The Stranger Or the Boy from Belcourt

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ANDREW GIAMBRONEtwo of Gustave’s hopes for Camus were ultimately fulfilled. But at the ripe age of seventeen,that would still take some time. 185Camus would carry his experience of near-fatal illness for the rest of his life, withfrequent relapses occurring along the way. His notebooks — written between 1935 and 1951— are filled with profound statements about death, tragedy, and the fragility of humanexistence. 186 “It is death which gives gambling and heroism their true meaning,” Camuswrote in March 1936, when he was only twenty-three-years-old. 187 Then, en route to Paris inAugust 1937, Camus solemnly recalled his struggle with tuberculosis while thinking aboutthe modernist short story author, Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923). 188 She too had contractedthe disease, twenty years earlier in 1917, and subsequently died of a pulmonary hemorrhagein January 1923, at the age of thirty-four. 189 Mansfield’s fate resonated strongly with thetwenty-something Camus, for he was facing internal and external challenges, both as anindividual and as a member of human society:On the way to Paris: this fever beating in my temples. The strange and suddenwithdrawal from the world and from men. The struggle with one’s body. Sitting inthe wind, emptied and hollowed out inside, I spent all my time thinking of K.Mansfield, about that long, painful and tender story of a struggle against illness.What awaits me in the Alps is, together with loneliness and the idea that I’ll be thereto look after myself, the awareness of my illness. 190Jean Grenier, it seems, was onto something when he visited Camus at home andsensed “an internal tension and a retreat of being” within his student. 191 Having endured thecomplications of tuberculosis for several years by the time he was writing his notebooks,Camus was still struggling to come to terms with his own physical and psychologicallimitations. Feelings of emptiness and loneliness were common; indeed, they caused Camus185 Here, one wonders whether Camus’s change of environment, in addition to his illness, composed a difficulttransition. Was he comfortable suddenly having an intimate father figure to talk to, when he had never met hisown father? Did he miss his mother, grandmother, brother, and other uncles, despite the silence that reignedover their apartment in Belcourt? The author does not speak on this subject.186 Camus, Albert. Notebooks, 1935-1951. trans. by Philip Thody. New York: Marlow & Company. Print.187ibid. p. 16188 “Katherine Mansfield: 1888-1923—A Biography.” KatharineMansfield.com. The Katherine MansfieldBirthplace Society, 2005. Web. Mar. 9, 2014. .189 The parallels between Camus and Mansfield do not end with tuberculosis; she was also raised in a colonizedcountry (New Zealand), was disillusioned by the repression of the native people there (the Maori), and finallymoved to the seat of a colonial power (London). Like Camus, Mansfield’s writing is remembered for her lucidprose and her characters’ engagement with the physical world.190supra Camus, Albert. Notebooks, 1935-1951. p. 44. Italics in original.191supra Grenier, Jean. “Souvenirs d’Albert Camus.” p. 43161
THE STRANGER, OR THE BOY FROM BELCOURTto ponder the existential underpinnings of selfhood and suffering, which would later serve asthe fuel for his fiction and essays. 192The experience of illness gave Camus the vocabulary to articulate a certain selfawareness,which allowed him to see himself and others more clearly. “It is to the mostspiritual souls, assuming them to be the most courageous, that it is given to live out the mostpainful tragedies,” Camus recorded in August 1938, quoting Nietzsche. “But it is for thisreason that they honor life, because it is to them that it shows its greatest hostility.” 193 ForCamus, suffering and tragedy were associated with honor and courage, not because theygave life meaning in themselves but rather because they presented man an opportunity torevolt against his mortal limits. What mattered most in Camus’s burgeoning philosophicalsystem, then, was an individual’s reaction to his Absurd condition — that one defines oneselfthrough one’s acts and mindset, despite life’s tragedies and tragic end. 194A May 1935 entry in Camus’s notebooks, where he cites his high school philosophyteacher, Jean Grenier, reveals the importance Camus attached to self-awareness achievedthrough adversity and suffering: “Grenier: We always have too low an opinion of ourselves.But in poverty, illness, or loneliness, we become aware of our eternity. ‘We need to be forcedinto our very last bastions.’…That’s exactly it, neither more nor less.” 195As Camus’s repeated references to him show, Jean Grenier greatly influenced the illand impressionable Camus. 196 197 With his tuberculosis in remission, Camus returned to Le192Death in the Soul, an account of Camus’s travels to Prague and Italy in 1936, beautifully captures therecurrent solitude and anxiety Camus felt as a young man: “Around me were a million human beings who hadbeen alive all this time whose existence had never concerned me. They were alive. I was thousands of kilometersfrom home. I could not understand their language. They walked quickly, all of them. And as they overtook andpassed me, they cut themselves off from me. I felt lost…I started to feel anxious…Something in my rapid pacealready seemed like flight…I feel uneasy, hollow, and empty…I was afraid of being sick, then and there, in themidst of all those people ready to laugh; still more afraid of being alone in my hotel room, without money orenthusiasm, reduced to myself and my miserable thoughts. Even today, I still wonder with embarrassment howthe weary, cowardly creature I then became could have emerged from me…At that moment I had gone as far asI could. I had no more country, city, hotel room, or name. Madness or victory, humiliation or inspiration—wasI about to know, or to be destroyed?…I find it hard to separate my love of light and life from my secretattachment to the experience of despair that I have tried to describe. It will be clear already that I don’t want tobring myself to choose between them.” Camus, Albert. Death in the Soul in Lyrical and Critical Essays. ed. byPhilip Thody, trans. by Ellen Conroy Kennedy. New York: Knopf, 1968. Print. p. 40-51. Italics in original.193ibid. p. 96.194 Though of course Camus had not yet developed his ideas on “the Absurd” when he first contractedtuberculosis, defining the term here can help us see its roots in Camus’s confrontation with mortality. As hewrites in The Myth of Sisyphus: “Man stands face to face with the irrational. He feels within him his longingfor happiness and for reason. The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and theunreasonable silence of the world.” supra The Myth of Sisyphus, p. 28195supra Camus, Albert. Notebooks, 1935-1951. p. 5196 Years later, Grenier played down his influence over the young Camus, claiming that he had done no more forhim than other students. Scholars attribute this seeming indifference to Grenier’s jealousy of his star pupil,especially as Camus became increasingly renown in the literary world. “Grenier’s relationship with Camus is162
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