Updating Camus: The Absurd, Revolt, and Strangerhood in Riikka Pulkkinen’s Vieras

This article argues that Albert Camus’s concepts of the absurd, revolt, and strangerhood together form a useful interpretive prism through which to examine the intertwined motifs of religion, the female body, motherhood, and ethnoracial otherness in the Finnish author Riikka Pulkkinen’s Vieras (2012; The Stranger)—a novel that, in effect, has the same title as Camus’s L’Étranger.¹ The Camu-sian “absurd” means the outcome of the collision between humans’ fundamental existential longings (for happiness, for purpose, and for a rational explanation of the world) and the silent indifference of the universe in the face of these yearnings: “Man stands face to face with the irrational. He feels within him his longing for happiness and for reason. The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world” (Camus 1991a, 28).² According to Camus, an individual’s discovery of the absurd should mark their existential starting point and lead to revolt³—a process that Camus defined and explained rather succinctly in The Myth of Sisyphus (1991a, 53–5) and much more discursively in the historically and politically oriented and stylistically sprawling Rebel (1991c). Relying on The Myth’s conceptual definition, this article uses “revolt” to refer to a person’s simultaneous embrace of and defiant response to the absurd (see also, e.g., Foley 2008, 10).

Because Pulkkinen’s Vieras is a work of fiction rather than philosophical scholarship, it neither delves into the historical genealogies of Camus’s definitions of the absurd and revolt nor discusses the internal evolutions of these concepts within his oeuvre.⁴ Pulkkinen, rather, chooses as her self-evident starting point the universalist interpretation that the absurd is experienceable in contexts beyond what Camus in his retrospective 1955 preface to the first American edition of The Myth called “the French and European disaster” of World War II (1991b, v). Set primarily in contemporary Helsinki and New York City, Vieras features Maria, a modern and liberal Finnish Lutheran pastor who in her early thirties undergoes a profound crisis of faith—or, in Camu-sian terms, experiences the absurd—and concludes that working as a professional advocate for theism is no longer an intellectually or existentially viable option for her. This article will show that as Pulkkinen detaches Camus’s basic concepts from their original historical catalysts (World War II and the atrocities committed by authoritarian regimes before, during, and after it), she uses artistic license to reinterpret—in particular, to feminize—the notion of revolt.

In much of Vieras, the spiritual professional Maria’s revolt manifests itself as her rebellious and celebratory embrace of her body; the process includes, for example, a fiercely physical extramarital affair. Pulkkinen’s feminist modification of Camusian revolt thus first focuses on a highly individualistic variety of female empowerment that draws on a woman’s intense, intimate, and joyful connection with her bodily existence. After this initial stage of Maria’s revolt, another stage follows: during what may, at first glance, look like surrender and acquiescence rather than revolt, Maria resigns from her ministry, reconciles with her husband, returns to her marriage, and gives birth to her first baby. (The maternal New Testament connotation of Maria’s name is obvious, as is Pulkkinen’s allusive play with the familiar juxtaposition of the Madonna/ Mother Mary trope and the archetype of the “fallen” or licentious woman, which is folklorically associated with Mary Magdalene; the name of Pulkkinen’s Maria references both “Marys.”) Some novelists might depict such domestically oriented life decisions by a female protagonist as conservative acquiescence stemming from an internal need or external pressure to surrender to the traditional female role after all, for the sake of following religious, local, or familial mores. Pulkkinen’s approach is markedly different, as this article will demonstrate: instead of depicting female subservience, Vieras casts Maria’s eventual choices as constructive outcomes of her Camusian revolt—an ongoing process that has, by the story’s conclusion, resulted in a newly empowered female subjectivity, which is necessarily still changing and evolving...