Paper II Section I – Module A – Essay on The Stranger & The Meursault Investigation

Resource Description

Essay Rewrite MOD A (Trials): 20/20

Paper II

Section I

 

Question:

Although the texts align in representing society’s impact on the individual, Daoud’s The Meursault Investigation collides with Camus’ The Stranger in its postcolonial reframing of the earlier text.

To what extent is this statement true in light of your exploration of Textural Conversations?

 

Prescribed texts:

The Stranger (Albert Camus 1942), The Meursault Investigation (Kamel Daoud 2013)

 

Through the creation of a dialogue, an intertextual engagement, we find new truths that emerge in the commonalities and aligning values across cultures. The recontextualization of individual experience from a different perspective allows for the universal ideas from separate cultures to resonate and be extended; while those which collide with reductive simplification we reframed and form new meaning. Albert Camus The Stranger (1942) and Kamel Daoud’s post-colonial revisioning The Meursault Investigation (2013) form a emergent value, as common-universal themes emerge through intertextuality. Camus work operates in response to the changing modality of French, and by effect Western society as it moved into modernity, extending the values formed in the French Revolution of 1789 of Liberte, Egalite and Fraternite to form a new human, Meursault, the embodiment of these values. Kamel Daoud engages in a post-colonial reframing of these values asserted by Camus, by extending a similar individualist mode of narration through Harun, just as the Algerian War of 1954 – 1962 thought to revolutionise the Algerian identity from a Pied-Noir imposers, while Islamic Fundamentalism would have the same oppressive and axiomatic modality of set social behaviours. It is through the holistic contribution of both texts, the dialogue that is created, that we as an audience gain a better understanding of truth and value across contexts and cultures.

 

Language constructs and frames our societal truths in a boundary of understanding, forming a set of axiomatic beliefs and social norms that determine the way we live. Camus contextually dissonant novel to his time, The Stranger realises the ennui of solipsist Meursault who loses personal expression and attempts to live in ‘Good Faith’ in a world of complexity and socialised normality. Camus is contending against the socially acceptable, revealing how language, the very mode of communication is fallible and leads to miscommunication and an inauthentic expression of ones interior world. In effect, Camus critiques the reduction in individual agency and expression that the collective society have had on individuals like Meursault. Camus, through the character relationship of Marie and Meursault, forms a microcosm to discover truth, just as Marie’s banal question of “do you want to marry me?” receives the apathetic response of “ it doesn’t make any difference” from Meursault, we as an audience are illuminated to the fallibility of language to authentically portray ones interior state. This is reiterated as Marie argues that these formalities are “a serious thing”, to which the meaninglessness of language is exposed, as Meursault argues “No”, giving no acknowledgement of its value. Camus further extends the breakdown of language in a collective and macro-sphere. Through the court hearing of Meursault, who fells inclined to “blurt out that it was because of the sun” that he committed murder, which in response ‘people laughed”. Camus is reproaching the harmful and inaccurate nature of societal truths to resonate with individual experience. Meursault’s disconnection from the majority of society is embodied in his actions and failure to care for “trivial” matters like his “mothers funeral”. Camus enlightens our understanding of 1940’s Algeria, a location in which a multi-plurality of cultures, language and histories form a reductive breakdown in language that fail to give individual empowerment and agency.