Palais de Justice and Poetic Justice in Albert Camus' "The Stranger"

Cardozo School of Law

Palais de Justice and Poetic Justice in Albert Camus' "The Stranger"Author(s): Ernest SimonSource: Cardozo Studies in Law and Literature, Vol. 3, No. 1 (Spring - Summer, 1991), pp. 111-125Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. on behalf of Cardozo School of LawStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/743503 .

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Ilov-

Palais deJustice and Poetic Justice

in Albert Camus'

The Stranger Ernest Simon

Richard Weisberg1 and Richard A. Posner2 address from the point of view of the jurist the ever-simmering question of Meursault's guilt or innocence in Albert Camus' The Stranger. Weisberg argues the case for Meursault's innocence. He finds "no moral aberration" in the protagonist of Part I (116), where Camus "builds a portrait of a man with his own system of ... positive values," who "partakes of the free flow of human existence with honesty, if not perfect Cartesian rationality." (120) He absolves Meursault of guilt for the murder of the Arab and speculates that "in an American court, Meursault's lack of real premeditation would have formed the basis of a viable defense" (121), and "he would have been convicted of manslaughter." (122) Posner focuses on Meursault's guilt and takes Camus to task for "inviting the reader to take Meursault's part despite his crime and lack of remorse, by depicting him as victim rather than killer and by depersonalizing the real victim." (89) Posner enthusiastically endorses Rend Girard's argument3 that Camus, in his portrayal of the trial, indulged his "contempt for judges," and for this purpose needed the paradoxical figure of an "innocent murderer." Posner concludes: "This analysis shows how little The Stranger has really to do with law and how much it has to do with a form of neoromanticism in which criminals are made heroes." (90)

As lawyers, Weisberg and Posner share a central interest in the link between law in reality and law in fiction. This concern prompts them to take the trial literally. Yet, Camus, commenting on The Stranger in his Carnets of 1942, warned that "Le rdalisme est un mot vide de sens .... Je ne m'en suis pas soucid. S'il fallait donner une forme a mon ambition, je parlerais au contraire de symbole."4 (Realism is a word devoid of meaning .... I took no account of it. If I were to give a form to my intentions, I would, rather, speak of symbol.) The terms by which both legal commentators assess Meursault's guilt or innocence are: their judgment of the assumptions

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of the law and its representatives, the fairness of the legal procedures, and the values embodied in the investigating magistrate and the prosecutor. Weisberg equates the law with "regimentation" (122), stating that, in the eyes of society, "the protagonist's capital offense ... is his being-against-the-law, not his act against the Arab." (122) Posner, on the other hand, sees the trial as "a sinister farce in which the defendant is condemned not for having murdered the Arab but for rejecting bourgeois values." (87)

My thesis is that we can assess Meursault's guilt and/or innocence only if we understand his trial not as a mimesis of legal process, but as a metaphor for another kind of trial in which his particular kind of guilt -- a guilt that, realistically, cannot be formally submitted to a court of law -- is examined and evaluated.

Jean-Marie Apostolides has pointed out that the French classical theater, particularly Moliere's comedies, "offered a space for simulation where new behaviors were subjected to imaginary testing, by trial and error."5 These comedies castigate behavior that, like avarice or philandering, is beyond the purview of the law: "Although this behavior may flout the moral code, it is not clearly illegal."6 In The Stranger, Camus uses a court to examine and judge not the actual crime, but the kind of behavior that has traditionally been judged by literature, because it escapes the law's jurisdiction.

Camus may have been aware of this affinity between his story and Moliere's comedies. As the first court session is about to open, Meursault remarks about the row of jurors facing him:

Je n'ai eu qu'une impression: j'dtais devant une banquette de tramway et tous ces voyageurs anonymes 6piaient le nouvel arrivant pour en apercevoir les ridicules. Je sais bien que c'dtait une idde niaise puisque ici ce n'dtait pas le ridicule qu'ils cherchaient, mais le crime. Cependant la diffdrence n'est pas grande ... (1185)

(I had only one impression: I was facing a bench in a streetcar and all these anonymous travelers were scrutinizing the new passenger to find his ridiculous traits. I know very well that this was a silly idea, for here it was not ridiculousness they were looking for but criminality. Still, the difference is not that great ....)

This passage also suggests that Meursault is about to undergo castigation by ridicule as well as by judicial process -- a humiliation that befalls him (1198) and some of the witnesses (Pdrez, 1190; CUleste, 1191; Masson and Salamano, 1192) in the course of the

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proceedings. This further suggests that the purpose of the trial in the structure of the novel (and according to the prosecutor's strategy) is not to judge Meursault for the murder of the Arab but to examine his character and values, to judge a man who does not cry at his mother's funeral -- that is, to evaluate his former life and the assumptions that determined its course. When viewed in this light, the murder can be understood as the necessary event that pulls Meursault within the orbit of the law and provokes the elaborate process through which he (and we the readers) can reexamine his life.

This is not to say, as Posner does (90), that the murder is an arbitrary and otherwise irrelevant device for bringing Meursault into the grasp of the law. Nor is it an "accident" caused by Meursault's loss of "free will" (121), as Weisberg insists. The murder is itself the consequence of Meursault's former life, of the choices he has made and failed to make. It is the violent eruption of his unacknowledged guilt. Meursault is clearly guilty of shooting the Arab. He himself points out to his attorney that, as concerns his act on the beach, his case is very simple. Not so simple and hence requiring reexamination are the content, value, and meaning of a life whose course, as described in Part I, has placed Meursault on that beach with Raymond's revolver in his hand. Thus Camus remarks in his Carnets that "Le sens du livre tient exactement dans le paralldlisme des deux parties." (1932) (The book's meaning resides precisely in the parallelism between the two parts.) The trial is the occasion for reviewing Meursault's actions in Part I point by point and subjecting them to detailed public scrutiny.7 So far he had been able to evade such sucrutiny, just as he had evaded the brutality of the African sun by escaping into the water, until that fateful moment when the sea solidifies and his finger tightens on the trigger "a cause du soleil" (because of the sun).

Meursault's unruffled existence depended on his avoidance of public and self-scrutiny, and on his evasion of responsibility. The director of the old-age home and Salamano act as accomplices in helping him perpetuate the status quo. In their first interview, the director tells him:

Vous n'avez pas a vous justifier, mon cher enfant. J'ai lu le dossier de votre mere. Vous ne pouviez subvenir a ses besoins. II lui fallait une garde. Vos salaires sont modestes. Et tout compte fait, elle dtait plus heureuse ici. (1128)

(You needn't justify yourself, my dear boy. I've read your mother's file. You couldn't provide for all her needs. She needed a round-the-clock-nurse.

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Your salary is modest. And, all in all, she was happier here.)

This is at worst a lie, at best a pious exaggeration, since we know that Madame Meursault was still a vigorous woman who, on her evening walks with Pdrez, could tackle the four-kilometer round trip from the home to the village. Salamano, too, supports Meursault's excuses after informing him that the neighborhood had judged him severely for putting his mother in the home: "Et l'asile, du moins, on se fait des camarades" (and at least at the home one can make friends), echoing the director's earlier remarks.

As witnesses at the trial, however, both the director and Salamano, despite their good will, give damaging testimony. One function of the trial, then, is to break down this complicity in the illusion of innocence that Meursault had effortlessly obtained from others and in turn extended to them, as when he agreed with Raymond's self-exonerating assessment of his brutality to his mistress, "C'est elle qui m'a manqud" (she's the one who did me wrong), echoing his 'Ce n'dtait pas de ma faute" (It was not my fault) earlier in Part I.

We are all each other's "copains" (buddies) and accomplices in the claim of innocence,8 as Camus insists elsewhere as well: Clamence, in The Fall, develops this idea of complicity and pairs it with guilt, for only the guilty need accomplices. "Je n'ai plus d'amis, je n'ai que des complices" (I no longer have friends, I have only accomplices), says Clamence, describing one of the consequences of his self-recognition.9 Later, he remarks:

Chacun exige d'etre innocent, ' tout prix, meme si,

pour cela, il faut accuser le genre humain et le ciel .... Si vous dites a un criminel que sa faute ne tient pas a sa nature ni ' son caract're, mais a de malheureuses circonstances, il vous en sera violemment reconnaissant. (1517)

(We all claim to be innocent, at any price, even if, to this end, we have to accuse both heaven and humankind .... If you tell a criminal that his fault lies in neither his nature nor his character, but in unfortunate circumstances, he'll be vehemently grateful to you.)

Meursault's friendly witnesses try to introduce the excuse Clamence later calls "unfortunate circumstances." The good Cdleste says "Pour moi, c'est un malheur. Un malheur, tout le monde sait ce que c'est; ;a vous laisse sans ddfense;" (1191) (For me, it's a misfortune. A

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misfortune, everybody knows what that is; it leaves you defenseless). Raymond claims that Meursault's presence at the beach was "un hasard" (a matter of chance).

Weisberg, in espousing the point of view of the defense, echoes Meursault's friendly witnesses: "the natural environment on the day of the murder -- coupled with the slight drunkenness from the luncheon wine ... -- did in effect rob him of his free will." (121) He insists, indeed, that Meursault's crime stems from neither his nature nor his character, stressing his "positive values," his honesty, his compassion (Salamano), his loyalty (Raymond), and even his enjoyment of everyday labor (120), thus echoing the defense attorney's presentation of his client as a model son, a loyal employee, a man who is well-liked and sensitive to others' misfortunes. But Camus dismisses this portrait as unconvincing, ineffectual, and no more faithful to reality than the prosecutor's diatribes. Posner, on the other hand, in his unequivocal condemnation of Meursault, espouses the state's position to the point of writing a weighted summary of Part I (86-87) that parallels the prosecutor's account -- which we know to be false -- and distorts Meursault's life in precisely the same way. And when Judge Posner opines that "a case can be made that he is a psychopath, utterly self-absorbed and incapable of any feeling for his fellow-human beings

.... " (89), he puts himself in the untenable

position of the shopkeeper of The Plague, whose reaction to a news item concerning a young office worker who has killed an Arab on a beach proposes a solution of sweeping simplicity: "Si l'on mettait toute cette racaille en prison ... les honnetes gens pourraient respirer" (1262). (If they put all that rabble in jail, ... decent folks could breathe more freely.) In Camus, the ambiguity of guilt and innocence is not so easily resolved; by ignoring the author's ironic signposts, Weisberg takes the part of an accomplice, Posner of an executioner.

The legal process, epitomized in the prosecutor's speeches, labels Meursault as "criminel de nature et de caractere" and hence destroys the tacit complicity in innocence that has otherwise marked Meursault's life.10 This labeling may be an arbitrary, unfair, and deadly form of regimentation, as Weisberg claims; but it forces Meursault to look at himself in the unfamiliar and hitherto unbearable light of culpability. That is why, when he finally does stare at his reflection in his tin plate, he has a schizoid dxperience:

Il m'a sembld que mon image restait sdrieuse alors que j'essayais de lui sourire. Je l'ai agitde devant moi. J'ai souri et elle a gardd le meme air sdvere et triste. (1183)

(It seemed to me that my reflection remained

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serious even as I was trying to smile at it. I jiggled it before my eyes. I smiled and it kept the same stern and sad expression.)

A moment later, however, Meursault becomes acutely conscious of his situation, of the meaning of being in prison, that is, of his new identity as a "coupable" (a guilty one), and the reflection is again faithful to his self. For the first time, he recognizes his voice as his own:

Le jour finissait et c'dtait l'heure dont je ne veux pas parler, I'heure sans nom, oi' les bruits du soir montaient de tous les dtages de la prison dans un cortege de silence. Je me suis approchd de la lucarne et, dans la derniere lumiere, j'ai contempld une fois de plus mon image. Elle dtait toujours sdrieuse, et quoi d'dtonnant puisque, a ce moment, je l'dtais aussi? Mais en meme temps, et pour la premiere fois depuis des mois, j'ai entendu distinctement le son de ma voix. Je l'ai reconnue pour celle qui rdsonnait ddjia depuis de longs jours a mes oreilles et j'ai compris que pendant tout ce temps j'avais parld seul. (1183)

(The day was ending and it was the hour I don't want to speak of, the nameless hour, when the sounds of evening rose from all levels of the prison in a train of silence. I went to the window and, in the last light, I contemplated once more my reflection. It was still serious, and no wonder, since, at that moment, so was I. But at the same time, and for the first time in months, I distinctly heard the sound of my voice. I recognized it as the voice that had been sounding in my ears for many long days and I understood that during all that time I had been speaking to myself.)

Meursault's increased understanding emerges only gradually during the legal process. At its beginning, the examining magistrate, brandishing a crucifix, exclaims: "Les criminels qui sont venus devant moi ont toujours pleurd devant cette image de la douleur." (The criminals who have come before me have always wept before this image of suffering.)11 Meursault reacts with:

J'allais rdpondre que c'dtait justement parce qu'il s'agissait de criminels. Mais j'ai pensd que moi aussi j'dtais comme eux. C'dtait une idde & quoi je ne pouvais me faire. (1175-76, emphasis added)

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(I was about to answer that that was precisely because they were criminals. But then I thought that I too was like them. It was an idea I couldn't get used to.)

He begins to accept the notion of his culpability only well into the trial, when he senses the audience's revulsion: "J'ai senti alors

quelque chose qui soulevait la salle et, pour la premiere fois, j'ai compris que j'dtais coupable (emphasis added). (Then I sensed

something that aroused the courtroom and, for the first time, I understood that I was guilty.) Thus the trial serves both to apply to Meursault from without the label of culpability, and to induce him to accept and internalize it as part of his altered identity. Yet Meursault does not discard his former identity. He remains attached to the

supposedly carefree, natural creature whose speech was silence, whose season was eternal summer, and whose playground was the beach; otherwise, his speech of self-justification to the priest at the end of the novel would be empty and meaningless. But he now begins to understand that his former identity was incomplete, inadequate.

Caligula, looking into his mirror an the end of Camus' play (the second version of which is contemporary with the novel) exclaims: "ma libertd n'est pas la bonne" (my freedom is not the right one); Meursault, looking into his tin plate, might say to himself: "My innocence was not the right one; my happiness was not the good one." His kind of innocence, based as it was on the treacherous equilibrium of neutrality, and his kind of happiness, founded primarily on sensual enjoyment, were terribly fragile. He recognizes this in a flash, without yet a clear, detailed understanding, when he says after firing the fifth shot, "J'ai compris que j'avais d6truit l'dquilibre du jour, le silence exceptionnel d'une plage ou j'avais dtd heureux. (I understood that I had destroyed the balance of the day, the exceptional silence of a beach where I had been happy.) Through his trial, understood as a testing of his identity, Meursault, this man with half a name, is brought to understand that his former life of uninvolvement on the beach was indeed exceptional, and that in trying to experience only the pleasant side of life (l'endroit) while avoiding the negative side (l'envers), he was living only half a life with half an identity.12

To my knowledge, no critic has accorded much prominence to the theme of identity in Part II; and that is curious, when we consider that in The Misunderstanding (the play Camus wrote in 1941- 43) Jan is killed because he concealed his identity.13 Yet, Camus marks the two crucial events of Meursault's new life (his initial incarceration and the start of the trial) with the question of his identity. Part II begins:

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Tout de suite aprns mon arrestation, j'ai dtd interrogd plusieurs fois. Mais il s'agissait d'interrogatoires d'identitd qui n'ont pas durd longtemps. (1171)

(Right after my arrest, I was interrogated several times. But it was about my identity, and the session didn't last long.)

And at the start of the first court session:

On m'a encore fait d6cliner mon identitd, et malgrd mon agacement, j'ai pensd qu'au fond c'dtait assez naturel, parce qu'il serait trop grave de juger un homme pour un autre. (1187)

(They asked me once again to state my identity, and despite my irritation, I thought that it was natural enough because it would be a serious thing indeed to judge one man for another.)

The irony of that remark lies in the fact that this court is indeed going to judge one man for another: it is going to judge and condemn the man who fired the four shots that did not kill for the man who fired the first shot that did kill. Both the investigating magistrate and the prosecutor emphasize those four shots. The magistrate asks repeatedly: "Pourquoi avez vous tird sur un corps a terre? Pourquoi? II faut que vous me le disiez. Pourquoi?

(Why did you fire on a fallen body? Why? You must tell me. Why?)

And the prosecutor concludes his analysis of the accused's premeditation with this triumphant flourish, as reported by Meursault:

Et "pour etre sOr que la besogne dtait bien faite," j'avais tird encore quatre balles, posament,

' coup

sur, d'une fagon rdfldchie en quelque sorte. (1196) (And "to make sure that the job was well-

done," I had fired another four rounds, calmly, at point-blank range, in a well considered way so to

speak.)

This emphasis on the four shots is a major element in the

miscarriage of justice that most commentators have felt and that both

Weisberg and Posner, in their opposite ways, place at the center of their discussions. But it is a miscarriage of legal justice only; for it is

perfect poetic justice. The Meursault who fired the four shots could not have fired the first; yet the Meursault who fired the four shots could not have come into being without the other, and only the second Meursault could understand, assume responsibility, and

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meaningfully undergo judgment for the guilt of the first. The first Meursault is still there, however, the one who can

say, "Et meme, dans un sens, cela m'intdressait de voir un proces. Je n'en avais jamais eu l'occasion dans ma vie." (And, in a sense, it would even be interesting to see a trial. I had never in my life had the opportunity.) This is the uninvolved observer who watches the passing human scene with acuity and mild amusement. But there is now in Meursault another observer who observes the first -- a psychological reflexivity that becomes characteristic over the course of Part II. Camus immediately objectifies this new psychological situation through the enigmatic figure of the young reporter, about whom Meursault reflects:

Dans son visage un peu asymdtrique je ne voyais que ses deux yeux tris clairs, qui m'examinaient attentivement sans rien exprimer qui fOt d6finissable. Et j'ai eu l'impression bizarre d'etere regardd par moi meme. (1186, emphasis added)

(In his slightly asymmetrical face I saw only his two very bright eyes, which scrutinized me intently without any definable expression. And I had the odd impression of being watched by myself.)

The reporter as observer and recorder, epitomizes the role Meursault typically assumed in Part I, as when he spent Sunday afternoons on his balcony, overlooking the human scene below. The reporter thus embodies the complex of attitudes that most fully defines the nature of Meursault's guilt: his placing himself above the human drama -- his character as dtranger in the sense of outsider, his attitude of neutrality intended to relieve him of the burden of making difficult choices, his strategy of non-responsibility, as when he says about Marie's proposal of marriage, "c'dtait elle qui le demandait et moi je me contentais de dire oui." (She's the one who was asking; as for me, I merely said yes.) The man who failed to establish his full identity feels robbed of his individuality when his own attorney uses the first person, "disant 'Je' chaque fois qu'il parlait de moi," (saying "I" each time he spoke about me.) When questioned about this odd practice, the policeman replies, "Tous les avocats font ca." (All lawyers do that.)

Indeed! Meursault, playing the role of advocate for Raymond when

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writing the letter to his mistress, must have written "Je" many times. So Camus applies poetic justice with ruthless specificity. Both parts begin with incarceration; Meursault had put his mother in an old age home, and at the beginning of Part II he is put in prison. He had always avoided others' questions:

Je ne voulais pas ddjeuner chez Cdleste comme d'habitude parce que, certainement, ils m'auraient posd des questions et je n'aime pas cela. (1139)

(I didn't want to have lunch at Cdleste's as usual because they would certainly have asked me questions, and I don't like that.)

Now as part of the legal procedures he is subjected to relentless questioning.

Camus imposes poetic justice on Meursault primarily through the medium of the prosecutor's argument, which finds consequence and value in actions that Meursault had deliberately left arbitrary and insignificant. The law's strategy thus finds an interpretive void, a requirement of some explanation for Meursault's life, and the law is quite ready to provide its own authoritative view. The refusal to view the mother's body,'4 the cafd-au-lait, the cigarettes, the Fernandel film, the affair with Marie, the letter for Raymond, and the false deposition on his behalf -- all these acts, which Meursault had dismissed implicitly or explicitly with "cela ne veut rien dire" (that doesn't mean anything) the prosecutor now organizes into a structure of connections, meanings, and values. We and Meursault know these to be outrageously false, but Meursault, in the absence of any such structure of his own making, is forced to accept them as "plausible." The prosecutor manages to assign to his victim the fundamental identity of criminal.

Camus' message is clear: in the perspective of a reality bereft of meaning (the absurd), you cannot choose, and you cannot judge. You are innocent because no one can judge you; but your personal and human identities are forged out of choices and judgments, and if you do not assume the responsibility of making them, someone else will make them for you, and you will be found guilty. Out of such dilemmas is built the tragedy of the human condition.

This ethical paradox is clearly illustrated by Meursault's response to his lawyer's question concerning his love for his mother:

"Sans doute, j'aimais bien maman, mais cela ne voulait rien dire. Tous les etres sains avaient plus ou moins souhaitd la mort de ceux qu'ils aimaient." (1172)15

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(Certainly, I did love mama, but that didn't mean anything. All healthy beings had more or less desired the death of those they loved.)

The statement illustrates the wrong side and the right side of things and points to the deeper meaning of "that doesn't mean anything." In the original Meursault's philosophy, opposites cancel each other, leaving nothing; but it is precisely because all aspects of life contain their opposites that anguished judgment is necessary, so that the good can be chosen and separated from the bad. Meursault could have chosen to live his love for his mother and let the hatred lie dormant. Camus, through the trial, makes him bear the responsibility for the choice he did not make. Nearing his execution, Meursault accepts this responsibility; in his last outburst, he asks for a hatred fully compatible with his guilt.

The legal condemnation to death cannot be his sole punishment, for in the face of death we are all equally "privileged." As both Weisberg and Posner point out, however, Camus does offer a recognizable account of a trial in a French court as well as a caricature of it. He goes into considerable detail in depicting its conventions and procedures; he dwells on the behavior of the participants, the cordial atmosphere in the courtroom, where habituds greet each other as in a club, the formality and mechanical regularity of the procedure, the inflation of language perpetrated by both the prosecutor and the defense attorney, the sarcasms of the presiding judge, the browbeating of the witnesses and the misleading truthfulness of their testimonies, culminating in Marie's tearful protest: "On la forgait a dire le contraire de ce qu'elle pensait." (1192) (They forced her to say the opposite of what she was thinking.)

Camus imposes such painstaking detail in order to subject law itself to poetic justice. That is why Camus, departing from the classical model of Molibre, brings the world of the law into his novel, its formal and practical manifestations, its social and political assumptions, its representatives and procedures -- law as a whole must also be subjected to the light of philosophic scrutiny, under which its pretenses, deficiencies, and arrogant complacencies will be revealed. In a world where any potential judgment -- particularly moral judgment -- is tinged with ambiguity, no person, no institution, can be entirely innocent. Camus puts the law, too, on trial, by virtue of the same principle that turns Clamence, the anti-hero of The Fall into a "judge-penitent."

If the law is deemed incapable of resolving the ambiguities of the human situation and inadequate to the task of judgment, this does not mean that Meursault must be innocent -- as Weisberg insists; nor does it mean that Camus romanticizes the criminal -- as Posner would have it. Meursault, like Tarrou in The Plague, has abdicated the

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burdensome responsibilities of choice and made himself vulnerable to both external judgment -- the court's verdict -- and the judgment of that other self whose unsmiling visage he sees reflected in his tin plate.16 Yet the law must also be imaged in a critical mirror. And Meursault's situation and personality are well suited to the job of destroying its pretense. A spectator at his own trial, distanced by his estrangement from the society the court represents, he can look upon the tragi-comedy of the courtroom like a modern Candide or Ingdnu, sometimes with wide-eyed astonishment and amusement, sometimes with a caustic, conscious irony that is more the author's than his own. Meursault's account of the prosecutor's summation is particularly rich in examples of this strategy:

Moi j'dcoutais et j'entendais qu'on me jugeait intelligent. Mais je ne comprenais pas bien comment les qualitds d'un homme ordinaire pouvaient devenir des charges dcrasantes contre un coupable. (1196)

(I was listening and I was hearing that I was being judged intelligent. But I didn't quite understand how an ordinary man's qualities could become crushing charges against a culprit.)

Et j'ai essayd d'dcouter encore parce que le procureur s'est mis a parler de mon ame.

11 disait qu'il s'dtait penchd sur elle et qu'il n'avait rien trouvd, messieurs les jurds. II disait qu'a la vdrit6 je n'en avait point, d'ame, et que rien d'humain, et pas un des principes moraux qui gardent le coeur des hommes ne m'dtait accessible. (1197)

(And I tried to listen some more because the prosecutor started to talk about my soul.

He was saying that he had looked at it closely and that he had found nothing, gentlemen of the jury. He was saying that in truth I didn't have one -- a soul, and that nothing human, and not one of the moral principles that stand guard over the hearts of men was accessible to me.)

(Note that in this last passage, the surprising switch from indirect to direct discourse within the same sentence underscores and casts into doubt Meursault's supposed naivetd.) These are only two examples of a whole series of ironic-ingenuous remarks culminating in a final comment that captures the essential traits of Meursault's situation and personality:

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Je n'ai pas regardd du cotd de Marie. Je n'en ai pas eu le temps parce que le prdsident m'a dit dans une forme bizarre que j'aurais la tete tranchde sur une place publique au nom du peuple frangais. (1201)

(I didn't glance in Marie's direction. I didn't have time for that because the presiding judge told me in an odd phrasing that my head would be cut off in a public square in the name of the French people.)

The mention of Marie recalls his innocent sensuality; the notice he takes of the judge's "odd phrasing" expresses his ingenuousness and his estrangement as well as his ironic perspective on the court; the spelling out of the penalty evokes his new identity as culprit and anticipates his new consciousness of mortality.

Many commentators, including Posner (88), have underscored the "unrealistic" harshness of this sentence -- especially in a colonial setting,17 when self-defense provided a very plausible argument. That Meursault's attorney hardly alludes to self-defense is another implausibility, one so glaring that Camus must have intended it. Camus' portrayal of the trial cannot be taken as a realistic account of legal process in a French colonial court any more than his hero's apocalyptic experience during his ten-minute walk on the beach after a French luncheon in a setting of banal domesticity can be taken as a realistic portrayal of the hostility of nature. We see here not a frontal assault on the law, but a critique of judgment itself, which reaches its climax in the prosecutor's summation. Weisberg has quite rightly pointed out that in Continental jurisprudence "as depicted by European novelists" the investigating magistrate "duplicates the methods and the creative deeds of the novelist ... Thus, in both the inquisitor and the novelist, acuity of perception serves to uncover and to record reality in its fullness." (47) But it remains for the prosecutor (and the defense attorney) to organize that reality into a structure of meanings. What invalidates the prosecutor's interpretation of Meursault's reality is not its wrongness, for it does fulfill a prime requirement of both legal and literary discourse: it is "plausible." What invalidates it is its ease, its rhetorical glibness, its blindness to ambiguities, and its exclusion of any feeling for the accused. These are literary more than judicial failures.

In Molibre's plays, aberrations threatening to society but immune to the law are exposed and satirized; in Camus' novel aberrations damaging to humanity but normally immune to the law are prosecuted in a court of law so that the law itself can be exposed and satirized. For the law, in its mechanical application of judgment and its simplistic distinction between guilt and innocence, does

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violence to human solidarity by separating human beings into two mutually exclusive categories (Weisberg's "regimentation"). The novel itself thus becomes the privileged space where both Meursault's life and the persons and institutions that would judge that life can be subjected to scrutiny and ultimately, perhaps, to the reader's judgment.18

1. The Failure of the Word: The Protagonist as Lawyer in Modern Fiction (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984). All subsequent references to this work will be indicated by page numbers set in parentheses in the text.

2. Law and Literature: A Misunderstood Relation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988). All subsequent references to this work will be given by parenthetical page reference in the text.

3. Rent Girard, "Camus' Stranger Retried," 79 PMLA, 319 (1964). 4. Albert Camus, Thdatre, Rdcits, Nouvelles, (Paris: Gallimard, 1962), p. 1933. All subsequent references to Camus' works are to this volume and will be given in the text. All translations are by the author.

5. "Moliere and the Sociology of Exchange," 14 Critical Inquiry 477 (1988). 6. Id., at 491.

7. See Brian T. Fitch, The Narcissistic Text (Toronto: U. of Toronto Press, 1982), ch. 4, for a detailed discussion of the text's "reflexivity" and the reader's role in fulfilling its intentions. Fitch argues that Part I functions as a trap that ensnares the reader into adopting the point of view of the prosecutor. This is what Posner has done. Fitch further suggests that Part II may function as a trap that ensnares the reader into rejecting the point of view of the prosecutor and sympathizing exclusively with the accused. That is what Weisberg has done.

8. It is high time to point out that the word innocence, in both French and English, has at least two meanings: ingenuousness and freedom from guilt. The two meanings are related; but the distinction is important. Meursault loses his illusion of the second kind of innocence on the beach; but, as we shall see, be brings some of the first kind with him into the courtroom.

9. I was alerted to this parallel between Clamence and Meursault by Marilyn K. Yalom in "Albert Camus and the Myth of the Trial," 25 Modern Language Quarterly 434 (1964). Yalom also points to the nature of Meursault's guilt when she remarks: "The medieval sin of neutrality -- a lack of commitment to good or to evil -- is rendered into modern terms as a crime of complicity, whose uncertain moral status is mirrored in the gray Dutch landscape." Id. at 488.

10. Again, The Fall develops this theme more explicitly. Clamence imagines a moral universe where people would be labeled by sign-boards on their houses, which would advertise their moral condition -- as would their calling cards: "... nous serion forces de revenir sur nous-memes .... Oui, I'enfer doit etre ainsi: des rues a enseignes et pas moyen de s'expliquer. On est class6 une fois pour toutes" (1499). (... we'd be forced to reflect upon ourselves.... Yes, hell must be like that: streets with sign-boards and no way to explain yourself. You are stamped once and for all.") Meursault and his friendly witnesses find no way to explain themselves at his trial.

11. That an examining magistrate would, in the course of carrying out his official duties,

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indulge in such a personal and passionate outburst is highly improbable, to say the least. So much for realism! But, see the alternative explanation of Weisberg supra note 1, ch. 3.

12. I allude to the essential meaning of the title of Camus' first collection of essays, L'Envers et l'endroit (The Wrong Side and the Right Side), written in 1935-36 and published in Algiers in 1937, just before he started work on The Stranger. 13. Note that the experience of the image in the tin plate takes place just after Meursault relates the story of the Czechoslovakian, which summarizes the plot of The Misunderstanding.

14. But seeWeisberg, supra, note 1, pp. 121-22, for a convincing case that Meursault was at first eager to view his mother's body and later declined for very understandable reasons.

15. Critics "friendly" to Meursault are fond of quoting this statement about his mother as evidence of his honesty. Indeed, it is startlingly honest; and clearly, Camus sets it in contrast to conventional hypocrisy, here represented by the lawyer. But honesty does not guarantee innocence; and hypocrisy does invoke real values.

16. In The Plague, this double vulnerability is expressed in Tarrou's succumbing to both forms of the disease: the bubonic (external, social) and the pulmonary (internal, private). 17. Posner, supra note 2, p. 88: "A colonial French court would not have been so eager to convict and sentence to death a Frenchman accused of murdering a 'native.' "

18. Camus thus emphasizes the part of French criminal procedure that admits character evidence. Weisberg's argument that Meursault would not have been convicted of murder in an American court (supra, note 1, pp. 121-122) and Posner's statement to the contrary (supra, note 2, pp. 88-89) with his demonstration that Camus faithfully portrayed actual French procedure, are irrelevant in the literary perspective of poetic justice.

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Documents

Palais de Justice and Poetic Justice in Albert Camus' "The Stranger"