One of the constants features of her world is the changing identity of characters, who hide behind different names or sexes, and who often lead simultaneously two or more parallel lives. In this world of ontological instability, only objects and the natural world remain the same. Thus, for example, the Renaissance Cardinal in ‘The Deluge at Nordeney’ turns out at the end of the story to be the valet Kasparson, who killed his master and took his place. But the apotheosis of this switching of identities is Pellegrina Leoni, nicknamed Lucifera or Donna Quixotta de La Mancha, whose story appears among myriad of other stories in ‘The Dreamers’. An opera singer who lost her voice through shock in a fire at La Scala in Milan during a performance of Don Giovanni, she has her admirers believe that she is dead. She is helped in her plan by her admirer and her shadow, the fabulously rich Jew Marcus Coroza, who follows her throughout the world, forbidden to speak to her or be seen by her, but always on hand to help her escape should an emergency arise. Pellegrina changes name, personality, lovers, countries — Switzerland, Rome, France — and profession — prostitute, artisan, revolutionary, aristocrat guarding the memory of General Zumalacárregui — and dies, finally, in an Alpine monastery, in a snowstorm, surrounded by four abandoned lovers who knew her at different times and in different guises, and only now discover her peripatetic identity thanks to Marcus Coroza. The Chinese box — stories within stories — is a technique used with admirable skill in this tale to piece together, like a jigsaw puzzle, through accounts that at first seem to have nothing in common, the fragmented and multiple existence of Pellegrina Leoni, will-o’-the-wisp, perpetual actress, made — like all Isak Dinesen’s characters — not of flesh and blood but of dream, fantasy, grace and humour.
Isak Dinesen’s language, like her culture and the topics she deals with, does not correspond to the models of the time; it is also a case apart, an inspired anomaly. When Seven Gothic Tales was published, its language disconcerted Anglo-Saxon critics with its slightly old-fashioned elegance, its exquisite, irreverent nature, its word play and sudden displays of erudition and its divorce from the English language spoken on the streets. But it was also disconcerting because of its humour, the delicate, cheerful, irony with which these tales refer to indescribable cruelty, vileness and savagery as if they were trivial, everyday occurrences. Isak Dinesen’s humour is the great shock absorber of all the excesses of her world — be they human or spiritual — the ingredient that humanises the inhuman and gives a kindly appearance to what, without it, would cause repugnance or panic. There is nothing like reading her to prove the adage that anything can be told as long as one knows how to tell it.
Literature, as she conceived it, was something that writers of her time found horrifying: an escape from real life, an entertaining game. Today things have changed, and readers understand her better. By making literature a journey into the imaginary, the fragile Baroness de Rungstedlund was not evading any moral responsibility. On the contrary, she helped — by being distracting, bewitching and amusing — to placate that need that in human beings is as old as eating and clothing themselves: the hunger for unreality.
Paris, April 1999
L’Étranger
The Outsider Must Die
Along with L’Homme révolté (The Rebel), L’Étranger (The Outsider) is Camus’s best book. It seems that the project was born in August 1937, albeit in a very vague way, when Camus was convalescing in a clinic in the Alps from one of the many relapses that he suffered following his attack of tuberculosis in 1930. In his Cahiers (Notebooks) he points out that he finished the novel in 1940. (But it was only published in 1942, by Gallimard, thanks to the support of André Malraux, who had been one of the literary models of the young Camus.)
The time and circumstances in which The Outsider was conceived are significant. The icy pessimism that pervades the references to society and the human condition in the story clearly stems in great part from the illness that weakened his fragile body over decades, and the anguished climate in Europe at the end of the inter-war years and at the outbreak of the Second World War.
The book was interpreted as a metaphor of the injustice of the world and of life, a literary illustration of that ‘absurd sensibility’ that Camus had described in Le Mythe de Sisyphe (The Myth of Sisyphus), an essay that appeared shortly after the novel. It was Sartre who best linked both texts, in a brilliant commentary on The Outsider. Meursault was seen as the incarnation of a man hurled into a senseless existence, the victim of social mechanisms that beneath the disguise of big words — The Law, Justice — were simply unjustifiable and irrational. Like the anonymous heroes of Kafka, Meursault personified the pathetic situation of the individual whose fate depends on forces that are uncontrollable as well as unintelligible and arbitrary.
But soon after there emerged a ‘positive’ interpretation of the noveclass="underline" Meursault was seen as the prototype of authentic man, free from conventions, incapable of deception or self-deception, whom society condemns because he cannot tell lies or fake what he does not feel. Camus himself supported this reading of the character, writing in a prologue to a US edition of the noveclass="underline"
The hero of the book is condemned because he doesn’t play the game…he refuses to lie. Lying is not only saying what isn’t true. It is also, in fact especially, saying more than is true and, in the case of the human heart, saying more than one feels. We all do it, every day, to make life simpler. But, contrary to appearance, Meursault doesn’t want to make life simpler. He says what he is, he refuses to hide his feelings and society immediately feels threatened…So one wouldn’t be wrong in seeing The Outsider as the story of a man who, without any heroic pretensions, agrees to die for the truth.25
This is a perfectly valid interpretation — although, as we shall see, it is incomplete — and it has come to occupy almost canonical status in studies on Camus. The Outsider thus becomes a denunciation of the tyranny of conventions and of the lies on which social life is based. A martyr to the truth, Meursault goes to prison, is sentenced and presumably guillotined for his ontological inability to disguise his feelings and do what other men do: play a part. It is impossible for Meursault, for example, to pretend to feel more grief than he actually feels and to say the things that, in these circumstances, one expects a son to say. Nor can he — despite the fact that his life depends on it — pretend in court to feel remorse for the death that he has caused. This is what he is punished for, not his crime.
The critic who has developed this argument most convincingly is Robert Champigny in his book on the novel entitled Sur un héros païen (Gallimard, 1959). In it he states that Meursault is condemned because he rejects ‘theatrical society’, which he defines as a society not made up of natural beings but rather one in which hypocrisy holds sway. With his ‘pagan’ — that is, non-romantic, non-Christian — behaviour, Meursault is a living challenge to the ‘collective myth’. His probable death by guillotine is, therefore, that of a free man, a heroic and edifying act.