When Refusal Changes the Scene: Camus for Writers
This essay discusses Act II of Les Justes and “The Guest” in full, including the story’s ending.
In the second act of Les Justes—The Just Assassins in Stuart Gilbert’s translation—Camus keeps the attempted assassination offstage. We stay in an apartment with two revolutionaries waiting to hear a bomb. Their comrade Kaliayev has gone out to kill a Russian grand duke on his way to the theater. A carriage passes beneath the windows, its wheels grow distant, and the expected explosion never comes.
The silence alarms the people we are watching. Dora, who prepared the bombs, fears that Kaliayev has been arrested; Annenkov, the group’s leader, waits for information. Their anxiety draws us into an uncomfortable expectation: the sound that would reassure them would announce a killing.
When Kaliayev returns in tears, his apology precedes the reason for his failure. Annenkov asks whether he was afraid. Only with Stepan’s entrance do we learn that the grand duke’s niece and nephew were in the carriage. For a few moments, the man who spared children has stood before us as a man ashamed of failing his comrades. Camus makes us meet the shame first. The coming argument will have to work through his need for their acceptance.
What the first promise makes possible
Kaliayev offers to go back to the theater and kill the children if his comrades decide he should. In Gilbert’s translation, he ends:
“I’ll do whatever the group decides.”
That whatever leaves a frightening amount undecided. His arm failed him in the street, but he has returned prepared to let the group judge the failure and command another attempt. The audience cannot yet rely on his recoil to protect the children. Those listening to him have been offered real power over what he will do next.
Over the ensuing exchange, Stepan insists on obedience and invokes the Russian children who will continue starving under tyranny. Dora challenges the killing of these two children in the name of the people the revolution promises to liberate. Each speaker is also addressing Kaliayev’s still-open offer. As they press their cases, an order he had agreed to accept becomes an order he will resist. Should the group send him back on those terms, he now promises:
“I’ll fling myself under the horses’ feet.”
Camus sends him to the same theater in both speeches. The proposed journey holds steady while its purpose changes: he first offers to kill the children, then threatens his own destruction if commanded to do so. He has withdrawn the obedience he placed at the group’s disposal. Annenkov must now decide in front of a man who has announced how far his opposition will go.
For a writer, the first promise is indispensable to the second’s force. Introduce Kaliayev with a fully settled prohibition, and the debate can only display his firmness. Let him offer obedience, and the intervening speeches acquire the power to change his participation. We listen for what he may still agree to, with a consequence waiting beyond the apartment. His eventual refusal carries the memory of the consent it has displaced.
The hesitation is audible inside his recollection too. At first, the approaching carriage quickens everything: his heartbeat, his excitement, his urge to leap into the air. His repeated insistence on his happiness gathers speed until the children appear, sitting upright with their hands on their thighs. Their stillness interrupts the rush toward the target. His arms go limp, his legs weaken, and the carriage gets away.
Even here, Camus keeps the speech disquieting. Kaliayev imagines that, had the children turned toward him, he might have thrown the bomb to extinguish their sad expression. A writer could have omitted this possibility and left us a more reassuring portrait. Its presence makes it harder to separate his compassion from the violence for which he had worked himself up. He is trying to tell his comrades what happened, including a thought that damages the defense he needs them to accept. The later firmness grows out of this shaken, compromised telling.
What a body can interrupt
During the debate, Dora asks whether Stepan could shoot a child at close range with his eyes open. He says he could if ordered. She immediately challenges him for having closed his eyes.
The question has given an actor something to do that the other actor can catch. Onstage, we hear Stepan affirm his willingness as his eyes close, and Dora seizes on the gesture. His first response is surprise. Then he says he wanted to imagine the act more vividly and answer truthfully.
Closed eyes cannot prove what he would do with a weapon. They do, however, interrupt his command of the exchange: he must answer for something he has done in front of the others. The challenge shifts from the revolution’s entitlement to one man’s capacity to perform the killing he demands. His body has become evidence available to his opponent.
Annenkov still has to send these men out together. He orders a fresh attempt; Stepan submits without surrendering his contempt. Kaliayev will spare the children, but explicitly declines to spare the grand duchess. The scene’s reprieve is bounded by the killing they still intend.
Then the carriage is heard again. Earlier, its passing produced bewilderment: why had nobody thrown?
Now the same sound passes through an agreement we have heard being made. The absent explosion has acquired a reason, while the danger of another attempt remains. Camus can close the act on the wheels and the renewed task, leaving the argument’s resentment intact.
The reply Daru will not hear
“The Guest” puts a different strain on refusal by separating the decision from the answer it receives. Daru, a schoolteacher in colonial Algeria, is ordered to deliver an Arab prisoner to the police. He objects to becoming the man’s escort.
Eventually he leads him onto the plateau, gives him food and money, and indicates two routes: toward the police or toward nomads who could shelter him.
The story stays close enough to Daru for us to follow his disgust, hesitation, and desire to escape the task. It also records what his proposed freedom looks like from outside: he takes the prisoner’s elbow, turns him toward the other route, and explains where to go. When the prisoner tries to speak, Daru cuts him off.
In Justin O’Brien’s translation:
“No, be quiet. Now I’m leaving you.”
The command and the departure occupy two short sentences. The first stops the prisoner’s answer; the second ends his opportunity to give it. Daru wants the man to decide, yet retains control of the moment at which their conversation must cease. Camus puts the contradiction into the conduct of the exchange, where it can disturb our sympathy for a teacher whose inward reasons we have followed.
Beside Kaliayev’s unfinished promise, this interruption becomes especially revealing. In the apartment, other people have time to press an offer until it changes. On the plateau, the person most affected by Daru’s offer cannot finish his reply. The schoolteacher departs before an answering voice can test what he believes he has granted.
Daru later sees the prisoner walking toward the police. The narration reports his direction and Daru’s distress; it leaves the prisoner’s reasons unstated. To explain the choice confidently as guilt, fear, obedience, or bewilderment would supply the very inward speech the story withholds. We share Daru’s sight of the departing man and his inability to settle what the departure means.
This unequal access also limits what we should admire in the construction. The unnamed prisoner speaks elsewhere, but receives little of the sustained inward attention granted to the European schoolteacher. Much of the story’s uncertainty is produced through that imbalance. A writer borrowing the effect should notice whose consciousness has supplied the drama and whose has been kept at a distance. In this colonial setting, the allocation of speech and sympathy carries its own political burden.
The classroom answers back
At the school, Daru finds an accusation on the blackboard:
“You handed over our brother. You will pay for this.”
Again, two short sentences. One assigns him a completed deed; the other threatens its consequence. His deliberations, his provisions for the prisoner, and the alternative route have disappeared from this judgment. The writers of the message are unidentified. We know what Daru could say in reply, but there is nobody at the blackboard to listen.
Camus placed the blackboard near the story’s beginning, with rivers of France drawn in different colors for pupils in Algeria. The accusation now stands among those rivers. The teacher’s lesson remains visible, but he has become the person being addressed. An object from his daily work makes the change tangible: he returns to the place where he explains the world and finds words about himself that he cannot correct by explaining his intentions.
Kaliayev’s comrades answer him in time to alter what he promises. Daru’s decisive answer reaches him after he has left the prisoner. Both scenes make a refusal vulnerable to another person’s response, and their timing determines what that response can do. Camus’s example gives a writer a concrete test for an argumentative scene: follow the promise, command, interruption, or accusation into the next action. After the words have been spoken, who can still answer—and what can that answer change?
Sources
Albert Camus, The Just Assassins, translated by Stuart Gilbert, in Caligula and Three Other Plays (Knopf, 1958), Act II: the opening wait, Kaliayev’s return and two offers, Dora’s exchange with Stepan, and the carriage at the close. The linked text uses electronic pagination; act and speaker locate the passages.
Albert Camus, Les Justes (Gallimard, 1950), Act II. French text consulted alongside Gilbert’s translation.
Albert Camus, “The Guest,” in Exile and the Kingdom, translated by Justin O’Brien (Knopf, 1958), opening classroom description, the exchange at the two routes, and final classroom paragraph.
For a different use of speech in Camus, see The Fall: How Camus Turns Confession into Control.
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