The Impact of L’Etranger: Oblique Reflections on an Oblique Novel

Abstract

I came to L’Etranger via L’Exil et le royaume (Exile and the Kingdom), or to be more exact, The Renegade’, one of the stories that figured in the book. It had been published in 1957, the year Camus won the Nobel Prize. I was taken in by this dark parable on suffering and power and the fascination that power holds for its victims. It had some special insights: ‘How can a man become better if he’s not bad, I had grasped that in everything they taught me.’¹ Its prose was over-dramatised, raised deliberately to a hallucinated pitch. The characters were straight out of an archetypal nightmare, the sorcerer with his raffia hair and breastplate full of pearls and the Fetish himself with his double axe-head and ‘his iron nose twisted like a snake’. The landscape was as exotic as it could be — the fiery sandscapes of the African desert, the city of salt with its streets of mineral whiteness where the protagonist comes to convert the barbarians. (That he had already robbed the Catholic seminary he lived in, and had cast off his habit, was another matter). And there were images of searing heat: ‘an endless sea of brown pebbles, screaming with heat, burning with a fire of a thousand mirrors’ (EK, 34).