- The Failure of the Word: The Protagonist as Laivyer 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.
- 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.
- René Girard, “Camus' Stranger Retried,” 79 PMLA, 319 (1964).
- Albert Camus, Théatre, Récits, 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.
- “Molière and the Sociology of Exchange,” 14 Critical Inquiry All (1988).
- Id., at 491.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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 forcés de revenir sur nous-mêmes…. Oui, l'enfer doit être ainsi: des rues à enseignes et pas moyen de s'expliquer. On est classé 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.
- That an examining magistrate would, in the course of carrying out his official duties, indulge in such a personal and passionate outburst is highly improbable, to say the least. So much for realism! But, seethe alternative explanation of Weisberg supra note 1, ch. 3.
- 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.
- 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.
- But see Weisberg, 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.
- 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.
- 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).
- 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.’”
- 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.
Law & Literature
Volume 3, 1991 - Issue 1