SOURCE: Léger, Susan. “Camus's ‘L'Hôte’: The Lessons of an Ending.” French Literature Series 17 (1990): 87-97.

[In the following essay, Léger analyzes the ending of “The Guest,” and considers several critical interpretations of that enigmatic section of the story.]

For most readers of Albert Camus's “L'Hôte,” the story seems to end not with its final words, but with the last sentence of the penultimate paragraph, which brings the narrative events to a dramatic and surprising close: “Et dans cette brume légère, Daru, le coeur serré, découvrit l'Arabe qui cheminait lentement sur la route de la prison” (1623). Daru, the French schoolteacher, turns back to see that the Arab prisoner, to whom he has shown the road to freedom, has chosen instead to go on in another direction. The reader has expected, even hoped with Daru, that the Arab would head south to take refuge with the nomads in the desert. With the discovery that the prisoner is heading for the prison, the reader is baffled. Until now, the story had centered on Daru's dilemma about what to do with his strange guest. At this point, the reader is made to focus instead on the Arab's enigmatic choice.

The concluding paragraph of “L'Hôte” takes us back to the schoolhouse on the hill. The teacher is standing alone, gazing out of the window of his classroom. Behind him on the blackboard is an inscription which reads: “Tu as livré notre frère. Tu paieras” (1623).

Most commentaries on this last paragraph treat it as a sort of addendum to the story, as an epilogue rather than its real ending. The fact that Daru may die for something he has not done is taken by some critics as an ironic twist to an already ambiguous situation. Others maintain that the introduction of the Arab's “brothers” so late in the story produces inconsistencies in the story line. Why does Daru become a target now, when he was willing to liberate the Arab anytime during the previous twenty-four hours? Still others find the ending ideologically unacceptable. Maurice Roelens, for one, objects that after the Arab's remarkable action readers are obliged to look once again at the Frenchman: “le drame du colon vient au premier plan, le regard se fixe sur une dernière image complaisante, celle du Français d'Algérie …” (16).

The Arab's decision to go to prison is, on the face of it, so incomprehensible that we should not be surprised that readers resist, even resent, the return to the classroom at the close of the story. We should not be surprised either if so many critics have made it their main task to account for the Arab's behavior. The story provides so few clues, however, and contains so many ambiguities, that there has been little agreement about the Arab's motives. After a summary of the principal explanations, English Showalter concludes, fairly I think, that “none is entirely without flaws, and none can be demonstrated false. Camus surely intended it that way” (78).

Camus presents us with a riddle for which no solution seems forthcoming. Far from providing any further insights into either Daru's or the Arab's previous actions, the final paragraph only deepens the mystery. Showalter insists that a valid reading of the story must “focus on the error” (79), as he calls it, that Daru has made in judging his guest. Focussing on this so-called “error in judgment” would require further conjecture about the Arab's character and frame of mind, obliging us to return ultimately to the Arab's decision. Once again we would exclude from our reading the final paragraph and the illuminations it brings to the narrative as a whole.

We are left with two troubling questions: 1) why does Camus leave us with the riddle of the Arab? and, 2) why does the end of the narrative, rather than offer a solution, compound this riddle by the addition of a cruel irony? These two questions lead to a third that is even more perplexing: Why, in spite of these obstacles to understanding, does the story make for such pleasurable reading?

Some preliminary reflections on endings in general are in order here. In his Dictionary of Narratology, Gerald Prince gives this definition for the “end” of a narrative: “the final incident in a plot or action. … The end functions as the (partial) condition, the magnetizing force, the organizing principle of narrative” (26). In the abstract, the notion of ending seems unproblematic enough, but in practice, real endings often pose problems for readers. Porter Abbott begins a recent essay on textual categories with this refreshing reminder:

Because it is made up, a story ends where it ends. … When students come up after class to ask if Lady Brett Ashley or Jake Barnes is going to commit suicide, we ask them to unask the question. … in Hemingway's story, as in any story, the last event is the last one the author chooses to give us.

(597)

The reader's task, of course, is not to disregard the ending or to go beyond it and invent a new one, but to ask: why this ending, to this particular story?

Genette would have us consider the end of any story its most important narrative unit. In his view, the ending is not where we stop, but rather, where we are to begin, inasmuch as the final sequence in any narrative determines and explains, retrospectively, the function of all the preceding elements of the story. If for the reader the events of La Princesse de Clèves, to use Genette's example, lead to Mme de Clèves's refusal to marry Nemours, the opposite is true for the author and, in a sense, for the reader who wants to make sense of the story. Since the refusal follows from earlier narrative events, we would do better to begin by asking what function these events serve in the story rather than what they mean. That is to say, we should look at the events in a story not, as some may be inclined to do, by accounting for the second by the first, the third by the second, and so forth. We should, rather, want to explain the first in terms of the second, the second in terms of the third, and so on. For it is a simple, operative fact that the final event or unité du récit “est celle qui commande toutes les autres, et que rien ne commande: lieu essentiel de l'arbitraire …” (94). It is the ending that gives meaning to all the events which came before, and it follows that if the end of a story changes, its meaning changes. Roger Quilliot, commenting on the addition of the last paragraph to the second version of “L'Hôte,” underscores the importance of this revision: “on peut donc dire, sans abus de language, que la signification de la nouvelle a partiellement changé du manuscrit à l'édition définitive” (2049).

My question about Camus's story is this: how is our understanding of it changed when we view its conclusion not as the end of the story but the beginning of the retrospective sequence of narrative elements that make it up? If the last paragraph is the point to which the text leads us, then all the earlier events in the story contribute to the preparation for this final scene. It is not the Arab's decision that generates or causes the writing on the blackboard; it is the writing on the blackboard that presupposes the Arab's decision to go to prison. Without the Arab's return to prison, the final scene could not occur. Had the Arab taken the road to freedom, there would have been no final paragraph, or, for that matter, perhaps no story at all.

In Genette's analysis, the motivation for any event in a story serves to “cover up” that event's function in the narrative: “le d'où cela vient-il? sert à faire oublier le à quoi cela sert-il?” (90). The range of motivations that readers have alleged for the Arab's choice of prison amply proves how effective this kind of cover-up can be with respect to the story's structure. The Arab's turn toward prison must be comprehensible, while causing heartbreak for Daru and surprise for the reader. It must be motivated in the story so that it effectively conceals its own usefulness in preparing the final paragraph. In order for the Arab's choice to perform its function in the narrative the reasons for this choice must be ambiguous, but clearly so.

At the beginning of the final paragraph, readers must be able to accept both the Arab's act and their own inability to comprehend it. In order for the story to work, in other words, readers must proceed to the conclusion with no certainties, while feeling at the same time that nothing is missing from the story. As in a good mystery, all the pieces of the puzzle are provided, in the final paragraph they are all assembled and we are given a clear-cut answer: neither Daru, nor the reader, understands what happened. The story does not provide any answers, but it does not leave any dangling questions either. We know that we do not know why the Arab went off to prison. This acceptance of our lack of knowledge about the reasons is essential, I believe, to the way Camus's “L'Hôte” makes its point.

Instead of speculating about why the Arab has done what he has, we might do better to take stock of what we do know with certainty when we arrive at the story's final paragraph. In addressing this question, I would like to focus on the second sentence of the final paragraph. If Daru is looking out the window without seeing anything, it is because: “Derrière lui, sur le tableau noir, entre les méandres des fleuves français s'étalait, tracée à la craie par une main malhabile, l'inscription qu'il venait de lire: Tu as livré notre frère. Tu paieras.”

“Derrière lui”: the sentence begins by reminding us that Daru is no longer looking at what the narrator is about to show us.¹ This is one of the few points in the story where the narrator's view does not coincide with Daru's. We are, in fact, emerging here from one of the few narrative gaps in the story. We have not walked with Daru back to the schoolhouse, nor do we read the writing on the blackboard simultaneously with him. We are obliged to imagine what Daru's reaction must have been to the chalked message, but we do not read it at the same time, or from the same place, or with the same reaction. At this critical point at the close of the story, our viewpoint is effectively detached from Daru's. His back is turned to us. For him, the story is over.

Before we read the inscription, however, or even know exactly what it is we are going to see, we are given two further indications as to the precise point where we must focus our attention: “sur le tableau noir, entre les méandres des fleuves francais.” These two prepositional phrases take us back to the geography lesson at the very beginning of the story. A river map of France is the first thing we see in the schoolhouse. As Daru walks across the classroom in search of a sweater, the narrator describes what is on the blackboard: “[Il] traversa la salle de classe vide et glacée. Sur le tableau noir les quatre fleuves de France, dessinés avec quatre craies de couleurs différentes, coulaient vers leur estuaire depuis trois jours” (1611). We will have every reason to recall this blackboard drawing when it is mentioned again in the final paragraph, as the context in which the death threat is inscribed, since it is the only colorful spot in otherwise bleak surroundings, a fact that is marked stylistically by the repetition of the number “four” (“quatre fleuves … quatre craies”). In addition to providing us with information about the school curriculum and the length of the snowstorm, the map with its meandering French rivers acts as a framing device both for the words we will read on the blackboard at the end and for the story as a whole. Appearing after the geographical description which identifies this unnamed region for us as a place other than France, the map and its four colors contrasts with the cold, inhospitable landscape surrounding Daru's dwelling. At the end, it will serve to designate the space through which the landscape's hostility penetrates the schoolhouse. The outline of France offers the Arab's “brothers” a meaningful space in which to affirm their existence and proclaim their values.

These unnamed writers in this nameless place never appear in the story at all. They exist only as a hand, and as a clumsy hand at that. The inscription on the blackboard is “tracée à la craie par une main malhabile.” The words on the blackboard are generally seen as a defacement of the map of France by these supposed revolutionaries. Showalter, for example, writes that “… there is a certain symbolic justice in the desecration of the map …” (81). But this seems an inappropriate description. The words on the blackboard are traced on the board. They are written, simply, “par une main malhabile;” not a hand bent on destruction, but a clumsy, untrained hand. The verb “tracer” is a synonym of “to write” in French, and means to write with care. The exact term is all the more noteworthy since it has appeared only once before, at a pivotal point in the story. Balducci, the gendarme, insists that Daru follow the rules and accept responsibility for the Arab prisoner by signing the official receipt. In the passage following this request, a gesture that might ordinarily merit little or no attention is described in extraordinary detail. The reader is clearly being asked to sit up and notice something significant:

Daru ouvrit son tiroir, tira une petite bouteille carrée d'encre violette, le porte-plume de bois rouge avec la plume sergent-major qui lui servait à tracer les modèles d'écriture et il signa.

(1616)

The precision brought to the act of signing highlights it and reminds us of the care with which the teacher prepares his lessons, whether they be in French geography or in penmanship. In both cases, he produces models for his students. Daru's signature at this crucial point in the narrative initiates what we might call a model story. By signing, Daru signals his recognition both of Balducci as a representative of French law and order and of the Arab as a criminal. Also, he assumes for himself a place in the system. In other words, with his signature, the schoolteacher authorizes a narrative in which he refuses to believe but in which he will have, nevertheless, a key role. He writes himself into the story; he “signs up,” as it were, for participation in the events which follow.

There are, then, two hands in the story that write with care, one skilled, the other untutored, and both hands write words which function within the narrative as possible death sentences.

The words on the blackboard say that Daru has been judged guilty by the Arab's “brothers” and that, if they have their way, he will pay with his life. Daru's signature spells out another death sentence, in a narrative of which we see only glimpses and that exists only in the mind of the Arab. Because he does not understand French, the Arab constructs a narrative of his own by the way in which he interprets the tone of voice and gestures of the two Europeans who hold him prisoner. As Balducci tells Daru what he knows about the Arab's crime, the Arab is watching and listening. Balducci, passing his hand over his throat like a blade, illustrates his account with a gesture that imitates the one used in the murder: “l'Arabe, son attention attirée, le regardait avec une sorte d'inquiétude” (1615). Failing to understand that Balducci's gesture is part of an event belonging to the past, the Arab sees in it the prediction of a future event, in which he himself will be the victim. In the same way, when Daru signs Balducci's papers, the Arab takes this action, as well, as having serious consequences for himself. Shortly after their meal together, the Arab asks Daru a question which can only have been generated by his observation of the signature: “C'est toi le juge?” (1618). In the Arab's perspective, the two gestures, Balducci's throat-cutting and Daru's signature, combine to form a private narrative in which he as subject has been found guilty and sentenced. Marie-Laure Ryan calls this kind of story-within-a-story an “embedded narrative,” that is, a mental representation resulting from “the knowledge, wishes, intents and obligations” (“Structure” 108) of one of the characters. It is not only the reader who “reconstrues the fabula on the basis of what the narrator tells him”; characters as well “build their own versions from what they witness directly” (“Tellability” 323).

As “L'Hôte” unfolds, the reader is confronted with three distinct perceptions of the narrative events.² Each character perceives differently the roles played by himself and the two others, and on this basis forms his own mental representation. Balducci's is the simplest: he perceives himself as representing his country, treats Daru as his son, and sees only an enemy in the Arab. Since Daru sees the gendarme as his friend, he cannot discount entirely Balducci's version of events. Although he refuses the law enforcement role that Balducci wishes to pass on to him, Daru assumes, almost in spite of himself, the role of the judge the Arab takes him for. To the Arab's question: “C'est toi le juge?” Daru responds with a definite “non.” He nevertheless goes on to ask his guest the two questions that determine a murderer's fate in a European system of justice: “Pourquoi tu l'as tué? … Tu regrettes?” (1619). While Daru's viewpoint may correspond more closely to a European reader's perceptions and expectations, the glimpses we catch of the Arab's story make us aware of its complexity. Although it is sometimes based on inaccurate or misunderstood information, it retains a certain validity for us, and helps shape the fabula that we as readers are reconstruing on our own. The rising tension in the story is a result of the conflicts we perceive between these various embedded narratives.

Had the Arab chosen freedom when Daru left him in the desert, this tension would never have been resolved. Had Daru actually taken him to prison, as the Arab's brothers claim, this tension would have simply collapsed, the writing on the blackboard would have been truthful (and useless in the narrative), and Daru's final exile would be meaningless. There would be, in short, no story, or, in Gregory Bateson's words, no “little knot … of the species of connectedness we call relevance” (qtd. in Chambers 20). The “connectedness” that constitutes this story is produced by the reader, in the flash of anger we perceive and feel in reading the words on the blackboard.

The words threatening Daru's life at the end of the story are often referred to as a “message,” whereas the narrator describes them as an “inscription.” The difference between these two designations is considerable. The function of a message, whether written, oral, or gesticular, is to communicate information independently of its formal modality. An inscription, on the contrary, as the root meaning of the word specifies, proclaims its written form.

These words traced in chalk on the river map of France, which are a threat for Daru, have a more complex significance for the reader. The first sentence in the inscription constitutes an uninformed version of the events related in the preceding paragraph. Because, as an interpretation of these events, the inscription is completely erroneous, it is, for the reader, even more alarming than the threat it conveys; its most frightening aspect lies in the fact that it contradicts what the reader knows with absolute certainty about Daru's motives and actions. For the reader, who has watched Daru first refuse responsibility for the prisoner, then agonize over a decision he feels will affect his “honor” as a human being, the accusation, “Tu as livré notre frère,” is horrendous. We may be in the dark about the reasons why the Arab chose prison, we many even quarrel with the ways in which Daru offered him the choice, but we can have no doubt at all that the Arab's action was voluntary and deliberate to the extent that it was based on full information concerning the alternatives that each of the roads offered him.

Brian Fitch has argued that the inscription on the blackboard should be read as a mise en abyme of the story (4), a recapitulation in miniature and a condensed rehearsal of its main narrative lines. This mirror-narrative, emerging at the end of the surface narrative is, however, a somewhat distorted “retelling” of the story. The first sentence in the inscription (“Tu as livré notre frère”) comments on what came before; the second (“Tu paieras”) projects a sequel beyond the narrative space. The present of the story is contained only in the temporal gap between the two sentences in the inscription, a temporal gap which the reader is invited to bridge.³

In order to connect the gaps in any narrative, the reader recalls and invests with significance certain narrative units of the text itself and brings into play, in addition, familiarity with other texts. The reader relies, that is, on what Lucien Dällenbach has described as two types of knowledge: “a memory of the text” and “a memory of texts” (197). The final fabula we as readers will reconstrue will be informed not only by the segments of “L'Hôte” that we remember and bring back to this narrative space, but by our memory of other earlier guests in literature.

The connectedness between Camus's story and the literary topos of hospitality is articulated in two precise ways. Daru espouses a higher law than the one he has been asked to enforce: “le crime imbécile de cet homme le révoltait, mais le livrer était contraire à l'honneur” (1621). This judgment is reinforced from a complementary angle when Daru tells the Arab that if he takes to the desert he will be protected by the nomads: “Ils t'accueilleront et t'abriteront, selon leur loi” (1623). Daru's code of honor, like the law of the nomads, reflects the long tradition of hospitality exemplified in the Old Testament, Greek literature, and modern folklore. According to this ancient paradigm, a stranger or a disguised kinsman arrives unexpectedly as an apparent or potential enemy (for example, the leper in the legend of Julien L'Hospitalier). The host, in order to fulfill his sacred obligations—provide food, shelter, protection—chooses to cross an established boundary. Julien eats with the leper; Daru offers the Arab a meal and shares it with him, beyond any need or expectation. The Arab is astonished; he asks: “Pourquoi tu manges avec moi?” (1618). And finally, the host performs an extraordinary gesture of hospitality, which takes the shape of a transgression that will transform him and his life entirely. Julien shares his bed with the leper; Daru gives the Arab murderer his freedom, thereby exiling himself definitively from the European community.⁴

When we read the inscription on the blackboard, we reject the first half, for we know that Daru has honored the code of hospitality to the end. But for this same reason, we accept the second half. Daru will pay, but his eventual death is presented to us not so much as an injustice as a signal of his imminent transformation. At the end of the legend of Julien L'Hospitalier, Julien is taken to heaven. As Daru discovers absolute solitude, he finds what Camus called the “kingdom” opening before him. The final sentence of the story takes him beyond his geographical boundaries: “Daru regardait le ciel, le plateau et, audelà, les terres invisibles qui s'étendaient jusqu'à la mer. Dans ce vaste pays qu'il avait tant aimé, il était seul” (1623).⁵

Notes

1. I make a distinction throughout my analysis between narrator (the one who tells the story) and main character (the one who sees and acts). Critics sometimes consider Daru the narrator of the story (see Greenlee, for example). Recent work in narrative studies allows us to describe the narrative process more precisely. Barny, who analyzes the story in terms of narrative point of view, distinguishes between the “focalisateur” (Daru), and the “focalisateur anonyme, responsable du découpage, de la mise en images dans son ensemble. Ainsi Daru ne se voit pas en train de regarder, il y a une autre instance qui le regarde” (817).

2. One of the ways we might represent schematically these differing perspectives:

   	PERCEPTION OF ROLES
   CHARACTERS	Balducci's	Daru's	Arab's
   Balducci	France	friend	power
   Daru	son	teacher	judge
   	enemy	Man	outsider
   Arab
   		guest

3. My reading of this story owes a great deal to Ross Chambers's insightful discussion of the concept of mise en abyme in Story and Situation.

4. Storey brings to light interesting elements of the guest topos by comparing Camus's story to Frank O'Conner's “Guests of the Nation.”

5. Camus's notion of “kingdom” has received much commentary. For a recent discussion, see Zepp.

Works Cited

Abbott, H. Porter. “Autobiography, Autography, Fiction: Groundwork for a Taxonomy of Textual Categories.” New Literary History 19 (1988): 597-615.

Barny, Roger. “Une lecture de L'Hôte d'Albert Camus.” Hommages à Jacques Petit. Ed. Michel Malicet. Centre de recherches Jacques Petit 41. Vol. 2. Paris: Belles Lettres, 1985. 813-833. 2 vols.

Bateson, Gregory. Mind and Nature. New York: Dutton, 1979.

Camus, Albert. “L'Hôte.” L'Exil et le royaume. Théâtre, Récits, Nouvelles. Ed. Roger Quilliot. Paris: La Pléiade-Gallimard, 1962. Rpt. 1985. 1609-1623.

Chambers, Ross. Story and Situation: Narrative Seduction and the Power of Fiction. Theory and History of Literature 12. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984.

Dällenbach, Lucien. “Reading as Suture (Problems of Reception of the Fragmentary Text: Balzac and Claude Simon).” Style 18 (1984): 196-206.

Fitch, Brian T. The Narcissistic Text: A Reading of Camus' Fiction. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1982.

Genette, Gérard. “Vraisemblance et motivation.” Figures II. Paris: Seuil, 1969. 71-99.

Greenlee, James W. “Camus' ‘Guest’: The Inadmissible Complicity.” Studies in Twentieth Century Literature 2 (Spring 1978): 127-39.

Prince, Gerald. A Dictionary of Narratology. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1987.

Quilliot, Roger. Présentation. Camus 2048-49.

Roelens, Maurice. “Un Texte, son histoire, et l'histoire: L'Hôte d'Albert Camus.” Revue des Sciences Humaines 165 (1977): 5-22.

Ryan, Marie-Laure. “Embedded Narratives and the Structure of Plans.” Text 6 (1986): 107-142.

———. “Embedded Narratives and Tellability.” Style 20 (1986): 319-40.

Showalter, English. Exiles and Strangers: A Reading of Camus's Exile and the Kingdom. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1984.

Storey, Michael L. “The Guests of Frank O'Conner and Albert Camus.” Comparative Literature Studies 23 (Fall 1986): 250-62.

Zepp, Evelyn H. “Exile in the Kingdom: Where is the King?” Albert Camus' L'Exil et le royaume: The Third Decade. Ed. Anthony Rizzuto. Toronto: Paratexte, 1988. 127-41.