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[00:00:22] Hello, this is Garlic & Pearls with Muriel Zagha, who is French, and me, Suzanne Raine, who is not, who is British. And this is the podcast where we explore what makes the British so British and the French so French. Muriel, it is your turn. We've got something very French and something which I think we all kind of, it's one of those elements of Frenchness that we're all aware of, but don't really understand.
[00:00:52] Like you understand it. Well, I'll try to clarify it as much as I can. Today, it's a book. It's a book and a film, I suppose, but it's primarily the book. I was inspired by your Kes episode, but this is a sort of black polo neck wearing, you know, version of this because it's French and so it's going to be a bit philosophical and intellectual, of course, rather than Yorkshire and rebellious because that's, that's the dichotomy.
[00:01:19] So the novel in question is L'Etranger or The Stranger by Albert Camus, which was published in 1942. And so you, you know about this book, it's immensely famous. Have you, okay, difficult question. Have you read it, Suzanne? No.
[00:01:40] No. But I do, of course, know very well the song by The Cure, which is all I think I need to know. I think that's probably a very good compact version of the book. And it's a great companion piece for the book. I think anyone who wants to read the book or reread it should be listening to The Cure single at the same time.
[00:02:04] Do you think you could do that? I'm sorry to interrupt, but do you think it's possible to do anything while listening to that song? Because it's got such a riff to it, hasn't it? Yeah, I think probably more a preparation. You listen to the song first. Yeah. Then you read the book. And then you listen to the song again. Exactly. In a sandwich sort of way. You're right. This is the best way. Okay. That's the end of the podcast. See you next time.
[00:02:31] All French books are nice bookended by some, you know, sort of indie Gothic pop. Or Cure or something. Yeah, that's true. When I finish talking, you can listen to The Cure. I'm just going to say a few more things about this book, which is really central to French culture.
[00:02:50] You know how we love a kind of cultural node on this podcast, something that is both in and of itself important and part of the canon of some kind, but also something that can tell us about, in this case, the Frenchness of the French. Let's first of all, let's first of all, let's first of all, let's first of all, have a little look at a photo of Albert Camus, the author, which is, I mean, there are lots of great photos of him, but the one I'm showing you is, I think, my favourite.
[00:03:21] Yeah, look at that. It's just a headshot with shoulders, head and shoulders. And you can see that he's wearing a great coat with the collar turned up. And then he has shortish hair, but it's sort of swept back, sort of brill creamed in a way with a tiny little sort of, he's got a widow's peak, but a tiny little quiff at the top.
[00:03:46] And then most importantly, he's got that James Dean pose with the cigarette coming out of his half opened mouth. So he looks, he's half smiling. He doesn't look too glum, but he also looks like he's been through the mill, doesn't he? And has lost all his illusions. He looks disenchanted. And in the background, there's some blurry wrought iron railings. Yeah.
[00:04:15] Possibly that's the bottom of the Eiffel Tower. Maybe so, but it's a sort of industrial French setting. Yeah. So quite a, you know, an interesting face, the face of a man who considers things. I assume that a lot of our listeners will know of the book, will have read it. But just to refresh everyone's memory and yours, because I think yours needs refreshing. I'm just going to tell you the story very quickly of what happens in The Stranger or L'Etranger.
[00:04:45] It's a novel, published in 1942. Won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957. So after the war, but it's a wartime novel, which I found surprising. I'd forgotten that it had been published so early. So the story is of a young man called Meursault. And of course, the Cure song ends with the words, oh, Mursault. It does. It does, which is how I know everything.
[00:05:13] So we're never told his first name or actually very much about him. And the story is narrated by himself. He's the protagonist and the narrator. He works in an office. He lives a fairly humdrum life in Algiers, which is where the whole story is set. So in French colonial Algeria, as it was then. And at the very beginning of the novel, Mursault receives a telegram telling him that his mother has died. She was in a home outside of Algiers. And so he goes to her funeral.
[00:05:43] And this gives us an idea of what he's like. And it's one of those books where the opening sentence is very famous. You know, it's very deadpan. It says, Aujourd'hui, maman est morte. Today, mother died. Ou peut-être hier, je ne sais pas. Or maybe it was yesterday. I don't know. J'ai reçu un telegramme de l'asile. Mère décédée. Enterrement demain. Sentiment distingué. I received a telegram from the home, from the retirement home. Your mother's dead. Funeral tomorrow.
[00:06:12] Distinguished sentiments. Salutations. Cela ne veut rien dire. C'était peut-être hier. That means nothing. It might have been yesterday. So very emotionless, blank response to a big event, which is the loss of the mother. So from the beginning, we know this is someone who's quite unemotional, or at least expresses himself in this way. And really an observer of life, an observer of his own life even. He's quite sort of alienated from his own life. And he's very taciturn.
[00:06:42] He never says more than he absolutely needs to say. He's one of those infuriating people. After the funeral, he comes home. He goes swimming. He meets a girl called Marie. We know her name. They go to the cinema to see a comedy together. They begin a relationship. Marie falls in love with Meursault very quickly. And she begins to talk about marriage. And he agrees to marry her. But again, in a really unemotional, not terribly encouraging or chivalrous way that he says,
[00:07:11] yes, whatever you want, it makes no difference to me. You know, he is that sort of bloke. And meanwhile, Meursault is being befriended. And again, it's a passive, everything that happens to him, he experiences quite passively. The love affair and this friendship with a neighbor. There's a man who lives in his building who's a sort of thug, really, a pimp, called Raymond Saintes, who befriends him. This Raymond Saintes person becomes embroiled in a violent quarrel
[00:07:39] with a group of Arab men because he is involved with the sister of one of them. She is his mistress. So there's a brawl and Saintes gets injured. One of the men has a knife, cuts his face. Anyway, it's all very unpleasant. And then Raymond Saintes, the neighbor goes to see the doctor to get patched up. And then he, later on, he, Meursault and another man are walking on the beach and they meet the same group of Arab men.
[00:08:09] And there's, again, a very uneasy, potentially violent face-off. Meursault knows that his neighbor has a gun and he takes it from him. In the way that you would, you know, when you're with someone who's a little bit of a loose cannon, you say, I'll just take the gun and that way there'll be no trouble. And then later still, so this all unfolds over the course of the same afternoon, Meursault is on his own. It's a very, very, very hot day.
[00:08:36] That is perhaps the main thing about l'étranger and the story in l'étranger. And the Cure song captures that very well. It's the beach and a really crushing, implacable sun, such as you get in the Mediterranean. Not a British sun. Although this last summer has been very hot, as we know. So Meursault has been sort of wandering around on the beach in the sun, slightly disorientated, and he's got the gun in his pocket, his friend's gun.
[00:09:03] And then he runs into the same young Arab man, the one with the knife. They look at each other and he, motivated by we don't quite know what, shoots the Arab man, not once, but four times. And then the second half of the book is about what happens to him afterwards, where he's tried, imprisoned and tried for murder or manslaughter.
[00:09:30] They're trying to determine exactly what he did and why. It's a strange story, really. And the second half of the book is quite detailed. You go through the whole machinery of justice. I should say just in bracket that although this is set in, it's in a colonial setting, this European French man who killed an Arab man is tried by the French justice system. So this is not Faulkner's world.
[00:09:59] It's a completely different way of interacting. I'm not saying it's uncomplicated and we'll get back to that, but you get the sense that actually the system sort of works and that it's perhaps more equitable than it, you know, than say in South Africa or in other places like that. The question is really why he's done what he's done. And I think the book remains pretty inconclusive and enigmatic about that. I mean, we are with him all the time.
[00:10:28] So we can see that he's suffering from the heat, that he's sort of blinded by the sun and the sweat pouring into his eyes and his exhaustion. And when he sees the man on the beach, that man has a knife in his hand. So does he feel like he's under threat? It's not clear. And later on during the trial, he doesn't do any of the obvious things that you do to exculpate yourself. You know, he doesn't say, well, he provoked me, he attacked me.
[00:10:58] He describes exactly what happens. And he says it was because of the sun. And of course, that doesn't go down very well with the jury. So he is then sentenced to death. Then the prison chaplain visits him at the end, tries to connect with him spiritually. He rejects that. And what he appears to come to terms with at the end of the book is that actually, the human condition is absurd. There's no meaning to anything. Death is the end.
[00:11:27] There's nothing beyond that. And because the human condition is absurd, there's no very clear morality to anything either. So he's not even quite clear whether murder matters in the grand scheme of things. You know, you marry this girl, you don't marry her. You kill this man, you don't kill him. It doesn't really matter. He, of course, is going to the guillotine. The guillotine is sort of there in the background waiting. So that's the story.
[00:11:54] So it's a rather strange little French novel, really. It's quite short. It did win the Nobel Prize. It was translated, it's been translated into dozens of languages. And I found that it is the third most read French language novel in the entire world after Saint-Exupéry's Petit Prince. You know, the little prince, the story, this lovely story. And Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea,
[00:12:22] which is one of those books that keeps coming back in various episodes of this podcast. I'm just wondering whether it's the third most read novel in French. In translation. But, you know, originally written in French, I think is what they mean. But I suspect one of the reasons is that had I done French A-level, for example, I would have read it because it's short and, you know, it's short and interesting. So you can see that whenever someone's designing a curriculum, they think, what should we put on it?
[00:12:52] Not another 10 volumes by Zola. Let's stick this on. It'll grab people's attention. It's short and interesting and it's quite accessible because it's written in modern French. I mean, the vocabulary is really accessible. It's not difficult to follow. The sentences are short. You know, you don't get those Proustian, very long sentences. None of that. So you're right about schools. Certainly in France, and that's another reason why it is so central, it's taught in French schools systematically.
[00:13:21] And it's taught usually in the classes, the year groups that are called seconde et première. So those are the two years before the baccalaureate. The year where you take the baccalaureate is called terminal because it's terminal. And two years before that are seconde and première. So you're 15, 16, 17 when you're reading it. It's taught by your French literature teacher. And I studied it in seconde when I was 15.
[00:13:48] And by a happy accident, I was also a big cure fan in those years. So you can imagine my delight when I listened to the single by the cure. And I realized that it was about the book I was studying at school because that doesn't happen very often. And why is it studied systematically at school? I think you've put your finger on it. It's because even for French students whose language is French, it's very accessible.
[00:14:12] And it's a book that works as a gateway to the next year, the baccalaureate year, where everybody's going to study philosophy. So, you know, that is one of the things we have, which I think is an effect of the separation of church and state. You have this Republican school system. You're not going to provide religious education.
[00:14:33] So you have to provide some other system to train young people to think about morality and freedom and all of those things. And that's the philosophy curriculum. And everybody does philosophy. Whether you do the sort of general baccalaureate or technical, you know, you have a little less, I think, if you're doing a technical baccalaureate. But you do get a couple of hours of philosophy every week anyway. It's one of those core subjects that everybody has to study.
[00:15:01] Can you imagine in the UK if we said we're all going to... Is this existentialism? Is this what this is? So it's very near. It's absurdism, which is very close to existentialism. Very close and contemporary. Because, I mean, just to quote, obviously they didn't write the book. But The Cure, there's that bit, the ending bit where it says,
[00:15:25] And their lyrics, as I remember them, could turn a walk away or I could fire my gun, staring at the sky, staring at the sun. Whichever I do, it amounts to the same absolutely nothing. And of course that, I think you could teach that in British schools. Because that is the kind of, you know, sort of nihilistic, punky, you know, depressed teenager sort of stuff. Yeah.
[00:15:53] You obviously made that a discipline and called it philosophy in a way that we haven't. That's what we've managed to do brilliantly. We've managed to transmute it. And so, yes, so you're preparing your French students for the philosophy curriculum that's coming. And l'étranger is a really good, I was going to say gateway drug, and that's not quite right. But gateway, certainly, introduction, introduction to philosophy.
[00:16:18] Because it's a sort of manifesto for this sort of philosophical system, which is absurdism, which is Camus' way of looking at things, a way of interpreting the human condition, which is basically that there's no meaning, the universe is indifferent. You know, it's your condition as a human being to seek for meaning. You're always looking for meaning and motivation. And the universe doesn't care about you and carries on with or without you in it regardless.
[00:16:48] So it's a bit like existentialism, which we've talked about before, but bleaker in a way, because existentialism at least says, well, make up your own destiny, then pretend that there is meaning. You can make your own meaning. Whereas absurdism is more, you know, we talk about absurdist theater as well. So Samuel Beckett's plays, for example, you know, Godot, Waiting for Godot. It's that kind of bleak, empty, fallen world where nobody hears you, you know, God is dead.
[00:17:18] There's nothing there. You're just sort of wandering around in a vacuum. It's a pretty depressing picture. But if you're a bit of a Gothic teenager, whether French or British, I think it will resonate because you will say, yeah, nothing matters. You know, whatever I do amounts to the same. It will resonate with you. And the other thing I think that resonates with teenagers, and that's another reason why it's taught in schools, is that the book, because of the crime that he commits and then the aftermath,
[00:17:46] the book gets you to think about morality and justice and the workings of the justice system, social expectations, all these kinds of things. Because one of the things that he keeps doing, because that's the way he's wired, is that he says exactly what he means. Today, we would say he has no filter, you know. So he's not very good at playing the social game. And especially when his head is at stake, literally, because he's being tried,
[00:18:16] it doesn't really occur to him to try and diminish his responsibility or explain what he did. He just tries to describe what he remembers. And that sincerity is his undoing. So that's, again, an interesting, because teenagers would probably say, yeah, that's just like me. You know, I always say what I think and then I'm punished. And my parents don't understand me. You can see how you would get their attention with that story. They would be able to find it relatable,
[00:18:43] even though it was written a long time ago from the point of view of teenagers today. It's the risk, certainly the risk with The Cure Song, is that it makes him into a kind of, and I'm sure you're going to come onto this, a hero figure in some way, when actually he's obviously not a hero figure. He's obviously not. He's an anti-hero, isn't he? Yeah, well, you know, you can't just go and shoot people because it's hot. You can't. You can't. No, absolutely.
[00:19:13] And this is a very good... It's a very good point. It's a very, very good reaction and a very good point. And you're right. I think the book is partly a fable, isn't it? It's partly a sort of allegory of what it's like to be a human being and push against the universe to the point where you transgress in the most serious way possible by taking another life.
[00:19:38] And because Camus is looking at it from his absurdist, tormented point of view, this, you know, he comes to the conclusion that this is barren and terrible. Not to say that one shouldn't. I mean, this is where he is closer to the existentialists. In his private life, he was politically quite committed. You know, he was someone who believed in trying to change things in real life. In his fiction, he depicts sort of dead-end situations. But actually, he wasn't a passive person at all in his actual life. And again, we'll come on to that.
[00:20:08] So in terms of the philosophy curriculum that's coming, this book will have rolled the ground, you know, for you. So when you start philosophy, you'll recognize some of the themes you're asked to think about. And then there's one final, but perhaps nowadays increasingly important of this novel, which has become steadily more controversial. And really since the 70s. And I will tell you more about that after the break. We're back.
[00:20:36] So I'm going to tell you more about what's become more controversial, more disputed about the novel, more politically awkward. It's time and place. So where Camus probably would have said that the action he describes as a sort of timeless tragedy, I mean, it has the quality of a Greek tragedy in modern dress. You know, I think that's probably what he was doing. In fact, this novel dates from 1942 specifically, and it describes the 1940s.
[00:21:04] And it is set in Algiers, which is not just any place. It is in French colonial Algeria. So the French are there, but there are other people there who are there before the French. And we've talked a little bit about the Algerian campaign in the 19th century. So this is 100 years and a bit more after that time.
[00:21:25] So one thing you may remember, Suzanne, from, I mean, actually, even the Cure song as well mimics that, is that in the book, the Arab men, and especially perhaps the man who is killed by Merceau on the beach, they're not named, these characters. They have no name. Merceau has a name. The man he kills is just the Arab or the Arab man. He doesn't have a name.
[00:21:52] And this is something that nobody commented on at the time of publication, because it was the war. I suppose people had other things to think about in 1942. They were wondering where the Germans were. I'm quite interested, actually. Sorry, I'm interrupting you, but I'm quite interested. No, no, no, please. Well, you might not know the answer to this, but publishing books is really difficult at the best of times.
[00:22:13] And publishing something quite avant-garde like this in, maybe avant-garde is the wrong word, but publishing something outré like this in 1942. How does that happen? Two things. So one thing is the Germans would not have been, German censorship, so the propaganda staffel would not have been triggered by this book because it makes no mention of the Germans or German presence in France. It's not in any way agitating people to resist. So there's nothing to object to.
[00:22:44] Nor did they take the French so seriously that they tried to silence us completely. They thought we were so inconsequential that the French were allowed to continue to make films, stage plays, publish novels. You know, the Germans would cast an eye over things and some things were, of course, suppressed and repressed, but not l'étranger. So I think it just, it was a modern novel and it was published without huge fanfare initially.
[00:23:11] And then it gained traction and it gained traction partly because Jean-Paul Sartre liked it. He and Camus parted ways, but for a while they were friends. They were both men of the left and Camus was a communist for a while. And so they were, you know, traveling companions and Sartre wrote about l'étranger approvingly. And so people who followed Sartre, all the people hanging out in their black polo necks in cafes on the left bank also read the book.
[00:23:37] So that's sort of the context for why it happened without too much trouble, even though it was during the war. It's always strange to think about life going on, certain aspects of life carrying on completely unaffected when other people's lives were, you know, blown to smithereens. But I suppose that's true of a lot of war zones.
[00:23:56] One thing that's become more and more foregrounded when people talk about l'étranger is that setting in French colonial Algeria, which at the time would have passed without comment. So in particular, the setting itself, this very fact that this is describing a colonial reality, colonial environment, and that Mursault is named, but not the Arab characters. So the Arab man on the beach has no name.
[00:24:24] And this began to trouble people increasingly since the 1970s, where you get more and more scholarly articles, journalists saying, hang on, this is shocking. This is a way of erasing these characters, othering them, as we would say now, you know, just not treating them, not giving them any humanity. And so the question is, is this actually a racist book? Is l'étranger racist?
[00:24:51] Was Camus racist in not naming the characters and then having his protagonist anti-hero hero kill one of them in cold blood? Or it looks like cold blood. What does it mean? This is a live issue in France. That it's not just when the book was published or in the 70s. It's now because in the intervening years since the publication of the book, there was the Algerian War of Independence.
[00:25:16] The Algerian War, which was a sort of foundational event in French history that we almost never talk about. One of those ghosts that, like the German occupation, you know, in a way it's comparable, or May 68 in a lesser way, or the French Revolution. You know, all these events that really change things, but that we find really difficult to approach frontally. As a result of the war and the independence, a lot of French people, like Camus, who would have called themselves Français d'Algerie.
[00:25:44] So French people from Algeria, not Algerians. Not just French people, but French people from Algeria because they had been born there and shaped by Algeria. A lot of these people moved, migrated to France and a lot of them to the south of France, which is what Camus did. Also quite a few Muslim Algerians who didn't fancy the new regime and preferred to stay in a French context. And so they followed. Some of these people are with us.
[00:26:14] And then, of course, there was more Algerian migration later on, economic migrants, especially since the 1970s. So all these things have had, as you know, a profound effect on French society and culture. And to fast forward to the present day, relations between France and Algeria are very, very tense, diplomatically speaking. You know, it's really not an easy conversation that they're having.
[00:26:40] And sadly, there are serious problems in France in terms of integration. We have a lot of people who are French, were born in France, but are of Algerian descent. We would say that they don't feel French. They don't feel integrated. And at the same time, they don't really want to go back to Algeria. So it's created this very naughty, complicated situation. And now this is the context in which we look at l'étranger, which was written.
[00:27:06] I want to say, I mean, this sounds like a odd thing to say, but it was written in a more innocent time. And by which I mean, a more unaware time. Camus did not know about all these implications. In terms of teaching the book in French schools, now we talk about that aspect as well. I mean, I think it's impossible now to teach it and not say, and you must be aware that this is set under colonial occupation and this is the context. And what do you see in the book that makes you think about that?
[00:27:34] And of course, the young teenagers reading the book in France nowadays will notice that the Arab character is not named. And what does that mean? You know, so there's room for conversation there. Now, in terms of the racism or I don't know if that's the right word, but the racial relations in the book, they're a bit more complicated possibly than just saying, well, obviously Camus was a racist and he was erasing those characters. I don't think that's quite what's happened. There was a film adaptation recently. You know, I can't help myself.
[00:28:04] I have to bring a film in. This is not a book that's been adapted very often because it's very difficult to adapt. In many ways, it's very direct. And in many ways, it's very elliptical. And also the subject matter is actually increasingly controversial. So you have, it takes a brave person to say, I'm going to take on L'étranger and put it on the screen. But François Ozon, O-Z-O-M, who is a French filmmaker, has done just that. So there was a previous adaptation by Visconti, which was honestly, you know, you can take or leave.
[00:28:33] It didn't really work very well, partly because Camus' widow was all over it and wanted to control every aspect of it. But Ozon's new adaptation, which is called L'étranger or The Stranger, like the book, is, I think, very successful because it's just revisionist enough. He doesn't completely change the story or very heavy-handedly right some wrongs. You know, it's not like that at all.
[00:28:56] But he is aware of some things that perhaps in a film need to be brought out a little bit more. So one of the things he does, and it's a beautiful film anyway, I would recommend it as a piece of cinema. But one of the things he's foregrounded when he, in an interview, is the not naming, not giving the Algerian characters a name. So he has done that.
[00:29:20] So in the film, the woman who is the mistress of Raymond Sintès and her brother, who is shot by Mursault, they are named Djimila and Moussa Hamdani. So they have a name. And you can say, well, okay, so that gives them more humanity. It fills them out more. The character of the sister, Djimila, of the mistress, is also more filled out dramatically. She has lines of dialogue that she doesn't have in the book. You know, all that is great.
[00:29:47] I would just say they get given a name by the grace of the hand of the French filmmaker. And if you are being difficult, you'd say, well, that's a bit neocolonialist. Those areas are so difficult to extricate yourself from. I don't know. But I think I can see in what spirit he did it. And I think it works because the film is very faithful to the book. He doesn't rewrite the story or change the register of the book.
[00:30:14] But he does show us certain things that perhaps reading the book, especially as a young person who doesn't really know about French history, you might miss. So the fact that the characters have a name is a gesture of generosity, of fraternal generosity. I think that's how it's meant. The other things he does, and it's done very fleetingly, but it's very effective. For example, there's a scene where Mersot and his girlfriend Marie go to the cinema together
[00:30:42] and they walk into this cinema and there's a little sign on the wall behind them that says, interdit aux indigènes. So no natives allowed. Right. So you see that and that is a reminder of the sort of society where they live. There are also a lot of street scenes where you see people walking, you know, going about their business and you see European women in their little suit, it's the 40s, so, you know, in their little suits and hats and Arab women completely covered up and they glide
[00:31:11] past each other and nobody communicates. It does tell you there are these two communities and they live side by side, but they are in fact completely separate and they live separate lives. This is perceptible in the book, but in a way it's a sort of absence rather than in the film where you are shown that this is the situation. And I think that works really well. I can entirely understand how it is offensive to not have a name.
[00:31:39] And I understand all the nuance of the argument about putting a name in or not. But is the whole point of the thing, if you're looking at the kind of absurdist thing, the absolutely nothing underlying message in it, isn't the whole point that this man, because of the sky and the sun can go out and shoot somebody whose name he doesn't even know.
[00:32:06] So, so it's, it's the whole point is that you're killing an anonymous person. And in this instance, it happens to be an Arab, but if it had been set in somewhere else, it could have been an unnamed somebody else. Absolutely. Absolutely. I completely agree with you. I mean, I watched the film with an open, you know, I went in with an open mind and I tried to understand the intention of the filmmaker. But by and large, I'd say, leave it alone because it's a very strong statement.
[00:32:36] And it's exactly what you're saying. By the way, Robert Smith of The Cure ran into a bit of trouble with the song because the title of the song is Killing an Arab. I can see it's the same problem. It's the same problem. And I think he, he came across slightly, there were accusations that he was somehow inciting racist attacks. And he said, well, that's just what the story is.
[00:33:03] It could have been a Norwegian or anything else, you know, and that's, that's what happens in the story. And then he said, if I'd thought about it, if I'd realized what was going to happen, I would have called the song Standing on the Beach. And so it's, it is complicated. I think you're right. I think actually, the more the book and the film or any other adaptation song, whatever
[00:33:28] it is, show you an alienated consciousness, the better because that is what the story is. It's about someone who absolutely cannot connect, cannot connect with anybody. And in a moment of fatigue, just loses any means of, you know, connecting with another human being on a, on a footing of equality. So in a way, the harsher, the better because it is a harsh story.
[00:33:56] And it's a pity in a way, it's because it's become synonymous with the French occupation of Algeria. It undermines the story because, because of the context. If he'd just gone into Versailles and shot a stranger, you would be having a conversation about the shooting of a stranger, not about the shooting of an Algerian person, which is the problem. That's right. That's right.
[00:34:25] But of course, there's no real getting away from the fact that the stranger in question is an Algerian person, yeah, is an Arab man, because that's, that's, that's where we are. So in the film, as in the book, you get all the philosophical and ethical questioning of Camus' world, responsibility, freedom, free will, the human condition, the absurdity of life, you know, touches on all these things. It's rather good, I think, that the film is in black and white for those people who are going to see it, because it's very beautiful.
[00:34:52] It's very immersive in terms of going back to the past. It also tells you, because it's black and white, it tells you that that world is gone. So the experience that these Français d'Algerie were having, living in this idyllic place, because it was, by all accounts, from the point of view of the French, a lovely place to live. It's, it's gone, it's over, you know, that, that place still exists, but you can never have that experience again.
[00:35:17] Just to dwell on all this difficulty, and I suppose the Français d'Algerie thing, being a French person who's never, sometimes never been to France, not born in France, not brought up in France, never been to France. You're born in Algeria, but you still perceive yourself as French. Strange thing. It's worth remembering that Algeria was not even a colony. It was a French department. It was actually an apartment.
[00:35:43] And people used to say the Mediterranean flows between the metropole, so metropolitan France and Algeria in the same way that the Seine flows between the right bank and the left bank of Paris. And it wasn't really a joke. It's, it seems completely outrageous now to us. At the same time, I mean, it's an odd analogy, but you know, we've spoken several times now
[00:36:06] on this podcast about how France and Britain, France and England certainly used to be a lot more interconnected in people's minds as a territory, even though they are separated by the channel. So it is really a question of the historical mindset and the circumstances that you're in, that it will, it will, it would direct people's point of view and the way they look at a piece of land in relation to another piece of land.
[00:36:33] So the attachment to Algeria from the French point of view was, was deep. Again, it's really hard to project ourselves or to imagine being in that mindset. But there was, from the point of view of the Français d'Algérie, of the French colonists, a sense that this was all lovely. And these lovely people, these lovely local people, they love to serve us. And it's, it's as it should be.
[00:37:01] There's a sort of naturalness about the whole state of affairs. It's really hard. Camus himself, getting back to him, because he is, of course, the case in point. Camus doesn't really question colonialism as such, because it's more, it's almost like it's the water he's always swumming. Like, you know, fish doesn't know. Was he born in Algeria? So he's, he's French-Algerian. Yeah. He's French-Algerian. He's born in Algeria.
[00:37:28] He always speaks of Algeria as his mother country. You know, he never says, I was born in Algeria, but of course my allegiance is no. And in fact, in L'Étranger, in the book and in the film, at one point, Meursault is offered a job in Paris and he doesn't particularly want it. But it's, you don't get that classic pull of Paris. And of course, he'll want to go to Paris because it's so much more interesting and attractive than where he is. He wants to stay where he is.
[00:37:56] And I think that reflects how Camus himself felt. So there was a very strong and sort of very sensuous attachment to, he was a man with a Mediterranean sensibility. And I have a Mediterranean sensibility, so I can relate to that. He loved Algiers, which is mostly where he lived, although he knew other parts of Algeria a little bit, but actually that was what he knew best. He wrote very beautifully in some of his essays where he describes
[00:38:25] how filled with sun the whole thing is, you know, the colors, but also he describes the Casbah overlooking the harbor in Algiers. And it's like a pile of white cubes. It's a very modernist sensibility. You know, he's looking at it that way. And just all these, I mean, the usual cliches, the sense and the agitation and the bustle and how wonderful that is. It's difficult to understand, but nobody really, when they first read the novel, said,
[00:38:53] Oh, this is a colonialist work. There's a French academic called Martine Mathieu-Job, and she is professor emeritus at the University of Bordeaux and a really eminent chemist specialist. So she's looked into all these questions of his political consciousness and his relationship with Algeria. And she says he was a man of the left. He was more aware of inequality than most.
[00:39:20] So he wasn't a typical colonial writer. You know, there was a school of French colonial novelists who wrote about Algeria, and they wrote in a very paternalistic, condescending way about the natives. And they had often in their books, native characters, Algerian characters, who were represented in the most, you know, with all the most racist cliches. I'm not going to elaborate.
[00:39:48] You can fill in the blanks. And were sometimes given a voice, but again, the way they expressed themselves, the way they behaved, confirmed all kinds of racial stereotypes and a very comfortable sense of superiority on the part of the writer. And that's where maybe getting back to l'étranger, you can say, okay, so he doesn't give a voice or a name to the Arab characters. Another layer to that, besides what you pointed out,
[00:40:15] which is this alienation of the man who is in a moment of complete sort of breakdown, really, is that Camus felt, it's almost like he felt a little bit what we now call cultural appropriation. He felt that if he put Arab characters or Berber characters in his books, he would be writing about something that he didn't really know enough about. He didn't feel he had the authority.
[00:40:44] So in a funny sort of way, I think it's a mark of respect. That's probably what he felt. We looking at it now, it's hard to reconstruct, but I think he probably felt as I would, I think if I were asked to write about, you know, Welsh people. I've been to Wales a couple of times. I don't know what it's like to be Welsh. And if people said to me, well, you have to have some Welsh characters in this piece that you're writing. You need to talk about their point of view. I wouldn't know where to start. You could say,
[00:41:13] Camus was living among these people. Literally, you know, he grew up in a pretty mixed area of Algiers, where there are lots of Arabs and Berbers and French Algerian people. So it's not as though he was in a segregated area of the town. He went to school with children. He played to school with Arab children. Do you know if he spoke Arabic? No. So he didn't speak Arabic and he was completely ignorant of Islam. Completely ignorant. Gosh.
[00:41:42] And the way this is described, there's a Berber novelist called Mouloud Mamery, who is a contemporary of Camus. So he was born maybe three years after him. He grew up and he was educated in France. And so he's another example of this hybrid Algerian French culture. He said, being someone of the same generation, but obviously someone who wrote a lot more overtly and confidently and
[00:42:12] subversively about Algeria. He said Camus could not have done otherwise because there were glass barriers, is the expression he uses. There were glass barriers between the French and the Algerians. So it wasn't apartheid. You know, there was no segregation or like the deep South. It wasn't like that. But there were these barriers, which again, you sort of sense in the film. And Camus, because of the way he was trained, he was a Mediterranean man. He was a European, really.
[00:42:41] He was a patriot, but not a nationalist. And his thing was really classical culture. So to him, Algeria was like Greece. And he said, actually, I have the heart of a Greek. So again, the story, which is a tragedy in modern dress, I think he would have thought, well, it's not particularly a story about Algeria. It's a timeless story in the way that Greek tragedy is timeless. So, I mean, it's tempting and people do it a lot in our times. It's tempting to say to Camus retrospectively, well,
[00:43:10] you should have educated yourself a bit more. And why didn't you have any curiosity for Arabic or for Islam? Why didn't you reach out to these people? Nobody did that. And maybe that says a lot about the French imperialist approach, which is very different, I think, from the British. You know, when you think of the British in India, it's a whole other story. And of course, not particularly an entirely positive one. But I think in terms of what you might call fraternizing,
[00:43:41] there was a different approach. And a different mindset. And the French kept themselves to themselves more. Even the ones who, like Camus, understood that they were in an environment where the Algerians, the Berbers, the Arabs were being treated unfairly. So in terms of decolonization, one interesting question is how Camus felt about the prospect of Algerian independence, obviously.
[00:44:10] And I will tell you more about that when we come back after a little ad break. If you think back to 1942, those questions at the time of the publication of the book, nobody thought about Algerian independence seriously. You know, nobody really worried about it. When he got the Nobel Prize, it's 1957, we're right in the midst of insurrections. There are bombings, you know, the Front de Libération Nationale, which is the independentist organization,
[00:44:40] are planting bombs on tramways, for example, and killing people. So it's a very tense period of time. And the left-wing intellectuals like Sartre are fully supportive of this. They're saying, it's the liberation movement. It's the only thing they can do. We can't stand in the way of it. We have to give in and let them have independence. And we can't criticize the methods. And when Camus is in Sweden to receive his Nobel Prize in 1957, a lot of journalists say to him,
[00:45:09] how do you stand on all this, you know, the violence in Algeria, given that you live there still? And he said, and this is a famous quote, he was referring to specifically the bombings on public transport, on trams. He said, if it's a question of choosing between Algeria and my mother, I choose my mother. And what he meant was, my mother could be sitting on one of those trams. So I can't support
[00:45:36] any bloodthirsty violence of this kind because it might hurt my mother or anyone else I know. And the abstract idea of Algeria is meaningless to me in that context. That's what he meant. Of course, Sartre thought, traitor, he's supporting Algerie-Francaise, you know, the anti-independence movement. He's obviously more right-wing than we thought. And they dropped him. So he fell out with Sartre. That's typical writer, Artie. So I don't understand what he's saying.
[00:46:07] Is he saying Algeria without the French or Algeria with the French? Right. So that's where he's a utopian dreamer and a typical artist in that he doesn't really face facts. In terms of violence, he's thinking, this will not solve things. I don't want people to start blowing each other up. Surely there's a middle way. We can... I think he was in favor of access to education
[00:46:36] for the Algerians, proportional representation in parliament. So quite big things, actually. But by then, it was a little late. You know, sometimes when there's a powerful trend, it's going to happen. People just wanted their independence. This is true of so many other colonies, ex-colonies. In terms of... But it's interesting to me that there's a sort of, to use an Orwellian word, double think, a double way of thinking about violence.
[00:47:06] Because on the one hand, he's saying, no, no, no violence. But he had lived through the Second World War. He had, in fact, joined the resistance in 1943 in France on French territory. And I don't think he killed anybody. But, you know, he understood that you had to join the underground. And I think most of his activities were journalistic. But nevertheless, he wasn't saying then, oh, well, dialogue with the Germans is surely preferable. You know,
[00:47:35] so was it partly trauma after the war that he had lived through that and he couldn't really face any more bloodshed? I don't know. It's such a different generation from ours. You know, our experience of the war has been so small compared to his generations that it's difficult to imagine quite what he meant. I think he kept hoping that war could be avoided. It couldn't be. And both
[00:48:04] the independentists, the Algerians who wanted independence, and the French far right who were, and the military who were absolutely dead set against it, hated him. So he became a hate figure for both sides. That's really sad. But there you are. But I don't think he was a particularly astute political analyst. I think he was a nice guy and a dreamer and a utopian. And perhaps those people are not
[00:48:34] the best place to make significant political decisions or strategic decisions. Why did he get the Nobel Prize in 1957? 1957, yes. It's interesting the process, isn't it? Why did it take that long? Also, why did it take that long and then why did it happen at a time of great political questionable? Unrest? Yes. The Swedish Academy specifically recognized Camus for his influential body of work rather than
[00:49:03] the single book. So he did get it for L'Étranger, but he had also written many other things, plays and other novels and the whole absurdism thing about individual morality and the search for meaning. And because he had always opposed totalitarianism, so I suppose from the point of view of the Swedish Academy, he was a principled figure. He'd always said no to l'Otarianism. He was a significant writer, a really important writer who had
[00:49:33] invented something, a philosophical system as well. It's interesting that this happens while these insurrections and uprisings and violent attacks are happening in Algeria. It's possible that the Swedes hadn't entirely taken that on board. I don't know. Again, we're dealing with intellectuals. Is there any sense in which you could interpret L'Étranger as being a comment on
[00:50:03] totalitarianism? So the individual who shoots someone whose name they don't even know. There is something about systems of government which, I mean, you mentioned Orwell and there's this... I did mention Orwell. You're right, there is something, well, not faceless because actually there are characters, specific characters in the book, but there's something mechanical about, for example, the trial and the process of justice in quotation marks feels
[00:50:33] very dehumanized in the book. And then the other thing is the killing of the Arab man on the beach, the crime. This same Camus specialist, Martine Mathieu-Job, her take on it is that perhaps Camus is expressing the idea that there are these two communities that can't mesh together. He observes this. And that to want to eliminate the other
[00:51:02] means that you won't be able to enjoy the territory. You have to live together. That's what she reads. I'm not sure that it's there explicitly, but it's one way of looking at it. That there is something politically, culturally dangerous about wanting to be too rigid and that the only way forward is dialogue. dialogue. But then you think, why did he write a book where someone shoots someone else instead of saying, oh, hello, it's you again.
[00:51:33] We met earlier, remember, with my friend, you knifed him in the face. Why don't we try and be friends? Sorry, I'm being flippant. Anyway. It's a harsh story. He's describing a harsh reality. It's a French book. So let's loop us back, Muriel, because you have to explain to me, this is what makes the French so French. French. This is a French book and I think for me, the shortness of it makes it quite
[00:52:02] distinctive. Yes. And the fact that it's making a philosophical point. I think that's the heart of it. That's very French. Again, if we look again at the picture of Camus with his cigarette and upturned collar, he's a sort of embodiment of the French intellectual, of the left-leaning French intellectual, and I think continues to inspire generations of teenagers and students who study him.
[00:52:33] It's also, I suppose, that's another point of view, but because the book has done so well and is so well regarded in the world, if you are French and you've been nurtured by this book at school, when you go abroad, you mention the book, you will meet a lot of people who have also read it and enjoyed it. That reinforces your sense of Frenchness in and of itself. It's a strange sort of thing. It's like any successful French product
[00:53:02] you feel partly responsible for, even though you didn't write the novel yourself. I suppose also what I meant by the Frenchness of the French is current contemporary tensions. We are generally a happy podcast, aren't we, at Garlic and Pearls? And we look at things in an optimistic manner, but we also sometimes acknowledge that there are intractable situations or complicated situations. And L'Etranger as a book, Camus as a figure,
[00:53:32] they are the tip of the iceberg of a very long history between Algeria and France, which remains unsolved and it's difficult to see quite how we're going to make headway. I am basically an optimist, so I hope that things can get better. But a lot of our listeners will have seen, for example, the film La Haine, which is set in, it's a 1990s film, mid-90s, it's quite old now, really, and it was set in the suburbs of
[00:54:02] Paris. And the three main characters, the three young men are one black man, one Arab man, one Jewish man, and they're all marginalized and all living in these forgotten estates. The sad thing about that film is that when you watch it now, it seems like a sort of idyllic memory of a wonderful past, and it was at the time denouncing an unacceptable situation of people who've been left behind,
[00:54:32] things are, if anything, far worse now. And in terms of relations between descendants of Algerians or people who were born in France who are French but are of Algerian origin and other French people and other communities, things have become very difficult. And it's difficult, actually, you can't really put that to one side because it is part and parcel of what contemporary France is like and what the French have to contend with as French people. So it's a
[00:55:02] slightly downbeat, it's not the first time I'm not the only one to end on a downbeat note, you've done it yourself. Sometimes we're honest on this podcast, we look things in the face. So I think I'm not claiming to have explained it all away or really clarified entirely what this is, but it's about this complicated sense of French identity, shall we say. And L'Étranger gives us an insight into it, but it doesn't entirely explain. And also
[00:55:31] our attitudes to the book keep changing as we change. And that's true of so many classics. Which is a way of understanding it is. So there we are. Thank you, Muriel. I feel like I've had a proper lesson as if I had done it for my French A-level, which I didn't take, but now I would be in a position to pass. That's wonderful. I'm so delighted. It's not too late, it's never too late. It's never too late,
[00:56:01] Suzanne, or listeners who are thinking of doing a French A-level at this late stage or, you know, slightly delayed stage, do it. Suzanne, thank you for listening. No, Muriel, thank you. Thank you for that genuine, marvellous exposition on a book, which, again, we've all heard of but don't really understand, even those of us who've read it. So really appreciated that. And we've got to go off and prepare for the next one. Yes, the rolling tide of
[00:56:31] garlic and pearls never stops. Do not forget to subscribe to the podcast and then you'll never miss an episode. You wouldn't want to miss an episode, really. They're all unmissable. Do, of course, go back and look at our catalogue and there may be things that you've missed and that you want to catch up on. That's also a very good idea. For example, we did an episode about black polo necks and the French intellectuals which I think would be a good companion piece, a slightly more light-hearted companion piece to this episode. Follow us on the socials, keep in touch,
[00:57:01] we love hearing from you and we look forward to seeing you next time for something else. Bye Suzanne. Au revoir Muriel.