Stranger on Earth

A Note to the Reader: In writing this piece, I have attempted to avoid spoilers. The plot summary below is of the superficial kind and should not spoil anyone’s viewing experience. For a more comprehensive summary, refer to:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Human_Condition_(film_series) As far as cinematic war chronicles go, there is not one that is grander and more urgent than Masaki Kobayashi’s mammoth 9-hour-and-47-minute trilogy The Human Condition (1959-61), with David Shipman, the famed British film critic, calling it “unquestionably the greatest film ever made” (984). And yet, ironically, few casual viewers will have seen it, partly due to its off-putting length. This should be rectified. The trilogy carries with it a message as pressing and disconcerting as that of Platoon (1986) or Apocalypse Now (1979), and should be acknowledged by anyone with an ounce of interest in humanist cinema. The film may be more than half a century old, but the protagonis...

Albert Camus’ The Outsider  (or The Stranger ) features on most high school reading lists. Teachers of English literature are attracted to it because of its slimness; it is compact and written in startlingly uncomplicated language; its protagonist – a man alienated from society - is someone teenagers have no trouble relating to. But is it really that straightforward? Those of us who teach it year after year – have we really felt the gravity of Camus’ landscape-changing message? The students who skim through it year after year – have they really understood Meursault’s stance as they claim? After all, one of the 20 th -century’s greatest philosophers, Jean-Paul Sartre, was completely floored by the novel when he first encountered it during World War II. (His biographer Annie Cohen-Solal says “his intellectual machinery jammed” [5].) In 1943, Sartre, having mulled over the ambiguity of the novel, published “A Commentary on The Stranger ” in the literary magazine Le Cahie...

May 15, 2012 Lost in Translation: What the First Line of “The Stranger” Should Be Posted by  Ryan Bloom for The New Yorker For the modern American reader, few lines in French literature are as famous as the opening of Albert Camus’s “L’Étranger”: “Aujourd’hui, maman est morte.” Nitty-gritty tense issues aside, the first sentence of “The Stranger” is so elementary that even a schoolboy with a base knowledge of French could adequately translate it. So why do the pros keep getting it wrong? Within the novel’s first sentence, two subtle and seemingly minor translation decisions have the power to change the way we read everything that follows. What makes these particular choices prickly is that they poke at a long-standing debate among the literary community: whether it is necessary for a translator to have some sort of special affinity with a work’s author in order to produce the best possible text. Arthur Goldhammer, translator of a volume of Camus’s Combat...

“I tried to make my character represent the only Christ that we deserve.” – Albert Camus speaking of Meursault in 1955 Albert Camus’ brand of existentialism, absurdism, and nihilism with regard to his 1942 “philosophical treatise” The Outsider is a thing of fascination and paradox. In this age of increasing intolerance and orthodoxy, the novel’s ground-breaking theme should once again be highlighted. Meursault’s antics throughout the novel are the stuff of literary legend: he displays no emotions at his mother’s funeral; he seems oddly unaffected by Marie’s love for him; he shows no concern for domestic violence and animal cruelty; he does not hesitate to kill a man when the need – whatever its cause is – arises. Meursault is the very personification of amorality. He rejects the rules and ethics of society and refuses to be enslaved by what Nietzsche calls “herd morality.” This naturally brings about grave consequences. In the society we inhabit, a man who does not con...