#L'étranger

[bernardmarx]

[wolfsnape]

[bookfirstlinetourney]

Round 1

I’ll make my report as if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of the imagination.

-The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin

Aujourd'hui, maman est morte. Ou peut être hier, je ne sais pas. J'ai reçu un télégramme de l'asile : « Mère décédée. Enterrement demain. Sentiments distingués. » Cela ne veut rien dire. C'était peut être hier.

(Mother died today. Or, maybe, yesterday; I can’t be sure. The telegram from the Home says: YOUR MOTHER PASSED AWAY. FUNERAL TOMORROW. DEEP SYMPATHY. Which leaves the matter doubtful; it could have been yesterday.)

-L'étranger, Albert Camus

I’ve confessed everything and I’d like to be hanged. Now, if you please.

-Chime, Franny Billingsley

[montagne-russe]

shooting him with my lyrics beam

[crydadoll]

I was thinking about how some points in Electroma's history is similar with some ones in "Létranger / The Stranger" from Albert Camus. The main "heroes" from both universes just want to live their lives in the way they think it is better for them. And because of this, they both (Meursault and the bots) are condemned by society. Instead of change their minds, they prefered die following their ideals. Other common point between the histories is the sun. The sun was the reason for their doomed. In "The Stranger", because of the sun, Meursault shot the guy and was arrested; and in Electroma, because of sun, the bot's 'human's faces' started to melt, making the other bots pursue them. I'm very happy to realise this. The Stranger is one of my fav books. And i love it how Electroma is similar with it. <3

[have-you-read-this-short-fiction]

*Originally published in French under the title "L'Étranger"

[endworldbroadcast]

[ Part 2 of this analysis ]

Half-formed thoughts that I'm too sick to think about too deeply but re: 'The reason Meursault shot that man was because he actually did care for his mother' in disconnected paragraphs:

It's notable that he refers to her as 'Maman': the English version (that I am familiar with at least) translates this as 'Mother', which is technically indeed what it means, but any English speaker can attest to refer to your mother as 'Mother' sounds clinical and detached. 'Maman' does not quite have the child-like quality English speakers associate with, say, 'Mommy' but it's definitely a warmer title than 'Mother' that already paints a particular image about the relationship they have. This may be the most important point, but besides that...

Meursault does have emotions and he expresses as such in the story, it's just that the subtext/follow-up to his expressions is that it makes no difference either way. An 'obvious' thing that may be silly to point, probably, but I'm surprised at the number of times I have seen it simply be said that the 'crux' of his character is he feels nothing.

Since I like to think of him as a quintessential schizoid (who doesn't), my interpretation of him is that he experiences the same dilemma many schizoids do: he is superficially apathetic but is in reality incredibly sensitive, even if he himself may not be 'aware' of it. It's a case of using the maximum of your energy to suppress the maximum of your ego: nothing feels meaningful or important because the overwhelming nature of emotion is eschewed from the selfhood.

Despite this, Meursault would be a person who is sensitive to change. He gets irritated when others push him to do things, even if he responds with passivity (avoidance, 'I'll just go along with it and be done with it') to hide it. This in part can be interpreted as perhaps apathy, perhaps the whole 'don't like people intruding upon me' feeling, but I also feel it's something like... 'I don't see the point of doing that because it makes no difference even if I did.'

The story textually demonstrates his apathy (for example, when he's asked about moving for a job and he doesn't really care because life's the same everywhere) but I think his apathy is deeper than just... well, apathy. When he says none of it makes a difference, it's not that he doesn't actually believe anything will change in a literal sense but that he doesn't feel like any of it will be meaningful to him. His default response is to try to be immovable whether he does it through action or inaction: that is, he'll resist minor irritation but also go along with what would be considered major decisions (marriage, moving for the job).

And that seems contradictory at first (wouldn't that be a big change?) but Meursault's avoidance and sensitivity has come to a point where he evaluates reality not through its material state but through personal abstract connections. If he goes through a big change like marriage or moving or even going to prison, to deal with the disruption in his material reality he tries to tell himself that it is not different in an abstract sense: how he is within. It's like a classic schizoid schism where things that happen to the external self/the 'body' are considered irrelevant to the internal self/the 'mind'.

It's notable that when he's in prison that one thing he thinks about is something he learned from his mother: the idea that there is nothing in the world that one cannot learn to stand. It may just be a generic shibboleth but I always found this noteworthy because it's the principle from which I myself deal with my own issues: of course material reality has a tangible effect on you, and it can change in major, unpredictable ways. And you can't control it! And to deal with that lack of control instead of thinking about things externally (what can be done with the circumstances?) you think you can learn to live through it by controlling it internally, that is, making 'life' be nothing more than a test of endurance, a series of learning how to make yourself tolerate.

I think the fact that in prison, his thoughts surround his mother quite a bit is also evidence enough that, while he may not love her in a 'traditional' way, still had a relationship with her distinct from everyone else.

All that aside what actually stood out to me is when questioned for his motive for the murder, what he points out is his irritation with the sun. On a surface level, his apathy is brought up again: his irritation with the sun in his eyes and the heat of the day is tantamount to a man's life. He lacks the emotional capacity to internalise murder the way a 'normal' man would.

This stood out to me in particular because he brought up the sun before: during his mother's funeral.

It's a very loose association that only exists in abstraction and not in reality, but Meursault is exactly the kind of person who lives in abstraction and not reality: the sun is something he associates with his mother's funeral, ergo, it symbolises a period of major 'change' that he has yet to learn how to process and bury, even if he appears to be apathetic to it all.

When he confronts the man he shot, it is indeed not about the man at all, but a looser connection that only exists in his mind: that man, the sun, his mother's death.

I don't really think he 'loved' his mother the way one usually expects love to be, even if only because I'm projecting my schizoidism of being unable to 'love' from being unable to feel like one is actually 'in' material reality. But what mattered is that his relationship with his mother was distinct—he knew and remembered her in a way he did for nobody else. So when she died, perhaps her being lost as an individual may have been received with 'apathy' but it still had a more abstract meaning of marking an irreversible change.

When all other events, people and places are indistinct Meursault can convince himself that swapping them around will make no difference: material reality is a meaningless blur, so in his own abstractions objects are interchangeable with one another. Thus when things change, he can mentally operate as if the new is indistinguishable from the old. But Maman was someone he 'recognised' so with her loss there was no internal object to immediately replace it with: it presented a challenge of being a change he could recognise and thus could not deny nor ignore.

Shooting the man was something he himself could not explain in logical, material terms because it really did mean nothing in material reality, and he was aware of it. He knows he has no 'real' motive and that he didn't even know the guy. But in the abstract reality from which he operates from, the man's presence was associated with the sun and thus occupied the same metaphorical space of his mother's death. Shooting him was, in an irrational way, a way of seizing control against the feeling that there was a change in his life that he could neither move back from nor pretend made no real difference.

[limethechef]

He could be in this very room! He could be you! He could be me! He could even be- oh wait, it is me! Well, that settles it. Off to visit your mother!

[quote-tournament]

Tumblr kicked me off randomly idk if my ask sent but if not…I also wanted to ask what your favorite quote is, not necessarily one that’s competing in this bracket 🐝

Ho friend, that is so difficult for me to choose... You know, my entire desk is tagged with the quotes I liked over the years (I might keep a clear spot for this tournament's winner)

My top 3 favourite quotes are :

Number 3:

Can you feel your heart burning? Can you feel the struggle within? The fear within me is beyond anything your soul can make. You cannot kill me in a way that matters

-the mushroom, @/personsonable

This is the quote that made me create a Tumblr account, it is also the quote that started the quote desk™

Number 2 :

Aujourd'hui, maman est morte. Ou peut être hier, je ne sais pas. J'ai reçu un télégramme de l'asile : « Mère décédée. Enterrement demain. Sentiments distingués. » Cela ne veut rien dire. C'était peut être hier.

-Albert Camus, L'étranger

(translation:

Mother died today. Or, maybe, yesterday; I can’t be sure. The telegram from the Home says: YOUR MOTHER PASSED AWAY. FUNERAL TOMORROW. DEEP SYMPATHY. Which leaves the matter doubtful; it could have been yesterday.)

That was the fastest I have ever been hooked into a book. I know it's already such a well-known quote, but the hold it had on my 16 years old self was ungodly. Reading this book was supposed to be school work, but I had barely finished the first sentence I knew it was living work for me. I don't think the English translation has the same gut wrenching quality tho

And now *drum roll* number 1 !

I love you. I'm glad I exist.

-Wendy Cope, The Orange

That is such a nice verse to end the poem on. I have written the entire poem on the side of the desk, so that it is at eye level when I'm in my bed, and I can see it no matter where I stand in my room. It's the general you. You random people in daily life, you who reads this, you the concept of time, you myself. I might get tattooed a peeled orange just for this poem

[sofiaisanalien]

Book recommendations?

Mmmm let me see, I think I like many genres but I only hate romance, the typical "man×woman" romance, like Colleen Hoover books. Here are some of the books that I like:

Radio Silence, by Alice Oseman (and Solitaire even though I'm only halfway through it)

The catcher in the rye, by J.D.Salinger

Almond, by Wong-Pyung Sohn

The perks of being a wallflower, by Stephen Chbosky

The stranger, by Albert Camus

The Silent Patient, by Alex Michaelides

Literally any tale by Edgar Allan Poe

The Midnight Library, by Matt Haig

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and his years of pilgrimage, by Haruki Murakami

No longer human, by Osamu Dazai

Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury

[fidjiefidjie]

Bonne matinée 💙 🌍 💜

HK & les Saltimbanks et Flavia Coelho 🎶 L'étranger

(Les temps modernes)

[wolfsnape]

Mais du coup, les gens qui pensent que L'étranger c'est le meilleur classique, on est d'accord qu'ils ont lu aucun autre classique ? C'est même pas le meilleur Camus

[thestranger-albertcamus]

[swaggy-kat-me0wy-meow]

SINCE WHEN BOOKS COST SO MUCH MONEY?? like no wonder kids dont read omg.

No but like.. REALLY, LIKE THERES NO WAY CLASSIC LITTERATURE PIECES SHOULD COST THIS MUCH ESPECIALLY WHEN IT'S OFTEN REQUIRED IN CLASS. LIKE IT FEELS REALLY PREDATORY??? I HATE CAPITALISM. LIKE. I WILL STEAL NOW, I DONT CARE ANYMORE. EFF IT. STEALING TIME, PEOPLE START STEALING.

[le-nid-du-poete]

Pour que tout soit consommé, pour que je me sente moins seul, il me restait à souhaiter qu'il y ait beaucoup de spectateurs le jour de mon exécution et qu'ils m'accueillent avec des cris de haine.

L’étranger. Albert Camus.

[illusoryhaze]

i finished the stranger