Two Personal Investigations of the Act of Reading:

Understanding Camus

By Pablo D’ Stair

I first encountered Albert Camus’ L’etranger as a rather ugly, pocketsized edition under the title The Stranger. It was the Stuart Gilbert translation I read and I remember the first time I came across a different translation, this by Matthew Ward, I was violently repelled by it. The translation was incorrect—this was not The Stranger, not what Camus had said to me when we first met and so the text felt to me an imposter.

In particular was the final passage of the piece, the final sentence. Gilbert has it as “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 they should greet me with howls of execration” and Ward has it like this “For everything to be consummated, for me to feel less alone, I had only to wish that there be a large crowd of spectators the day of my execution and that they greet me with cries of hate.”

Much differs, of course, even in this short span of words, but it was the last four that so unsettled me.

***

“…with howls of execration”—I don’t know that I literally understand what the words mean, if at this moment someone asked me to define “execration” I’d be unable to. At the time of my first encounter with Gilbert, though, I didn’t care, felt I understood the expression as a totality. To me a “howl” was mournful pain, desolation, fear mixed with anger and I assumed “execration” was a type or degree of such despair—the word suggested a lost, almost soulless pitch to something, an agony too painful to articulate.

Yes, despite my superficial lack of understanding, I bonded with this phrase, it imprinted—this was the way the novel ended and moreover it was imperative the novel end just so, every word preceding these four was momentum to make them impact, severely, absolutely.

“…with cries of hate”—In comparison to Gilbert’s take, this seemed watered down, polite, even timid—“cries of hate” were simpleton, understandable, “hate” so ordinary, even unintelligent, precise but blundering. And “cries” were not howls, were blubbering, self-referenced, aimed and built of something specific and born of the crier—cries were cried out with some purpose.

No, this novel, Meursault’s confronting the naked absurdity of man, could not culminate like this, it simply could not.

***

Of course, I had to admit I was comparing Gilbert to Ward, nothing to do with Camus. Then it struck me I ought to see what Camus had to say about the matter—I think it was with an odd, cocky swagger I decided this, decided I was going to prove myself “right.”

As an adolescent American, I admit the novel in its original language struck me as an oddity, as though it was more appropriate it exists in my easy, native tongue than that of its author—logic dictated against this, though. Camus said what he had said so I sought out this curiosity, this book-as-the-author-wrote-it and discovered that L’etranger led up to the following: “Pour que tout soit consommé, pour que je me sente moins seul, il me restait a souhaiter qu’il y ait beaucoup de spectateurs le jour de mon execution et qu’ils m’accueillent avec des cris de haine”

“Cris de haine”—I was sunk, felt sucker punched, ashamed, held the novel in my hands as though it were something I could conceal, evidence that might be buried.

I was wrong about Camus, wrong about all of my passionate rhetoric—my reasons why execration wasn’t hate, hate wasn’t execration may have been true but meant nothing now, my insistence on “howls,” my disdain of “cries,” showed me to be a fool caught up in my own interpretative subjectivity.

It was as though I had never even read Camus.

***

But of course, I had never read Camus, not until that moment and even in that moment I was not reading Camus, simply looking at words in a language I neither spoke nor read—if not for having already seen the words in translation, the entire thing would be a cipher.

Still, the superficially jarring difference between what I had first read, had so insistently identified as Camus, and what Camus had actually said, turned me inside out.

I could not let go of Gilbert, of what I felt about this phrase work, how I understood the novel, how I understood myself with regard to it—what Ward said was not what Camus said though I could see for myself that it was.

Yet, was it?

“Cris de haine.” Cris—“cries” was evident—Haine—“hate” was evident—but surely in the combination of the two was some sound of “execration,” surely there was some quirk to the spirit of the expression that would demand not so much a literal French-English dictionary insertion but a felt comingling of meaning and linguistic nuance. I spent awhile in such forlorn, flailing about thought, trying to cram the words I preferred into the strings of letters in French, these meaningless jumbles that were words but to me were no words at all.

***

I first came across L’etranger under the title The Outsider while on a trip to Ireland—it was a little edition, lovely, and to boot it had a translation I’d never come across before, this time by Joseph Laredo.

I’d never heard the piece called anything but The Stranger—it had been a decade since my first encounter and only this one title had ever been uttered by anyone I’d met who knew the work, in anything I’d ever read about it.

Idly flipping to the end of the edition, out of habit, I found that Laredo had written this: “For the final consummation and for me to feel less lonely, my last wish was that there should be a crowd of spectators at my execution and that they should greet me with cries of hatred.”

***

Hate. Hatred. Execration. I set the words side-by-side—‘execration’ was clearly the odd duck, but what was to be made of these other two? Was hate, hatred? It seemed to me, no, decidedly not.

Hate seemed an abstraction, a universal, something unformed to individuality; hatred seemed this abstraction filtered through individuals toward some object in particular, hate-with-direction; and in the meantime the only definition I’d come across for execration aligned it to a curse, a denunciation, an active will to damn. But these were wildly different sentiments—to be met with unformed “cries of hate”, confronted with an ultimate abstract expression was not the same as being met with personal “hatred,” with repugnance over one’s own actions, one’s own being and neither of these were the same as being met by crowds of people literally cursing, damning, demanding some eternal form of disgust be visited on another. “Hate” could indicate that once Meursault was killed a balance would be restored, “hatred” that a particular justice had been settled, a slight reconciled, and “execration” suggested that the vitriol would follow the dead man forever, define him, that his death was not enough, he needed to be sunk with a weight that would drag his corpse ever deeper and deeper in some abyss.

No, it wasn’t just the words themselves—the novel was entirely different dependent on this final sentiment.

It couldn’t after all, be said that the ending could run like this: “In the end, facing the end, all that I needed to hope for, all that was required for sense, peace to be made of it all was that on the day they dragged me through the courtyard to my death I find the streets empty, soundless, no eyes falling on me, no sound of voices, nothing but the progress of my own breath.”

Though couldn’t it?

This was not a translation of Camus, of course—even in my mono-linguistic understanding of the world I knew that—but would it alter the novel? If someone read every word leading up to this statement, what would they come away with?

***

What had I come away with?

I felt, again, as though I’d never read the book. What had happened in it, what had it meant?

To find some grounding, I approached the question from the angle that interpretation is on the part of the reader, it means something different to each of us—yes, certainly, any six-year-old could tell me that.

But, again—this took for granted the original, that if I had read L’etranger, my interpretation was just the same as anyone else’s, of equal value, so to speak. But I had never read L’etranger, I had read The Stranger—I had read two The Stanger and one The Outsider.

Camus had written the novel, not Gilbert, not Ward, not Laredo, but I had read only Laredo, Ward, Gilbert, never Camus.

I thought of it this way: If I gave my interpretation of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave to someone, though in my heart I may feel I was imparting it as it was intended, certainly I was not—someone else’s idea filtered through a third-party does not equal the original person’s point-of-view and my further interpretation is all the more removed.

But did this mean, by way of reversing the logic, that in fact the actual statement of Camus must be none of the words I was investigating—were they, all of them, extrapolations, incapable of leading me to the statement of the author, incapable truly of anything but leading me further away?

Perhaps.

Or was it true that one of them could be the statement as the author had made it, even unwittingly?

This consideration seemed off, seemed far too semantic—one could not accidentally express the same as someone else, one could not express the same as someone else, period.

*******

Of course , I had always accepted this as true—that an author cannot expect people to literally understand them, must be aware that they are writing something so deeply coded that its only purpose is to beget individual response in multiple, a different interpretation for each set of eyes, for each mind—the thing the reader reads is not the artist’s novel, and the act of reading, in the end, is entirely separate from the act of interpreting.

*******

But do I think that?

Look at it this way—hadn’t I been discussing Plato’s allegory a moment, ago? Assume that Plato imparted the idea to me, but I could not follow it, that when I tried to explain it back to him, I garbled it. Then, let’s assume some other party explained it to me and they did so in such a way that I understood it, could repeat it back no trouble—did this mean I understood what Plato had to say, or would Plato have to hear me and then say he approved?

Taking matters to such extreme rhetorical is ridiculous, of course—according to this spin, the only way to express the allegory would be to repeat it, verbatim. In fact, alteration, interpretation is central to understanding, when looked at through this filter—it is a requirement that I paraphrase, repeat in different words, synthesize the idea until it is, so to speak, my own.

***

Yet, to what end?

Following this line of thinking, my above, completely altered replacement of Camus’ final statement could, indeed, be a way of synthesizing the novel, understanding it—understanding through interpretation, even through interpretation that produces a different object.

What did Camus write, after all? He wrote a novel that was an expression of his idea—in this sense he was Originator—but certainly he was not writing of ideas that were his origin, but was synthesizing all manner of input—and in this sense Interpreter.

Yes, I liked this—and again it felt something I ought to have picked up in elementary school. This seemed sound enough—the interpretive aspect was present in originator, was necessary to synthesize originator’s interpretation and so the actual content became, in a sense, irrelevant as it came to strict sanctity, strict adherence to the individual expression of the author—Camus was irrelevant to understanding Camus’ work, because Camus’ work was only an investigation Camus was making, he had crafted an object to consider that he was no authority on.

***

I will admit that in my most experimental mindset, in my most abstract philosophical stabs at understanding literature, I often think that all work should be translated and only the translations should be read—even translation within a single language ( translation of synonyms, I call it). An author should turn his work over to another party and this party should paraphrase every sentence, re-write what they see using different words, attempting to render the same thing they saw through a means that must superficially be different—only these different words should be explored by readers. There should be an admission on the part of the artist that it isn’t their words they want explored, it is the exploration they have begun they want continued.

I assert this in these moments, because this seems to me the inevitable result of reading, no matter the action of the author, it seems a necessary, almost mystic acceptance.

In earnest I ask myself—if the artist insists on the audience interpreting through their exact words, aren’t they, in the end, asking that their words, exclusively, and not even what the words may represent be explored?

And to this I answer (as earnestly as I can manage) that there is no natural insistence on the part of reader that the words they read be those of the author. No. I can name countless works—many of them most formative to me—that in the above questioned sense I have not only never read but would be incapable of reading.

***

I confess, writing this now, that throughout the whole tracing of this little history—this progress of my personal time spent with Camus and others who I feel have gotten far closer to him than I—that I have felt a creeping disquiet not based on anything I have to this moment discussed. What I find unsettling is that I know none of these personal discoveries, none of these observations of the importance-of-nuance, the shattering-alteration-of-synonym, the questionable-sanctity-of-original are unique to me. Even as I pulled copies from the shelf to make certain I was setting down quotations correctly I see Translators’ Notes, Translators’ Introductions—even the most cursory search of commentary, critique, casual-reader opinion about Camus, Meursault, the confrontation with the absurd will lead to countless versions of the same investigation, give or take some quirk of tone, some quality of conclusion.

I feel horribly un-unique for my honest appraisal of my thoughts over something I have read and wish I could set down something subtle, new, unheard, unconsidered—I wish through some cobbled together semantic I could be the one to define L’etranger even moreso than can Camus.

I wish I could look at the page and see “Alors, j’ai tire encore quatre fois sur un corps inerte ou les balles s’enfoncaient sans qu’il y parut. Et c’etait comme quatre coups brefs que je frappais sur las porte du Malheur” and have no idea, no idea at all what it is saying.