/lit/ - Literature

>Looking back now, the real topic of “The Stranger” is painfully obvious. Camus and the French had a demographic problem. They were going to have to give up some prime Mediterranean beachfront. Which is why the idiot protagonist kills an Arab on the beach and gets himself executed. Spoiler alert: That’s the plot of “The Stranger.” French mama’s boy kills Arab on beach, whiles away the time in prison waiting to be guillotined thinking about…you know, I can’t even remember what he was thinking about. That’s probably because, like almost all the leftist European rhetoric of the postwar years, “The Stranger” is totally disingenuous. It can’t just come out and say, “God damn it, we like this beach! We conquered this beach! Why we gotta give up all this nice beach just because you Arabs are out-breeding us?” You look back now and it’s obvious that’s what Camus, a French Algerian (a now extinct tribe), was writing about. Normal tribal behavior, resorting to violence when you’re losing coveted territory. But God forbid Camus should talk that way out loud back in those post-Stalingrad days when everything was moral, except the nonstop lying.

>And if you’re one of these deeply, instinctively dishonest writers, you must always fog up the windshield as much as possible. So Camus’ hero kills an Arab because…”existentialism, man.” The context is carefully removed, for fear it might explode and send literary egos flying all across the sidewalk café. And the context is obvious: The long war between the North Shore of the Mediterranean and the South Shore. The Northies had it all their own way for a long time until the two huge wars where they ripped each other’s guts out; after that, the tide slowly started going the other way. Camus lived when the Northies were leaving the beaches, but the process wasn’t even close to being finished when they took the Tricolor down in Algiers and Tunis for the last time.