This article was downloaded by: [Middle Tennessee State University]On: 05 September 2013, At: 09:02Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registeredoffice: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Educational Philosophy and TheoryPublication details, including instructions for authors andsubscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rept20

Confronting the Absurd: An educationalreading of Camus’ The strangerAidan Curzon-Hobsona Otago PolytechnicPublished online: 27 Sep 2012.

To cite this article: Aidan Curzon-Hobson (2013) Confronting the Absurd: An educationalreading of Camus’ The stranger , Educational Philosophy and Theory, 45:4, 461-474, DOI:10.1080/00131857.2012.718150

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2012.718150

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the“Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis,our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as tothe accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinionsand views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors,and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Contentshould not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sourcesof information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims,proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever orhowsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arisingout of the use of the Content.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Anysubstantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing,systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms &Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

Confronting the Absurd: An educational

reading of Camus’ The stranger

AIDAN CURZON-HOBSON

Otago Polytechnic

Abstract

This article examines the concept of the stranger and the experience of strangeness in Albert

Camus’s The stranger. These themes have a range of synergies with educational thought.

They also lead us to other concepts that may have a place in educational debate, in particu-

lar the concepts of the absurd and rebellion. This train of thought also has potential for edu-

cational practice. If we accept that strangeness has a positive place in education, Camus is

insightful in allowing us to examine its pedagogical foundations and the wider conditions nec-

essary to give rise to the experience of strangeness.

Keywords: Camus, The stranger, absurd, rebellion

Introduction

There is no doubt that within Camus’s work are educational themes such as authen-

ticity, truth, care, community and hope. Across the wider stranger literature these

themes are also prevalent, as superbly examined by Colin Wilson (1956).

There is not, however, an already agreed ‘educational reading’ of Camus or an

established body of literature around the applicability of this work to educational

practice, policy and philosophy. We are only just beginning this project, a handful of

articles and writers beginning an original and exciting excavation. A good summary of

works to date is found in Roberts (2008). An aim of this article is to increase the

interest in this wider project.

Albert Camus’s The stranger (1942/1982) is a good place to start drawing these

threads together. However, I have also included reference to other works below to

support the ‘confronting’ spirit found in the main work. This will allow us to identify

specific characteristics of the stranger that resonate with established goals of education

and what, in turn, might be the traits of a learning environment that embody or are

oriented to this disposition. In some respects this is an attempt to describe the peda-

gogy of the stranger.

Educational Philosophy and Theory, 2013

Vol. 45, No. 4, 461–474, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2012.718150

� 2013 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Mid

dle

Ten

ness

ee S

tate

Uni

vers

ity]

at 0

9:02

05

Sept

embe

r 20

13

It is important to note that the breadth of Camus’s work describes a great diversity

of reactions to the absurd, most of which are ‘negative’. This reflects Camus’s goal

not to advocate one response to the question of strangeness but to examine in a way

that forces the reader to question his or her own response. But I also believe there is

a train of positive thought through his work, an ethic of sorts around the importance

of the stranger and how this disposition provides for what Camus, perhaps implicitly,

would demand of our society and education. This article suggests what this positive

philosophy might look like and it borrows from Camus’s discussion on the stranger,

the rebel and the artist——suggesting that across these is a set of themes or attitudes

or behaviours that might apply also to the teacher, the student and the learning envi-

ronment. This suggested pedagogy of the stranger or sense of strangeness and its

intended disposition (a confrontation with the absurd) reflect precedence for the fol-

lowing traits:

• the absurd

• doubt

• strangeness

• limits

• ambiguity

• dialogue

• solidarity

• creativity

• diversity and hope.

Across each of these concepts I have interpreted Albert Camus’s work as dedicated to

the stranger, to hope and to humility. I believe that across his fictional characters and

their conflicts, as well as inside his wider (non-fiction) prose and personal life choices,

Albert Camus examines a humanity wrestling with its own sense of individual and

communal strangeness. In all of these contexts the work of Albert Camus has been,

and will continue to be, a vehicle for exploring objectively the stranger as a literary or

existential theme and also eliciting in readers the real, lived experience of dislocation.

While licence has been taken here perhaps to overemphasize the positive philosophy

of Albert Camus, I believe it is in keeping with his overall intent, particularly in his

later writing.

The Absurd

Taking our first step of analysis, we find the stranger connected to the absurd; the

absurd as the vehicle, the shadow behind the stranger, the dislocating influ-

ence——perhaps even its home. The interaction of the stranger with others leads them,

in turn, to the absurd. It is the absurd that one could argue is Albert Camus’s modus

operandi for creating a sense of strangeness both within his own characters and in the

experience of the reader.

Given this, the intensity to which Camus draws the reader into the absurd is perhaps

greater than any other writer. Certainly across other writers studied in this monograph

462 Aidan Curzon-Hobson

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Mid

dle

Ten

ness

ee S

tate

Uni

vers

ity]

at 0

9:02

05

Sept

embe

r 20

13

they all confront the reader in a way that creates strangeness, questioning through nihil-

ism, the religious, the metaphysical and the existential, all of which posit a challenge

that can unsettle. These all evoke the absurd, but perhaps it is Camus that forces the

most overt confrontation. These contexts provide for a moment when the conscious-

ness recognizes the failure of our rationales and in turn our own minds to grasp coher-

ently a meaning that will transcend. Like the characters of Dostoevsky, Camus is

interested in how different minds react from this moment of awakening——how does

each character reconcile a demand to know and an unforgiving universe?

In this sense the absurd is educational. It ‘throws’ the individual into the moment

when he or she may recognize the gap between our sense of certainty (and therefore

hope) and what the world makes of it. Normally these two poles are in alignment and

our projects around meaning, knowledge and value achieve some leverage in the

world. But the absurd is the moment when we gain no traction giving rise to the feel-

ing of strangeness. These moments can happen when faced with the unusual or the

unfamiliar, although across Camus’s work they most often arise when his characters

are involved in their normal day-to-day activities.

Given this, I see at times in Camus’s work a concept of the absurd as something of

volatile educational potential——characters who choose to face the absurd take a step

into pure reflective, disruptive energy. Some try to find a way out, others reconcile.

But for Camus’s characters which either intentionally or unwillingly remain under its

gaze it transforms everything. Meursault’s step is recorded by Camus thus:

And because I couldn’t stand this burning feeling any longer, I moved for-

ward. I knew it was stupid and I wouldn’t get out of the sun with one step.

But I took a step, just one step forward. And this time, without sitting up,

the Arab drew his knife and held it out towards the sun. (Camus, 1942/

1982, p. 60)

Doubt

So in the broadest sense, Camus’s characters bear witness to the absurd as the great

educator——the catalyst for fundamental doubt and, in turn, lucid reflection. Meur-

sault reflects on this disjuncture:

I realized that I’d destroyed the balance of the day and the perfect silence

of this beach where I’d been happy. And I fired four more times at a lifeless

body and the bullets sank in without leaving a mark. And it was like giving

four sharp knocks at the door of unhappiness. (Camus, 1942/1982, p. 59)

As broader evidence of this, stories such as The plague and The fall, the plays Calig-

ula and The misunderstanding all hinge on moments where the absurd, in one way or

another, is made manifest. They, in turn, record our struggle with doubt. As Camus

describes, whether one turns away or embraces, it is doubt which educates in these

contexts ‘for the bane and the enlightenment of man’ (Camus, 1947/1960, p. 297)

and it is doubt created by the absurd which both imperils and liberates our most

heartfelt projects; a form of ‘never-ending’ defeat (p. 124). Whether it is in Paris,

Confronting the Absurd 463

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Mid

dle

Ten

ness

ee S

tate

Uni

vers

ity]

at 0

9:02

05

Sept

embe

r 20

13

Amsterdam, a courtroom, the church or the desert; these are all sites chosen by

Camus for the awakening to doubt.

Reading the absurd as the ‘condition’ to be confronted, which I believe suggests

something educational, Camus is offering us the stranger as the vehicle for this type

of transforming thought and action. His body of work is a record of ourselves and our

reactions at perhaps our most profound and important learning moments: the

moments in which, in the face of the absurd, we become lucid of a different kind of

doubt——the ‘benign indifference of the universe’ (Camus, 1942/1982, p. 117)——a

space where our keenest efforts are rendered illusory. Importantly for Camus, this

does not reduce our demand for meaning and value; it just provides us with no

recourse. Whether as his characters portray we shrink from the challenge, launch into

irrational or rational escapism, embrace or turn away from the absurd, one cannot

help but find within it a capacity to unsettle and render strange that which seemed

familiar.

Strangeness

In The stranger we find it is our failed sense of solidarity that creates doubt——deliv-

ered by Meursault’s interaction. This particular type of (existentialist) doubt brings

with it the more complex sensation of strangeness; where expected reactions based on

tradition and norms are unsettled. For Meursault’s lover Marie this is experienced

when Meursault responds indifferently to her questions about marriage; his manager’s

sense of self-worth is questioned when he asks Meursault for his thoughts on ‘promo-

tion’ to Paris; the constant bewilderment of the magistrate, his lawyer’s benevolence

turning to frustration, and the chaplain’s anger and eventual distaste. Each of these

scenes records how Meursault’s interaction creates a sense of disjuncture in others.

The reaction of justice to his ‘strangeness’ is perhaps the most extreme:

I tried to listen again because the prosecutor started talking about my soul.

He said he’d peered into it and found nothing, gentlemen of the jury. He

said the truth was that I didn’t have one, a soul, and that I had no access to

any humanity nor to any of the moral principles which protect the human

heart. (Camus, 1942/1982, p. 98)

Conversely, Meursault himself experiences a strong sense of strangeness as he

becomes increasingly affected by the reactions and expectations of those around him.

He finds peculiar and detached the processes of the courtroom, the change in behav-

iour of those around him from tolerance to cruelty, the elaborate preparation given to

his trial, the passing of time, the expectations of others; all of these leave Meursault

with a sense of contradiction that he finds anything from unsettling to despairing. His

experience of himself as a stranger seems to come from this sudden awareness of the

other. In some ways he is thrown (in the existential sense) into a contradiction

between his own sense of value and the indifference of others towards it:

It was at that point I noticed a row of faces in front of me. They were all

looking at me: I realized they were the jury … I just had one impression: I

was in a tram and all these anonymous passengers on the opposite seat were

464 Aidan Curzon-Hobson

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Mid

dle

Ten

ness

ee S

tate

Uni

vers

ity]

at 0

9:02

05

Sept

embe

r 20

13

scrutinizing the new arrival to find his peculiarities. I know it was a silly idea

since it wasn’t peculiarities they were looking for here, but criminality.

There’s not much difference though and anyway that was the idea that

came to me. (Camus, 1942/1982, p. 81)

In this sense Meursault is the object of strangeness, but this is the exception

through The stranger. He is predominantly the catalyst, the harbinger of strangeness.

Like the rats in The plague, the meteor in The state of siege, the enticing disingenuous

monologue of Jean-Baptiste Clamence, the icons of Exile and the kingdom, and even

the tremendous outpouring of love and care in The first man, these are interactions

that can carry the absurd awakening to others. Each of them creates the awareness in

others of the disproportion between their intent and the reality of others, of our need

to relook at something that once was assured and sensible, of our experience of con-

tradiction where once was unquestionable order.

Strangeness therefore represents the emotional upheaval when the individual is con-

scious of a demand that cannot be met. Strangeness is the emotional marking of this

lucidity. It is the sense that one’s demand for unity, meaning and value——‘human

insurrection’ according to Camus——is simply a protest without outcome. The experi-

ence of strangeness as we see it through Camus’s characters and in particular Meur-

sault is best described in The rebel: ‘he does not ask for life, but for reasons for living’

(Camus, 1951/1956, p. 101).

We could therefore say that the stranger might represent an important catalyst for

self-reflection——not as destructive as the absurd generally, instead an emotional state

subtly awakening in others new spaces for thought and action.

Limits

But what particular awareness does this sense of strangeness lead to? In terms of

Camus’s positive philosophy and the link with education, I believe a key idea is that

of limits, best embodied by Meursault in his outburst against the chaplain’s demand

for faith: ‘Willing as I was, I just couldn’t accept such as absolute certainty’ (Camus,

1942/1982, p. 105). For Meursault, absolutes cannot be sustained in the absurd

moment. The absurd experience might lead one (to escape) to absolutes as embodied

by the chaplain, but for those living within the absurd, a context of contradiction and

doubt, a recourse to absolutes is not an option:

Then, for some reason, something exploded inside me … He seemed so

certain of everything, didn’t he? And yet none of his certainties was worth

one hair of a woman’s head. (Camus, 1942/1982, p. 115)

In fact, it is the recourse to absolutes that Meursault and Camus’s rebel cannot

abide by. They, like our liberating pedagogues, prefer to live in the context of doubt

and ambiguity. This suggests a confrontation of sorts:

The first and, after all, the only condition of my inquiry is to preserve the

very thing that crushes me, consequently to respect what I consider essential

Confronting the Absurd 465

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Mid

dle

Ten

ness

ee S

tate

Uni

vers

ity]

at 0

9:02

05

Sept

embe

r 20

13

in it. I have just defined it as a confrontation and unceasing struggle.

(Camus, 1942/1955b, p. 34)

By staying in this confrontation we are forced to respect limits via contradiction and

ambiguity. This is the demanding, sometimes terrifying context that the stranger lives

within, the unsettling dwelling that Meursault inhabits.

But it is not only unsettling for him. It is this rejection of absolutes and the

demand for limits and moderation that perhaps threaten his society’s sense of order

the most. It could be argued that it is the indifference to its principles rather than

the opposition which his accusers cannot condone. An opposition based on a clearly

articulated, explicit revolution seems like it would be an easier proposition for his

court to understand and hence reform (the impending parricide trial, for example,

seems less of a crime for the officials). Perhaps then Meursault is demonstrating to

us, like some educational philosophies and institutions, that it is the power of doubt

that holds the greatest yet most disruptive potential. It provides unsettling ambiguity.

Father Paneloux, in The plague, seems to learn from this doubt. Meursault’s chaplain

refuses:

‘Do you want my life to be meaningless?’ he cried. As far as I was con-

cerned, it had nothing to do with me and I told him so. But across the

table, he was already thrusting the crucifix under my nose and exclaiming

quite unreasonably, ‘I am a Christian. I ask Him to forgive your sins’ … I

noticed that he was calling me by my first name, but I’d had enough.

(Camus, 1942/1982, p. 68)

Meursault in this scene is demanding we restore a humility to our knowledge and in

particular its application through principles. He is recoiling from a doctrine without

limit. In some way this reflects Camus’s wider challenge to the way knowledge is

legitimated and enforced in society. One could argue that Meursault’s death penalty

is part of a society’s need to correct an imbalance——a disjuncture produced by the

unsettling awareness of the limitations of thought, law and moral frameworks. We can

see this reaction across Camus’s work in his portraits of official personnel: under the

banner of justice they will commit murder and enforce silence, showing an indiffer-

ence to limits, preferring servitude and a unity enforced by physical and ideological

terror. Camus argues for something different:

Moderation, on the one hand, is nothing but pure tension. It smiles, no

doubt, and our Convulsionists, dedicated to elaborate apocalypses, despise

it. But its smile shines brightly at the climax of an interminable effort: it is

in itself a supplementary source of strength. (Camus, 1951/1956, p. 301)

Ambiguity

‘Beginning to think is beginning to be undermined’, writes Camus in the The myth of

Sisyphus (1942/1955b, p. 12). In this sentence, as above, he is exalting the path that

leads to danger through original reflection where one’s place, knowledge and truth are

ready to be questioned. It leads us, as Camus describes, to a recognition that a habit

466 Aidan Curzon-Hobson

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Mid

dle

Ten

ness

ee S

tate

Uni

vers

ity]

at 0

9:02

05

Sept

embe

r 20

13

once regarded as important and necessary suddenly loses its rationale where ‘in a uni-

verse suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger’ (p. 13).

For Camus this signals a first step to enlightenment, an awareness of limits, a call to

reason, action and to empowering relationships with others. It is a process through

which we might think differently; challenging the repressive projects that once seemed

untouchable, not in the face of something ‘greater’ but in recognition of their con-

tradictions and limits, once hidden, now apparent.

I would like to call this a step into ambiguity——a form of confrontation where the

absurd remains present. Camus warns that this is not always an easy step to take; that

instead we can remain tempted by a ‘hope’ that will quell both the challenge and the

rise of the absurd in our consciousness. While we might be easily cast into the abyss

of the absurd and the experience of strangeness it is not an easy place to remain:

Eluding is the invariable game. Hope of another life one must ‘deserve’ or

trickery of those who live, not for life itself, but for some great idea that will

transcend it, refine it, give it a meaning, and betray it. (Camus, 1942/

1955b, p. 15)

This might reflect aspects of Meursault’s experience of strangeness in the court-

room when he is asked to recall conversations, preferences and desires (marriage,

work, white coffee, the murder, the lifeless body, the sea and sky). He sees these

instances as passing, ambiguous moments in life, beyond the capacity of himself or

the courtroom to reduce. He feels unable to play the game expected of him:

He asked me if I had felt any grief on that day. This question really sur-

prised me and I thought how embarrassed I’d have been if I had to ask it. I

replied though that I’d rather got out of the habit of analysing myself and

that I found it difficult to answer his question. I probably loved mother

quite a lot, but that didn’t mean anything … Here the lawyer interrupted

me, looking very flustered … The only thing I could say for certain was that

I’d rather mother hadn’t died. But my lawyer didn’t seem pleased. (Camus,

1942/1982, p. 65)

And further on, Meursault reflects on the importance of context and ambiguity

over principle:

When I was first imprisoned, though, the worst thing was that I kept think-

ing like a free man … but there were others unhappier than I was. Anyway

it was an idea of mother’s and she often used to repeat it, that you end up

getting used to everything. (Camus, 1942/1982, p. 75)

In these passages Meursault does not want to be disruptive or resist but in truth he

cannot find an enduring meaning which can easily, definitively explain under the gaze

of the absurd. But those around him require a different outcome; they need to elude

this ambiguity by establishing the overarching rationale. They must explain his behav-

iour in accordance with the principles of society——explanations which construct and

constrain behaviour within manageable frameworks.

Confronting the Absurd 467

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Mid

dle

Ten

ness

ee S

tate

Uni

vers

ity]

at 0

9:02

05

Sept

embe

r 20

13

But these constructions fail to engage the ambiguity Meursault sees in life and that

is typical of the stranger. More than this, as his outburst with the chaplain demon-

strates, he believes that they are axioms leading to a betrayal of life. He believes

without ambiguity that there is nothing left but the communique and the enforcement

of principles. Hence, Meursault represents the importance of ambiguity in creating a

sense of disjuncture through which the world can appear different and spaces for lib-

eration might be discovered. However, he finds that the courtroom is no place for this

sense of strangeness:

He asked me in the same weary manner whether I regretted what I’d done.

I thought it over and said that, rather than true regret, I felt a kind of

annoyance. I had the impression that he didn’t understand me … Anyway,

the tone of the examinations gradually changed. It seemed as if the magis-

trate had lost interest in me and had somehow classified my case. (Camus,

1942/1982, p. 69)

And before sentencing:

The judge replied that … he would be happy to have me specify the motives

which had inspired my crime. Mixing up my words a bit and realising that I

sounded ridiculous, I said quickly that it was because of the sun. Some peo-

ple laughed. My lawyer shrugged his shoulders and immediately afterwards

he was asked to speak. (Camus, 1942/1982, p. 99)

These are examples of the stranger whose sense of ambiguity is rebuffed and per-

haps despised. The stranger is largely a record of this conflict; The first man and The

plague and The myth of Sisyphus provide the more positive examples. In these works

the power of ambiguity is demonstrated and described as the potential to ‘lose the

illusory meaning with which we had clothed the world’ (Camus, 1942/1955b, p. 20).

In ambiguity habit and ‘stage-scenery’ disappear: ‘The world evades us because it

becomes itself again’ (p. 20). It is at this moment of brave consciousness that one

chooses a response to remain in the absurd or to flee. Camus suggests that genuine

liberty can survive only if one retains the ambiguity within the absurd; the denial of it

leads to nothing but servitude. In terms of rejecting ambiguity, he signals the court-

room as society’s most effective apparatus:

How can we be surprised that such a claim should have developed in the

world of court trials? They reject the man of today in the name of the man

of the future. (Camus, 1942/1955a, p. 189)

Dialogue

But how, against these apparatuses of repression, are these traits of ambiguity,

strangeness and moderation created? Isolated in his cell, consciousness and the mental

gymnastics of Meursault might be sufficient. But I believe that Camus advocates for

the collective endeavour: dialogue and solidarity. It could be argued that Exile and the

kingdom is Camus’s greatest study in this. In this work and The stranger, he shows

468 Aidan Curzon-Hobson

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Mid

dle

Ten

ness

ee S

tate

Uni

vers

ity]

at 0

9:02

05

Sept

embe

r 20

13

how dialogue leads his characters to question, to look at contradiction and have ambi-

guity constructed. The absurd is carried by dialogue——the conversations humble our

thought——constructing new limits through community.

This dialogical encounter based on a particular concept of hope might be a sim-

ilar process to that which we find so strongly in the work of educational philoso-

phy, in particular the work of Paulo Freire and Martin Buber. For these writers,

as for Camus, it is only through dialogue that one can find collective value, agree-

ment around meaning, the instrument to challenge truth and the vehicle for resist-

ing the metanarrative. Dialogue for Camus is the essential force behind rebellion.

Without dialogue Camus believes we are left with only the communique. He

describes this as a community devoid of creativity and without an effective capacity

to find a common ground in anything except the scaffold and its silence (Camus,

1951/1956, p. 279).

Camus is signalling here (amongst other things) a society’s failure to build a com-

munity based on dialogue and its contrasting passion (and perhaps preference) for

silence and order based on fear. He describes this elsewhere as a ‘mutual understand-

ing and communication’ able to survive only in ‘the free exchange of conversation’

(Camus, 1951/1956, p. 283). For Camus, what is essentially lost is the opportunity

for ambiguity and creative contradiction. Dialogue cannot exist with a ‘person who

has been reduced to servitude’ (p. 283). There is no space for such a person to speak

within the communique and it is through speaking that the stranger can give rise to

the absurd and one can draw others into the absurd experience and a communal

sense of strangeness. It is in dialogue that we learn to be humble——learn that our

knowledge projects are already humiliated. Camus goes further in explaining this, and

one cannot miss the link here to similar statements in established educational

literature:

Instead of the implicit and untrammeled dialogue through which we come

to recognise our similarity and consecrate our destiny, servitude gives sway

to the most terrible of silences. If injustice is bad for the rebel, it is not

because it contradicts an eternal idea of justice, but because it perpetuates

the silent hostility that separates the oppressor from the oppressed. (Camus,

1951/1956, p. 283)

Solidarity

In the context of The stranger we can see this through the character interaction and

the link between dialogue and solidarity. Camus’s characters demonstrate how dia-

logue depends on solidarity to exist and solidarity reproduces the conditions necessary

for dialogue. I believe the most touching example of this in The stranger is Meursault’s

connection with the caretaker when he visits for his mother’s funeral and then later in

the courtroom when the caretaker is called as a witness. In the initial scene, the care-

taker is about to unscrew the coffin for Meursault to see his mother when Meursault

stops him. In a context of high anxiety and fear, a simple exchange generates empa-

thy, compassion and acceptance:

Confronting the Absurd 469

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Mid

dle

Ten

ness

ee S

tate

Uni

vers

ity]

at 0

9:02

05

Sept

embe

r 20

13

He was just going up to the coffin when I stopped him. He said, ‘Don’t you

want to?’ I answered, ‘No.’ He didn’t say anything and I was embarrassed

because I felt I shouldn’t have said that. After a moment he looked at me

and asked, ‘Why not?’ but not reproachfully, just as if he wanted to know. I

said, ‘I don’t know.’ He began twiddling his white moustache and then,

without looking at me, he announced, ‘I understand.’ He had beautiful

bright blue eyes and a reddish complexion. He offered me a chair and then

he sat down next to me. (Camus, 1942/1982, p. 12)

This is a quiet, committed form of solidarity, where perhaps we find the genuine lim-

its to freedom that need to exist for a community to retain its capacity for doubt,

lucidity and rebellion. This starts with simple compassion based on immediate, lived

needs. It is about the time and place and the relationships needed to sustain happi-

ness for that moment——the rejection of meaning that transcends this immediate con-

text. Although the stranger’s demand is there for unity and meaning it can only be

found in the particular. In The stranger there are countless scenes where the moment

resonates with meaning, highlighting the love found in the particular——an opening up

to the ‘benign indifference’ of the universe.

This is solidarity found in the particular. For Camus this cannot be based on

principle and he rejects those principles that seek to construct an ideological and

physical totality. Enforced by an abstract sense of justice the ambiguity of the world

remains hidden. And Camus’s characters illustrate that ambiguity is ever present

and judgement, according to the absurd, is a far more complicated thing than our

everyday justice. Meursault embodies this method, unwilling to judge according to

the principle:

On my way upstairs, in the dark, I bumped into old Salamano, my next

door neighbour. He had his dog with him. They have been together for

eight years … he beats the dog and swears at it. Then they both stop

on the pavement and swear at each other, the dog in terror, the man in

hatred … It’s been going on like that for eight years. Celeste always

says, ‘It’s dreadful’, but in fact you can never tell. (Camus, 1942/1982,

p. 31)

This demand for ambiguity, an unwillingness to judge according to principle, are

key themes of the stranger. Difference and lack of justification are the ‘terrible’ conse-

quences of absurd freedom. This disposition of the stranger unsettles those who live

by principle. In the context of Meursault’s promotion his boss is left bewildered:

I replied that you could never change your life, that in any case one life was

as good as another and that I wasn’t at all dissatisfied with mine here. He

looked upset … I’d rather not have upset him, but I couldn’t see any reason

for changing my life … I very soon realised that none of it really mattered.

(Camus, 1942/1982, p. 44)

For Camus’s characters choice cannot be made on principle alone. It is only

through solidarity and consequent dialogue that meaning is found and this, in turn, is

470 Aidan Curzon-Hobson

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Mid

dle

Ten

ness

ee S

tate

Uni

vers

ity]

at 0

9:02

05

Sept

embe

r 20

13

where abstract principles can be mediated or at least subjected to the lived reality of

the community. These are the spaces where our ‘terrible’ freedom to construct mean-

ing is recognized (and demanded of us). Without this sense of solidarity and space,

Camus argues that servitude, falsehood and terror will dominate, each of which are

the ‘cause of silence between man, obscuring them from one another’ (Camus, 1951/

1956, p. 284).

In the context of rebellion Camus explains it thus. Again, one might see the syner-

gies with established educational thought:

Rebellion itself only aspires to the relative and can only promise an assured

dignity coupled with a relative justice. It supposes a limit at which the com-

munity of man is established. Its universe is the universe of relative values.

(Camus, 1951/1956, p. 291)

Creativity

Creativity has a special place in Camus’s argument for the dialogical, critical encoun-

ter. I believe that it is a key process through which the sense of strangeness is

experienced, although The stranger has little if any explicit reference to the concept. It

does, however, suggest the creative disposition and its place in connecting with the

unknowable:

The hero of the book is condemned because he doesn’t play the game. In

this sense, he is an outsider to the society he lives, wandering on the fringe,

on the outskirts of life, solitary and sensual … But, contrary to appearances,

Meursault doesn’t want to make life simpler. He says what he is, he refuses

to hide his feelings and society immediately feels threatened. (Camus, 1942/

1982, p. 119)

Looking at creativity across other works by Camus, he describes it as ‘the heat of

battle’ embodying the ‘incessant movement of contradiction’ (Camus, 1951/1956,

p. 283). Camus advocates aspects of the artistic tradition to enlighten and unsettle,

‘leading us back to the origins of rebellion’ (p. 258).

In reflecting on the stranger’s capacity to unsettle through the novel or art gener-

ally, Camus offers us an interesting insight. Painting for Camus in particular lends

itself to forging creative space in which dialogue and community might evolve. In this

form he believes one can find a record of the unique, the specific, the opportunity to

record the shop floor, the worker in the street and the poverty of a room. This is the

subject content that Camus argues is the most appropriate context for art and the

stranger. It records dialogue and ambiguity, and in doing so demands of its viewers a

dislocation of sorts in defence of the particular rather than the abstract. Its value is

that it is a highly ambiguous and perhaps dislocating activity——giving rise to the

absurd: ‘art realizes without apparent effort the reconciliation of the unique with the

universal of which Hegel dreamed’ (Camus, 1951/1956, p. 256). In this sense art

does no favours for the absolute, it cannot support a totalizing principle. The tight-

rope of the stranger and Meursault resonates here:

Confronting the Absurd 471

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Mid

dle

Ten

ness

ee S

tate

Uni

vers

ity]

at 0

9:02

05

Sept

embe

r 20

13

To create beauty, he must simultaneously reject reality and exalt certain of

its aspects … art disputes reality but does not hide from it. (Camus, 1951/

1956, p. 258)

In the novel, Camus gives the stranger much greater attention, and again here we

can see a pedagogy of sorts outlined for a confrontation with the absurd. Both reading

and writing the novel is for Camus a potential act of rebellion as it holds the promise

of fundamental questioning and the dislocation of certainty (see, for example, his

commentary on Kafka and hope in the appendix to The myth of Sisyphus). More than

other forms of creativity, Camus believes that the novel is the first to be repressed

through the totalitarian revolution. For this reason it stands out historically as an

important stage for the stranger brave enough to exercise a freedom oriented to soli-

darity. The reader of the novel is in turn also a rebel or an outsider questioning his or

her sense of unity. This is not always assured, but creativity embodies choice. Like an

educator:

By the treatment that the artist imposes on reality he declares the intensity

of his rejection. (Camus, 1951/1956, p. 268)

Hence, could it be that education, like art and creativity in general, is the mediating

process where lived experience is elevated for the stranger?

Real literary creation uses reality and only reality with all its warmth and its

blood, its passion and its outcries. By doing this it adds something that

transfigures reality. (Camus, 1951/1956, p. 269)

Diversity and Hope

This is perhaps the most complex theme across the work of Albert Camus. Similar to

the characteristics discussed above, diversity and hope are a source of challenge for

Camus against the totalitarian approaches found in the political and social apparatus

of society:

So for me Meursault is not a reject, but a poor and naked man, in

love with the sun which leaves no shadows … So one wouldn’t be far

wrong in seeing The Stranger as the story of a man who, without any

heroic pretensions agrees to die for the truth. (Camus, 1942/1982, p.

119)

This signals a humility in relation to hope, a call to humble arms against totalizing

ideals in particular the enforcement of justice or a history as all-encompassing ideal

(or ends). Hope in particular is seen by Camus (although often only explicitly dis-

cussed in the negative sense of nostalgia) as the conduit for moderation, care and

love. Remaining in the face or confrontation with the absurd:

The wondrous peace of this sleeping summer flooded into me … So close

to death, mother must have felt liberated and ready to live her life again.

No one, no one at all had any right to cry over her. And I too felt ready to

472 Aidan Curzon-Hobson

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Mid

dle

Ten

ness

ee S

tate

Uni

vers

ity]

at 0

9:02

05

Sept

embe

r 20

13

live my life again … I realized that I’d been happy, and that I was still

happy. (Camus, 1942/1982, p. 117)

Hope in this sense is a demand and openness for the absurd and the stranger. As

above, this is not the same concept of ‘hope’ that Camus targets as inauthentic——a

form of bad faith. It is instead a hope for a diversity that comes with the sensation

of strangeness, inherent within an interaction with others and the shadowing of

individual thought and action. This is a disposition that is unwilling to relinquish

ambiguity and therefore, deliberately, lives in diversity:

To work and create for nothing, to sculpture in clay, to know that one’s

creation has no future, to see one’s work destroyed in a day while being

aware that, fundamentally, this has no more importance than building for

centuries——this is the difficult wisdom that absurd thought sanctions. Per-

forming these two tasks simultaneously, negating on the one hand and mag-

nifying on the other, is the way open to the absurd creator. (Camus, 1951/

1956, p. 103)

This quote reflects strongly some of the themes already established in educational phi-

losophy and it reflects the humility found in the stranger and the conscious rejection

of one’s ability to grasp and construct a totality. This suggests a sense of oneself con-

stantly in change, an existential state of becoming rather than arrival, and it brings to

mind Camus’s scathing attack on those who usurp the ambiguity of meaning and his-

tory to fulfil their need for absolutes:

Any thought that abandons unity glorifies diversity. And diversity is

the home of art … Thus I ask of absurd creation what I required

from thought——revolt, freedom, and diversity. (Camus, 1942/1955b, p.

107)

Camus explains this hope for diversity using language such as ‘utter futility’——‘lost

causes’——and his story of Sisyphus ‘signifying nothing’ demands that the efforts of

the stranger too should be ‘exerted towards accomplishing nothing’ (Camus, 1942/

1955b, p. 108). This is not nihilism but a warning that meaning must be found, for

the stranger, in diversity and community. The stranger has no recourse. His charac-

ters refuse nihilism and exalt our best efforts but recognize the failure and the indiffer-

ence that others (and the universe) will show in the future towards them. It is a most

lucid form of learning embodying the disjuncture of the stranger. Could this be rele-

vant for both the teacher and student?

The workman of today works every day in his life at the same tasks and this

fate is no less absurd [than that of Sisyphus]. But it is tragic only at the rare

moments when it becomes conscious. Sisyphus, proletarian of the gods,

powerless and rebellious, knows the whole extent of his wretched condition;

it is what he thinks of during his descent. The lucidity that was to constitute

his torture at the same time crowns his victory. (Camus, 1942/1955b,

p. 109)

Confronting the Absurd 473

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Mid

dle

Ten

ness

ee S

tate

Uni

vers

ity]

at 0

9:02

05

Sept

embe

r 20

13

This might again reflect the disposition of the stranger (and perhaps our liberating

educators and students) who transform, knowing the futility of effort, our understand-

ing of one’s self in the world, questioning the conditions under which we live and

demanding the limits which we cannot exceed. In confronting the absurd in this way,

by learning as a stranger, educators and students might be considered Camusian-type

rebels as they explore diversity and the fundamental questioning across the existential,

political and metaphysical.

Conclusion

I began this article wondering whether there was a place for Camus’s stranger in edu-

cation and reflecting on The stranger for hints as to what this picture might look like.

Meursault shows us clearly the contradictions and the perils of the stranger in society.

But by highlighting this and by drawing on some of Camus’s positive philosophy,

would it be possible now to state that, given the summary, we can start to trace a

coherent set of characteristics: that across the concepts of the stranger, the rebel and

the artist, there is a picture of what Camus would demand of the teacher, the student

and the learning environment? All of these characteristics reflect the importance of

certain traits of the stranger and the sense of strangeness. They mirror Camus’s posi-

tive reflections on his own education in The first man and have synergies with educa-

tional philosophy.

The stranger would certainly be at the heart of this picture; creative and strong in

the face of doubt, lucidity, ambiguity and contradiction. The stranger’s demand

would be a confrontation, for a pedagogy based on limits and moderation, under-

pinned by a lucidity of the absurd. Given this, does it not fit what many demand

already of education——that in the face of overwhelming odds and unknowability we

find moments of fundamental yet (humiliated) insight?

The absurd man, when he contemplates his torment, silences all the idols.

In the universe suddenly restored to its silence, the myriad wondering little

voices of the earth rise up. (Camus, 1951/1956, p. 110)

References

Camus, A. (1955a). The artist and his time. In A. Camus, The myth of Sisyphus (J. O’Brien,

Trans.) (pp. 185–192). London: Penguin. (Original work published 1942)

Camus, A. (1955b). The myth of Sisyphus (J. O’Brien, Trans.). London: Penguin. (Original

work published 1942)

Camus, A. (1956). The rebel (A. Bower, Trans.). New York: Vintage Books. (Original work

published 1951)

Camus, A. (1960). The plague (S. Gilbert, Trans.). London: Penguin. (Original work published

1947)

Camus, A. (1982). The stranger (J. Laredo, Trans.). London: Penguin. (Original work published

1942)

Roberts, P. (2008). Bridging literary and philosophical genres: Judgement, reflection and educa-

tion in Camus’s The fall. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 40, 873–887.

Wilson, C. (1956). The outsider. New York: Penguin.

474 Aidan Curzon-Hobson

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Mid

dle

Ten

ness

ee S

tate

Uni

vers

ity]

at 0

9:02

05

Sept

embe

r 20

13