Webdiary - Founded and Inspired by Margo Kingston

Solomon continues his series of reviews of classic novels, the most recent of which was his take on The Fountainhead.

By Solomon Wakeling

The Outsider is usually billed as a disturbing work about, well, an outsider. Meursault is nothing of the sort. He is a normal person. He could be one of Howard's battlers. His attitude to life is one that ignores social stigmas. Most people do.

The first sign that Camus shows of Mersault's alleged abnormality is when he says he finds it interesting to be told about the length of time a body takes to decay in different climates, in regards to his dead Mother. Whilst it may seem normal for a person to recoil from such a topic, Meursault is able to stomach it and accept the natural processes of the environment. His calm acceptance of the messy realities of life is a sign of good sense, rather than something to be looked on with horror.

Meursault reacts to the elaborate religious rituals surrounding his Mother's burial with the intelligent observation that she never gave a thought to religion in her life. This shows a critical mind at work, someone that can question authority and think for themselves. A rejection of religious rituals is not a sign of peculiarity, rather, it is a sign of intelligence. He recognises the meaninglessness of the ritual when applied to a non-believer.

The third sign is when he chooses to smoke a cigarette in the presence of his dead Mother. He feels at first that he should show respect for the dead. He concludes, correctly, that it doesn't really matter. He is conscious of social norms but he chooses to ignore them. This is what a normal person would do in the situation, if they even thought about it at all. It is a sign of sanity that Meursault is able to make a rational choice when faced with this situation. It would have been equally normal if he had chosen not to smoke the cigarette, out of respect for his dead Mother. The important point is that there is a rationale for his actions.

Unlike most outsiders, Meursault has normal relations with women. He is comfortable placing his head in the lap of a woman he knows and doesn't hesitate to ask her to the movies. He is confident and relaxed around her. He kisses her towards the end of the show, admitting that he did it "clumsily". He is neither over nor under confident. As Margaret Thatcher once said, there is no community, only the individual. Most people live in varying degrees of alienation. This is a normal characteristic, not to be feared. Yet Meursault is not totally alienated - like most people, he has normal relationships, friendships and lovers, not shying away from social contact like a true outsider.

Rather than feeling oppressed or like a slave in his work, Meursault accepts it as natural and works quietly and efficiently. He knows why he does it and why it must be done. Yet he also enjoys his leisure time, going for walks and swimming, loving nature and the outdoors. He describes staring at the sky for a long time, giving him a touch of the poetic spirit. He enjoys wine and smoking and doesn't shy away from pleasure.

The first truly unusual action that Meursault gets up to is when he goes to the house of a local pimp, his friend, and agrees to help him get revenge on a woman who had betrayed him. All he required was that Meursault draft a letter to her, which would make her feel guilty, so that he could sleep with her and then spit in her face. Meursault agrees, perhaps under the influence of wine. This is a callous act but one that is not beyond the realms of normal human behaviour. When placed in a situation with someone you know and asked to do something that will harm someone you don't know, an ordinary person may feel that they owe nothing to the stranger. When a victim is remote from us, it is natural to feel little sympathy for them. We care about our kin but not for others. Think of Australia's reaction to the Iraq war.

Towards the novel's close, Meursault is convicted for killing an Arab. You might argue that normal people don't kill other people. My answer to that is: Why not? There is nothing fundamentally different about a murderer than anybody else. Most killers and their victims are known to one another. Most killers are not abnormal, they are perfectly ordinary people that make an unfortunate decision at the spur of the moment. In the right situation anyone is capable of taking the life of another. Again I ask you to think of Australia's reaction to the Iraq war, where we killed not one Arab, but many.

Meursault argues at the end of the novel that essentially, none of his decisions matter. He says he passed his life in one way, when he might have passed it in another and that it doesn't matter either way. He correctly points out that other people have tried to foist ideas upon him. What he rebels against, and what most people rebel against, is socialisation. Society tries to coerce you in to thinking in a certain way, or at least, pretending that you do. There are differing levels of socialisation. Most people are less conflicted about the choices they make than Meursault and choose to live in peace with society because it is in their interests to do so. They accept the social contract to differing degrees. The point Meursault misses, marking him as different from his fellow men, is that whilst society may be oppressive, it often has good reasons for being so. Murder disrupts social harmony and it is in our collective interests that those who perpetrate it be punished for it.