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<\/a>Ren\u00e9 Girard is one of only 40 members, or\u00a0immortels,<\/em>\u00a0of the Acad\u00e9mie Fran\u00e7aise, France’s highest intellectual honor. The Andrew B. Hammond Professor of French Language, Literature, and Civilization\u00a0has been at Stanford since 1981.<\/strong><\/p>\nIn 1964,\u00a0Ren\u00e9 Girard published “Camus’s Stranger Retried,” in Modern Language Association’s PMLA<\/em>. The essay earned a $1,000 \u201cbest essay\u201d award from the Modern Language Association \u2013 important early recognition from the American academy for the Frenchman, and one that pleased him enormously.<\/strong><\/p>\n The seminal essay was eventually included in his 1978 collection, To Double Business Bound:\u00a0<\/em><\/a><\/strong>Essays on Literature, Mimesis and Anthropology<\/a>.\u00a0<\/span><\/em>The book was selected by\u00a0Choice <\/em>as one of the outstanding academic books of the year.<\/span><\/p>\n An excerpt:<\/strong><\/p>\n Let there be no murder and a good pretext to get rid of Meursault will, indeed, have been lost, but a pretext should be easy to replace, precisely because it does not have to be good. If society is as eager to annihilate Meursault as it is pictured by Maquet, the remarkable existence of this hero should provide more “pretexts” than will ever be needed to send an innocent to his doom.<\/p>\n Is this assumption well founded? We ask this question in all awareness that we are abandoning, for the time being, pure literary phenomenology for common sense realism. If we feel, when we are reading the novel, that Meursault lives dangerously, this impression evaporates under examination. The man goes to work regularly; he swims on the beaches of the Mediterranean and he has dates with the girls in the office. He likes the movies but he is not interested in politics. Which of these activities will take him to a police station, let alone the guillotine?<\/p>\n Meursault has no responsibilities, no family, no personal problems; he feels no sympathy for unpopular causes. Apparently he drinks nothing but caf\u00e9 au lait<\/em>. He really lives the prudent and peaceful life of a little bureaucrat anywhere and of a French petit bourgeois into the bargain. He carries the foresight of his class so far that he waits the medically recommended number of hours after his noonday meal before he plunges into the Mediterranean. His way of life should constitute a good insurance against nervous breakdowns, mental exhaustion, heart failure, and, a fortiori<\/em>, the guillotine. Meursault, it is true, does not cry at his mother’s funeral, and this is the one action in his life which is likely to be criticized by his neighbors; from such criticism to the scaffold, however, there is a distance which could never be bridged if Meursault did not commit a murder. Even the most ferocious judge could not touch a single hair on his head, had he not killed one of his fellow men. The murder may be a pretext, but it is the only one available, and upon this unfortunate event, the whole structure of meaning erected by Camus comes to rest. It is very important, therefore, to understand how the murder comes to pass. How can a man commit a murder and not be responsible for it?<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n Let a million devotees of l’absurde<\/em> copy Meursault’s way of life down to the last dregs of his caf\u00e9 au lait<\/em>, let them bury their entire families without shedding a single tear, and not one of them will ever die on the guillotine for the simple reason that their imitatio absurdi<\/em> will not and should not include the accidental murder of the Arab; this unfortunate happening, in all probability, will never be duplicated.<\/p>\n The accident theory weakens, if it does not destroy, the tragic opposition between Meursault and society. That is why it does not really account for the experience of the reader. Phenomenologically speaking, once more, the relationship between Meursault and his murder cannot be expressed in terms of motivation, as would be the case with an ordinary criminal, but it is nevertheless felt to be essential, rather than accidental. From the very beginning of the novel we sense that something frightful is going to happen and that Meursault can do nothing to protect himself. The hero is innocent, no doubt, and this very innocence will bring about his downfall.<\/p>\n The critics who, like Carl Viggiani<\/strong>, have best captured the atmosphere of the murder reject all rational interpretations and attribute this event to that same Fatum<\/em> which presides over the destinies of epic and tragic heroes in ancient and primitive literatures. They point out that the various incidents and objects connected with this episode can be interpreted as symbols of an implacable Nemesis.<\/p>\n We still invoke Fate, today, when we do not want to ascribe an event to chance, even though we cannot account for it. This “explanation” is not meant seriously, however, when we are talking about real happenings taking place in the real world. We feel that this world is essentially rational aind that it should be interpreted rationally.<\/p>\n An artist is entitled to disregard rational laws in his search for aesthetic effects. No one denies this. If he makes use of this privilege, however, the world which he creates is not only fictional but fantastic. If Meursault is sentenced to death in such a fantastic world, my indignation against the iniquitous judges must be fantastic too, and I cannot say, as Camus did in his preface to the Bree-Lynes edition of L’Etranger<\/em>, that, in our society<\/em>, people who behave like Meursault are likely to be sentenced to death. The conclusions which I infer from the novel are valid for this novel only and not for the real world, since the laws of this world have been violated. Meursault’s drama does not give me the right to look with contempt upon real judges operating in a real court. Such contempt must be justified by a perfectly rational sequence of causes or motivations leading from the funeral of the mother to the death of the hero. If, at the most crucial point in this sequence, Fatum<\/em> is suddenly brandished, or some other deity, as vague as it is dark, we must note this sudden disregard for the rational course of human affairs and take a very close look at the anti-social message of the novel.<\/p>\n If supernatural necessity is present in L’Etranger<\/em>, why should Meursault alone come under its power? Why should the various characters in the same novel be judged by different yardsticks? If the murderer is not held responsible for his actions, why should the judges be held responsible for theirs? It is possible, of course, to read part of L’Etranger<\/em> as fantasy and the rest as realistic fiction, but the novel thus fragmented presents no unified world view; even from a purely aesthetic point of view it is open to criticism.<\/p>\n The fate theory looks satisfactory as long as the episode of the murder remains detached from the novel, but it cannot be integrated with this novel. Sympathy for Meursault is inseparable from resentment against the judges. We cannot do away with that resentment without mutilating our global aesthetic experience. This resentment is present at the phenomenological level and we must somehow account for it even if it is not logically justified.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Ren\u00e9 Girard is one of only 40 members, or\u00a0immortels,\u00a0of the Acad\u00e9mie Fran\u00e7aise, France’s highest intellectual honor. The Andrew B. Hammond Professor of French Language, Literature, and Civilization\u00a0has been at Stanford since 1981. In 1964,\u00a0Ren\u00e9 Girard published “Camus’s Stranger Retried,” in … Continue reading <\/a>On the purely phenomenological level, Meursault’s condemnation is almost unrelated to his crime. Every detail of the trial adds up to the conclusion that the judges resent the murderer not for what he did but for what he is. The critic Albert Maquet<\/strong> expressed this truth quite well when he wrote: “The murder of the Arab is only a pretext; behind the person of the accused, the judges want to destroy the truth he embodies.”<\/p>\n