CAMUS’S SKEPTICAL TRIAL: FROM LA MORT ......Camus’s Skeptical Trial 345 Stroud’s words, in modern times skepticism has come to be understood “as the view that we know nothing,

The Romanic Review Volume 101 Number 3 © The Trustees of Columbia University

Colin Davis

CAMUS’S SKEPTICAL TRIAL: FROM LA MORT HEUREUSE TO L’ÉTRANGER

Ni oui ni non, le langage est seulement une machine à fabriquer du doute.1

The publication in 1994 of Camus’s final, unfinished novel, Le Premier Homme prompted a renewal of interest in his work, and particularly in

his relationship to Algeria. At a time when colonial and postcolonial studies were becoming increasingly influential, Le Premier Homme reminded readers that Camus was first and foremost an Algerian writer. It encouraged a more sympathetic and better- informed reassessment of his ambivalence toward French Algeria and Algerian independence. In a comprehensive reevaluation of the significance of Algeria in Camus’s work, David Carroll records how reading Le Premier Homme led him to revise entirely his earlier views.2 By contrast, the posthumous publication of Camus’s first completed novel La Mort heureuse more than two decades earlier in 1971 elicited a relatively muted response. It attracted some scholarly attention, but nothing comparable to the continuing academic and commercial interest occasioned by Le Premier Homme.3 The novel was seen as an interesting failure. Camus had worked on it between 1936 and 1938 but left it unpublished in his lifetime. Encouraged

1. Albert Camus, “Sur une philosophie de l’expression,” Œuvres complètes I: 1931–1944, éd. Jacqueline Lévi- Valensi et al. (Paris: Gallimard, 2006) 907. Throughout this article, references to La Mort heureuse and L’Étranger are to this edition, and given in the text.2. See David Carroll, Camus the Algerian: Colonialism, Terrorism, Justice (New York: Columbia UP, 2007) xiii: “For many years, I had for the most part agreed with the prevailing postcolonial critique of Camus’s Algerian political and literary texts, hold-ing the general position that, in fact, this present book directly challenges. Everything changed for me, as I believe was the case for many others, after I read Camus’s autobio-graphical novel, The First Man, when it was published posthumously in 1994. Reading the novel led me to question both my own assumptions about Camus and those of his most vocal critics and to reread all his work, especially the texts dealing with colonial Algeria, which had been the focus of the most devastating critiques of his work.”3. It is significant, for example, that The Cambridge Companion to Camus frequently touches upon issues of colonialism and postcolonialism, and it contains a chapter on Le Premier Homme, whereas La Mort heureuse is not even mentioned in the index or

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by the similarity of the protagonist’s name, Patrice Mersault, to that of Meur-sault in L’Étranger, most readers have regarded La Mort heureuse as at best a stage along the way to the later novel.4 The current article does not aim to challenge this assessment in itself. Rather, by placing La Mort heureuse and L’Étranger in the context of philosophical skepticism, it argues that the dead-lock at the core of La Mort heureuse is an unresolved tension between a desire for lyrical possession of the world and a sense that reality and experience elude narrative; moreover, the article suggests that this unresolved tension is in fact the condition that all Camus’s subsequent literary works, up to and including Le Premier Homme, continue to negotiate.

According to Stanley Cavell, skepticism in its modern philosophical form can be traced to Descartes’s Méditations (1641). Cavell argues that Descartes’s work signals a reorientation of the skeptical problematic: “The issue posed is no longer, or not alone, as with earlier skepticism, how to conduct oneself best in an uncertain world; the issue suggested is how to live at all in a groundless world. Our skepticism is a function of our now illimitable desire.”5 Descartes himself sets out to refute the claim that the world is groundless, but he begins by throwing doubt onto everything that can be doubted. In the attempt to salvage the possibility of knowledge, he accepts that he must proceed by first conceding that everything we think we know may be wrong. The very exis-tence and constitution of the external world that I believe I inhabit cannot be known for certain: I may be dreaming, or mad, or the victim of an evil deity.6 Out of Descartes’s enquiry, however, there soon emerges the certainty of the cogito, that is, the conviction that since I think, I can at least be assured that I exist as a thinking subject.

Descartes hoped that from this grounding, further certainties could be established; other philosophers, however, have not been convinced. In Barry

chronology; see Edward J. Hughes, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Camus (Cam-bridge: Cambridge UP, 2007).4. Borrowing a comparison from Gide, Jean Sarocchi writes in his introduction to Camus’s text that “dans la chrysalide de La Mort heureuse se formait la larve de L’Étranger,” “Genèse de La Mort heureuse,” La Mort heureuse, by Albert Camus (Paris: Gallimard, 1971) 17. Sarocchi also calls La Mort heureuse “une préfiguration” and the “matrice” of L’Étranger (18). Roger Quilliot insists on the other hand that La Mort heureuse “n’est nullement la matrice de L’Étranger”; see his “Présentation” of L’Étranger in Camus, Théâtre, récits, nouvelles (Paris: Gallimard, 1962) 1914. Quil-liot nevertheless describes Meursault from L’Étranger as the “frère cadet” of Mersault from La Mort heureuse (1913), and he lists some of the similarities between the two novels (1913–14).5. Stanley Cavell, Disowning Knowledge in Seven Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003) 3.6. See René Descartes, Méditations, Œuvres et lettres de Descartes (Paris: Gallimard, 1953), especially “Première Méditation,” 267–73.


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Stroud’s words, in modern times skepticism has come to be understood “as the view that we know nothing, or that nothing is certain, or that everything is open to doubt.”7 The stance toward its two principal concerns—what we know of the external world and what we know of other minds—is susceptible to a range of formulations extending from the flat denial of knowledge (we know nothing) to a more modest caution about truth claims (it is always pos-sible we might be wrong). Since Descartes, philosophy has proved incapable of settling once and for all its dispute over skepticism; as Cavell puts it, “Philoso-phy left to itself has been unable to determine whether skepticism is refutable (Descartes, Kant, Moore) or irrefutable (Hume, Wittgenstein) or unworthy of refutation (Husserl, Heidegger, Quine) or self- refuting (Austin, Strawson, Dewey).”8 Whatever the case, the problem of what I know of the world, or of myself and of others, will not go away. Emmanuel Levinas concurs with Cavell on this point: “La philosophie ne se sépare pas du scepticisme qui la suit comme une ombre qu’elle chasse en le réfutant pour la retrouver aussitôt sur ses pas.”9 Skepticism remains a standing threat that may irrupt into our ordinary lives at any moment to destroy our most secure convictions.

From the beginning, Camus was a reluctant skeptic. For many of Camus’s generation, Henri Bergson appeared to have overcome the problem of skepti-cism by arguing that the world is pre- rationally, intuitively available to the subject. Bergon’s intuition is, as Deleuze puts it, “avant tout une connaissance immédiate.”10 For Bergson, the external world exists, and it can be directly apprehended. In his copy of Bergson’s Matière et mémoire (1896), Camus underlined a sentence in which Bergson claims that the book affirms “la réalité de l’esprit” and “la réalité de la matière” whilst attempting to determine the relation between them.11 Writing in response to Bergson’s Les Deux Sources de la morale et de la religion in the year of its publication (1932), the eighteen-year- old Camus enthusiastically embraced the possibility of bypassing the intellect and directly apprehending reality: “Rien de plus séduisant que cette idée: écarter l’intelligence comme dangereuse, baser tout un système sur la connaissance immédiate et les sensations à l’état brut; c’était, en fait, dégager toute la philosophie de notre siècle.”12 But Camus was disappointed by Les Deux Sources de la morale et de la religion because, in his view, it failed to transform Bergson’s philosophy into a new religion for his age. It remained

7. Barry Stroud, The Significance of Philosophical Skepticism (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1984) vii.8. Cavell, Disowning Knowledge, xv.9. Emmanuel Levinas, Autrement qu’être ou Au- delà de l’essence (The Hague: Mar-tinus Nijhoff, 1974) 260.10. Gilles Deleuze, Le Bergsonisme (Paris: PUF, 1968) 2.11. Quoted in Olivier Todd, Albert Camus, une vie (Paris: Gallimard, 1996) 71.12. Camus, “La Philosophie du siècle,” Œuvres complètes I, 543.


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locked in the performative contradiction of using the intellect to demonstrate the failings of the intellect, thereby implicitly reaffirming the value of what is explicitly impugned. Moreover, Bergson’s intuitionism does not so much refute skepticism as refuse to engage with it, and as such it remains vulnerable to the skeptical threat it was deemed to have defeated. There is no guarantee that the world is actually as we intuit it to be; what we think we know may turn out to be deluded.

Camus expresses this skeptical threat more directly a decade later in Le Mythe de Sisyphe (1942), published in the same year as L’Étranger. A key passage begins by resolutely contradicting the skeptic’s denial of certainty about the external world, but goes on to make sweeping concessions to the skeptical standpoint:

De qui et de quoi en effet puis- je dire: “Je connais cela!” Ce cœur en moi, je peux l’éprouver et je juge qu’il existe. Ce monde, je puis le toucher et je juge encore qu’il existe. Là s’arrête toute ma science, le reste est construction. Car si j’essaie de saisir ce moi dont je m’assure, si j’essaie de le définir et de le résumer, il n’est plus qu’une eau qui coule entre mes doigts. Je puis dessiner un à un tous les visages qu’il sait prendre, tous ceux aussi qu’on lui a donnés, cette éducation, cette origine, cette ardeur ou ces silences, cette grandeur ou cette bassesse. Mais on n’additionne pas des visages. Ce cœur même qui est le mien me restera à jamais indéfinissable. Entre la certitude que j’ai de mon existence et le contenu que j’essaie de donner à cette assurance, le fossé ne sera jamais comblé. Pour tou-jours, je serai étranger à moi-même.13

Camus’s starting point is not Descartes’s.14 Descartes begins by conceding that all our opinions may be wrong; Camus, on the contrary, resolutely affirms that the existence of the self and the world are unquestionable. But this leads to an absolute dead end. Whereas Descartes was looking for some point invul-nerable to doubt that could serve as the foundation for assured knowledge, Camus’s exclusion of the self and world from the assault of doubt offers no further philosophical yield. I may know some things for certain (I exist, the

13. Camus, “Le Mythe de Sisyphe,” Œuvres complètes I, 232.14. On the comparison between this passage and Cartesian skepticism, see John Foley, Albert Camus: From the Absurd to Revolt (Stocksfield: Acumen, 2008) 7–8. Foley refers to further discussions of the relationship between the absurd and skepticism in Thomas Nagel, Mortal Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1979) 11–23, and Mitchell Gabhart, “Mitigated Skepticism and the Absurd,” Philosophical Investiga-tions 17.1 (1994): 67–83.



world exists), but this is of strictly no use to me in the discovery of further truths. Camus and Descartes are moving in opposite directions. Descartes endeavors to progress from systematic doubt to the possibility of knowledge; Camus begins in certainty but then falls into utter bewilderment.

Rather than a rigorous argument in favor of skepticism, Camus’s essay dis-plays a skeptical sensibility according to which our assurance about reality is at best fragile and at worst disastrously in error. His literary texts will repeat-edly return to the ways in which our tranquil habitation of a familiar world may be thrown into turmoil. The famous opening paragraph of L’Étranger exemplifies this position, as it reads like an exercise in skeptical self-question-ing.15 Chronology is uncertain, because the narrator cannot locate himself within his own history; he answers only “je ne sais pas” to the question of whether his mother died today or yesterday. The psychological make- up and emotional states of other selves remain uncertain when feelings are expressed only in conventional formulae (“sentiments distingués”). And anyway, “Cela ne veut rien dire”: nothing means anything, including the text we are reading. The narrator is an as yet nameless “je” without purchase on the external world or other selves and without confidence in the language he uses. This is Camus’s version of the tabula rasa with which Descartes begins his attempt to rescue human knowledge from systematic doubt at the beginning of his Méditations. From the first use of the “je” in L’Étranger, Meursault appears as a subject of ignorance (“je ne sais pas”) rather than of knowledge. Descartes’s subject at least knows that it exists; Meursault implicitly responds that this does not get us very far, as we drift in a world we do not understand amongst other selves who make no sense to us.

The disorientating opening to L’Étranger contrasts starkly with the confi-dent first sentence of La Mort heureuse: “Il était 10 heures du matin et Patrice Mersault marchait d’un pas régulier vers la villa de Zagreus” (1105). If Valéry believed that in the twentieth century it was no longer possible to write “La marquise sortit à cinq heures,” Camus seems deliberately to defy the poet by retorting that Mersault went out at 10 o’clock.16 Unlike L’Étranger, from its

15. The paragraph reads: “Aujourd’hui, maman est morte. Ou peut- être hier, je ne sais pas. J’ai reçu un télégramme de l’asile: ‘Mère décédée. Enterrement demain. Sentiments distingués’. Cela ne veut rien dire. C’était peut- être hier” (141).16. In the first of his Manifestes du surréalisme of 1924, André Breton refers to Paul Valéry “qui, naguère, à propos des romans, m’assurait qu’en ce qui le concerne, il se refuserait toujours à écrire: La marquise sortit à cinq heures”; see Breton, Manifestes du surréalisme (Paris: Jean- Jacques Pauvert, 1979) 15. The exact phrase “La marquise sortit à cinq heures” has not been found in Valéry’s written work, though he does cite a number of similar formulations. Valéry’s objection to such statements in fiction seems to have been that they masquerade as truth claims when they are in fact merely


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very beginning, the novel specifies time (“10 heures du matin”), place (“la villa”), and character (Patrice Mersault, Zagreus). The “pas régulier” with which Mersault strides toward his destiny is matched by the narrative assur-ance with which the text gets underway.

However, the novel as a whole has generally been taken as not justify-ing the confidence with which it begins. In his afterword to the first edition of the novel, Jean Sarocchi describes the work as “médiocre”: the tone is inconsistent, the female characters are badly handled, the different elements do not fit together, the invented episodes and characters are poor, and only the autobiographical scenes are valid.17 In her magisterial study of Camus’s early writing, Jacqueline Lévi- Valensi describes the novel as a mistake. She insists that it suffers from “l’absence de nécessité intérieure,” and confirms that “c’est certainement la raison essentielle de son abandon”; its major fault is “le manque de cohérence.”18 Its most recent editor, André Abbou, broadly agrees with Lévi- Valensi. He cites two kinds of cause for the failure of the novel: structural reasons (Camus was trying to weave together too many disparate elements originating in former projects) and circumstantial reasons (critical comments made by Camus’s teacher Jean Grenier and his growing journalis-tic commitments beginning in October 1938).19 John West concurs that the principal internal flaw to the novel is its lack of coherence, arguing that “the author fails adequately to communicate a consistent message to the reader.”20

The convergence of these responses might give pause for thought. The crite-rion of coherence is certainly one that Camus himself invokes in his theory of literature.21 However, Richard Rorty has argued that the coherence of any text is not an objective, internal property, but something that interpreters supply in

arbitrary; they look as if they are telling us something about the external world, but in fact they describe nothing real. For discussion, see Gérard Genette, “Vraisemblance et motivation,” Figures II (Paris: Seuil, 1969) 71–100, and Colin Davis, “Paul Valéry and the Truth of Prose and Poetry,” Orbis Litterarum 43 (1988): 260–69.17. Sarocchi 16.18. Jacqueline Lévi- Valensi, Albert Camus ou la naissance d’un romancier (1930–1942) (Paris: Gallimard, 2006) 481.19. See André Abbou, “La Mort heureuse: Notice,” Camus, Œuvres complètes I, 1449–50.20. John K. West, “Political or Personal: The Role of the Chenoua Landscape in Ca-mus’s La Mort heureuse,” French Review 73.5 (2000): 843.21. See for example Camus, L’Homme révolté: “Qu’est- ce que le roman, en effet, sinon cet univers où l’action trouve sa forme, où les mots de la fin sont prononcés, les êtres livrés aux êtres, où toute vie prend le visage du destin” (Œuvres complètes III: 1949–1956, éds. Raymond Gay-Crosier et al. [Paris: Gallimard, 2008] 2870.



their descriptions.22 Although Rorty’s view by no means commands universal consent, it might at least prompt us to question the invocation of coherence as a criterion for judging the success or failure of Camus’s first novel. What constitutes coherence, and why should it be regarded as a categorical require-ment of a successful literary text? It is hard to imagine anybody criticizing L’Étranger or La Chute, for example, on the grounds that their “author fails adequately to communicate a consistent message to the reader.” Their open-ness and ambiguity are readily accepted as integral to their point; anything that seems incongruous can be regarded as an enigma to be pondered, a pos-sible source for new interpretation, rather than a structural flaw. To cite a well- known example, the four “extra” shots that Meursault fires into the body of the dead Arab in L’Étranger have generally been taken by critics as a problem worth thinking about rather than a mistake that Camus would have been better to excise.23 Yet in the case of La Mort heureuse, unexplained incongrui-ties are seen as a fatal flaw. Sarocchi says that the different elements of the novel “alternent sans être ajustés,” and he insists that this cannot be excused as “un goût étudié du contraste.”24 We might respond: Why not? Sarocchi implies that disparity may sometimes be integral to a text’s coherence, or that it may sometimes destroy it. But who gets to decide, and on what basis, whether disparity is “excusable” as deliberate contrast or to be condemned as an inadvertent error?

If critics of La Mort heureuse feel justified in invoking the novel’s lack of coherence as a reason for its failure, it may be that something in the novel itself calls for and then frustrates that yearning for consistency. My sugges-tion here is that the novel is not inherently any more or less coherent than, say, L’Étranger, but that it is driven more than the later work by a craving for

22. See Rorty, “The Pragmatist’s Progress,” in Umberto Eco et al., Interpretation and Overinterpretation: “So I should prefer to say that the coherence of the text is not something it has before it is described, any more than the dots had coherence before we connected them. Its coherence is no more than the fact that somebody has found something interesting to say about a group of marks or noises—some way of describing those marks and noises that relates them to some of the other things we are interested in talking about” (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992) 97.23. Such passages play the role of what Umberto Eco, in response to the work of Luigi Pareyson, calls a “stopgap”; see Eco, On Literature, trans. Martin McLaughlin (Lon-don: Vintage Books, 2006). Eco describes the stopgap as “something that interpretation sets aside, keeping it as a latent opportunity or stimulus for later interpretations, a potential signal capable of calling the interpreter back to renewing with each reading his faithful commitment to the work’s promises” (211; emphasis in original).24. Sarocchi 16.


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coherence that it discovers it cannot satisfy. It stages a confrontation between authority and skepticism; and the skeptical trial that the novel narrates will turn out to be decisive for Camus’s subsequent literary production.

The passage through skepticism involved in the transition from La Mort heureuse to L’Étranger is indicated by the reworking of material from the ear-lier novel in the later work. In La Mort heureuse, when Mersault’s girlfriend Marthe asks him if he loves her, he initially laughs and then replies: “Mais à notre âge, on n’aime pas, voyons. On se plaît, c’est tout. C’est plus tard, quand on est vieux et impuissant qu’on peut aimer. À notre âge, on croit qu’on aime. C’est tout, quoi” (1123). Later, when his wife Lucienne complains that he does not love her, he insists merely that he has not misled her: “Mais je ne te l’ai jamais dit, mon petit” (1172). However dismissive or cynical he may be, Mer-sault does not actually deny the possibility of love or the meaningfulness of the question. La Mort heureuse retains traces of belief in psychological moti-vation, so that characters are still to some extent identified by their feelings and emotional states. In L’Étranger, the attempt to peer inside an individual is either abandoned or, in the courtroom scenes in part two, ruthlessly mocked. As he faces a murder charge, both prosecution and defense lawyers claim to have looked into Meursault’s soul, but with completely different results (200–201). Meursault himself refuses to engage in any attempt at sustained introspection. When his girlfriend Marie asks him if he loves her, the question is dismissed out of hand: “Je lui ai répondu que cela ne voulait rien dire, mais qu’il me semblait que non” (161). Later, the same question prompts a similar reply: “J’ai répondu comme je l’avais déjà fait une fois, que cela ne signifiait rien mais que sans doute je ne l’aimais pas” (165). The skeptical erosion of the question is twofold: first, it is discarded as meaningless; then, even if it is conceded to be meaningful, the individual claims no privileged access to his own feelings. He is only able to say that “il me semblait que non” or that “sans doute je ne l’aimais pas.” Meursault rejects the lure of language as it invites us to make false claims about unstable, ungraspable emotional realities.

Another set of parallel passages in La Mort heureuse and L’Étranger rein-forces this sense that the later work has succumbed to the trial of skepticism. Left alone by their respective girlfriends, both Mersault and Meursault spend a dull Sunday at home. In each case, the protagonist eats, smokes, watches sports fans return from the match and the crowds frequenting the local cafés. Finally, Mersault tells himself that the day is over: “‘Encore un dimanche de tiré,’ dit Mersault” (1116). We might wonder why Mersault needs or both-ers to say this at all. It is as if announcing that the day is over, even if only to himself, is necessary to its completion. The statement brings the day to an end. It suggests that the world both can and needs to be kept within the frame of language. Suitably labeled, the day is at last over. The need to make the state-ment suggests a degree of anxiety: the world is only properly comprehended



once it has been turned into words. But at least that anxiety may be stilled by the relatively effortless correspondence of world, word, and subjective experi-ence. This in turn relates to the use in the novel of a third-person narrator who is apparently unconcerned by Valéry’s “La marquise sortit à cinq heures.” For the narrator of La Mort heureuse, the world remains nameable and narratable.

One of the key changes from La Mort heureuse to L’Étranger is the adop-tion of a first-person narrator who is as bewildered by his life and the world around him as we are likely to be. At the end of his dull Sunday, the pro-tagonist of L’Étranger echoes Mersault’s pronouncement that it is “Encore un dimanche de tiré,” but seems unable to leave matters with such oracular simplicity: “J’ai pensé que c’était toujours un dimanche de tiré, que maman était maintenant enterrée, que j’allais reprendre mon travail et que, somme toute, il n’y avait rien de changé” (154). Here, the anxiety that the world may escape the word overcomes the narrative and produces a frenetic attempt to hold on to it, which nevertheless marks its own failure. Whereas Mersault simply announces that the day is over, Meursault tries to link together a series of events and experiences (today is Sunday, mother has been buried, work begins again tomorrow), whilst sensing and underlining their disconnected-ness. Moreover, the conclusion that “il n’y avait rien de changé” casts doubt on whether what happens can have any significance that can be grasped and narrated in a meaningful sequence. Something happens but nothing changes. The narrating subject and the external world drift by one another, failing to make a real impact on one another and unable to achieve any lasting connec-tion. In La Mort heureuse, Mersault kills Zagreus in order to steal the money that will make it possible for him to have a happy life and a happy death; in L’Étranger, Meursault perhaps kills the Arab in order, more basically, to make something happen, to produce an event that could not be retrospectively dismissed by saying “il n’y avait rien de changé.”25 But the attempt fails, as in prison Meursault quickly rediscovers the alienation from the world he had previously known. Even if you kill a man, it seems, nothing changes; the world passes on unmoved, as oblivious as ever of a subject who is no more in pos-session of itself than it was before its act.

La Mort heureuse starts with a confidence that events can be narrated and that emotional states can be fixed and described. The novel sets out to establish a pattern that will give coherence and sense to the episodes of Mersault’s life. Its ultimate destination and meaning is to be the “happy death” announced by the title. The criticism quoted earlier, according to which the novel fails because it does not convey a consistent message, is valid not because this

25. For this reading of L’Étranger, see Colin Davis, “The Cost of Being Ethical: Fiction, Violence, and Altericide,” Common Knowledge 9.2 (2003): 241–53.


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would characterize good novels in general, but because this particular novel does seem to be straining to communicate a coherent attitude to life and death. This attitude derives from an insight concerning the possible fusion of self and world. Mersault seems close to achieving his goal in the “Maison devant le monde” chapter (part two, chapter three). Narrated in the present tense, it describes how he and his three female companions attain a state of harmony where there is no conflict amongst them or between them and their natural environment. The Bergsonian belief in intuitive knowledge is palpably in play here, as it is suggested that the characters are effortlessly and immediately in tune with each other and the external world. The text tells of the world’s availability to the subject willing to abandon itself:

Le jour se lève sur la mer et se couche derrière les collines, parce que le ciel ne montre qu’une route qui va de la mer aux collines. Le monde ne dit jamais qu’une chose, et il intéresse, puis il lasse. [. . .] Le monde ne dit jamais qu’une seule chose. Et dans cette vérité patiente qui va de l’étoile à l’étoile, se fonde une liberté qui nous délie de nous- mêmes et des autres, comme dans cette autre vérité patiente qui va de la mort à la mort. Patrice, Catherine, Rose et Claire prennent alors conscience du bonheur qui naît de leur abandon au monde. (1164–65; emphasis added)

This is La Mort heureuse at its most gnomically assertive. It may not be clear what it is saying, but it does seem to be attempting to say something. And the passage also encapsulates a theory of the text itself. The narrator speaks of a consistent path leading from sunrise to sunset, from the sea to the hills, from star to star and from death to death. What the narrator twice calls this “truth” is the path of the novel, which begins with Zagreus’s death and ends with Mer-sault’s and in the process narrates, perhaps, the steps by which Mersault learns how to achieve the happy death promised in the title. The repeated assertion that the world says only one thing tells us that meaning is authoritative and unequivocal for those who know how to hear it, that is, for the characters who abandon themselves to the world or the readers who submit themselves to the text. If the world says only one thing, then the text that speaks with knowledge of the world says only one thing also. It tells of its own inexorable course from murder to an understanding of the happy death.

Or does it? There are certainly moments in La Mort heureuse when the text insists upon the linearity and coherence of its development. The final chapter of the novel announces that Mersault has completed his evolution: “Il parut à Mersault qu’il avait atteint enfin ce qu’il cherchait et que cette paix qui l’emplissait était née de l’abandon de lui- même qu’il avait poursuivi et atteint avec l’aide de ce monde chaleureux qui le niait sans colère” (1188–89).



Moreover, he has finally discovered or created his own fundamental being: “De tous les hommes qu’il avait portés en lui comme chacun au commence-ment de cette vie, de ces êtres divers qui mêlaient leurs racines sans se confon-dre, il savait maintenant lequel il avait été: et ce choix que dans l’homme crée le destin il l’avait fait dans la conscience et le courage” (1194). The possibility of this ultimate settlement of a human life is precisely what Camus would later deny in Le Mythe de Sisyphe, when (in the passage quoted earlier) he argues that “ce cœur même qui est mien me restera à jamais indéfinissable” and that “pour toujours, je serai étranger à moi- même.” The earlier text insists that the subject can self- consciously and courageously create itself and thereby establish the pattern (“le destin”) that will give meaning to its existence; the later text categorically denies that any such disambiguation can be achieved.

Moreover, although La Mort heureuse claims for itself a linear progression culminating in the achievement of happiness through self- abandonment, the text’s forward movement is much less assured than this implies. The first part of the novel begins with the murder of Zagreus and then rewinds to recount the events leading up to it. So it begins with a kind of false start before recover-ing its proper chronology; this sense of false starts is subsequently intensified in the second part of the novel. Mersault travels first to Prague and then to Vienna before returning to Algeria; he seems to attain some sort of happiness in the “Maison devant le monde,” but leaves for reasons that make little sense to others even if they do to him.26 He then buys a house, marries Lucienne whom he does not love, lives on his own, gets bored, summons Lucienne, rap-idly gets bored with her, returns briefly to the “Maison devant le monde” and visits some of his former friends before returning to his house and eventually dying. The second part of the novel reads like a sequence of false starts that delay rather than advance its progression toward the happy death. The text is aware that what it calls its “recommencements” (1175) represent a risk to its plan; it insists, though, that they are in fact integral to the coherence that they might seem to disrupt: “Ces jours de dispersion qui lui avaient fait honte, il les jugeait dangereux mais nécessaires. Il aurait pu y sombrer et manquer ainsi sa seule justification” (1175–76). The contrast between the risk of dispersion and the exclusive unity of “sa seule justification” is vital here. The narrator tells us of the risk and maintains that it was necessary to its overall development. If, in line with most of the novel’s critics, we decide not to follow the text on this point, then doubt falls on both the coherence of the work and everything that goes along with it: the linguistic authority that underpins the third-person narrative, its psychological insight into character, its creation of a meaningful

26. Asked why he is leaving when he is happy, he says that he risks being loved, which would prevent him from being happy (1168).


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structure, and its ability to represent an intuitive harmony between human consciousness and the natural world.

La Mort heureuse points toward a coherence it cannot achieve. Its disparities and incoherencies, its false starts and sententious obscurities, make of it some-thing different and potentially more interesting than a lesson in life and death. It becomes the site of the struggle between lyricism and skepticism. Whereas La Mort heureuse remained unpublished in Camus’s lifetime, he did complete the lyrical essays that make up Noces (1938), published in the same year that Camus abandoned work on his novel. In Noces, what is constantly at stake is—as in the failed novel—the attempt to achieve the integration of self and world. Peter Dunwoodie describes the lyricism of Noces as articulating “the intensity of subjective experience, the profusion, indeed excess which greet the individual willing to abandon him / herself to ‘Nature.’ It thus privileges the present, immediacy, spontaneity.”27 Camus’s lyricism embodies an aspiration to the self’s flawless belonging to the world, a fantasized harmony unmarred by self- consciousness or irony. It may be achieved for moments and asserted in exuberant language. But Noces is trying to hold on to what La Mort heu-reuse discovers to be the most elusive of possibilities. In the novel, lyricism is exposed to the test of skepticism, as the search for sense and coherence is at risk of falling apart. Camus’s subsequent work grows out of the unresolved tensions of this first, abandoned novel. If its lyrical impulse migrates into the essays of Noces, its skeptical energies will mutate into L’Étranger.

La Mort heureuse asserts narrative authority just as it affirms the subject’s intuitive connection to the external world, whilst also entertaining glimpses of the skeptical corrosion of established certainties that will later characterize the world of L’Étranger. It is as if Camus had to dismantle his earliest convic-tions in an intuitively knowable world before he could begin his career as a published novelist. The hope for revelation has to give way to the experience of pure strangeness. Still overconfident about its revelatory capability, La Mort heureuse promises answers it never quite provides. In this context, the key encounter between Mersault and Zagreus in La Mort heureuse is important because it looks as if it is about to tell us more than it actually does; and in this withholding of information it parallels and anticipates the meeting of Meursault and the Arab on the beach at the center of L’Étranger. Both encounters result in murder, and both of them are marked by resonant gaps that throw into turmoil any prospect of interpretative confidence. In the case of L’Étranger, what is lacking when Meursault kills the Arab is any consistent, plausible explanation for what happens. The inadequately motivated murder

27. Peter Dunwoodie, “From Noces to L’Étranger,” The Cambridge Companion to Camus, ed. Edward J. Hughes (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007) 150.



creates the novel’s central enigma, which Camus’s readers, like the lawyers and jurors at Meursault’s trial, attempt to restore to sense. This is accompanied by a heightened register that signals Meursault’s expulsion from the natural world: the sun burns and assaults him; his dripping sweat creates what is called “un voile tiède et épais” or “un rideau de larmes et de sel” (175) between himself and the world. Nature rejects him: “Il m’a semblé que le ciel s’ouvrait sur toute son étendue pour laisser pleuvoir du feu” (176). He experiences the opposite of the reciprocal openness of self and world sought in Camus’s lyrical essays. The world is hostile; it repels him and bars him from access to it. The termination of his sensual collusion with nature is matched for the reader by the withholding of explanation in the passage. The text rebuts its reader just as the world expels Meursault.

This exclusion of the reader is matched in the penultimate chapter of part one of La Mort heureuse when Mersault visits Zagreus the day before he kills him. Zagreus undertakes to speak to him “à cœur ouvert” (1129). We are told that Zagreus tells Mersault his story, which is described as his “étrange histoire” (1129), and that Mersault receives it “d’un autre cœur, dans la con-fiance et l’amour” (1129). So the discussion is set up as a genuine encounter between two men, in which each will open himself up to the other. This stag-ing reflects the novel’s anti- skeptical stance: other selves are knowable to one another, just as narrative is capable of telling the stories of others and just as the world is accessible to intuitive knowledge. But part of what is strange about Zagreus’s “étrange histoire” is that, having been promised, it is barely recounted at all. What we discover about his past is sketchy: as a young man he had decided that he needed money to be happy; he amassed a fortune, using sometimes unscrupulous means, but before he could enjoy his wealth he lost his legs as the result of an unspecified accident. Zagreus’s story turns out to be teasingly elliptical, recounted only in outline, and lacking detail or motivation. The novel does not deliver what it claimed it was about to give us. Moreover, Mersault’s response to Zagreus’s (non- )revelations suggests that the attempt to speak “à cœur ouvert” fails to establish a bond between the two men. Mersault regards his future victim as “une loque” or “un zéro dans le monde,” and he thinks that Zagreus is not taking him seriously: “Il se fout de moi” (1132). Just before his own death, Mersault begins to feel “un amour violent et fraternel” for Zagreus; and he believes that by killing him “il avait consommé avec lui des noces qui les liaient à tout jamais” (1195). Here again, though, we might suspect that at its conclusion, the novel insists it has had a coherent develop-ment, which the rest of the text does not support. At the time of their final discussion, the “amour” and “noces” linking Mersault and Zagreus are more like disdain and hostility, leading to an irrevocable act of murder.

This failure of encounter in the penultimate chapter of part one of the novel is matched in the penultimate chapter of part two. Here, Mersault thinks he


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is about to confide in his friend Bernard: “Lorsque Bernard frappa, Mersault sentit qu’il allait tout lui dire” (1183–84). The text suggests the prospect of an opening of the self to the other in an act of full self- disclosure. The narrator compares Mersault to an artist who, having created his work, “éprouve un jour la nécessité de la mettre au jour et de communiquer enfin avec les hom-mes” (1184). Yet in the event Mersault does not reveal the secret of his past to Bernard, the encounter does not take place. And it is particularly significant that Mersault’s desire to communicate is compared to that of an artist, given that what in fact the novel describes is a failure of communication. La Mort heureuse promises stories and revelations that will confer sense on people’s lives, make their truths available to others, and speak of the integration of self and world. What it actually recounts is fragments of stories that do not quite add up to a coherent whole: other selves remain blocked off from one another, the world remains indifferent or hostile to its human occupants, and a novel about the artist’s need to communicate courts the risk of communicating far less than it intended. Perhaps it communicates nothing at all.

What La Mort heureuse narrates, then, is its failure to be the novel it wanted to be. It is, like Zagreus’s sparse self- revelations, an “étrange histoire” because it does not deliver what it seemed to offer. It undergoes the test of skepticism, and by doing so, it anticipates the triumph of uncertainty that pervades the text of L’Étranger. In that novel, others appear as unfathomable aliens or automata reduced to mechanical gestures; the first- person subject is obscure to itself, unable to achieve clarity about its own motives and actions; the world oppresses and assaults its human occupants, allowing them no sus-tained access to its self- sufficient equilibrium; and language is unable to forge or to convey anything that is stably meaningful. La Mort heureuse does not yet reach this point, but it foreshadows it. It resists, but always risks succumbing to, the semantic meltdown threatened by skepticism. Subsequently, Camus’s great fictional texts will start from the skeptical tabula rasa that, in La Mort heureuse, the author was still struggling against. Their location in a world where nothing can be taken for granted is made apparent from the begin-ning: the narrator of L’Étranger isn’t even quite sure what day it is; La Peste presents itself in its opening sentence as a chronique even though it is patently nothing of the sort; the narrator of La Chute warns us explicitly not to trust him (“Ne vous y fiez pas”).28 What is at stake in Camus’s later fiction is not whether skepticism can be overcome, but whether anything worth retaining can be constructed when skepticism is an ever- present danger.

28. See Camus, La Peste, Oeuvres complètes II: 1944–1948, éd. Jacqueline Lévi- Valensi et al. (Paris: Gallimard, 2006), 35 and La Chute, Œuvres complètes III: 1949–1956, 717.



This is not to say that lyricism or dogmatism entirely disappear from Camus’s writing. The essays of Noces revive the lyrical impulse that La Mort heureuse could not quite sustain, and there are lyrical moments in all of Camus’s novels and in the stories of L’Exil et le Royaume. Nor does the dogmatic urge, that is, the desire to communicate authoritative and meaningful positions, go away. It continues to animate Camus’s journalism and works such as Le Mythe de Sisyphe and L’Homme révolté. But his important literary texts, from now on, will serve as an extreme testing ground for dogmatic confidence and lyrical intuition. Literature, in other words, becomes for Camus the site in which the trial of skepticism cannot be evaded. In this context, Le Premier Homme represents a fascinating development. In that novel, Camus attempts to recap-ture a relation with the past and with the physical world, specifically Algeria, at a time when French Algeria was on the point of being irretrievably lost. In a sense, Camus’s last, unfinished work sets out to regain a relation with the world that his first, unpublished novel had sought to establish, but which had succumbed to the trial of skeptical doubt. The seeds of Camus’s incomplete final project are to be found in the failure of his abandoned first novel. The attempt to possess the world must pass through the painful experience of loss if it is to have even the slightest prospect of success. In other words, reality, for Camus, can be won back not by rejecting skepticism, but by traversing, surviv-ing, and living with its ongoing threat to what is most dear to belief and desire.



Documents

CAMUS’S SKEPTICAL TRIAL: FROM LA MORT ......Camus’s Skeptical Trial 345 Stroud’s words, in modern times skepticism has come to be understood “as the view that we know nothing,