"CORPOREAL CONSCIOUSNESS": Albert Camus’s Technology of the Self in The Outsider

Throughout this essay, all quotations from Albert Camus’s The Outsider are from the English translation by Joseph Laredo (London: Penguin, 1982)

For centuries the death penalty, often accompanied by barbarous refinements, has been trying to hold crime in check; yet crime persists. Why? Because the instincts that are warring in man are not, as the law claims, constant forces in a state of equilibrium (Albert Camus).

Albert Camus’s The Outsider (1942) is a novel composed about the absurdity and against the absurdity of modern society. The novel’s gloomy narrative portrays the life of a young man wandering on the fringe of society, trapped in an ambivalent cross-play of solitude and sensuality, innocence and guilt. Through the obstinate life of its narrator Meursault, the novel displays the inarticulateness between an individual consciousness and the world, an impediment between an emerging self and the hypocritical, conspiring society which surrounds it. As the novel progresses, the protagonist’s existential condition gradually becomes a subjective state of ‘being-for-itself’ which is continuously obfuscated by an external rigid system of justice and at the same time inwardly perplexed by the distortion of such a system. Camus allows the contrast between individual nihilism and the ‘absurdity’ conceptualized in the form of ‘otherness’ to permeate the narrative until eventually his narrator kills a man and is virtually unable to elaborate his feelings and to see himself as a criminal.

Strongly informed by Camus’s theoretical perspective of the Absurd, the narrator’s subjectivity, with its lucidity (or lack thereof), is less affiliated with those of a class or collectivity than with the psychology of his own solitary, apostate, increasingly isolated self. In this context, even the matter of agency and choice appears to be gratuitous and irrational. If the novel’s rejection of reasoned arguments poses genuine interpretive problems which are impossible to be reconciled in philosophical terms, Camus’s literary aesthetic embodies in its own structure all the ontological anxieties that the text sets out to dispel.

What fascinates me in The Outsider is its double game with perception, subjectivity, and belonging. Meursault isn’t just indifferent to culture, society, and law – the character stands as their negation, their bad conscience, the existentialist hero by default. But the novel can’t help tripping over its own devices: it tells us reason is a dead end, while spinning a meticulously reasoned language to make that case. The effect is at once ironic and revealing, an artifice that exposes itself even as it persuades us magnificently.

Meursault’s intractable indifference represents an assault on social conventions. Camus elaborates an antithetic encounter between the self and the other by indicating from the outset, that Meursault’s feelings are in scornful opposition to those expected of him:

[T]he warden went on talking but I didn’t pay much attention. Finally he said: ‘Now I suppose you’d like to see your mother?’ I rose without replying and he led the way to the door’ (The Outsider, p.11).

It is clear from the outset that the novel proposes a reversal of social order. The narrator in the passage above does not even rise to the level at which ethical and moral responsibilities are relevant. His morally inert attitude is in one sense destructive of human solidarity, but is also, perversely, a sign of it. The impersonal absolutism of the character’s conduct parodies the outright impersonality of the bonds which connect us to a common humanity, something that no subjective impulse can set aside. Nevertheless, this capacity to disengage from the conscious content of perception is for Camus, and for most existentialist writers, not a strange logic, but a structural one.

Meursault’s autonomous, unreflective indifference (‘Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don’t know’, and his socially impeding behaviour represent not only an embodiment of the ‘bad faith’ phenomenon but also a radical rejection of the ontological category ‘being-for-others’. This state is manifested, according to Jean-Paul Sartre, through a preoccupation with what others think, a way of being conscious of oneself in the world which generally produces and proliferates shame. Meursault’s action cuts against and defies the assumption that individual consciousnesses are united through sharing the same similar typification of the world and their experiences in it.

From a Freudian perspective, normative culture represses human instinct and freedom but Freud’s own tendency was to privilege culture rather than nature. Unlike Freud, who sees the human bound to a system of constrains necessary for humanity’s survival in society, even though he is aware of the consequences entailed by it, Camus empathically reinstates in The Outsider the nature-culture dichotomy. Meursault is at the same time constrained by his own narrative and transgressive of it.

In the same way that the text forwards the existentialist concept of ‘being-for-itself’ with its denial of social conventions, the protagonist’s impersonal connection with the outside world and his lack of human bonding jeopardizes tradition, public behaviour and social code. Camus exacerbates this hermetical dilemma by portraying his hero in pre-reflexive mode, vigorously clung to the ethics of authenticity and sincerity. In his ethical determination, Meursault refuses to lie (if not in every sense as the text eventually reveals, at least regarding his feelings): ‘I replied that neither mother nor I expected anything more of each other, or in fact of anyone else, and that we’d both got used to our new lives’ (The Outsider, p. 85).

Lying, according to Camus, is not only the fictionalization of the truth; it is also and more importantly a hyperbolic relation with reality, it is stating more than one really feels. In his study of Camus’s Philosophy of the Absurd, Avi Sage remarks that if Meursault is incapable of lying it is because he represents the self-determining paradigm of the absolute outsider, an embodiment of Camus’s ideas of innocence and blamelessness. For me, this situation is more paradoxical: Meursault is as incapable of lying as he is incapable of telling the truth. His decisions are not based on an ethical evaluation which favours truth over deceit or authenticity over falsity; instead, it belongs to the level of ‘corporeal perception’ in which the character is submerged in a mire of sensuality rather than in conscious perception.

In constructing his character in such a mode, Camus manages to capture in his novel something intrinsically humane: the fact that at a primary level we are all instinctive animals but in human society we cannot take this assumption too literal. As some commentators have suggested, the novel irremediably defies the relationship between human truth and social justice. In fact, Camus’s novelistic-philosophical discourse is inscribed by the very social rationalities it wishes to disrupt and transgress. If Camus’s construction of the outsider, if his conception of such a seemingly utopic form of existence represents an elevation of individual beings beyond all reason, it also operates ironically as a threat to capital, society and human relations. Meursault’s identity in the novel then, is both stained and unscathed by the inadequacy of his social awareness. The hero is a kind of substantiation of Sartre’s own philosophical attempts to pacify the dilemma concerning self-fulfilment through social roles and of one being spontaneously free to overturn such roles.

Interestingly enough, in the first section of the novel the presence of others (represented by secondary characters) plays no significant part in the shaping of Meursault’s identity. In one sense, this denial of normative forms of identity formation does not mean that the external, public gaze towards Meursault is meaningless. Instead, it indicates that Meursault is textually constructed in this part of the novel within the ‘being-in-the-world’ ontological structure, privileged by experience rather than consciousness.

Conversely, a shift in perception is produced in the second part of the novel increasing the semiotic instability of the text: ‘It seemed to me then that I could interpret the look on the faces of those present; it was one of almost respectful sympathy’ (p.107). The protagonist’s imprisonment compels him to discover the other and to reflect on the absurdity of his own existence, which is now not only inflexibly ‘taciturn and withdrawn’ from society (p.66), but also physically extricated from it. At this stage, it is almost as if Camus is scrupulously creating in Meursault an identification with the others just so that these external figures become obfuscating subjective entities. Camus creates in the novel an actual structure of disidentification, one in which causes Meursault to efface social interaction and become largely embedded in textuality.

Alongside an ontological crisis, the novel portrays a tragic opposition between Meursault and society. Elsewhere in the novel, Camus makes transparent to us the continuous, strange and eventually fatal detachment in Meursault’s relation to his own motives:

[The prosecutor] would like to know whether I’d gone back to the spring alone with the intention of killing the Arab. ‘No,’ I said. ‘In that case, why was he armed and why return to precisely that spot?’ I said it was by chance. (The Outsider, p. 85)

The discursive relationship between Meursault’s apparently unreasoned actions and the murder cannot be explained in terms of cause, effect or motivation (‘I said quickly that it was because of the sun’ (p.99). René Girard argues that this sinister relationship is felt to be essential rather than accidental. Seen one way, Girard’s explanation justifies the interpretative controversy in relation to the character’s behaviour: an ordinary crime is generally personally or ideologically motivated. Turn the prism, it places the protagonist in the realms of tragic heroes by attributing the qualities of the event to the same essential forces that presides the destinies of such characters.

In the same way that the words ‘crime’ and ‘innocence’ are irreconcilable, Meursault’s pervasive, aesthetically crafted state of existential ‘nothingness’, although energetically glorified in the text, can never be reconcilable with modern technocratic society, as Camus strategy for the novel’s closure demonstrates: ‘He [the judge] announced that I had no place in society whose fundamental rules I ignored’(p. 99). Meursault’s actions and behaviour may appear vacuous but the narrative continuously makes absence itself into a presence, emptiness into its own peculiar form of meaning.

Within the context of the Absurd, existence is random and the absence of any pre-eminent causality to infuse it with meaning leads to the articulation of immediate, instinctive, libidinal experience. The difficulty is that the concept must reckon not only with social order but with the very machinery of ideology that sustains it. Consequently, Meursault’s social ostracism in the novel becomes tragically at odds with cultural values. The transgressive power of the novel then, is that it dramatizes in its very internal structure a crucial paradox: the fact that the value placed in the ‘loftier ethics of justice’ arises from the failure of the very social relations it seeks to preside over.

Camus’s narrative looks creatively for ways to evade or suppress the spurious objectivity with which the legal institutions engulf society and oppress the individual. In this sense, the novel is a study of the results and consequences of the ‘implacable machinery’ of juridical norms, of its concrete effects on society rather than an enquiry into the institutionalized process by which they were and continue to be formulated. Camus’s philosophical treatises suggest that the essence of the ‘absurd’ is not located separately in the individual or in the world, it is rather a product of the coexistence of the two. If Meursault’s ambivalence and vulnerability represent rebellion, society and justice represent limitation. The novel represents thus a mirror of the society in which it was produced:

Because after all, the actual sentence which had established it was ridiculously out of proportion with its unshakable persistence […]. The fact that the sentence have been read out at eight o’clock rather than five o’clock […] all these things really seemed to detract considerably from the seriousness of such decision. (The Outsider, p. 105)

By contrasting the parody-like functioning of the social institutions with the equally absurd concept of arbitrariness, the text tries to persuade the reader that any judgment of guilt is inevitably wrong. In fact, the more the text attempts to normalize the inappropriateness of Meursault’s interactions with the social world, the more it confirms the hypocritical, amoral ineptitude of such world. David Sherman points out convincingly (despite considering the novel an aesthetic success) that Camus betrays the solipsism of his own work in the very act of writing it. If I take Sherman’s argument a step further, it seems to me that Meursault ends up inhabiting the world of rational thought in his very drive to undermine it, being imprisoned in the rationality of the text’s own philosophical precepts.

To end where we began, The Outsider typifies, rather magnificently, the Existentialist disbelief on reasoned arguments and Camus’s Philosophy of the Absurd, with its focus on arbitrariness, selflessness and alienation. What emerges it that Camus dramatizes in the very structure of The Outsider all the moral, ethical and aesthetical ambivalences of his own philosophical thought, even as he strives to mediate them and make them amenable. If the protagonist’s fidelity to the truth gives rise to individual authenticity, it also produces a colliding disengagement with the social conjuncture that produces such a character. Taken together, these threads suggest that the precepts of absurdity operate continuously within the novel: neither the social environment in which Meursault lives nor the inner world of his thoughts possesses any rational organization. Camus’s real provocation is not to show us a man undone by his own absurdity, but a society and its courts undone by theirs – judicial authority revealed as arbitrary, and the law as fraudulent theatre.

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On the Role of Translation in Joseph Laredo’s 1982 Rendering of The Outsider

Joseph Laredo’s 1982 English translation of Albert Camus’s L’Étranger, published as The Outsider, plays a pivotal role in shaping the novel’s reception in the Anglophone world. Laredo’s approach is characterized by a terse, straightforward style that attempts to mirror the original French text’s simplicity and directness. This stylistic choice handles the novel’s formal features and existential themes, particularly the protagonist Meursault’s detached indifference, by recreating in English a clear and unembellished narrative voice.

However, translation is never a neutral act. The very decision to title the novel The Outsider instead of The Stranger (or that matter The Foreigner) introduces a subtle shift in interpretation. While both titles are valid translations of L’Étranger, “outsider” emphasizes Meursault”s alienation from society, whereas “stranger” could imply a more passive state of being unfamiliar. This distinction influences how readers perceive Meursault”s relationship with the world around him.

Laredo’s translation choices, such as rendering the French “la tendre indifférence du monde” as “the gentle indifference of the world” has a definite impact on the philosophical undertones of the novel. The word “gentle” softens the original’s “tender”, potentially altering the nuance of Camus’s portrayal of the universe’s indifferent nature. Such linguistic decisions underscore the translator’s role in interpreting and conveying the source text’s meaning, highlighting that translation is an act of interpretation as much as it is of linguistic rendering.

Like most translations, Laredo’s insightful work is not merely a conduit for Camus’s ideas but an active participant in the dialogue between the original text and its new audience. By examining these types of translation choices, we are able to gain insight into the complexities of recreating or recomposing a work from one language and culture in another, and how such elaborate processes of cross-cultural communication can subtly or not influence the reception and interpretation of literary works.

Elton Uliana is a Brazilian writer, literary critic and translator based in London. He is the co-editor of the Brazilian Translation Club at University College London (UCL), where he is also a guest lecturer on Translation Theory. He is a member of Out of the Wings Theatre Translation Collective at King’s College London, and a reader with the Royal Court Theatre London for their International Plays in Translation project 2023. His work has been published in multiple anthologies including Contemporary Afro-Brazilian Short Fiction (UCL Press, 2024), Daughters of Latin America: An International Anthology of Writing by Latine Women (HarperCollins, 2023) and Oxford Anthology of Translation (Oxford Press, 2022). His work is also featured in multiple other specialised journals, including Art in Translation (Routledge), Massachusetts Review, Asymptote, Latin American Literature Today, West Branch, and Tablet. Uliana was part of the judging panel for the 2023 PEN American Translation Prize. He is currently working on the translation of a volume of plays by Howard Barker into Brazilian Portuguese.