When Details Change Hands in Albert Camus

Part of: The Deep Reader

This essay discusses selected Camus works in detail, including their endings.

What happens to an idea when someone has to live by it? Across Albert Camus’s novels, stories, plays, and essays, an argument can turn on a hand that cannot throw a bomb or a voice that converts confession into a right to judge. Sometimes the dispute begins over a cup of coffee.

In The Stranger, the caretaker offers Meursault a cup of coffee at his mother’s wake. He takes it. He likes coffee with milk, he tells us, and the information is complete enough to explain why he says yes. Much later, a prosecutor explains why the son should have said no.

“Et ils concluront qu’un étranger pouvait proposer du café, mais qu’un fils devait le refuser” [1]

And they will conclude that a stranger could offer coffee, but a son had to refuse it. The caretaker and Meursault also smoked together. The court can grant them both the same sequence of events and assign the breach of decorum to only one of them. We have been susceptible to this operation from the beginning. The novel opens with the familiar maman and a correction to the date of her death. The telegram fixes the funeral, which is enough to arrange a journey and useless for settling when she died. Meursault tells us where his information runs out. Some of us have already begun listening for how grief ought to sound.

On the beach, the sun brings back the heat of the burial. Camus has several sentences for what the glare and sweat do to Meursault’s sight, enough for us to register the physical difficulty without losing track of the man who steps forward and shoots. When the presiding judge asks for his motive, Meursault rushes through “à cause du soleil.” [1] Because of the sun. The courtroom laughs. Four words have taken the place of a sequence that linked heat, sight, and action without clearing him of responsibility. What he can make intelligible in a first-person narrative is nearly impossible to submit in answer to a question about motive.

At trial the prosecutor can draw on serious evidence, including Meursault’s help in Raymond’s scheme against his mistress. That complicity and the alleged indecency of taking coffee can be made to fit the same speech. The man Meursault killed has a sister and a grievance against Raymond, but Camus leaves him unnamed. Meursault’s coffee can acquire a second life in testimony. The dead man’s life receives no comparable reconstruction. The novel trains our attention on what happens when evidence changes hands, and makes us ask whose history never enters the record.

The courtesy that takes your answer

During the trial in The Stranger, Meursault hears his lawyer say I while speaking of the killing, as though the lawyer had committed it. Meursault feels pushed out of his own case. The Fall gives the privilege of speaking for another person to a man who knows how to make it feel like a favor. Jean-Baptiste Clamence offers to order a stranger a drink in an Amsterdam bar, interprets the bartender’s nod, and makes himself the stranger’s companion.

“J’installerai donc mon verre auprès du vôtre.” [2]

I’ll put my glass beside yours, then. The donc makes the movement of a glass sound like the conclusion of an exchange. Whatever invitation the stranger gave reaches us through the man who takes advantage of it. Even the joke about the bartender, whom Clamence grandly calls an estimable gorilla, flatters the visitor into a small alliance. There is more social bustle in this voice than in Meursault’s, although the arrangement lets one speaker supply both sides of the conversation.

The night Clamence passed a woman on the Pont Royal, he noticed her wet neck. He later heard a splash and cries, stopped, and kept himself from turning around. The neck is sharply visible, the woman’s life beyond it inaccessible. By the time he tells us how he works, the personal charge has become a way of obtaining jurisdiction over the listener.

“Plus je m’accuse et plus j’ai le droit de vous juger.” [2]

The more I accuse myself, the more right I have to judge you. Meursault’s lawyer could speak for him by virtue of his office. Clamence has to confer the office on himself. He starts with what he has done, assembles a portrait out of faults his listeners might share, and uses the resulting likeness to make a claim on them. The woman’s wet neck belongs to the charge he brings against himself. We hear a great deal about his failure to turn and almost nothing about the person whose answer would be hardest for him to appropriate.

Dostoevsky’s Underground Man is Clamence’s closest cousin. “It is a form, an empty form—I shall never have readers,” he insists, after imagining an audience for his notes. [3] He then supplies the audience’s objection to this very insistence and entertains the possibility that it lends him dignity. His invention can talk back. Clamence’s interlocutor can resist, too, but the man whose conclusions are at stake reports the resistance himself.

What stays on the blackboard

Early in The Fall, Clamence points out an empty rectangle above the bar. Much later he asks his visitor to open a cupboard. Inside is what he says once hung there, the stolen Just Judges panel from the Ghent Altarpiece. Among his reasons for keeping it, he says, “de cette manière, je domine.” This way I’m in control. He can produce the real judges for whomever he chooses, and even the prospect of arrest becomes a pleasure when he imagines being made into an example for the public. The glass he offered to set down beside the stranger’s was an invitation to a conversation whose exhibits he had already put away. [2]

The schoolmaster in “The Guest” has no such custody of his exhibit. At the opening, four French rivers run in colored chalk across the board of a snowbound Algerian classroom. At the end Daru stands facing the window. Camus moves our attention behind him, where a message has appeared:

“among the winding French rivers, sprawled the clumsily chalked-up words” [4]

The accusation says Daru handed over a man the inscription calls a brother, and will pay. The rivers stay visible. The accusation shares the teacher’s instrument and surface. Earlier Daru handed an unnamed prisoner food and money, showed him the roads toward custody and refuge, and cut off his reply. The previous night, Daru listens to the man breathe and tries to shake off the fraternity he feels in their shared lodging. The prisoner takes the road toward custody. Camus lets us see him choose and leaves his reasons open. Whoever chalked the accusation claims a kinship Daru felt briefly and wished away.

Kafka begins The Trial at the far end of this problem. “Jemand mußte Josef K. verleumdet haben,” the first sentence supposes. Someone must have slandered Josef K. [5] The arrest is certain, the supposed slander an inference. Kafka’s guards withhold the charge itself. Camus’s court has an identifiable killing before it and finds a way to make a funeral help explain it. Each proceeding gives its accused a different problem of knowledge.

When a principle costs somebody something

In Act II of The Just Assassins, the carriage carrying a Russian grand duke passes offstage. Its sounds recede. The conspirators wait for an explosion that never comes. So does the audience. Only afterward can Kaliayev describe his proximity to the children in the carriage and what happened to the arm holding the bomb.

“Mon bras est devenu faible. Mes jambes tremblaient. Une seconde après, il était trop tard.” [6]

His arm goes weak, his legs shake, a second passes. The audience hears in his account what kept the street silent. The group still has to decide what to make of that silence. Dora then contests Stepan’s assumption that killing these children will help the children who are starving under the regime. The two sets of children can coexist in a speech. Only one set was close enough for Kaliayev to see. Camus makes proximity a problem the conspirators have to settle before they can act again.

In The Misunderstanding, Maria gives her husband Jan the simplest means of being welcomed by the mother and sister he has come home to find.

“Quand on veut être reconnu, on se nomme, c’est l’évidence même.” [7]

If you want to be recognized, you say who you are. Jan wants to see how his family lives before he declares himself. He gives Martha an assumed name. She takes the passport he offers, and a servant interrupts before she reads it. Later, as Martha searches his clothes, “le passeport tombe et glisse derrière le lit.” [7] The passport falls and slides behind the bed. The servant retrieves it unseen. There is a human reason to risk the first silence. With each renewed chance of recognition, the stage machinery must do more to preserve it. The play’s ritual severity can make those chances feel like steps toward an unavoidable death. It can also leave us attending to the servant’s timing when we would rather be attending to Jan’s reluctance.

The Plague makes an exit available and lets the person who wanted it change their mind. The journalist Rambert has a way out of quarantined Oran at midnight. On a car journey he tells the doctor Rieux why he could no longer leave and love the woman waiting for him in quite the same way.

“il peut y avoir de la honte à être heureux tout seul” [8]

There can be shame in being happy alone. Rieux has granted that choosing happiness is honorable. When Tarrou pits happiness against sharing other people’s misery, Rambert contests the choice. A swerve interrupts the doctor, and midnight finds Rambert studying the district he will cover. Tarrou checks his watch. The appointment has held, down to the hour.

The chronicle has comic room for Grand, who can scarcely get his fictional horsewoman past her first sentence. Asked how she is doing, he says, “Elle trotte, elle trotte.” [8] She’s trotting, she’s trotting. The horse can trot indefinitely while the novel goes nowhere. In the same chronicle Grand’s patience serves the sanitary squads as he keeps their records. Camus can distribute public work among quite different men. Rieux’s wife leaves Oran ill. Near the end her death reaches him in a telegram. “Il y a huit jours,” he tells his mother. [8] Eight days ago. The chronicle gives us those days as elapsed time in Rieux’s voice. Danielle Marx-Scouras gives such absences their emotional due. [9] Janine is a chance to see how much space Camus can give a woman’s experience when the story follows her through the hours.

What a body can say

Janine, in “The Adulterous Woman,” has her own reasons for staying with Marcel. She knows “that Marcel needed her and that she needed that need.” [4] The word need comes back with its object changed. His dependence gives her something she depends on in turn, a discovery the sentence makes without simplifying her affection. At night she leaves him asleep and goes alone to the fort. Cold hurts her lungs. Camus follows the sensation through her body until she moans, and when she returns to Marcel the bedside light blinds her. “Ce n’est rien, mon chéri … ce n’est rien,” she says through tears. It’s nothing, darling, it’s nothing. [10] Her husband hears the reassurance. The reader has spent time inside the experience she cannot tell him.

At Tipasa, Camus puts the grammar of perception to work in his own voice.

“Au bout de quelques pas, les absinthes nous prennent à la gorge.” [11]

After a few steps, the wormwood takes us by the throat. Just before this, the sun was warming one side of the face and the sea could still be watched. Now the plant is the grammatical subject and the visitors are in its grip. The plants ferment in the heat and their scent makes the sky reel. By “Return to Tipasa,” the visitor must also contend with a keeper, opening rules, and barbed wire. The wire acquires its larger sense through an exact list, “les tyrannies, la guerre, les polices, le temps de la révolte.” [11] The speaker still has to get inside the enclosure. When December light restores some of the old pleasure, the essay can carry that pleasure back into the work awaiting the speaker in Europe. The return earns its warmth from what the years have made harder to recover.

Two stone surfaces do comparable work in the unfinished The First Man. Before Jacques Cormery enters the cemetery at Saint-Brieuc, a child is doing homework “sur une plaque de pierre tombale encore vierge d’inscription,” on a gravestone still blank. Inside, two engraved dates turn a son’s obligation into an encounter for which kinship has given him no preparation.

“L’homme enterré sous cette dalle, et qui avait été son père, était plus jeune que lui.” [12]

The man buried beneath the slab, who had been his father, was younger than he was. The child uses a gravestone as a desk. Inside the cemetery, the dates on another stone allow a forty-year-old to see his father as a young man who never had the chance to grow old. The long sentence of tenderness that follows can widen to the other graves because the two numbers have first disordered one family’s time.

Where the last sentence outruns the scene

Pascal’s hunter would turn down the hare if someone offered it to him outright. “They do not know that it is the chase, and not the quarry, which they seek.” [13] The hare supplies a reason to keep moving so that the hunter needn’t sit with what Pascal, writing within a Christian account of human wretchedness, thinks he is trying to avoid. In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus follows a man on the walk back down to the stone, when movement gives him time to think about the very fate to which he is returning.

“La lutte elle-même vers les sommets suffit à remplir un cœur d’homme. Il faut imaginer Sisyphe heureux.” [14]

The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a human heart. We must imagine Sisyphus happy. Between exertions on the descent, he has time to consider the life the gods have assigned him. The stone rolls on. There is room, Camus says a little earlier, for an absurd discovery without happiness. The final sentence moves from this qualified relation to the impersonal il faut, which lays an obligation on the reader. We can follow Sisyphus down the hill and still be less sure than the sentence about how he feels. The confidence of the ending is part of its force and the place where we can most profitably resist it.

What to steal from Camus

Give the reader something they can use before you tell them what it means. The coffee in The Stranger is first an offer made to a tired man keeping vigil. Let your detail do that first job thoroughly, then see whether it can survive a change of speaker or audience. A teacher could still use Daru’s board for a geography lesson. The second inscription has left the first legible, and whoever walks into the classroom inherits both.

Give the body something to interfere with. Choose the sensation for what it changes. At Tipasa the smell takes over from sight as the walkers enter the ruins. The weight of an object can decide whether the person holding it will move in time. If you are writing a scene about conviction, find the option the character actually wants and can still take. Rambert has an appointment to miss. If you are writing an essay, give the counterexample the same chance to interfere with your claim.

Read a confession once for what it risks, then again for what it asks its hearer to concede. Give the other person a reply with consequences, especially if the speaker has made self-criticism sound like a qualification for office. Reserve the freedom to speak, choose or refuse for people whose lives would otherwise be reduced to evidence in somebody else’s case.

What not to steal: Camus’s signatures

A borrowing should survive a change of voice, setting, and moral outcome. If it needs Camus’s speaker, scenery, and verdict to remain effective, you have carried over too much of the finished work.

• Meursault’s deadpan persona. His reasons for accepting coffee collide with the court’s expectations of a grieving son. That collision depends on the distance between his narration and the testimony built from it. Copying both his clipped self-explanations and his sun-struck perception risks importing the persona along with the method. Borrow the conflict between a person’s reasons and the language used to judge them; discover how your own character would speak. [1]

• Clamence’s complete confessional trap. The cultivated stranger, the nearly inaudible listener, and the conversion of self-accusation into jurisdiction belong to one closely fitted design. A second charming barroom penitent risks sounding like Clamence in another suit. Study how a speaker controls the transmission of an objection. Find a social occasion and an appetite for power that require a different conversation. [2]

• Tipasa’s sunlight and consolations. Sun, sea, and stone belong to everyone. Reusing the sunlit ruins, the bodily exaltation, and the return to renewed conviction would carry over much of Camus’s particular design. In “Return to Tipasa,” pleasure has to be recovered in a place altered by time and restrictions. Copying the luminous scenery and the reassuring finish leaves that history behind. Borrow the tension between remembered and altered place; find the place your own subject requires. [11]

Where Camus falls short

The reservations here concern the works themselves, including passages whose craft is formidable.

• Unequal imaginative attention. The murdered man in The Stranger is indispensable to Meursault’s fate but never acquires comparable individuality. Mme Rieux’s final illness likewise remains outside the sustained attention granted to her husband; its end reaches him in a telegram. These lives sustain the central men’s moral dramas without receiving a comparable imaginative investment. Restricted narration explains the omission. It does not recover what the novels have left unwritten. [1, 8]

• Overmanaged tragic machinery. Jan’s reluctance to identify himself in The Misunderstanding has a credible motive. The interrupted reading of his passport, its fall behind the bed, and the servant’s unnoticed removal of it repeatedly protect that silence from discovery. The machinery becomes conspicuous enough to compete with the human predicament. At these points, the catastrophe depends too visibly on Camus preventing an ordinary means of recognition from working. [7]

• The leap from lucidity to happiness. Camus connects Sisyphus’s happiness with his appropriation of his fate, while conceding that discovering the absurd need not produce happiness. The reservation concerns the further step from conscious defiance to happiness. We can accept his hero’s defiance without being persuaded that it makes him happy. The final imperative makes that contested transition sound settled. Its eloquence can conceal the remaining gap. [14]

After Camus: similar authors and further reading

Choose the next book by the question you want to pursue. These pairings extend the comparisons in this essay; Pascal offers a philosophical counterpoint as well as a lesson in construction.

• After The Fall: Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground. Return especially to Part I, chapter XI, where the narrator invents an objection to his claim that he has no readers. Compare that staged reply with Clamence’s report of his listener’s resistance. In each case, ask what the confessor gains by deciding how the objection reaches us. [2, 3]

• After The Stranger: Franz Kafka, The Trial. Begin with the arrest chapter. Camus’s courtroom recasts acts the reader has witnessed; Kafka’s opening gives us an arrest and a conjecture about slander. Follow what each proceeding permits the accused to know. The resemblance becomes more useful when you can describe how their predicaments diverge. [1, 5]

• For another use of spare dialogue: Ernest Hemingway, “Hills Like White Elephants”, in Men Without Women. Listen to the man’s repeated assurances about the operation and to Jig’s replies. Compare his efforts to make a shared subject sound harmless with Meursault’s limited explanations. The next FAQ develops this pairing: similar brevity can perform quite different work. [1, 15]

• After The Myth of Sisyphus: Blaise Pascal, Pensées, especially “Diversion” (Brunschvicg 139). Pascal’s hunter keeps busy to escape reflection; Camus’s descent makes reflection possible. Read the two movements together, retaining Pascal’s Christian premises. The comparison tests how an action can carry a philosophical argument before its conclusion is stated. [13, 14]

FAQ

Is Camus a minimalist like Hemingway?

In Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants,” a man tells Jig, “It’s really an awfully simple operation, Jig,” followed by “It’s not really an operation at all.” [15] Both speakers know what he means. The conflict concerns what his wording asks her to agree to. Meursault’s narration limits a reader’s access to explanation in the first place. Brevity produces two different kinds of uncertainty. Jean-Michel Adam reproduces a 1945 interview in which Camus warns against applying the reduced method of The Stranger everywhere. [16] Reading Clamence and Janine makes the danger of a uniform clipped voice audible.

Where can I see Camus revise a technique across works?

Read the opening and the last conversation of The Fall for what happens to the right of reply. Put “Nuptials at Tipasa” beside “Return to Tipasa” and follow what has to happen before the place can give pleasure again. For the work an ending can do, pair the last paragraph of “The Guest” with the last paragraph of The Myth of Sisyphus. One leaves an accusation somebody else has written on a usable surface. The other leaves a verb that asks us to supply the condemned man’s happiness. For a route across the books and plays, see How to Read Albert Camus.

Can I borrow the craft without adopting the philosophy?

Yes. In The Myth of Sisyphus, the absurd names a confrontation between our demand for an intelligible world and the world’s silence. [14, 17] You can share Pascal’s premises, Camus’s, or neither and still try the same local test. Follow the concrete action until you can say exactly what it makes possible to imagine. Then read your last sentence again and see whether it asks more of the action than it can give.

Sources

French and German passages are translated here unless a translator is credited. Locators follow the editions cited.

[1] Albert Camus, L’Étranger, Faded Page transcription of the Le Livre de Poche printing, 1964. Part I, chapters 1 and 6, and Part II, chapters 3–4.

[2] Albert Camus, La Chute, Gallimard, 1956, Ebooks libres et gratuits transcription. Bar and empty rectangle, pp. 2–3. Pont Royal, pp. 39–40. Panel, pp. 74–75. Judge-penitent and final encounter, pp. 79–85. Page numbers follow the digital text.

[3] Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground, translated by Constance Garnett. Part I, chapter XI.

[4] Albert Camus, Exile and the Kingdom, translated by Justin O’Brien, Knopf, 1958. “The Guest,” opening, night in the school, and final classroom paragraph. “The Adulterous Woman,” Janine’s reflection on Marcel before her night walk.

[5] Franz Kafka, Der Prozess, Die Schmiede, 1925. Chapter 1, p. 1.

[6] Albert Camus, Les Justes, Gallimard, 1950. Act II, Kaliayev’s return and Dora’s exchange with Stepan.

[7] Albert Camus, Le Malentendu, revised Gallimard text, 1958. Act I, scenes III and V, Act II, scene VII, and Act III, scene I. See also Sophie Bastien’s account of the play’s dramatic form.

[8] Albert Camus, La Peste, Gallimard, 1955 printing of the 1947 novel. Part I, Rieux’s wife’s departure. Part II, Grand’s draft and work for the sanitary squads, pp. 151–54. Part IV, Rambert’s decision, pp. 227–29. Part V, news of Mme Rieux’s death, p. 314. Page numbers follow the print markers in the transcription.

[9] Danielle Marx-Scouras, “Portraits of Women, Visions of Algeria”, The Cambridge Companion to Camus, pp. 131–44. Chapter summary.

[10] Albert Camus, L’Exil et le Royaume, Gallimard, 1957. “La Femme adultère,” final paragraphs.

[11] Albert Camus, Noces suivi de L’Été, Gallimard, Folio printing, 1999. “Noces à Tipasa,” pp. 12–13, and “Retour à Tipasa,” pp. 157–58 and 164–67. Page numbers follow the print markers.

[12] Albert Camus, Le Premier Homme, Gallimard, 2013 EPUB of the 1994 posthumous text. Part I, “Recherche du père,” “Saint-Brieuc.”

[13] Blaise Pascal, Pensées, translated by W. F. Trotter. Brunschvicg fragment 139, “Diversion.”

[14] Albert Camus, Le Mythe de Sisyphe, Gallimard, augmented edition, transcribed by Les Classiques des sciences sociales. Final title chapter, pp. 165–68.

[15] Ernest Hemingway, “Hills Like White Elephants”, Men Without Women, 1927. The station conversation about the operation.

[16] Jean-Michel Adam, “La qualité des productions discursives”, Cahiers de linguistique française 20, pp. 23–26. Camus’s revisions and the November 1945 interview.

[17] Ronald Aronson, “Albert Camus”, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Section 3, “Suicide, Absurdity and Happiness.”