Lacan e& Literature PURLOINED PRETEXTS Ben StoltzfusLACAN AND LITERATURE Purloined Pretexts BEN STOLTZFUS STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK PRESSChapter 7 ALBERT Camus: THE STRANGER If this event was recognized as being the cause of the symptom, it was because the putting into words of the event (in the patient’s “stories") determined the lifting of the symptom. —Jacques Lacan, “The function and field of speech and language in psychoanalysis” Alienation, not bliss, is the dominant theme in Camus’s first published novel, The Stranger. Nonetheless, there is a wor(l}d of dif- ference between Meursault, the alienated narrator of part 1 of L'Etranger, and Meursault, the reconciled narrator of part 2. If the so- called primal scene is the cause of his symptoms—lethargy and indif- ference, coupled with anger and alienation—then putting the event into words (the killing of the Arab) enables Meursault to understand himself in relation to the “indifference” of the world. At the end of the novel he assumes the meaning of his life and the consequences of his death. However, before we proceed with this line of inquiry, that is, a Lacanian exegesis, we need to look briefly at the reception the novel has received since its publication in 1942. Readers have offered many explanations for Meursault’s char- acter, his behavior, and his enigmatic shooting of the Arab. Meursault is sometimes viewed as indifferent, callous, and shal- low—an individual who is alienated from society and from himself. At other times he is described as a person who is honest to a fault, a man who is unwilling to compromise with the system. René Girard says that “Meursault is the fictional embodiment of the nihilistic 116The Stranger 119 selves into the silence of the narrative gap—the silence between the first shot and the four subsequent ones that Meursault pumps into the inert body of the Arab. Whereas Meursault fills the gap with the light of the sun, the magistrate fills it with his need to believe in a Christian God. The death of the Arab always raises two fundamental ques- tions: Why did Meursault kill him? And why, after the first shot, did he shoot four more times into the corpse? Meursault says that it was because of the sun, but his judges, not to mention many readers, do not understand how the sun could influence him to such a degree. Indeed, the question of his guilt or innocence hinges on each reader's reaction to Meursault’s assertion. Those who believe him foreground his honesty, while those who doubt him devalue the sun’s complic- ity. Everything depends on our interpretation of nature’s role. However, before proceeding with a Lacanian reading of L’Etranger, a reading which, I believe, resolves the question of the sun’s part in the death of the Arab, it will perhaps be useful to summarize the views of Freudian commentators. Psychoanalytic studies of Camus’s works in general and of L’Etranger in particular began with an article by Arminda A. de Pichon-Riviére and Willy Baranger. According to them Meursault’s relations with his mother are marked by feelings of sadomasochism, while her death evokes in him reactions of guilt accompanied by schizophrenic symptoms. In order to escape this sadistic guilt and rejoin his mother in death, Meursault commits suicide. This, they say, is the meaning of the shooting of the Arab and of his failure to defend himself in court.” Julian L. Stamm interprets the murder of the Arab as a symptom of Meursault’s unconscious homosexual sadomasochistic fantasies. The shooting is an ejaculation, and the four additional shots are a discharge of tension that is both aggressive and sexual. The entire scene, says Stamm, is analogous to the “orgiastic peak in the male and the gradual detumescence.” Even the glare of the sun “expresses the seething homosexual desires within him [Meursault] . . . as well as his passive wish to be pene- trated by these rays.”* Whereas the magistrate fills the gap in the narrative with Christianity, Stamm fills the silence between the first shot and the others with homosexuality. Brée fills it with hon- esty; Girard with delinquency; Sartre with Meursault’s refusal to play the game; Champigny with Epicurean heroism, Fitch with tem- poral distance; and Wagner with ineptness. We each read the book with our own unconscious desire.120 Lacan and Literature Alain Costes provides the first Freudian analysis of Camus’s work as a whole. Costes stresses the alleged origins of the schizophrenic symptoms that he finds in an early biographical piece, the one in which Camus describes an assault on his mother one evening by an unknown assailant. The incident is interpreted by Costes as an oedipal phantasm whose reverberations reinforce the author’s sadism, masochism, and guilt. Costes concludes that all of Camus’s work is a projection of his unconscious longing for his mother, a need to transcend the void of her silence (she spoke little and seemed reluctant to show her feelings). Camus’s discourse, says Costes, “emanates directly and unmistakenly from incestuous desire” (“émane directement du pur désir incestueux”).* Jean Gassin analyzes the underlying symbols and images in Camus’s work, and, like Costes, he sees Camus’s relationship with his mother as the key. For Gassin, however, the guillotine, like the Arab’s knife flashing in the sun, and the piece of shrapnel that killed Camus’ father during the war, is the essential symbol because it rep- resents the image of primary castration and death. However, Gassin does not analyze the scene of the shooting of the Arab because he believes that everything about it has already been said.* A Lacanian reading does, nonetheless, cast a different light on the event and it is useful, therefore, to present the sun’s complicity in the shooting of the Arab in Lacanian terms. Costes, while maintaining that a work of art should be interpreted as a dream or as a symptom, but seem- ingly unaware, in 1973, of Lacan’s Ecrits, wonders how conceptually to connect a spoken discourse with a written one (“La question demeure: Comment mener 4 bien cette transplantation massive de concepts, d’un matériel ‘parlé’ a un matériel ‘écrit’?”).* The exciting and perhaps not surprising aspect of Lacan’s insights into the struc- ture of language as a linguistic and semiotic system is that they con- firm Freud’s intuitions about the unconscious. All the Freudian anal- yses of Camus’s works use a biographical approach to literature and they resemble Marie Bonaparte’s exegesis of Edgar Allan Poe's “Purloined Letter,” as opposed to Lacan's purely textual analysis of the short story.” Different systems provide different foci of interpretation. Although my focus will be psychoanalytic, and Lacan’s own readings are Freudian, the difference between earlier Freudian readings of L’Etranger and mine is that the previous ones, in their pursuit of teleological traumas and symbolic manifestations, have tended to devalue the text in order to privilege significant moments in