It was not until 1961, almost nineteen years after its first publication, that any critic suggested in print that Camus's L'Etranger could be read as a 'racialist' novel. (p. 61)

Camus himself insisted that he saw L'Etranger first and foremost as a book about a man who is a martyr to truth…. Throughout the novel, the reader is invited to sympathise with Meursault and see his cult of physical sensation—his delight at the crisp dryness of a hand-towel at midday, his love of swimming and making love, his appreciation of the sights and sounds of Algiers—as infinitely superior to the conventional values which are always being offered to him. Meursault, we feel, is right not to exchange the sun-drenched beaches of Algiers for the cold courtyards of Paris, right to prefer straightforward sensuality to Marie's sentimentalised idea of 'love', right to place the reality of this life higher than the hypothetical consolations of eternity, right to persist in his vision of the truth as he sees it even if this does lead him to the guillotine. How, then, can a novel with so attractive and honest a hero be seriously interpreted as embodying so unpleasant and life-denying an ideology as racialism? How, moreover, can so conscientious and self-conscious an artist as Camus have written a book which so contradicts the values which he officially defended in his lifetime? For he was not only the first French writer seriously to concern himself with the Algeria problem, campaigning as early as the 1930s in favour of equal treatment for Arab and European alike. He was, in 1945, virtually the only French journalist to warn of what was going to happen in Algeria if France did nothing to change its basically colonial status.

Once the book is isolated from Camus's life, however, the racialist undertones of L'Etranger becomes so easy to detect that one wonders why critics should have taken so long to point them out. The action of the book takes place in Algeria, sometime in the 1930s, at a period when there were some nine Arabs to each European. But only the Europeans have names: Meursault, Pérez, Masson, Sintès, Salamano, Cardona. The Arabs, in contrast, are a nameless, undifferentiated mass. When Marie comes to visit Meursault in prison, both she and the old woman—a European—who sits next to her are described with that attention to physical detail which is so agreeable a feature of the novel…. Camus either ignores the indigenous population of Algeria completely or treats it merely as a convenient backcloth against which the really interesting dramas, those involving Europeans, can be acted out.

Moreover, it can be argued that the Camus of L'Etranger does more than merely ignore the Arabs…. He tells a story in which the interests and point of view of the non-European characters are so totally sacrificed to the concerns of the 'whites' that one begins to wonder just exactly what his own subconscious attitude towards the two races was. For what actually happens in L'Etranger, when seen from the standpoint of the Arabs, is a peculiarly unpleasant example of both racialist and sexual exploitation. (pp. 61-2)

Camus wrote [the novel] at a time when he was working on Le Mythe de Sisyphe, his essay on the absurd, and wished to illustrate the idea that 'a supernumerary employee in the post office is equal to a conqueror if they have the same degree of awareness'…. Meursault, at least in Camus's conception of him, is a man who has gone through the experience of the absurd before the novel begins. He has had the overwhelming sense of his own mortality and consequently become aware of the 'blood-stained mathematics which command our lives'…. He is therefore living out the rest of his life in that 'weariness mingled with surprise' … which characterises the 'absurd man', consciously refusing the consolations of religion or any other form of reconciliation with the world. He knows that he is going to die and this knowledge, as he tells the priest, has taken all meaning from such normally all-important experiences as the death of his mother or the love which other human beings have for him. Drying his hands on a crisp towel at midday is just as important as being promoted to a better job. Indeed, insofar as physical sensations are the only reality in an absurd and valueless world, such an activity is more important than the worship of the bitch goddess success which would be implied by accepting his boss's offer of a new job in Paris, and Meursault needs to make only one more discovery about life to become one of the heroes of the absurd celebrated in Le Mythe de Sisyphe. He needs to find out that 'no depth, no emotion, no passion and no sacrifice could give the same value in the eyes of the absurd man to a conscious life lasting for forty years and a full awareness extending over sixty'…. He does this when, lying in his prison cell thinking about the possibility of being reprieved, he feels his eyes tingle with delight at the thought of 'twenty years of life to come'….

But in order to bring his hero to this point of awareness, Camus has to have him sentenced to death…. Such an ending also has the advantage of enabling Camus, early in his career, to give vent to the hatred of capital punishment which dominates La Peste, L'Homme révolté and the Réflexions sur la guillotine, as well as to express his mistrust of a legal system in which it is often more the skill of his lawyer than his own guilt or innocence which decides whether someone accused of murder is executed or acquitted. Neither were these the only considerations which led Camus to organise the plot of L'Etranger around a murder trial and a legal execution. He always thought of himself primarily as an artist, and clearly derived great satisfaction from constructing a narrative in which, as in L'Etranger, the completely innocent experience of events in the first half of the novel is interpreted as overwhelming evidence of guilt in the second.

All the different and overlapping intentions that Camus had in mind when writing L'Etranger thus involve a novel in which the central character is sentenced to death. All Camus therefore had to find was a convenient anecdote. The story of Sintès, Meursault and the Arabs eminently satisfied this condition. It nevertheless involved—and this is the central plank upon which a 'racialist' interpretation of L'Etranger is based—the total subordination of Arab to European concerns. (pp. 63-4)

[It is argued, however, that] a 'racialist' reading of L'Etranger completely distorts the novel and prevents us from seeing it as the masterpiece of irony, lyricism, humour and tragedy that it is…. It is consequently yet another example of the way in which contemporary considerations can completely distort our understanding of a work of art by preventing us from seeing it either objectively or in relationship to its time or the terms in which the author originally conceived it. It is, moreover, totally unsound because it makes the very elementary mistake of failing to distinguish between the author of a book and the fictional character whom he invents to tell the story. (pp. 65-6)

[It] is Meursault who is the racialist, not Camus himself. Indeed, by presenting events to the reader through the eyes of a 'Poor White', Camus is himself condemning both Meursault and the male-dominated, colonialist society which he represents. It is not Camus but Meursault who tells the story in which Arabs figure only as small part players and in which the murder of an Arab deserves only the most superficial of passing comments. Camus, in contrast to his fictional creation, is actually using both the events of L'Etranger and Meursault's own attitude towards them in order to underline how prejudiced and unbalanced he finds the colonial system which existed in Algeria in the 1930s.

This could well be a fruitful and defensible way of reading L'Etranger if it were not for one thing: The comments which Camus himself made about Meursault's character. For it is very clear, from the entries he made in his Notebooks when the novel was published, from an interview which he gave in 1946 and from the preface he wrote in 1955, that he did not have this kind of critical attitude towards the narrator in L'Etranger. The character of Meursault, he noted in 1942, was based partly upon two other people—one a man, one a woman—and partly upon himself. But he did not suggest that he rejected those aspects of his own personality which had gone to form his fictional hero. When the Catholic critic André Rousseaux attacked the novel for presenting a character 'without humanity, without human value, and even … without any kind of human truth', Camus drafted a long letter of reply—which he never in fact sent—but in which he summed up the meaning of the book as being either that 'society needs people who weep at their mother's funeral' or that 'you are never executed for the crime you think'. But although he mentioned 'ten other possible' ways of looking at the book, [Camus] gave no indication that he saw either Meursault or the attitude he represented as defective or inadequate. In 1946 he went even further when he told Gaëtan Picon that 'men in Algeria live like my hero, in an absolutely simple manner', and implied that their attitude towards life was, in many respects, preferable to that of the average Northern European. But he again abstained from any unfavourable comment on Meursault, and carried his enthusiasm for the main character of L'Etranger even further in 1955 when he described him as being 'inspired by a passion which is profound because unspoken, the passion for the absolute and for truth' and said he was 'the only Christ whom we deserve'.

It is in many ways unfortunate that Camus made these remarks about L'Etranger. Had he not yielded to the pressure which literary journalists and enterprising scholars so frequently put upon French writers to say what they 'really intended to do' in their books, L'Etranger would be far less vulnerable to the type of criticism put forward in the first part of this article. For it is only when we follow out the implications of Camus's remarks and begin to look at it as a novel about moral values that its flaws and inconsistencies appear. So long as it is seen as the study of a man who is genuinely 'an outsider' in the sense of someone who lives in his own private world and is simply not at all interested in what anybody else thinks about him, L'Etranger is … invulnerable to criticism on moral grounds…. Indeed, the remarks which [Camus] made about the novel after 1943 nowadays have the curious and wholly unintentional effect of making it seem a much less satisfying and intriguing book than it is when we read it in isolation from its author's proclaimed intentions. For they also have the effect of underlining, by contrast, what a poor fool Meursault is in his relationship with Raymond and how insensitive he is in his attitude to Marie. (pp. 66-8)

To revisit Camus's L'Etranger is thus, for me, first of all to realise how unwise creative artists are when they yield to the temptation of telling us what the meaning of their works 'really is'…. [The] impression which a book makes on its readers can change with the passage of time. In the 1940s, when writers, critics and readers were obsessed with the idea of the absurdity of the world, L'Etranger seemed an almost perfect illustration not only of this absurdity but of a valid reply which men could make to it through their personal attitudes and private experience…. It was only when the happy pagans celebrated in the pages of Noces became the shock troops of the Organisation de l'Armée Secrète, a violently racialist body devoted to keeping Algeria French at all costs, that critics inspired by an equal and opposite intolerance pointed out features of Camus's work which nobody had notice before. Henri Kréa, Pierre Nora and Conor Cruise O'Brien [who originally pointed out the racialism in L'Etranger] thus gave an excellent illustration of how right Baudelaire was when he said that literary criticism should be 'partial, passionate and political'. (p. 68)