Camus' le Malentendu and Some Analogues

Abstract

N THE period around 1940 Albert Camus was evidently much preoccupied with the theme of Le Malentendu. His novel L'Eltranger shows us Meursault in his prison cell reading and rereading a scrap of newspaper which tells of a Czechoslovakian traveler who after a long absence returns home incognito only to be killed for his money by his mother and sister. For Camus this fait-divers appears to have had a certain archetypal significance. Its power of suggestion is due partly to its strange resemblance and contrast with two much more famous tales, the parable of the Prodigal Son and the myth of Oedipus. It is, so to speak, the reverse of the Oedipus legend and the polar opposite of the parable. Though he assigns it to a newspaper source, Camus was doubtless aware that the story had already had a long life; but its relative obscurity made it possible for him to treat it without regard for its earlier forms, in folk tale, ballad, English eighteenth-century drama, and German Schicksalstragodie. Most critics of Le Malentendu do not appear to have recalled Mme de Stael's description in De l'Allemagne of Der vierundzwanzigste Februar by Zacharias Werner (1810).1 A commentator pausing to consider Werner's fate drama might have been led to its source in George Lillo's Fatal Curiosity (1736), and thence to the pamphlet Newes from Perin in Cornwall (1618).2 The peregrinations of this tale have carried it also into the southern United States, where it is well known among the mountaineers. The Kentucky frontier is the setting of Robert Penn Warren's Ballad of Billie Potts, published in 1944. In all of the examples mentioned, except Le Malentendu, the crime is perpetrated by the father. In Lillo's and Warren's versions the mother is an eager instigator, in Werner's play an unwilling witness. In Camus' play the murderers are the mother and sister, the father having long since died. Warren's ballad resembles Le Malentendu in that the innkeepers have already made it their sordid practice to rob and do away with wealthy clients. In Lillo's Fatal Curiosity and Werner's Der vierundzwazzigste Februar, on the other hand, no previous violence against travelers had been committed by the desperate pair.