Grammar, Judgment, and the Unnamed Dead in Albert Camus’s The Stranger

I. Mère Décédée

Six words, and none of them his. Mère décédée. Enterrement demain. Sentiments distingués. The home for the aged at Marengo, eighty kilometers from Algiers, composes the first sentence anyone in the book makes about the dead woman, and it composes it the way institutions compose everything, by subtraction. No article, no verb that would need a subject, a past participle standing where a death should stand, and then a closing formula lifted from the bottom of an administrative letter, the kind of phrase a clerk types without reading. Matthew Ward renders it “Mother deceased. Funeral tomorrow. Faithfully yours.” Stuart Gilbert, in 1946, gave the wire a heart it did not have, “Your mother passed away. Funeral tomorrow. Deep sympathy,” and the small kindness of that translation is already an act of the kind the novel will spend its second half exposing: someone supplying the feeling a document did not contain. There is no sympathy in the French. There is a form of words that a home keeps on hand because its residents die.

Meursault’s response is the first judgment he makes in the book, and it is a judgment about language. Cela ne veut rien dire. “That doesn’t mean anything.” The sentence has been quoted for eighty years as the motto of a man to whom nothing means anything, a misreading so durable that it functions as a second telegram, sent on his behalf by readers who never asked him. What he means is narrower and more exact. The wire does not tell him what day his mother died. It reached him today; she may have died yesterday; a participle has no calendar. He is reading closely. A man indifferent to meaning would not have noticed the gap. Meursault notices it and then does the only thing his situation allows, which is to guess, and he tells us he is guessing.

That is the whole of the novel’s first paragraph. It turns on the failure of one piece of paper to say when a woman died. Everything the courtroom will later do to Meursault begins here in reverse: a document about his mother, composed by strangers, which he refuses to read as saying more than it says.

Before the telegram there is the sentence that precedes it, the most translated four words in modern French prose. Aujourd’hui, maman est morte. Gilbert began the English life of the book with “Mother died today. Or, maybe, yesterday; I can’t be sure,” and for four decades the man English readers met was the man who called his mother Mother. Joseph Laredo, in 1982, kept “Mother.” Sandra Smith, in 2012, chose “My mother died today,” which is grammatically warmer and tonally more distant still, a sentence one might say to a colleague. Ward, in 1988, left the French word standing inside the English: “Maman died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don’t know.” The decision, and a good deal of commentary since, treats the word as a correction of character. A man who says maman is not the man who says Mother. Ryan Bloom, arguing in 2012 that the order of the French should also be kept, so that the sentence opens on “Today,” was making a related point: this is a book in which the day matters more than the death, and the syntax should say so before the meaning does.

The debate has a slightly comic quality, four translators and eighty years of readers crouched over four words, but the words deserve it, because the novel’s second half is a dispute about this: what a man’s language reveals of his heart, and who gets to decide. The prosecutor will build a soul out of details. The translators built one out of a noun. “Mother” gave the Anglophone world a Meursault stiffened at the throat, and the reputation for coldness that attached to him in English owes something to a lexical decision made in 1946. Maman is the word of the mouth and the kitchen, the word a child uses and an adult in France goes on using without embarrassment for as long as the woman is alive, and afterward. It is the one intimate word Meursault owns, and he never lets go of it. He uses it on the last page of the book, in the cell, in the hour when he understands why she took a fiancé at the end of her life. He does not, that I can find, say ma mère once in his own voice. The people who will describe him to a jury never say anything else.

That distribution of vocabulary is not an accident of realism. At the home, the director speaks of “Madame Meursault” and “your mother”; the caretaker says madame votre mère, the tradesman’s courtesy; the priest, the undertaker’s men, the nurse, the friends who come to sit the night, all of them handle the dead woman with a formal noun. In the second part, the presiding judge, the prosecutor, the defense attorney, the witnesses, and the chaplain will speak of “the mother,” “the deceased,” “his mother,” “your mother.” The child’s word exists in this book only in the narration. It is never spoken aloud by anyone, so far as the text reports, and it is never heard by the court. The jury that condemns Meursault as a man ...