Ｔｈｅ Ａｂｓｕｒｄ ｕｎｄｅｒ Ｔｈｅ Ａｌｇｅｒｉａｎ Ｓｕｎ

“Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don’t know.” – Albert Camus (L’Étranger)

The French existential novelist Albert Camus is famous for describing life — or human existence — as absurd in itself. But to understand this abstraction (from the Latin abstrahere, “to draw away”), we must look closely at the world in which Camus was brought up — the human relations he witnessed — to truly grasp this idea of absurdity.

In L’Étranger, the protagonist, Meursault, detached and emotionally numb, kills an Arab. It is French Algeria — a world filled with Arabs and Berbers — and the sun shines on all. Yet, as Edward Said once remarked, “the sun never shines on Arabs” in Camus’s world.

Meursault commits a meaningless murder and is tried — not for the killing of an innocent man, but for being emotionally detached. He does not cry at his mother’s funeral and instead complains about the sun. This detachment defines him.

The world of French Algeria during Camus’s time was one of conflict, blood, and terror — a world divided between occupier and occupied. It was in this world that characters like Meursault were born: men of emotional drought, shaped by both beauty and brutality. The stunning Algerian landscape — the paysage Camus loved — rested upon French colonial violence, and upon the resistance of Algerians who longed for freedom and dignity. In this world, absurdity is palpable, almost tangible.

The absurdity and meaninglessness of that world is condensed in the fact that Meursault is condemned not for taking an innocents man’s life, but for his indifference to his mother’s death. It is as if his mother symbolized la France par excellence, while the murdered Arab is reduced — in Giorgio Agamben’s terms — to bare life: a life that can be killed but not mourned.

So yes, Camus — human existence is absurd and life is meaningless – yet, only when they are situated in a milieu where a men live in a politically unjust world, where one man is considered lesser than another, even though both are men. That, indeed, is the ultimate absurdity.

WM