The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Albert Camus · L’Étranger · a novel in two parts, of six and five chapters · Gallimard, 1942 · scored on Camus’s French, read from knowledge; no text in hand, French quoted only where its words are certain, with the desk’s plain English beneath, and Matthew Ward’s translation (1988) for sense
Mode
Philosophical novel told as a plain first-person récit; a novel of the absurd, a trial and a condemned man’s last night in one voice
Mythos
The scapegoat expelled by a community whose rites of grief he would not share, who ends by asking for the crowd’s hatred; the sun as fate, a physical power at the funeral and on the beach; the outsider
Phase
From a telegram announcing a mother’s death to the night before an execution: some three weeks to a shooting on a beach, then about a year of examination, trial and the cell
Presentation
Fiction; two parts of six and five chapters, hinged on the shooting; first person throughout, in the passé composé, with almost no account of motive
Register
A flat, plain, unlinked sentence that turns to metaphor and cadence at the shooting, admits the court’s rhetoric as a foreign tongue, and rises to lyric on the last page
Scale
One man, his mother’s funeral, a girl, two neighbours and a court; Algiers, its beaches and the home at Marengo
Governing Proposition
A man who works in an office in Algiers buries his mother at Marengo without weeping, swims with a girl and sees a comic film the next day, writes a letter for a neighbour because he has no reason not to, and some three weeks later shoots a nameless Arab on a beach in the sun; tried, he is condemned less for the killing than for the funeral. The wager of the novel is that a man who will not lie about what he feels is a stranger to a society that requires him to perform its feelings, and that a first-person narration which reports and never explains can make that refusal the subject of the trial, and show a court writing the story of a soul the book declined to write.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
“Aujourd’hui, maman est morte. Ou peut-être hier, je ne sais pas.”
“Today Maman died. Or maybe yesterday, I don’t know.” The novel opens on a telegram and a doubt. Meursault, a man who works in an office in Algiers, is told by telegram that his mother has died at the old people’s home at Marengo. The voice is set in the first two sentences: short, plain, in the first person, unsure of the day and not troubled by being unsure. Everything the second part of the book will hold against him is in them already. The court will want to know what he felt; the sentences tell what happened. The doubt about the day will become evidence.
The book is built in two parts, of six and five chapters, and the hinge between them is a shooting on a beach. The first part runs from the telegram to that shooting, some three weeks later; the second covers about a year, from the arrest through eleven months of examination to the trial and the night before the execution. It is told in the first person throughout, and in the passé composé, the tense of speech, rather than the passé simple of the classical récit: Sartre observed it in 1943, and it is a fact of the text. The narrator reports what he did, saw and felt in the body, in short sentences without connectives, and almost never says why.
Gallimard published L’Étranger in Paris in 1942, under the Occupation, in the same year as Le Mythe de Sisyphe, Camus’s essay on the absurd. It was the first published novel of an unknown journalist from Algeria. It is a single finished book, printed as its author issued it, with no rival version. Its hero has nothing to explain, and the book is built on that: a man without hidden depths, given in a form that does not look for them, so that the depths others will look for in him can be seen to be theirs.
Movement II
At the home Meursault keeps the vigil beside his mother’s coffin. He drinks the coffee he is offered. The old residents come in and sit facing him, and he watches them as he watches everything, by their faces, their bodies and the sounds they make. The screws of the coffin are noted. He does not weep, and he does not say why he does not; the book does not ask the question, and gives no answer to it. A reader who has met the novel of psychological analysis looks for the grief beneath the report and does not find it, and is left with what is there: a long night, a chair, the coffee and the old people facing him.
The funeral procession goes out in the heat. The sun is already a pressure, on the road and on the mourners, and the book records it as the body feels it. Old Pérez, from the home, cannot keep up; he cuts across the fields to rejoin the procession and falls behind again. It is one of the few moments in the first part where the plain report rises, and it rises through a body, an old man struggling in the heat, rather than through any statement of feeling. Then the burial is over, and Meursault goes back to Algiers.
The next day he swims with Marie, and in the evening they see a comic film with Fernandel. On the Sunday he watches the street from his balcony. The tram, the café, the salt on Marie’s mouth: the book gives these pleasures without comment, as it gave the vigil, and does not rank them. At the office he is offered a post in Paris, and he declines it; the book gives no motive. Each of these days, given flatly as days, will be read back in the second part as a count of the indictment.
Movement III
Two neighbours share his landing. Old Salamano has abused his dog for years, cursing it in the stairwell; then he loses it, and at night Meursault hears him weeping through the wall, and thinks of his mother. It is the book’s other mourning, given as comedy and left without comment. Raymond, the other neighbour, asks Meursault to write a letter for him, and Meursault writes it because he has no reason not to. At Céleste’s, where he eats, a little woman who moves like a robot shares his table for a meal. The days run on, and the letter starts a chain that ends on a beach.
On the beach, in the full sun, Meursault meets an Arab, whose name the book never gives. The sun is a blade on his forehead; the light flashes off the knife into his eyes; the trigger gives. Then he fires four more shots, and they are like knocks on a door: “la porte du malheur”
“the door of misfortune.” The whole physical world presses on one hand, and the scene is dread and grandeur at once. The first part closes here, on the act the second part will try and will hardly look at.
At the shooting the plain prose turns, for the first time, to metaphor, repetition and rhythm. The style breaks when the life does. It is prepared: the sun that pressed on the funeral procession presses on the beach, and the book has made of it a physical power, a fate that acts through heat and light rather than through any purpose. After the shooting the prose returns to the plain sentence, in the cell. The dead man stays nameless. Meursault does not name what he does not attend to, and the book keeps to his attention; what it keeps out of sight there, a whole colonial order, has become one of the questions it is read for.
Movement IV
The second part begins with the arrest, and runs through eleven months of examination. The examining magistrate shows him a crucifix, and before it Meursault refuses God. In the cell he finds a newspaper clipping about a Czech who came home rich and was killed by his mother and his sister. He reads it and rereads it. It is the novel’s own story inverted, a mother and a son and a death no one weeps for rightly, and it is all the reading the cell gives him.
At the trial the funeral is tried. The warden of the home testifies that Meursault did not weep; the coffee at the vigil is brought in as evidence; Marie is made to tell of the swim and the comic film the next day. The prosecutor reconstructs the funeral as the act of a monster, and links the accused to a parricide to be tried the next day, as if a man who did not weep for his mother had killed her. Asked why he fired, Meursault answers: “à cause du soleil”
“because of the sun.” The court laughs. It is a true answer, and one the court cannot use.
The second part retells the first. Every day the reader saw is given again, by magistrate, witnesses and prosecutor, as a narrative of guilt with a soul inside it, and the reader, who saw the days, knows the court’s story is false. The court writes the psychological novel Meursault refused to be in. The advocates’ rhetoric is given by flat report, and the report is the satire. The voice of the law enters the book as a foreign tongue. He is condemned to death less for the killing of a man whose name no one speaks than for a funeral at which he did not weep.
Movement V
In the cell he refuses the chaplain, who comes nonetheless and presses him to turn to God. At last Meursault breaks, and pours out at the priest everything he has held back. It is the one time the book lets its narrator speak at length, and the plain voice breaks into eloquence; the scene declaims more than the rest of the book, and it is the one place where the philosophy is stated. The outburst is prepared by the magistrate’s crucifix and by every earlier refusal, and it drives the chaplain out.
Then the night comes in, with stars and the smells of earth and salt, and he opens himself “à la tendre indifférence du monde”
“to the tender indifference of the world.” Of himself he says: “j’avais été heureux, et que je l’étais encore”
“I had been happy, and I was happy still.” He wishes for a great crowd on the day of his execution, and that they greet him “avec des cris de haine”
“with cries of hate”, the book’s last words. The prose rises to a lyric cadence it has withheld until then. The victim completes the rite in his own words, and asks to be hated for it.
The questions the book leaves have not closed. Sartre’s essay of 1943 read its sentence and its absurd; Barthes, in 1953, took it as the model of a neutral writing; Girard, in 1964, argued that the novel rigs its own trial; Conor Cruise O’Brien and Edward Said read the nameless Arab and the colonial order the book leaves out; Kamel Daoud, in 2013, answered it with a novel told from the dead man’s family. Visconti filmed it in 1967. Why he fired, whether he is innocent or the book’s alibi, whether his indifference is honesty or damage, and whether the happiness of the last page is earned, are argued still. The outsider has become a figure, and the figure is his.
Act III · The Twelve
The test is subtractive, and it finds almost nothing to take. The vigil and the funeral must come first, because the second part will try them; the swim with Marie and the Fernandel film the next day are the prosecutor’s evidence before they are anything else; and Raymond’s letter, which Meursault writes because he has no reason not to, is the chain that leads to the beach. Salamano and his dog, which look like local colour, are the book’s other mourning: the old man abuses the dog for years, loses it and weeps, and Meursault, hearing him through the wall, thinks of his mother. The clipping about the Czech who returns home rich and is killed by his mother and sister, read and reread in the cell, is the novel’s own story inverted. The scale is compelled, since a life with no hidden depths needs no more pages. What the test can take is small: the little robot woman at Céleste’s, and part of the chaplain’s exchange, do work the action has already done.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The disclosure can be stated and it holds: a society judges a man less for his act than for whether he performs the feelings it requires, and a man who will not lie about what he feels is a stranger to it, and dies as one. The action makes the case. The second part convicts Meursault of murder by way of his mother’s funeral: the warden’s testimony that he did not weep, the coffee at the vigil, Marie and the comic film the next day. The reader, who saw the life, knows the court’s story is false. A second truth comes in the last pages: no meaning is given from above, and a man may still be happy in the plain world. Held below the top on two counts: Meursault’s affectlessness is a constructed case, made to carry the argument, and the colonial condition the book stands in, where the dead man has no name, is disclosed against its grain rather than by its design.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Two great heights and several lesser ones, set in a prose that is flat by design. The first is the beach: the sun a blade on the forehead, the knife flashing light into his eyes, the trigger giving, and then four more shots, knocks on “la porte du malheur”, the door of misfortune; dread and grandeur at once, the whole physical world pressing on one hand. The second is the close: the chaplain driven out, a night of stars and the smells of earth and salt, and a man opening himself to “la tendre indifférence du monde”, the tender indifference of the world. The lesser heights are the funeral procession in the heat, and old Pérez cutting across the fields and falling behind. Held at this figure because most of the first part is level, and the elevation, when it comes, comes rarely: height counts, and so does frequency.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The myth is built, not evoked. The load-bearing structure of the second part is the expulsion of a scapegoat: a community makes a monster out of a man who would not share its rites of grief, and kills him to confirm its order, and the victim ends by asking for the crowd’s hatred, completing the sacrifice in his own words. The prosecutor links him to a parricide to be tried the next day, as if a man who did not weep for his mother had killed her. The sun is the other built force, fate as a physical power, present at the funeral and decisive on the beach. The particulars stay particular: the tram, the café, a Sunday on the balcony. Meursault has become an archetype, the outsider, as few figures of his century have. Held below the top because the pattern is single, and carried by one figure.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The inheritance is the French novel of psychological analysis, from Madame de La Fayette and Constant through Stendhal to Proust, whose method is to explain the self to itself; and beside it the classical récit in the passé simple. Camus wrote a first-person narrative that refuses analysis: the narrator reports what he did, saw and felt in the body, and almost never why, in the passé composé of speech and in short sentences without connectives. The plain sentence has an American source in Hemingway, and the turn is partly a transfer. But to set that manner inside a French philosophical novel, and to make the absence of inner explanation the subject of the trial, was a new road. The stake was real: the first published novel of an unknown journalist from Algeria, issued in occupied France and built on a hero with nothing to explain.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Change the form and the book loses what it knows. The passé composé and the unlinked sentence give a consciousness without causes, each moment set beside the last: the book knows his life as he lives it, without the story a life is supposed to have. The two parts are the second instrument. The first gives the events; the second gives them again, retold by examining magistrate, witnesses and prosecutor as a narrative of guilt, so that the form itself shows what the book discloses: the court writes the psychological novel Meursault refused to be in. At the shooting the plain prose turns for the first time to metaphor and rhythm, so that the style breaks when the life does; it breaks again, into eloquence, when the chaplain provokes him. Held off the top because the time and place of narration stay unresolved, a diary’s “today” in the opening and a retrospect elsewhere, and the book never makes the inconsistency mean.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Eighty years of return supply the evidence, and the questions remain open. Sartre’s “Explication de L’Étranger” (1943) read the sentence and the absurd; Barthes, in Le Degré zéro de l’écriture (1953), took the book as the model of a neutral, white writing; René Girard’s “Camus’s Stranger Retried” (1964) argued that the novel stacks its own trial; Conor Cruise O’Brien (1970) and Edward Said, in Culture and Imperialism (1993), read the nameless Arab and the absent colonial order; Kamel Daoud’s Meursault, contre-enquête (2013) answered the book from the dead man’s family. Each reading has stayed in play, and none has closed the others. Why he fired, whether he is innocent or the novel’s alibi, whether his indifference is honesty or damage, whether the closing happiness is earned: all are still argued. Held below the highest figures because the surface is lucid and a short book’s yield is concentrated: at the level of incident, a second reading confirms more than it discovers.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The field is the French and European novel of the twentieth century. The force is high: the book showed that a novel could render a consciousness from outside and make the refusal of interiority its moral subject, and that a short, plain récit could carry a philosophy without stating it until its last pages. Part of that force is a transfer from American prose, and it is discounted for that. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it is among the widest of any novel of its century, and it was immediate. The book set the type of the existential novel and of the outsider as a figure; Barthes’s degree zero made it the reference point of the neutral style that the nouveau roman would argue with; and it is still answered by novels, as in Daoud’s, and taken up by film, as in Visconti’s of 1967, and by song.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Survival is weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the novel was published complete by its author in 1942 and has been printed without break and without textual question since; nothing is lost or disputed. Presence is eighty-four years of continuous reading, teaching and translation, into dozens of languages, at school and university on several continents: as wide as any novel of its age has, though fame and sales are presence and not proof. The fabric carries no charge. The book has outlived the colonial Algeria that produced it and is now read partly against that order, which is evidence of survival rather than of a surface fixed to its moment. Eighty-four years of the widest presence are weighed as eighty-four years, and do not stand level with the survival of works that have lasted for centuries.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Judged on Camus’s French. The plain sentence is exact and never inert: the opening’s two short sentences, with their doubt about the day, set the whole voice at once. Detail is concrete and physical, the coffee at the vigil, the screws of the coffin, the heat of the procession, the salt on Marie’s mouth, and the rhythm is controlled so that the flat run of the first part can bear the turn at the beach, where the prose takes on metaphor, repetition and cadence, and returns afterward to the plain sentence in the cell. The courtroom satire is made by flat report of the advocates’ rhetoric. The last page rises to a lyric cadence the book has withheld until then. Held off the top because the secondary figures, Marie above all, are drawn thinly, and the chaplain scene declaims more than it dramatises.
Score: 9.0 / 10
One physics governs the book: the body and the plain world, the sun and the sea, set against the explanations others want. Take the two most distant elements: the comedy of Salamano cursing his dog in the stairwell, and the night before the execution. They obey the same law, habit and loss with no meaning above them, and Meursault meets both the same way, with attention and without commentary. Both parts keep one voice, so the court’s language enters as a foreign tongue. The two breaks of style are prepared: the sun presses throughout the first part, and his refusals of God before magistrate and chaplain build toward the outburst. The nameless dead man obeys the law too, since Meursault does not name what he does not attend to. Held below the top because the range is narrow, one consciousness, one milieu, one tone, and narrowness is not coherence; and the late eloquence strains the voice a little more than the build accounts for.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Judged as a short novel. The orders are held by one structure: consciousness; the family, in the mother, absent and decisive; love and the body, in Marie; work, in the office and the post in Paris refused; the state and its law, in the examination, trial and sentence; the sacred, in the magistrate’s crucifix and the chaplain; death; and the natural order of sun, sea and night sky. The trial binds them: every order the first part held loosely is called to account in the second. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is present and not held. Colonial society is everywhere in the setting, the Arabs on the beach, the nameless dead man, the pied-noir quarter, and the book never takes it up as an order; history is absent, though this is the Algiers of the late 1930s; labour and class are glimpsed. The form rightly keeps to one life, and a low mark on a small form describes the form.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.8 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 9.1, then The Living Form, Pressure on Tradition and The Made at 9.0. A text whole as its author published it and read without break for eighty-four years, as widely as any novel of its age; a form in which the second part retells the first as a story of guilt, so that the court writes the novel of the soul the narration refused; a reach that set the type of the outsider and of the neutral style; and a plain sentence exact enough to bear the turn at the beach and the cadence of the last page.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.8, held by what is present and not held: consciousness, the family, love, work, the law, the sacred and the natural order are bound by the trial, but colonial society, everywhere in the setting, is never taken up as an order, history is absent and labour is glimpsed. Next above it, The Sublime at 8.4: two great heights, the beach and the last night, in a prose level by design. Then The Archetypal Deep and The Swerve at 8.7: one built myth carried by one figure, and a turn partly transferred from American prose.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.8 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.0, The Made at 9.0, The Inner Law at 8.8, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Imperishable at 9.1, Pressure on Tradition at 9.0, The Unconcealment at 8.9, The Archetypal Deep at 8.7 and The Swerve at 8.7 clear the bar of 8.5, the last two by two tenths. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.4, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.8. Every summit condition is met; the work is held below the summit by its aggregate alone, at 8.8.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Albert Camus’s L’Étranger, published by Gallimard, Paris, in 1942, scored as the novel as published, in French: two parts, of six and five chapters. It is a single finished book with no rival version; a preface Camus later wrote for an American school edition is context, not the work. No text, French or English, was in hand; nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. Every axis is judged on Camus’s French. French is quoted only where its words are certain: the opening, the answer at the trial, the door of misfortune and the words of the last page; each is followed by the desk’s own plain English, and events are paraphrased. Translation · Matthew Ward’s The Stranger (Knopf, 1988), read beside for sense, chosen because it keeps the flat “Maman” and the plain sentence closer than Stuart Gilbert’s (1946, published in Britain as The Outsider); Joseph Laredo’s (1982) and Sandra Smith’s (2012) are known less well. No translation is quoted, and none is charged to the novel. The sound of Camus’s French beyond the sentences known here is neither credited nor charged. Facts that could not be verified, among them the length of the novel in words, the number of days the first part covers, the distance from Algiers to Marengo, the dates of composition, the number of languages the book has been translated into, the date of the preface, sources for the plain style beyond Hemingway, and remarks attributed to Camus on his hero, are not given. Citations are by part and episode.