‘…Why do we, All of us, have to Keep Judging and Being Judged?’: The Scapegoat and the Scapegoater in Albert Camus’ The Stranger and The Fall

This chapter continues the approach of the preceding one in discussing a legal, or ‘confessional’, narrative told from the perspective of the scapegoat-victim: Mersault from Camus’ L’Etranger/The Stranger (1942). It is then read against a rival confessional text, this one told by a sacrificer of scapegoats, the criminal lawyer Jean-Baptiste Clamence in Camus’ La Chute/The Fall (1956). Consistent with Camus’ own aesthetic concern with Greek tragedy, I argue for Mersault’s (secret) status as the pharmakon, the sacred bringer of disease into the community whose ritualistic murder releases the occult, or ‘magical’, power of cure latent within the slain body of the victim. Just as Kakfa’s The Trial was the diary of a Mosaic scapegoat, so The Stranger is the testament of a Sophoclean pharmakon. Reading Mersault as pharmakon also provides the perfect explanation for the novel’s famously ambiguous ending, which an enactment of Aristotle’s theory of katharsis, the telos of Greek tragedy. By contrast, Jean-Baptiste Clamence’s verbose and duplicitous confession in The Fall is a book length exercise in false consciousness: here, the advocate/comforter/helper/defender (Clamence = clemency = paraclete) is a parasitical figure, a high priest of bad faith, a ‘judge-penitent’, whose existence can only be justified through his cynical pronouncements of the existence of the ‘plague’ of reciprocal violence: a perfect twentieth century re-staging of Oedipus the King. Reversing the perspective of the sacrificial victim Mersault, Clamence, Camus’ second great anti-hero, provides us with the cynical confession’ of the ritualistic victimizer: the lawyer-as-judge-penitent as the manufacturer of scapegoats.