APOLLONIAN/DIONYSIAN PREDICAMENT IN ALBERT CAMUS’ THE STRANGER
CHAPTER ONE
Introduction
1.1 Background of the Study
Each new narrative work arrives not unannounced, but comes laden with echoes from the literary tradition. For already occupying deserved spaces in the estate of world literature are narrative texts which, in broad terms, are either tragic or comic. Although fictional, the novel—a subtype of narrative—comprises a real world with its nexus of relationships: a language, characters and incidents. Not only does this inter connectivity lay bare the organic structure of the work (its textuality and originality), it prompts thought. To study a novel means to dissect, or rather, in Derridean terms, deconstruct the concatenation of incidents found within the narrative text, all in an effort to grasp the movement of thought. This is so because literature, as a symbolic form, to borrow Paul Ricoeur’s expression, “gives rise to thought” (Conflict of Interpretations 299). Hence a close reading results in what Martin Heidegger has called ‘unconcealment.’ The Heideggerian word is his translation of the Greek aletheia (Poetry, Language, Thought 36). The disclosure of beings, one in particular, constitutes the concern of this research. The being in question is that of a hero, Meursault, the tragic hero of Camus’s magnum opus. There exist, as always, questions concerning the identity of a tragic hero, inquiry into his being and individuality as he suffers constraint. The peculiarity of a tragic hero’s predicament gives rise to this study.
1.2 Statement of the Problem
Literature is “an inexhaustible source of new critical discoveries” (Northrop Frye 17). As a kind of art, it never comes into being ex nihilo. Many a thing goes into it, namely human experiences, historical accounts, myths, bits from the literary tradition and so forth. Nonetheless, the closing reading of an individual work of art is not to be done in relation to any of the above, save for the world of literature. Furthermore the literary tradition echoes mythology unceasingly, and vice versa. Two Greek gods, Apollo and Dionysus, constitute the guiding principles of Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of the underlying will to power. The latter is considered the first tragic hero. Achilles of The Iliad, for instance, is a Dionysiac mask; in fact “all the famous figures of the
Greek stage, Prometheus, Oedipus, etc are merely masks of that original hero, Dionysos” (Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy 51). This deity embodies the “erring, striving, suffering individual” (Nietzsche 52). Thus an understanding of this Dionysiac condition provides new insights into the being, or nature, of the tragic hero of The Stranger. The above mentioned condition is made manifest—or possible even—by an opposing force: the Apolline.
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APOLLONIAN/DIONYSIAN PREDICAMENT IN ALBERT CAMUS’ THE STRANGER