The Stranger Or the Boy from Belcourt

THE STRANGER, OR THE BOY FROM BELCOURTCamus’s relationship with Hié taught him the depths of love, the limits of trust, and how thetwo can often conflict.Camus struggled too. He was jealous that Hié turned men’s heads on the street, evenas she appeared in a trance-like state from the morphine. Cut off from the Acaults’ supportand without employment, Camus was also facing financial difficulties. His scholarshipmoney had run out, and he had failed to land a quasi-literary job as a secretary at apublishing house. 235 Perhaps what was most painful for the author, however, was that hebarely had the time or energy to write. He knew he was good enough to get published injournals like Sud and Alger Etudiant, but he felt increasingly tied down by his commitmentsand the exigencies of adult life. “When we’re twenty, we think we have rights, but I am moreand more convinced that we only have duties,” Camus wrote to his friend Claude deFréminville towards the end of 1933:I am so weary and broken…I feel myself getting old, at twenty…I know very wellthat I am suffering, and living fully. I know that the sublime cannot do without thetragic, although the contrary is sometimes true, when tragedy squeezes us too tightlyand prevents us from weeping. [I am going through] days of bitterness and unbelief.236The external necessities of Camus’s day-to-day life were draining him from theinside. Just twenty-years-old, he had developed an acute sense of the tragic and the mundanefrom his real-life experiences, and had learned to express those sentiments through languagefrom years of reading literature and philosophy. Thus, Camus’s confrontation with life’sdemands (poverty, relationships, and mortality, among others) comprised the personal basisfor the absurdist and communitarian philosophies of his adulthood — absurdist, at first,because he saw no inherent meaning in suffering but only in individual revolt; andsubsequently communitarian because that very same revolt required recognizing theuniversality of the human condition. 237Life taught Camus what tragedy was; Nietzsche and others taught him how toprocess and articulate his experience of it. Camus continued to read such authors at theUniversity of Algiers, where he and Simone took philosophy courses together. He supportedthem by using the wages he had earned from tutoring high school students and the fundsHié’s mother had given them. 238235ibid.236ibid.237 For the best expression of Camus’s “absurdist” philosophy, see The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) or TheStranger (1942); to get an idea of the communitarian values at the heart of his humanism, one must read ThePlague (1947). It is helpful to consider the historical context in which these works were produced — the firsttwo at the height of the second World War, the other in the years immediately following the war’s end.238supra Bronner, Stephen Eric. Camus: Portrait of a Moralist. p. 8170