death of his mother, Meursault's series of unconscious actions became the guilt of his death: he smoked a cigarette while guarding her, drank a cup of milk coffee, he forgot her exact age, and on a date with his girlfriend the day after her funeral, and watched a movie...
These situations would not attract attention if they happened to an ordinary person, but when these details happened to a "murderer", an invisible moral judgment hat was involuntarily put on Meursault's head, becoming a label of "inhumanity" and "defection from society", and eventually making him "unforgivable" and sentenced to death in the "name of the French people".
How ridiculous is such a verdict! Meursault's fate depends not on the objective facts of the murder, but on how people perceive and speculate about him as a person.
The tragic ending was infuriating—Meursault's way of acting, living, and thinking became the reason for his death sentence, not his manslaughter.
Meursault's encounter is not his personal accidental encounter, but the injustice and discrimination brought to the people by the distorted judicial system in the context of the entire era, and Meursault's "outsider" is of universal significance. We were all once outsiders.
Using the vision of our 21st century young people to interpret Meursault, there are two words that can describe him - "Buddhism".
His Buddhist lineage is reflected in every aspect of his life and thinking. He is well aware that "the world's life is too much trouble" and "thousands of years of living methods have been like this", and he has a clear awareness of the embarrassment and helplessness of human living conditions.
Perhaps too calm, his attitude toward his mother, his attitude towards work, and his attitude toward marriage were extremely indifferent.
At work, the boss intends to open an office in Paris and intends to give the job to Meursault so that he can live in Paris and have the opportunity to travel. In the eyes of ordinary people, this is the life of young people, and most people will like it. Unexpectedly, Meursault only faintly echoed "yes" - he acted indifferent on the surface and inside. The boss asked him if he was not interested in changing his life, and he replied clearly: "People can never talk about changing their lives."
This idea and thought can actually explain all of Meursault's seemingly "absurd" behavior: after his mother's death, he not only did not shed a tear, but also dated his girlfriend; when his girlfriend proposed marriage, he also showed a "no-caring" attitude.
When a person living in reality is too sober, it will give people a feeling of indifference. Meursault lived only in the real world, preferring to die in the pursuit of truth rather than live in false lies.
This personality and attitude towards life made Meursault an "outsider" to society. Everything he did was out of place with society, and even his defense lawyer was not in the same boat as him.
More than once, Meursault deeply felt that in the courtroom, the presiding judge, the prosecutor general, the defense lawyer, and the reporter who interviewed the reporter were all family, and he was completely "excluded", during the interrogation, he made this voice in his heart: "Who is the defendant now?" The defendant can be crucial, and I have something to say. There was no possibility of argument, and he exclaimed more than once: "I have even been replaced." The judicial authorities "put me on the sidelines, I could not take care of any progress, they arranged my fate without consulting me". The way in which the judicial process excludes the defendant from the court in the novel is precisely the manifestation of the hypocrisy of modern law.
When I finished reading this work, my heart was as shocked as a million-word long masterpiece. For I see my own shadow in Meursault—unwilling to compromise, unwilling to delude myself, unwilling to live in a world of hypocrisy, unwilling to go to great lengths to please anyone, and I would rather give up all intractable hypocrisy and live the truest life, even if it is extremely humble and arduous.
Like Meursault, I was an "absurdist."
There are also several details of this work that deeply attracted me:
In his first meeting with the examining magistrate, Meursault thought "his case is very simple". At this time, the examining magistrate smiled slightly and said, "This is a view..."
At the second trial, the examining magistrate asked him if he was an "introverted, reticent man." Meursault replied, "For a reason, I never had anything important to say, so I remained silent." The examining magistrate also smiled as he had done last time, admitting that this was the best reason...
Mr. Li Yumin, a translator, believes that this is the brilliance of Camus's writing, listening to thunder in the silent place, and sneaking complex contradictions and conflicts in simplicity. Not to mention that there are words in the words of the pre-trial judge, just looking at him twice "smiling slightly", what symbolizes something, it is enough for people to find taste. Savoring this kind of dark pen in "The Outsider" is amazing.
Meursault flatly rejected both times "God."
The first time he said "no," it was the examining magistrate who asked him if he believed in God, and he said he didn't believe, and the examining magistrate said it was impossible, "everyone believes in God, even those who turn their backs on God." So the examining magistrate tried to persuade Meursault, and in the end, Meursault said "no."
The second time he said "no" was after Meursault was tried, when the priest went to his cell to see him, persuaded him that "human justice is insignificant, and God's justice is essential", and then asked Meursault whether he would allow his embrace, and Meursault replied: "No." ”
He says "no" to God, and in the eyes of others, says no to the "hope" of life. But Meursault knew that life was only once, and there was no eternity in the world.
The priest asked with emotion, "Do you love this land so much?" Then he asked Meursault what to think of another life. Meursault shouted at him, "It is in that life that I can recall." ”
Nietzsche once said, "What matters is not eternal life, but eternal vitality." Since there is no future, no eternity, only a short life, life is more worth living because it has no meaning, and man has no hope, which means that he increases his unfetteredness, which is what Camus called and embodies in many of his characters.
This kind of thinking reminds me of Maugham's reflection on the meaning of life conveyed in The Shackles of Human Nature.
Through the deaths of the protagonists' uncles and aunts, Fanning, Cranchaud, and Hidevor, Maugham reveals the true meaning of life—the deaths of people of different ages, professions, and achievements are similar—none of them leave any value, and their lives have no meaning.
This seemingly negative thought actually contains a very deep philosophy of "love for the world".
Professor Li Yumin believes that to love the world is to face up to the absurd, to experience the absurdity, to walk step by step in the present, to march in the flames of passion of resistance, Nietzsche wrote: "Obviously, the general trend of heaven and earth is to conform to the same direction for a long time: over time, something has been produced that is worth living on this earth, such as virtue, art, music, dance, reason, and spirit, that is, something that changes customs, something elegant, crazy, or sacred." Camus quotes a passage from Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil before going on to write: "This passage speaks of an imposing moral code, but also points to the path of the absurd. Go with the fiery passion, which is the easiest and at the same time the hardest. However, people compete with difficulties and sometimes evaluate themselves. ”
The ending of The Outsider is one of my most memorable endings to date. The same works that impressed me with endings were "Love in the Time of Cholera" and "The Great Gatsby" (related article link: Why did Márquez's "Love in the Time of Cholera" surpass "One Hundred Years of Solitude"?). A magnificent work of nothingness, shattered dreams, and human death, "The Great Gatsby").
Although "The Outsider" is a tragedy, the ending gives people a magnificent feeling, the reader does not feel sympathy or pain for Meursault's suffering, on the contrary, the end of the story gives people a sense of relief, as if letting go of the burden of life as relaxed and comfortable. This contrast and conflict produces an effect that is difficult for ordinary writers to achieve, that is, to give the reader an indescribable shock of calm, this extreme calm, which is deafening.
Li Yumin and Liu Mingjiu, two translators, have a relatively different translation of the end of "The Outsider", and I prefer the translation of the former.
I have excerpted the following separately for the reader's experience:
Li Yumin's translation is as follows:
For the first time in a long time, I thought of my mother. I seemed to understand why she had found a "fiancé" at the end of her life and why she was still playing the game of starting over. Over there, and so over there, around some nursing homes where life is about to be extinguished, the night is like a sad interval. When my mother was dying, she must have felt that she was about to be liberated and ready to experience all this again. No one, no one has the right to cry for her. I, too, felt ready to experience it all again. After this outrage, I seemed to be free of pain, empty of hope, facing this starry sky full of symbols, and for the first time I opened my heart to accept the gentle indifference of the world. Feeling that the world is so much like me, in short, like a sibling, I feel that I was happy before, and I am still happy. In order to be perfect, to make me feel so lonely again, I only hope that on the day of the execution, the crowd of onlookers will roar with hatred at me.
Liu Mingjiu's translation is as follows:
For the first time in a long time, I thought of my mother. I seem to understand why she was looking for a "fiancé" in her later years and why she was playing the game of "starting over" again. Over there, too, around a nursing home where life has been lost, the night is like a sad gap. So close to death, Mom must have felt relieved and was ready to do it all over again. No one, no one has the right to cry at her. And I, too, now feel ready to do it all over again. Just as this anger had just cleared me of the pain in my heart and hollowed out my passions and desires, now I was facing this night full of stars and inspiration, and for the first time I opened my heart to this indifferent world. I experienced the world being so much like me, so friendly and harmonious, feeling that I was once happy and still is. In order to start and end well, to fulfill merit, and to not feel that I belong to a different kind of thing, I expect that on the day of my execution, many people will come to see the hilarity, and they will all shout out hatred to me.
There is still a lot to think about "The Outsider", and I believe that in a few years, when I re-read this work again, I will have more and deeper feelings.
Finally, I end with a sentence from Mr. Li Yumin: "No matter how excessively imitated the mask of absurdity, people living in this land can always have the truth of our lives in the end." ”
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