How absurd is this?

I have a confession to make. For all my pretend erudition, for all my supposed literary cred, I was hiding a deep dark secret. A horrific shame far worse than any mark that Hester Prynne would ever have to bear. I, dear reader, had never read anything by Albert Camus.

Well, now I have. I just finished The Stranger (and I read it in English because my other secret shame is that I'm monolingual) and now a few pieces fall together. It would be interesting to teach this book alongside Richard Wright's Native Son and Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy, since trials figure so heavily in all three novels; both Dreiser and Wright layer on the detail and interpretation until you're gasping for air, but Camus just lets everything sit out there in the air, like a slight garnish meant more to show off the simple beauty of the plate. How French of him.

Meursault's of-repeated phrase "it didn't mean anything" sums up the protagonist's view pretty well until his execution nears, at which point he realizes that he's simply a cog in society's vast machine, playing his role as condemned criminal. As I'm reading this section I'm thinking to myself "OK, Foucault Discipline and Punish, the docile body etc." Dig on this:

So the thing that bothered me the most was that the condemned man had to hope the machine [the guillotine] would work the first time. And I say that's wrong. And in a way I was right. But in another way I was forced to admit that that was the whole secret of good organization. In other words, the condemned man was forced into a kind of moral collaboration. It was in his interest that everything [his execution] go off with out a hitch.

The novel ends with Meursault embracing his role as murderer, wishing for the hate of the crowd who will gather to watch the execution. It's the closest to any sort of meaning that he allows himself to create for the world.

This reaction is eerily similar to Wright's Bigger Thomas, who rejects his lawyer's defense that social conditions produced the murder of Mary Dalton, preferring instead to assert it as his act, understanding that if he claimed it as his own he claimed subjectivity. However, whereas Meursault accepts his role as murderer as a role to be played in a pageant that has no real meaning, Bigger takes on his part in order to break free from the pageant that objectified him.

Now I'm itching to get back in the classroom. Well, maybe next spring.