Albert Camus: L'Étranger (1942)

Le Livre De Poche edition, jacket design by Lucien Fontanarosa 

[Image source: Alexis Orloff, https://www.flickr.com/photos/aorloff/6072937176/]


A book that (as The Outsider, in Stuart Gilbert's translation) was on all our male youthful minds and bookshelves in the 1970s. In other words a classic Peng-gie Modern Classic, along with Gormenghast, The Glass Bead Game, etc.

(In the USA, it has generally been titled The Stranger.)

(I think I studied it for French A-Level, along with Racine's Britannicus , Voltaire's Candide and Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac.)

 L'Étranger being so short and easy to read, is a good study-text for schools; you can still find out all about it in Shmoop and places like that. And it still gets plenty of discussion, though I've a feeling its moment has passed, that the urgency of the issues Camus intended to raise is less clear-cut than it was, and that on the other hand time has only tended to underline the glaring issue of the book's quite primitive attitudes to women and to colonized "natives". In particular our awareness of and contacts with the Arab world have been completely overhauled since 9/11; westerners can no longer regard the Arab world as something separate. But as recently as 1980, when The Cure released an admired single called "Killing an Arab" (based on  L'Étranger), I was probably typical of British 21-year-olds in having only the smallest sense that this could possibly offend someone. I don't necessarily claim that modern sensitivities in the west are all 100% positive or well-directed, but I do think they mostly are and they've certainly changed how we think and feel. In the study, especially. (Meanwhile in the real world, it remains unclear when the number of Arabs being killed by Westerners is going to stop accelerating.)


Camus' L'Étranger (1942) -- The Stranger, The Foreigner, The Outsider -- tends to be interpreted against the background of other material. As usually happens with much-discussed books, this accumulated material is apt to set the agenda. The material includes Camus' "Essai Sur l'Absurde" (The Myth of Sisyphus), which he wanted published alongside the novel, his 1955 note, Sartre's 1943 essay, Cyril Connolly's Introduction, wider conceptions of the Absurd and Existentialism, and the more glaring contrasts between the book's assumptions and our own (i.e. about colonial Algeria, the Arab world, men and women...) Then there's the fact of L'Étranger having been so influential and so eagerly consumed; some people saw it as an expression of their own philosophy, and an indispensable guide to life. In these circumstances the most important thing may be what L'Étranger meant then; in the heyday of its influence, the 1950s and 1960s. (And no doubt it meant different things in the English-speaking and French-speaking worlds..)

These things are all relevant, but still I want to get back to the text before me. (That innocent notion really means "get back to how I go about reading it".)

My methodology is: Meursault is treated as a real person. My assumptions are: His philosophy, like everyone else's, is of interest principally as a betrayal of the inner psychic tensions that are either personal to himself or more widely symptomatic of his society. Like everyone else he does not know what he is doing or why, or even what he really thinks; these things are more easily seen from outside. Like most people he is a regular self-sabotager. He is a self-conscious outsider, that is, an insider playing a licensed outsider role within his society. His differences resemble the society he differs from. The society in question is a male-dominated colonial society. (The real "stranger", as others have tartly said, is the dead Arab.)

Much, I realize, is missed out by taking this viewpoint. I respect Sartre's insistence that L'Étranger ought to be read against the horizon of Camus' thought; to do otherwise is in a sense a reader's self-indulgence; as if one ignored the intention of a call to revolution and preferred to count its adverbs. But tacitly, the outlined approach does engage a little with Absurdism. (While I usually prefer to argue that an author cannot control the meaning of art, there are clearly instances where the intention of the artefact is signalled with special insistence, as is the case here. The artefact is doubly not an island; both as existing in the world and as being marketed for a specific worldly use.) There are some other interesting things that I don't get on to: for example the undertow of classical mythology noted in David Saint-Amour's essay (see below).

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1. "Mother died today."  (Stuart Gilbert's translation - others have pointed out that "Maman" is more intimate and childish in tone - "Mum died today ...")

People have made much of Meursault not knowing when exactly she died, as if this already betrays a striking indifference. Yet the first paragraph is real-time narrative in the present tense. At this moment he cannot know because the telegram has not told him. (At this moment he still isn't sure which bus he's catching.)

By the 4th paragraph, the narration has subtly slipped into past-tense narrative, ("I took the two o'clock bus") and from this point there are no further indications of how much time separates the narrated events from the moment of narration.

The final chapter (Part 2, Ch 5) has the same structure, beginning in real-time ("I have just refused, for the third time, to see the prison chaplain"), but slipping into past-tense narration when the chaplain unexpectedly walks in.

The impression persists that the early chapters are vaguely diary-like, inasmuch as the chapters usually end with Meursault going to bed, and usually begin with a new day. In the second half of the book, of course, days have less individuality.

There is no attempt to account for the narrative we are reading (e.g. as a diary or a piece of writing addressed to an audience). I don't think most people will imagine that Meursault is the writing type. But he suppresses things - from his own thoughts?  Is that because the topics are painful for him to focus on, or because he considers exploring them pointless - or does he only think this because they are painful?

Meursault does not trouble to report if he was later told about what time his mother died. He probably was told, even if he didn't ask. The impression is of a man who is quite incurious, particularly about matters that are usually thought to be of interest. His apparent incuriosity about the man he has killed is one glaring example.

Meursault seems to disdain lying. Talking too much, claiming feelings you don't have. But habitual reserve can be a way of withholding the truth too. When reserve is patently misinterpreted, isn't it best to explain a bit?

Meursault takes refuge (that's my interpretation sneaking in, of course) in being uninterested. He is, I think, conscious of feeling inarticulate.

During the story often notes that he was in a bad state to interact with people. The sun or the heat affect him. Or crowds and noise. He frequently says he is tired or dizzy; at other times he may be bored.  For one reason or another he frequently doesn't take in everything that someone is saying to him.

2. The chaplain, at the start of their talk, suggests to Meursault that, though he thinks he's sure he doesn't believe in God, perhaps he isn't really so sure as he thinks.  "Are you really so sure of that?" he says.

Finding Meursault unwilling to reply, he then generalizes the case: Don't people often feel sure of something, when they're really not?

Meursault replies:

I said that seemed quite possible. But, though I mightn't be so sure about what interested me, I was absolutely sure about what didn't interest me. And the question he had raised didn't interest me at all.

This is nearly a very a-propos reply. If Meursault had said: "though I mightn't be so sure about what I believed, I was absolutely sure about what didn't interest me", this would be a reasonable argument requiring some thought to counter. What he says instead, on the other hand, looks like weak bluster. Someone who admits the possibility of not being sure about what interests them can't be absolutely sure about what doesn't interest them. It sounds like Meursault gets ahead of himself, picks up one of his own favourite contrasts (interested/not interested) and deploys it too early in the sentence.

Did Camus really mean to write this? It's an extremely credible confusion. Is it an intentional instance of how Meursault tends to tie himself in knots so his replies are inarticulate?

I think we can see the same inarticulateness in the long diatribe that he finally unleashes when he loses his temper with the priest. It is repetitive, it jumps about, it doesn't hang together, and does the argument about fatalism really carry any weight in the end? Meursault himself seems aware that he may not have put it very well: "[C]ouldn't he grasp what I meant by that dark wind blowing from my future?"

 If Meursault is conscious of being inarticulate, his frequent claims of lack of interest look tactical; they are a way of avoiding communication.


2a. Some might add to this, Meursault not relishing the task of explaining things to the women, after Raymond is wounded. But I suppose this means, not explaining the fight but explaining why the Arabs have got it in for Raymond; the letter written by Meursault, the Arab girl being beaten up, etc. Telling that story to his own girl-friend might well seem problematic.

Meursault's failure to go in to Masson's bungalow is fateful. Perhaps he needed to talk to women a bit more often. It is sometimes said that Marie and he don't have much in common, don't have anything to say to each other. But isn't the truth that Meursault puts up a wall that precludes them having anything serious to say, because it never occurs to him to share his real thoughts or his real life? (For example, the business with Raymond..) And isn't this a very typical macho male wall...

His male pals say, as a matter of course, that Meursault has little in common with his mother. I think we can conclude that he was not a confiding son.

It seems relevant to propose here that Absurdism is a philosophy - more than a philosophy, an excuse - that appeals to men far more than to women. (This Guardian article seems to confirm that it's very much a man's book...)


3. A number of Amazon readers have commented on how much Meursault reminds them of autistic narrators in more recent books.


4. At a late stage in the trial, Meursault does attempt an explanation:

I tried to explain that it was because of the sun, but I spoke too quickly and ran my words into each other. I was only too conscious that it sounded nonsensical, and, in fact, I heard people tittering.

5. The account of events leading up to the killing is ambiguous. It suggests that Meursault isn't thinking clearly. If Meursault is so hot, why doesn't he go inside or bathe his head in the sea? (The water, we are told, comes right up to Masson's bungalow.) Or do anything but walk back, under that pitiless sun, to the exact place where the dangerous Arabs might reasonably be supposed to be? He says he was taken aback by the reappearance of the Arab, so presumably the killing was not premeditated, though Meursault himself supposed that Raymond's earlier walk along the beach did perhaps did have vengeful intention; so what really drives Meursault to return to this same spot? What about that ominous thought, "[O]ne might fire, or not fire.." For the four additional shots he has no explanation, but despair at the ruinous event of the first might be a possible motive.

The appearance of a steamer at the time of the fateful encounter is possibly intended to be echoed by the steamer's siren on the book's final page.

6. Book II Chapter 1 describes - or rather, fails to describe - Meursault's explanations after being arrested.  By the way, we never find out how he was arrested. Did the shots alert a crowd to this lonely spot, or did M. give himself up? At any rate, we can perhaps infer that he made no resistance to arrest.

Regardless of how different the judicial system may have been in Algeria in the 1930s, you can't get arrested for murder without someone saying to you, probably fairly swiftly, "Tell me in your own words the whole story of how it happened."  We find out eventually that this was said repeatedly and that Meursault did give an account, if not several accounts. But by a certain authorial sleight of hand, we never get to hear these accounts which, as readers, we consider so crucial to appraising the subsequent actions of both the lawyers and the accused.

The message, I suppose, is that appraisal is not going to be the most helpful approach to this particular novel.

What we do get to hear is Meursault being obstructive: saying things that are irrelevant and counter-helpful, or commenting without further explanation that some matter seems very simple or of minor importance, or flat-out refusing to answer a direct question (about the four shots).


7. But is Meursault really so inarticulate? There's also a set of contra-indications. For example about the four shots; it was Meursault himself who emphasized that there was a pause between the first shot and the other four. Though the novel doesn't report his other accounts, it's clear that they were as detailed as this.

He communicates well with men, who consider him "a good sort". The examining magistrate, after a distinctly histrionic meltdown about M's lack of religion, subsequently names him "Mr Antichrist", pats him on the shoulder, and seems to have a kind of rapport with him; M enjoys conversations with his lawyer and the magistrate on general matters. Later, the prison-guard notes that M is intelligent and has a way with words, unlike other prisoners.

Above all he's a white Algerian like everyone in the legal establishment and all the people he names or hangs out with. Evidently the colony shares understanding to a certain extent; it couldn't be avoided. A shared understanding, for instance, that shooting an Arab may not be the end of the world. Lots of readers have speculated that Meursault ought to have been able to get off if only he weren't so prone to self-sabotage. Did he even mention that the Arab drew a knife? We don't know, of course, if there was confirming evidence to back up what only he saw; but there should have been. You'd think that a drawn knife on its own would be enough to establish threat; enough evidence of self-defence to escape, at any rate, the guillotine.

This brings us back, again, to the question of intent. Meursault allows himself to be considered a friend by Raymond, but evidently there's a marked disparity between the two men in terms of intelligence and education. When Meursault intervenes about the gun, and is given the gun, he effectively uses that class-superiority to "take charge". He implies then that he is better fitted than Raymond to judge when is the right occasion to shoot. In the event, he turns out to be a poor judge. But to a certain extent he employs at this later juncture the same ground-rule he formerly spelled out to Raymond; you can't shoot someone unless they threaten you, but then you can. The fact that he has the gun, and knows it, and goes back to the stream, suggests that he is still intoxicatedly playing the part of "a man in charge"; the responsible colonial who may have to enforce order by a controlled (well-judged) act of violence. If not, indeed, the self-sacrificial colonial.*

[*See John Kucich, Imperial Masochism:British Fiction, Fantasy and Social Class (Princeton University Press, 2006)]


8. The scene of Marie's prison visit in Bk 2 Ch 2 is one of the most impressive in the book. It's hugely frustrating to read, since Meursault fails to have any but the most unsatisfactory communication with the woman who nevertheless is beginning to be the focus of all his hopes. Instead of talking with her, he wastes the minutes annotating with futile detail who else is talking to whom, and repeating fragments of their conversation. (The language barrier, here as elsewhere in the book, interposes a big gap between colonials and natives; Meursault cannot understand Arabic or Berber and cannot quote it; one practical reason why the Arabic characters aren't named.) M., as usual, is full of excuses to the reader/himself. He is unused to the light, distracted by other prisoners, not in the right mood, always dislikes having to raise his voice, and so on. Here we can see his self-sabotage most clearly (and the complete separation of his mental life from what he communicates to Marie). The scene is apparently important in its consequences. Marie's letter says that she can no longer visit because she isn't married to him (Is it true? How was she able to visit him the first time?); this in turn leads to the period of misery that Meursault dislikes speaking of.

9. The prison visit is one of several episodes in the book that have the air of being set-pieces. Another is the prolonged account of Meursault's solitary Sunday after Marie has departed in Bk 1 Ch 2. I said earlier that there's no attempt to account for the existence of Meursault's narrative. Although the book is in the first person throughout, yet it evinces a great range of styles, put together rather intuitively, and we can't always infer too much about M's own thoughts from it. Take for instance the sentence:

But she hadn't any appetite, and I ate nearly all. (Bk 1, Ch 4).

It's put into Meursault's mouth, but is obviously there to confirm to us that Marie is horrified by the nasty scene in Raymond's room, while Meursault isn't. What about the earlier sentence "He'd beaten her till the blood came"?  Here too the normative implications are clear. Though Meursault himself overlooks the viciousness of Raymond's behaviour, yet Camus is finding ways of telling us how any normal person would feel about it. It's quite a crude technique from a Jamesian perspective, but it makes for a thrilling ride.

The chapter ends with another authorial prompt. M overhears Salamano weeping for his lost dog and "For some reason, I don't know what, I began thinking of Mother." We can guess that he's thinking of the loneliness she suffered when she was first in the care home. Then "as I wasn't feeling hungry", M goes to bed. That might be just because of his eating for two at lunchtime, but it's sufficiently close to the other sentence to suggest that M's thoughts are upsetting.

So M did feel something for his mother.

After considering for a bit he asked me if he could say that on that day I had kept my feelings under control.
'No,' I said. 'That wouldn't be true.'

This is the first interview with the defence lawyer. M has frequently been credited with a principled veracity. But surely the wording the lawyer proposes is, in fact, the truth. M is self-sabotaging.

You could argue that a good deal of what happens in Bk 1 - specifically the involvements with Marie and Raymond - are the direct result of feelings of loss that M himself won't admit to. For him "Really, nothing in my life had changed." But the mere fact that he is watching for a change proves the opposite.

*

Albert Camus' 1955 note, which has been highly influential on interpreting the novel:

http://fuckyeahcamus.tumblr.com/post/50653536999/afterword-by-albert-camus-for-the-outsider



Sartre's 1943 essay on L'Étranger, in English translation, can be found here (p. 26-44):

https://archive.org/stream/SartreJeanPaulLiteraryAndPhilosophicalEssaysCollier1962/Sartre,%20Jean-Paul%20-%20Literary%20and%20Philosophical%20Essays%20(Collier,%201962)_djvu.txt



Interview with David Carroll, author of Albert Camus The Algerian:

https://cup.columbia.edu/static/carroll-interview

Interesting interview defining Camus' changing politics and his plea for non-violent democratic change in Algeria, rejected by both sides.


Claire Messud, "Camus and Algeria: The Moral Question" in the New York Review of Books (November 7th, 2013):

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/nov/07/camus-and-algeria-moral-question/?insrc=wai

(This excellent piece asserts, on the contrary, Camus' consistent moral viewpoint.)


Guardian review of Sandra Smith's recent translation:

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/dec/09/outsider-albert-camus-smith-review



Guardian reading group discussing Camus' attitudes to Algeria and Algerians.

http://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2013/nov/19/the-outsider-camus-algeria-reading-group



Commentary by Sophie Lioulias:

http://trajetslitteraires.wordpress.com/2013/09/17/letranger-dalbert-camus-lenigme-meursault/comment-page-1/




Amazon review, by jacr100, criticizing the novel:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/review/R4OZHW205IJTA

jacr100's against-the-tide unfavourable review of The Outsider.  One of the most indefatigable Amazon.co.uk reviewers and not someone to ignore - jacr100 has reviewed more modern novels than you've ever read. He's uninterested in modernism and tends to take an emperor's-new-clothes viewpoint; clearly someone who operates outside the academic literary community.

If the narrator is a purely sensual mediterranean sort (a point argued by Connolly, etc), why does he have such a humdrum job and futile semi-demi-friendships and nothing else?

"if being an individual entails such a lack of zest for life, it might be preferable to be a suppressed cog in the wheel."

 "a near total lack of environmental description which removes the tale from any geographical or cultural context"

That's an accusation that would surprise a lot of people, but it does have something in it. Algeria is not exoticised at all; pretty much without Arabic life or "local colour"; this is more difficult to pronounce on since the colonial environment in which Meursault (and Camus) lived has completely disappeared.



Amazon review, by Christopher H, arguing that L'Étranger should be treated as a roman dur: 

http://www.amazon.co.uk/review/R11UIBWZET75WK/ref=cm_cr_pr_perm?ie=UTF8&ASIN=0141182504




Detailed chapter-by-chapter commentary by Simon Lea:

http://www.camus-society.com/camus-stranger-study.html




L'Étranger as a cartoon book (by Jacques Ferrandez).

http://www.bdencre.com/2013/04/10326_rencontre-avec-jacques-ferrandez-auteur-de-letranger/

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David Saint-Amour's 1977 essay "Underground with Meursault: Myth and Archetype in Camus's L'Etranger"  - psychological/mythological analysis - recommended.

http://journals.hil.unb.ca/index.php/ifr/article/download/13245/14328

*

Steven J. Rubin, "Richard Wright and Albert Camus: The Literature of Revolt", The International Fiction Review, Vol 8 No 1 (1981), pp. 12-16. 

https://journals.lib.unb.ca/index.php/IFR/article/download/13478/14561/18186  [PDF]

Notes the striking resemblances of L'Étranger (1942) to Richard Wright's Native Son (1940). E.g. in prison scenes such as the priest's visit, in the murder being a sort of accident with something unexplained about it, in the protagonist's refusal or inability to articulate, in his sense of an absence of meaning to his life. The contrasts are equally glaring; Bigger Thomas, a slum-dwelling black boy in a snowy Chicago Southside doesn't obviously resemble Meursault in Algeria; the ferocious context and theme of Wright's novel is the Black Belt experience of what we now call institutional racism. Wright's bestseller wasn't translated into French until 1947 (Un enfant du pays). All the same, I found myself wondering.

The cross-influence that's usually discussed is in the reverse direction. Wright met Sartre and Camus when they visited America in 1946, and he moved to Paris the same year. His 1953 novel, confusingly titled The Outsider, was definitely influenced by French existentialism. 

Alain-René Le Sage (1668-1747): Gil Blas de Santillane

[Image source: http://www.bookine.net/Lesagebiographie.htm]

.... I therefore went in search of Doctor Sangrado, and brought him to the house. He was a tall, meagre, pale man, who had kept the shears of Clotho employed during forty years at least. This learned physician had a very solemn appearance, weighed his discourse, and gave an emphasis to his expressions: his reasoning was geometrical, and his opinions extremely singular.

After having observed the symptoms of my master’s disease, he said to him with a very physical air: “The business here is to supply the defect of perspiration, which is obstructed: others, in my place, would doubtless prescribe saline draughts, diuretics, diaphoretics, and such medicines as abound with mercury and sulphur; but cathartics and sudorifics are pernicious drugs, and all the preparations of chymistry are only calculated to do mischief: for my own part I practice a method more simple, and more sure. Pray, what is your ordinary diet?” – “My usual food,” replied the canon, “is broth and juicy meat.” –“Broth and juicy meat!” cried the doctor, surprised, “truly, I do not wonder to find you sick: such delicious victuals are poisoned pleasures and snares, which luxury spreads for mankind in order to ruin them the more effectually. You must renounce all palateable food: the most salutary is that which is most insipid: for as the blood is insipid, it requires such victuals as partake the most of its own nature. And do you drink wine?” added he. “Yes,” said the licentiate, “wine diluted.” –“O! diluted as much as you please,” replied the physician, “what an irregularity is here! what a frightful regimen! you ought to have been dead long ago. How old are you, pray?” –“I am going in my sixty-ninth year,” replied the canon. “Right,” said the physician, “an early old age is always the fruit of intemperance. If you had drunk nothing else than pure water all your life, and had been satisfied with simple nourishment, such as boiled apples, for example, you would not now be tormented with the gout, and all your limbs would perform their functions with ease. I do not despair, however, of setting you to rights again, provided you be wholly resigned to my directions.”

The licentiate having promised to obey him in all things, Sangrado sent me for a surgeon, whom he named, and ordered him to take from my master six good porringers of blood, as the first effort, in order to supply the want of perspiration. Then he said to the surgeon: “Master Martin Omnez, return in three hours, and take as much more: and repeat the same evacuation to-morrow. It is a gross error to think that blood is necessary for the preservation of life; a patient cannot be blooded too much; for as he is obliged to perform no considerable motion or exercise, but just only to breathe, he has no more occasion for blood than a man who is asleep; life, in both, consisting in the pulse and respiration only.” The doctor having ordered frequent and copious evacuations of this kind, told us, that we must make the canon drink warm water incessantly; assuring us that water drunk in abundance, was the true specific in all distempers whatever. And when he went away he told Dame Jacinta and me, with an air of confidence, that he would answer for the patient’s life, provided we would treat him in the manner he had prescribed. The governante, who possibly thought otherwise of this method, protested that it should be followed with the utmost exactness. Accordingly we set about warming water with all dispatch; and as the physician had recommended to us, above all things, not to be too sparing of it, we made my master drink for the first dose two or three pints, at as many draughts. An hour after we repeated it, and returning to the charge, from time to time, overwhelmed his stomach with a deluge of water: the surgeon seconding us, on the other hand, by the quantity of blood which he drew from him, in less than two days the old canon was reduced to extremity.  (Book II Ch II)

Dame Jacinta and Gil Blas, not ill-pleased by the event, barely have time to bring a notary so that a will can be made out in their favour. As the poor old man expires, Doctor Sangrado returns,

and looked very foolishly, notwithstanding his long practice of dispatching patients. Nevertheless, far from imputing the canon’s death to his watery draughts and evacuations, he observed as he went out, with an air of indifference, that the patient had not lost blood enough, nor drank a sufficient quantity of warm water...

I have quoted this, one of the most arresting passages in Gil Blas, on the assumption that few English-speaking readers will have encountered it. (How Smollett must have relished translating this!) For though the name of Gil Blas is familiar to anyone who has studied the English novel (Scott, Dickens and so on being fervent readers of Le Sage), the book is now barely available, though it is still read in France. 

Things would be different, no doubt, if Gil Blas were always, or often, as fiercely vigorous as this. Doctor Sangrado, perhaps an invention of sheer fancy, is a satire so generalized that it works equally well as a critique of conventional and of alternative medicine; you might say as a critique of all the professions whatever, inasmuch as all of them presume that one can validly be in a position to advise others on how to live their lives and solve their problems, a presumption whose successes are rarely demonstrable and whose unrelieved failure, even, is so well bolstered by a conspiracy of discourse that it usually escapes notice.

[I might add, though, that I was caught up short by a sentence in Bruce Chatwin’s Utz (1988): “The Doctor would kill his patient in order to rid him of his disease.” This is implied to have been a familiar motif of the Commedia dell’ Arte, but I am unable to confirm it – on the contrary, the Dottore of the Commedia was a lawyer. Anyway, the death-dealing Doctor is a stock joke, e.g. in Molière’s L’Amour médecin  – I am so ignorant, I have no business writing this... There’s also Barrabas’s autobiography in The Jew of Malta:

            Being young, I studied physic, and began

            To practise first upon the Italian;

            There I enriched the priests with burials... (II.3)

This, however, is but one in a list of murderous professions. Later, in Scott’s The Abbot, we see the joke mutating gently into Dr Lundin’s ridiculous concern for his professional prestige and his “honorarium”, his respectful attitude towards chronically enfeebled potion-takers and his disgust at the rudely healthy who never employ his services. 

The seventeenth chapter of Richard Ford’s lively Gatherings from Spain (1846) is devoted to a discussion of the wretchedness of Spanish doctors, who are “dangerous like a rattlesnake”. Among the causes that Ford proposes are 1. an indifference to science resulting from Philip III’s law, motioned by universities led by ecclesiastics, “prohibiting the study of any new system of medicine, and requiring Galen, Hippocrates, and Avicenna”; 2. the low status of the calling, in a land where status and the pundonor are of such high account; 3. “the philosophy of the general indifference to life in Spain, which almost amounts to Oriental fatalism, in the number of executions and general resignation to bloodshed”.

But in 17th c. Protestant Europe things were not much better. Quinine, which was so effective in the treatment of malaria (then a disease that infested Europe), was vehemently condemned.  “At this time, the profession was still in the thrall of Galen’s dictum laid down in the 2nd century AD, which strongly promoted bleeding as a way to expel corrupt humours. Even when the efficacy of the Jesuits’ powder was demonstrated, the medical profession shunned it, using the excuse of its religious connections. A more likely reason for its rejection was that bleeding was more profitable. For instead of a short course of efficacious bark infusions, several expensive bleedings would have been administered, and since this was no cure the fevers would return, requiring further, costly treatment” (Toby and Will Musgrave, An Empire of Plants, 2000). ]

Whatever its literary provenance, Le Sage’s stock joke about doctors has a plain relevance to his book, in which health, like destiny, cannot be explained and is therefore portrayed as a matter of chance.

Gil Blas gains from its lack of ambition. Passing blithely from story to story, its common framework is the hero (or sometimes another person) being involved in some means of getting by. This might not necessarily mean a job; it might mean involvement in some scam or temporarily important affair. Most of the jobs that Gil Blas tries his hand at are singularly useless, by modern standards; they do not produce economic issue. For the most part they are in service. Jobs are easily found, and not long retained; usually, we find ourselves sharing those formative early days when a servant is forming impressions of his milieu. If you like a steadiness of moral vision, Gil Blas admirably supplies the steadiness, at the expense of the morality. 

The hero’s shallowness of character is important. In Book III Chapter I he begins work for a new master: “He was a man turned of fifty, seemed to be serious and reserved, though good-natured withal; so I conceived no bad opinion of him.” Since the master has no obvious place in society, however, scandal begins to circulate, and Gil Blas is infected by this immediately. He thinks that his master is a spy: “I saw him walking in the street with an air of assurance that at first confounded my penetration: but, far from being duped by those appearances, I distrusted them, having no favourable opinion of the man.” In fact, the corregidor’s visit reveals that the master is merely well-off and outstandingly lazy; his way of life is a philosophical proposition. Gil Blas swings with the tide again: “After this conversation, which the alguazil and I overheard at the closet-door, the corregidor took his leave of Don Bernard, who could not enough express his gratitude; while I, to second my master, and assist him in doing the honours of the house, overwhelmed the alguazil with civilities, making a thousand profound bows, though in the bottom of my soul, I harboured that disdain and aversion which every man of honour has for one of his occupation.” The bottom of his soul is only two inches beneath its surface, but the presentation is all the better for it.

By the time we reach Book III we might think that a pattern is emerging. Book III Chapter IV finds Gil Blas in service with a beau. “Well”, says a fellow servant pretty soon after, “don’t you begin to get rid of your rust?” Such remarks are irresistible, and soon Gil Blas confesses that  “though it (this way of life) was quite new to me as yet, I did not despair of being reconciled to it in time.” After Don Matthias has been killed in a duel (an affair of no great gravity), Gil Blas switches seamlessly, and even more entertainingly, into service with an actress, in the company of the delightful Laura. But at this point there is an unexpected check. Gil Blas reminds himself (what we have long forgotten) that he originally set out to be a tutor, and under the temporary influence of moral remorse he withdraws from this lively circle. (Fairly obviously, he can’t keep up the pace.) What follows in Book IV dispels any simple pattern. He finds himself in service to one Aurora, and after pleasingly mistaking her advances and making himself ridiculous, gets involved in a good-natured plot to entrap a rakish lover. But in the midst of this, we are treated to a highflown tragedy about mistaken purposes in Sicily (“The Baleful Marriage – A Novel”, as Smollett has it). Le Sage may have been one of those authors, like John Ashbery, who prefer to think that they write to no program.

We are bound to read these early novels from the perspective of later ones, and at first to characterize the “picaresque novel” by its emptinesses – for instance, the lack of signification that is signified by the word “episode”. This makes the book easy to put down (no-one now could read Gil Blas day after day). What makes it easy to take up again is, to us though not to contemporary readers, a more elusive matter. No doubt it’s true that much of this elusive attractiveness is what Le Sage and his readers would be surprised by; the insouciance that was always a component in the book itself is magnified by its distance from us, by the weight and spaciousness of the crumbling brown volume, its appallingly interesting engravings, Smollett’s meaty prose, and other reassuring reminders that the book is secure in an untroublesome category of our existence.

In Book IV Chapter IX Gil Blas, “having seen everything that was curious in Toledo” (an unexpected foreshortening) is on his travels again. He overtakes a stranger whom he recognizes as the man being sought by the party of soldiers he has just passed by at the inn, and in view of this pursuit and the imminent onset of a storm, they decide to take leave of the high road and to seek shelter with a “holy hermit”, who welcomes them. The storm breaks fearsomely; “The hermit fell on his knees before an image of St Pacomo, which was glued to the wall, and we followed his example.” Soon a frugal though wholesome meal is supplied, but Don Alphonso (the travelling companion) is too distracted to eat. The hermit observes: “I perceive that you are accustomed to better tables than mine, or rather, that sensuality has corrupted your natural taste. I have been in the world, as you are now: the most delicate viands, the most exquisite ragouts, were not too good for my palate: but since I have lived in solitude, I have retrieved the former purity of my taste, and at present can relish nothing but roots, fruits, milk; in a word, that which composed the nourishment of our first parents.” It’s a speech that appeals to us, despite the faint tincture of Dr Sangrado. Don Alphonso is persuaded to tell his story; then a fellow of the hermit returns to the grotto, and they confide that their holy appearance is a disguise; in fact they turn out to be two scoundrels who have already fleeced Gil Blas in an earlier chapter.  They too have now discovered that they are being pursued, and urge Gil Blas and Don Alphonso to join them: “You cannot do better than to join your fortune to ours; you shall want nothing: and we will baffle all the search of your enemies. We know almost every inch of Spain having travelled over it; and are acquainted with the woods, mountains, and every place proper for an asylum against the brutality of justice.” So the four hastily abandon the grotto, though it is now nightfall, “leaving as a prey to justice the two hermit’s robes, with the white and red beards, two pallets, a table, a rotten chest, two old straw-bottomed chairs, and the image of St. Pacomo.”

The transformation in our attitude to that image is of course very funny. At the same time Don Raphael, both as hermit and robber, focuses a sense of pastoral liberation, though we now recognize the malicious amusement in his unctuous remarks about diet. This sense of liberation persists all the while the four are together, though it won’t be long before Gil Blas and Don Alphonso will part amicably from the others (for once again, the pace is a bit too hot). As they hide in a pleasant glade, drinking wine and eating slices of roasted meat, Don Raphael gives us a splendidly colourful account of his adventures, which include a long captivity in Algiers. It makes a long chapter, and the next one begins: “When Don Raphael had ended his narration, which I thought very tedious, Don Alphonso was so polite as to say it had diverted him very much indeed.” Thus Gil Blas is able to take a small literary revenge for Don Raphael’s dominance (and for the loss of his purse); Le Sage knows that the story is far from tedious.

I am sorry to say that “the brutality of justice” eventually catches up with Don Raphael and Lamela, in the form of an Auto da Fe in which they are the principal luminescences. Gil Blas witnesses the ceremony with horror, with swooning, with self-congratulation on his own good sense in separating from them, and, in the space of one sentence, with oblivion: “but these afflicting images, which disturbed my imagination, dispersed insensibly...” (Book XII Chapter I).

Liberation and insouciance are natural themes of the picaresque novel, if you compare it with the claustrophobically taut plotting of later novels – the High Victorian and most of its successors. In these books, everything signifies. Human beings are in thrall to chains of event developing from their own characters, their family and acquaintance, their society. The novelist sees a mission in drawing out the logic that entraps them: El destino de un pueblo es como el destino de un hombre. Su carácter es su destino (J. Wassermann, quoted as the epigraph to Los Bravos (1954) by Jesús Fernández Santos).

In Gil Blas this business of destiny is less well understood. Destiny might exist (Gil Blas mentions it sanctimoniously on a number of occasions), but its operations are just as invisible to the reader as to the hero; the visible procession consists of chances, good and ill luck. Just deserts are rarely apparent. (Two typical instances: the tutor who is not allowed to punish the stupidity of Don Raphael’s noble schoolmate has the clever idea of whipping Don Raphael instead; and Gil Blas, tentatively producing the honest literary criticism that his employer the archbishop has urged on him, is of course instantly dismissed.)      

Prose fiction is always a mimesis of experience; at least, it always is when it’s read. The mimesis interposes, however, a contrast between experience and the literary monument that mirrors it. The picaresque novel, by comparison with the forms that spring from Scott and Balzac, omits the element of explanation. The book lives alongside the reader’s own progress through the days; it does not, so to speak, turn to confront it with annihilating intelligence. Both its hero and its reader live from hand to mouth. 

[“Camille Pissarro died in Paris on 13th November 1903 of blood poisoning caused by an abscess of the prostate: his homeopathic doctor had attempted to cure it without operation.” Perhaps one may conclude, with Dr Sangrado in mind, that any form of medicine is blighted by a doctrinaire spirit.]

[Gil Blas was published, in two volumes, in 1715.  A third volume appeared in 1724, and a fourth in 1735.] 

*

I read Smollett's translation; one of the first "old" books I ever acquired, though it took me many years to get round to reading it.

Scott was under the impression that Smollett lent only his name to the translation, but this is apparently an error, and it's now recognized as the definitive Gil Blas in English. It was published in 1748, nine months after Roderick Random.

(2003)

William Congreve: The Way of the World (1700)

William Congreve, portrait by Sir Godfrey Kneller

William Congreve (1670-1729) threw over his career as a dramatist at the age of thirty. The Epilogue to The Way of the World ends:

So poets oft, do in one piece expose

Whole belles assemblées of cocquets and beaux.

It was not so true of other poets as it was of him. The Way of the World soars above the details of its ingenious plot-line and even the real passion of its lovers - it creates an edifice of wit that none could match, and you feel this came easily to him, easily enough to cast aside after a disappointment.  

What single model, indeed, could deserve the honour of inspiring such a flight as Lady Wishfort's ever-more-salacious propriety?

But as I am a person, Sir Rowland, you must not attribute my yielding to any sinister appetite, or indigestion of widow-hood; nor impute my complacency to any lethargy of continence– I hope you do not think me prone to any iteration of nuptials––

Wait. Far be it from me––

Lady. If you do, I protest I must recede– or think that I have made a prostitution of decorums, but in the vehemence of compassion, and to save the life of a person of so much importance––

Wait. I esteem it so––

Lady. Or else you wrong my condescension––

Wait. I do not, I do not––

Lady. Indeed you do.

Wait. I do not, fair shrine of virtue.

Lady. If you think the least scruple of carnality was an ingredient––

The scene can only end by being interrupted. What coarse stuff "Malapropisms" must seem to be, after this.

(2008)

John Dryden (1631 - 1700)

John Dryden (portrait by John Michael Wright, c. 1668)

[This recently identified painting was purchased by the National Portrait Gallery in 2009 (Image from ArtFund)]

Scattered notes written in 2001 and 2004...

Dryden’s Poems

January 2001. For the last four months or so I’ve been reading Dryden. It began with an accidental dip into the Auden/Pearson anthology of English poetry - a book my father acquired from a brief dalliance with Heron Books, a sort of classic book club. He passed it on to me when I began university twenty-five years ago. I’ve always used it, and it survived the purge of my library in 1996 - by choice not accident; I wanted to keep the canon by me.

So, I dipped in Volume III, my least-loved period in English verse. Then I wanted to read Absalom and Achitophel in full, so I went to Waterstone’s. There was no Dryden at all - I was astonished, and then of course hooked on the quest. A second-hand bookshop in Bath supplied further inadequate selections, eagerly devoured. Then came the Arthos selection, found in St Leonards on Sea; like all in the Signet series, generous and attractive. Finally the Oxford Poems, borrowed from Frome library, and - ordered from bookshop - the cheap Wordsworth volume - £2.99, and as complete as any.

[This curious hiatus of Drydens didn’t last; there are now, it seems, a mass of Selected Drydens in the shops (2002).]

Dryden is a poet who can’t quite be made to fit into a single volume. But after many years I can more or less claim that I have read another “complete” English poet, to add to Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson, Milton and Keats; but that was all a long time ago. It means more now; there’s less time. And I have really immersed: I feel like saying (as biographers do) “Dryden has been a good companion”. Indeed, I don’t want it to end. I have an eighteenth-century volume of Plutarch with an introductory Life by Dryden; his prose too is a fine thing – though somehow a bewilderingly different thing.

None of the books mentioned is really complete because there’s no Aeneid - though I have since discovered that this has an unexpectedly vigorous life on the Internet, since it’s invariably the translation used by those benefactors who have made Virgil available on their websites. I was at first misled into thinking that the bulky Oxford volume was complete but it’s a selection, pointedly excluding The Hind and the Panther. I appreciate the polemical gesture, but don’t really condone it; a poet’s original work, however unsatisfactory, must always supply a fuller idea of the writer than translations. And whether Hazlitt is right to say this, it is certainly a higly defensible claim, that  “it has more genius, vehemence, and strength of description that any other of Dryden’s works, not excepting the Absolom and Achitophel. It also contains the finest examples of varied and sounding versification...” You need The Hind and the Panther to sign off Dryden.  

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another note on Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights - Naturalism

Penguin English Library jacket (1970s style) - turning a detail of Branwell's bad picture into an iconic image

[Branwell's painting of 1833-34, commonly referred to as the Gun portrait, showed himself and his three sisters. Emily was 15 or 16 at the time.

The Gun Portrait, from an old photo

Arthur Bell Nichols thought the painting so poor (or so unflattering to his late wife Charlotte) that he destroyed it, retaining only the part showing Emily, who definitely came out best.

Emily, from the Gun Portrait (NPG)

Even so, the portrait is markedly improved by the cracks (which, for instance, make her nose look interestingly snub instead of characterlessly straight). But what above all transformed the effect is the Penguin jacket-designer's crop.  This, by eliminating the back of Emily's head, conceals the Victorian sloping shoulder-line and the languid hair, and creates an altogether more forceful image. Here is a woman, we're convinced, who already has Wuthering Heights in her sights.]

*

This note is about David Daiches' 1965 Introduction to the Penguin English Library edition of Wuthering Heights.

And first some trivia.


DAVID DAICHES

1.  Professor Daiches was an interesting man - read his 2005 obituary in The Scotsman:

http://www.scotsman.com/news/obituaries/professor-david-daiches-1-720657

His surname (Jewish/Yiddish rather than Scottish) is pronounced  "day chiz"  or "die chiz". That's probably how you pronounced it already, but it's good to know..!


NOVELETTISH

2.  Daiches (referring to an article by Thomas Moser, in which Heathcliff is identified with the Id) says:

This view involves an admission that the latter part of the book - Heathcliff's revenge and its final abandonment, the growth of love between the younger Catherine and a now-civilized Hareton - is inferior and indeed novelettish, the grafting on to the real novel of a conventional moral pattern ... etc etc. 

OED novelette, n. :

1. A story of moderate length having the characteristics of a novel. Now: a short, light, romantic, or sentimental novel (freq. depreciative).

These days the unusual word "novelette" is apparently still used in the world of writing competitions to refer to a fiction longer than a short story but shorter than a novella, i.e. 7,500 - 18,000 words, approximately.

But generally the meaning of "novelette" over the past two centuries has been derogatory. Classically it evoked books that were typified by sentimentality, triviality, and trite morality. They might be chauvinistically dismissed as reading material for young ladies or uneducated persons.  The novelette might be regarded as namby-pamby.  A typical example is A.A. Milne's send-up "The Seaside Novelette".

http://www.readbookonline.net/readOnLine/37693/

"Penny-novelettes" were, I suspect, the direct forebears of what my own generation called "Mills and Boon romances". Economics plays a big part in this. The novelette was cheap. Hence it tended to be short and written without much care. Appealing to connoisseurs was out of the question. Originality was out of the question. The skill was to hit off broad effects for a popular audience.

(The word novelette could also be used to mean trashy genre fiction, e.g. a "pornographic novelette").

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in the business park

I once wrote a post in which I extolled the botanical virtues of my local scruffy industrial estate. And maybe the message of today's post should be, Don't neglect the business park!

The business park environment can be characterized by ample, but highly manicured, green space; many trees and shrubs, often exotic, for reasons of privacy and low maintenance; often some freshwater features (artificial ponds); extensive tarmacked and paved areas. Sometimes the business park may include a "nature reserve" (there's one in mine) but that's a separate topic. In this post I am talking about the business park proper.

The initial impression may be a little unpromising, but nature often does well here and there are several reasons for that.

Though there are many people in the business park at certain times, they spend most of their time working indoors and usually have little incentive to mess with anything they see growing outside. The general public are not encouraged to pass through; this means a lack of dogs, idle teenagers, children, etc (groups that are much more interested in interacting with plants). So plants tend to be left alone, except by the grounds staff.

Though the business park is designed to look manicured to a casual passer-by, and though it certainly is manicured by those hard-working groundspersons, yet the management plan is designed for spending minimal time per acreage. In such a large space there is inevitably neglect, and the closer you look the more ecological niches you'll tend to find. For example, a bare paved car-park may look completely empty of plant life until you notice all the Rat's-tail Fescue (Vulpia myuros) !

A final feature is that there is a lot of full sun in a business park. Car-parks are intrinsically open spaces - so are ponds and lawns. Besides, the preferred tree species are usually short (because untroublesome), and every few years the shrubs are cut back to 1 metre or less, in order to prevent the development of nasty things like bramble thickets or falling branches that could scratch someone's Merc. This environment suits some plants very well.

Sometimes the park produces real surprises, for instance the Corky-fruited Water-dropwort that I wrote about before.

Here's an unexpected outbreak of Yellow-wort (Blackstonia perfoliata) that I noticed last week (late September). I've always associated this plant with semi-natural short chalk grassland (it's a very characteristic member of that community), but here - as apparently in County Durham - it seems to be spreading into urban brownfield sites with calcareous substrate. In this case I imagine the calcareous substrate is a bit of builder's lime. Though West Swindon does in fact lie on a limestone scarp (the Upper Jurassic), the limestone hardly ever outcrops and it doesn't have a big effect on conditions at the surface. At any rate, the area is not teeming with Yellow-wort.

As you can see, my camera played up and all the photos went wrong. The flowers only open in the morning, and anyway now it's too late because the strimmer-man has been round.

Yellow-wort, with its fondness for steepling out of much shorter turf,  is obviously prone to being strimmed, The plants are annuals but have no doubt made provision for this sort of mishap.

In contrast, I noticed that the next plant was completely overlooked by the strimmer-man. Black Nightshade (Solanum nigrum) is one of the plants I alluded to earlier as seeming to have a particular fondness for the business park environment.

Solanum nigrum

It's also a plant I like a lot, though I don't really know why. It's something to do with the low scrambling habit and gribbly leaves (both in marked contrast to S. dulcamara, see further down). Also the combination of unripe green berries with ripe black ones - no intermediate shades.

Solanum nigrum, berries

Black Nightshade is considered poisonous in the UK but, surprisingly, is eaten in some parts of the world (apparently non-toxic strains have been bred).

Solanum nigrum, leaves and flowers

Solanum dulcamara, growing as free-standing plant

Here's its big sister, Woody Nightshade (Solanum dulcamara). Technically this is a vine (i.e. it scrambles to 4m on other plants), but you often find it free-standing - as in this pic - , though then it doesn't get much over 1 meter. You can see its shooting ambitions. But the shoots are not quite upright. As they grow taller they start to bend, like a fishing rod with a weight on the end. In the happy event that they come into contact with some solid body, they then go into full-on sprawl mode.

Solanum dulcamara, ripe berries

I have to deprecate the alternative English name, "Bittersweet" - which tends to suggest that the plant is an interesting taste experience. It is a lot more poisonous than Black Nightshade. However variants of this name occur across Europe, e.g. French "Douce Amère", Swedish "Besksöta", etc.

The berries ripen from green through orange to red. Meanwhile the purple-and-yellow flowers are usually still going strong (though not on this plant), producing a range of bright colours that in my eyes gives it a faintly reptilian glitter.

Solanum dulcamara, unripe berries

Solanum dulcamara, leaves

Euphorbia helioscopia, October crown

I agree with C.F. Nyman, who noted in 1868:

Liksom våra Euphorbier i allmänhet har icke heller denna art något prunkande utseende, men väcker dock en viss uppmärksamhet genom sin symmetriska byggnad, regelbundna grening och gulaktiga grönska.

(Like our other Euphorbia species, it doesn't blow you away with its looks. All the same there's something striking about its formal symmetry, regular branching and yellow-green colour.)

The yellow-green colour, of course, is not on show here. On the other hand Nyman wouldn't often have witnessed such a remarkable display of branch-work as this (the season for growth in Sweden being so short). The plants here, with their single "trunk" and elaborate "crown", resemble miniature trees; they must have been growing since the spring. They are of course annuals, making no provision for a personal future and putting all their effort into prolonging the production of flowers and seeds until the last possible moment.

Euphorbia helioscopia, detail

Euphorbia helioscopia, detail of detail

The same plant, on 24th November

The same plant, on 31st March