The Light, Motherhood, and Abortion

Something else interests me in the two lines I pointed out from The Stranger--both bring up the question of control and responsibility. Meursault states that it comes down to a choice: he can either shoot or not shoot. He has the ability, the free will, to do one or not do one. In this way, it is simple. Do or do not. He can choose--but does he? After he pulls the trigger, regardless of why, he states that he himself shattered his own happiness. He accepts the agency for his actions. The "why" doesn't matter.

R.'s point about the light as connected to Meursault's mother brings me to another similarity between The Stranger and Play It As It Lays. The main character, Maria, also connects her mother, and her mother's death, to the sunlight: "Maria did not know whether any of that had actually happened but she used to think it, used to think it particularly around the time the sun set in New York, think about the mother dying in the desert light, the daughter unavailabe in the Eastern dark."

One of the book's main themes is motherhood, and the entire novel centers on Maria's abortion and subsequent need to play the role of the perfect mother for her daughter, Kate, who is in a hospital for a mental and physical condition and cannot be what Maria wishes. Still, as if in penance for the abortion, Maria determines that she will get Kate out of the hospital, live with her on her own, and take up canning, the kind of domestic act that would prove her fit for motherhood. It is Kate that gives Maria purpose, if not reason.

One last quote about the light, as tied to life, death, and motherhood: "She cried because something had just come through to her, there in the sun on the Western street: she had deliberately not counted the months but she must have been counting them unawares, must have been keeping a relentless count somewhere, because this was the day, the day the baby would have been born."

More thoughts later on abortion--and what it might mean to be addicted to it.

--C.

Stranger in a Strange Land (or Stranger No More)

C., it’s funny you should point out that particular passage from The Stranger, because it, along with a few others, provides a key insight into an element of Meursault’s character that is usually ignored. The oft-repeated response of first-time readers, whether they like the book or not, is that Meursault lacks any sort of emotions, but the passage you point out quite clearly demonstrates an emotion: happy.

See for yourself: "I shook off the sweat and sun. I knew that I had shattered the harmony of the day, the exceptional silence of a beach where I'd been happy."

And to take the next logical step, the past tense demonstrates another emotion: unhappy (which, of course, is synonymous with any number of other emotion words).

There’s also something else about that passage that I think is important and am consistently surprised to never hear mentioned, though, to be fair, the scholarship on The Stranger is voluminous and it is quite possible I have just not come across it yet. Nonetheless, everyone who has read the book mentions all of the sun and heat references throughout. The culmination of this being Meursault’s reasoning for shooting the Arab on the beach: the sun was in my eyes.

Academics and casual readers alike have debated what this could possibly mean ever since the book’s emergence in 1942. Some of the theories are quite imaginative (childhood trauma—the sun represents the light at the end of the birth canal), some very physical and logical (he tensed up with the sweat and sun in his eyes—keep in mind, no first-person pronoun in the first shooting sentence), and some controversial (he’s a racist—the sun reminded him of his whiteness and thus he shot the Arab, a non-white).

I’m doing myself a disservice by posting this without a copy of the book in hand, but no one ever mentions the hints throughout the book that the sun is a representation of his mother, the sun, the moon, and the stars, which of course links back to another theory I have regarding the translation of that very famous first sentence of the book.

Regardless of how you want to translate Maman (a whole separate issue), the full sentence has been translated twice into English as ‘Maman/Mother died today.’ The problem here is that we are ignoring something very important about the original French structure: “Aujourd’hui, Maman est morte.” Quite literally: “Today, Maman is dead.”

While some may think it a stretch, it seems hard to believe that Camus, who was so very precise about his stylistic usage, did not have some intention with this sentence, which, for my money, lays out Meursault’s world, showing us an ordering of what is important: the first, and most important, thing is Today, right now, this moment. The second, the thing that causes everything else in this novel, Mother. And the third, the thing that finishes it off, that comes at the end of the sentence (and yes, think about that in every sense of both the book and life—the end of the sentence), is Death.

If this theory is correct, the English translation is a pretty big gaffe (which only goes to highlight the incredible difficulty of translation).

So, returning to your passage, C., Meursault is like a bottle up until this point, unbeknownst to him, and when the sun gets in his eyes, he is reminded of his mother (and her recent death) and he is in fact blinded for a moment, in which, without thought, the trigger is pulled. The famous four shots that follow are simply steam escaping the sides of a lid.

The White Album

A blank page. More than a blank page: Electronic white space infinitely expanding and only as tangible as a screen. Ink and paper gives way to pixels and codes, and still we write and discuss. Stone tablets and papyrus, now this. It is not the medium that matters but the words. At least, we want them to, need them to.

And so, R., I am listening. So we begin. What is more fitting than to start with the alternately daunting and exciting prospect of so much white space? It brings us right to the two novels we discuss the most and the two authors we come back to again and again. I am talking about Joan Didion's Play It As It Lays and Albert Camus' The Stranger (of course, the photo from Café de Flore also inspired this post). Whiteness, the brightness of the sun, as if the essence is contained in vast nothingness.

From L'Etranger: "We stared at each other without blinking, and everything came to a stop there between the sea, the sand, and the sun, and the double silence of the flute and the water. It was then that I realized that you could either shoot or not shoot."

From Play It: "When that failed she imagined herself driving, conceived audacious lane changes, strategic shifts of gear, the Hollywood to the San Bernadino and straight on out, past Barstow, past Baker, driving straight on into the hard white empty core of the world. She slept and did not dream."

In her essay, "Why I Write," Didion discusses writing Play It: "I had only two pictures in my mind ... and a technical intention, which was to write a novel so elliptical and fast that it would be over before you noticed it, a novel so fast that it would scarcely exist on the page at all. About the pictures: the first was of white space. Empty space. This was clearly the picture that dictated the narrative intention of the book -- a book in which anything that happened would happen off the page, a 'white' book to which the reader would have to bring his or her own bad dreams."

The elliptical is also the lyrical. Both Camus and Didion are masters of style with sentences that are as much a part of the story as the narratives themselves. R -- your turn on Meursault and the sun. How about these lines: "I shook off the sweat and sun. I knew that I had shattered the harmony of the day, the exceptional silence of a beach where I'd been happy."

And speaking of lyrical -- readers, check out R.'s translation of Camus' Notebooks 1951-1959.

-- C.