Every language artist is an artist of the struggle against the condemnation to death.
—Hélène Cixous
Like many if not all books, this one began in another book, Jacques Derrida’s Death Penalty, Volume I, which is the transcript of the first year of a seminar given from 1999–2000.1 I have had a long and varied relationship with this book over the past almost twenty years. I first heard these lectures at UC Irvine, in two successive spring quarters when Derrida was in residence there and reprised in English the lectures he had written and delivered initially in French, at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. As auditors, already, the lectures made a strong impression on the mostly American audience in California, if I may judge by my own response. Because the issue of the death penalty had and still has urgent pertinence here, where it remains in actual practice under the law of many states and the federal government, Derrida repeatedly challenged his listeners to question this singular remainder of capital punishment in a world that has widely abolished it. When he delivered the lectures for his UC Irvine audience, this American context often pressed itself on the analysis, for the death penalty that year was frequently in the news. No one could have realized then, however, that 1999 would in fact set the mark for the most executions in the United States in any year since 1977, when Gregg v. Georgia effectively allowed them to resume.2 This highpoint, so to speak, being reached in the execution chambers of the U.S. justice system regularly left its mark on the seminar.
Later, when I was able to read the typescripts of the lectures, this mark especially held my attention. It signaled a particular place, I ventured, in the actual struggle over the U.S. death penalty, a location that Derrida could not have named precisely in 1999 but that his analysis nevertheless points us to. I sought to work this out in an essay that brought Derrida’s analysis of what he called the anesthesial logic of the modern death penalty into line with the crisis currently shutting off the supply of anesthetic for lethal injections in the United States.3 That essay was a first attempt to respond in writing to the seminar, to let its reflections extend into the present, where the U.S. death penalty continues its agony. I made other such efforts, the most sustained being a translation of the first volume of the seminar, which was published in 2013 after three years of work.4
Once The Death Penalty existed as an English book, I designed a graduate seminar in comparative literature around it. I titled it “Literature and the Death Penalty,”5 which was not just out of disciplinary compliance. As I outline in detail in Chapter 1, Derrida’s seminar repeatedly takes its lead from literature and literary texts.6 Our own seminar followed Derrida’s closely, especially for its readings of literary texts, but we also adopted the principle of supplementing his reading list with other works. I added the short text by George Orwell “A Hanging,” Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony,” Baudelaire’s prose poem “A Heroic Death,” and Hugo’s The Last Day of a Condemned Man, a text that Derrida leaves aside in his long discussions of this writer. The students in the seminar added other texts: Roberto Bolaño’s The Part about the Crimes, from 2666; Oscar Wilde’s Salome; Krzysztof Kieślowski’s A Short Film about Killing; and many others. After the seminar ended, I kept thinking about the topic and before long realized I had begun to imagine this book in my head. Soon enough I started writing it, and its first two chapters came quickly because they could be drawn straight from the seminar. But I did not see where it would turn in subsequent chapters, in which I wanted to focus each time on a specific literary work.
Meanwhile, I was reading everything I came upon that might set me on a fruitful path. I lingered long with Invitation to a Beheading, which was the first of his novels that Vladimir Nabokov translated into English. As a somewhat conscientious comparatist, however, I could not think about writing seriously on this fascinating novel, which I was able to read only in translation, albeit a translation by the author.7 I had to stay with what I could track closest to ground level, in the grain of an idiom, for I believe that is where literary language is most disruptive of expectations and thus most productive for a new thinking against the death penalty, which is what I was after. Literary historical studies like John Cyril Barton’s Literary Executions: Capital Punishment and American Culture, 1820–1925 and David Guest’s Sentenced to Death: The American Novel and Capital Punishment helped me probe the American example.8 Bolstered by legal histories like Stuart Banner’s The Death Penalty: An American Institution,9 these literary studies accumulated insight into the specifically American institution of capital punishment, which I was coming somewhat reluctantly to recognize as perhaps the most pertinent framing of the book I was trying to write. I say “reluctantly” because the pertinence of the questions I wanted to raise and worry with this book could not be contained, so I believed, by the peculiarity of the American context and the very particular history there of the persistence of a legal death penalty.
The reluctance to feature the American experience of the death penalty dissolved more or less when I read Robert Coover’s extraordinary 1977 novel The Public Burning (see Chapter 3). This exhaustively researched fictional recasting opens on the eve of the day, June 18, 1953, originally set for the execution in the electric chair of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg at Sing Sing prison for the crime of espionage. Coover, however, has exercised the extreme fictional license of moving the execution from a prison enclosure into the open of Times Square and staging there a hyperbolic public spectacle, which one can read as the correlative of the frenzied atmosphere that surrounded the Rosenbergs’ arrest, prosecution, conviction, sentencing, imprisonment, and final punishment. Although legal wrangling with the publisher delayed it, Coover’s novel had first been scheduled to appear in 1976, the American bicentennial year, which also happens to be the year the Supreme Court issued the opinion in Gregg v. Georgia that in essence restarted executions in the country after a ten-year de facto moratorium. Naturally, this coincidence is nowhere remarked in the novel itself, whose meticulous reconstruction of the Rosenberg “affair” stays strictly within its historical frame. Nevertheless, it weighed on the scale with which I had begun to measure the novel’s pertinence for the post-Gregg era of the American death penalty, during which the secrecy surrounding executions has, over the past decade, reached a high degree of obsessiveness in state legislatures and among prison authorities. An important precipitating factor for all this secrecy, as I had analyzed in my earlier essay, was the withdrawal from the market of the anesthetic favored in lethal injection, the execution method invented in the wake of Gregg. With its central device of hyperpublicity, The Public Burning inverts this drive toward secrecy and, in the process, which is the process of fiction, exposes phantasmatic investments that maintain and sustain the practice of the death penalty. For if indeed, as Derrida argues, the death penalty survives on the strength of a phantasm, which is the phantasm of a sovereign power over death and the end of finitude,10 then it draws on the power of fiction. It is a phantasm, however, insofar as it disavows the fiction in favor of belief. Fiction that does not disavow but rather remarks itself, fiction such as The Public Burning, can make readable the phantasm as such, as well as its remains.
If the coincidence between the publication of Coover’s novel and the resumption of executions in the United States was just that, a coincidence, the same can most definitely not be said of Norman Mailer’s enormous novel The Executioner’s Song, published three years after the decision, in 1979 (see Chapter 4). On the contrary, the novel owes its very existence to Gregg: Its subject is the last nine months of the life of the man, Gary Gilmore, who was the first to be executed under this new dispensation of American capital punishment.
The work of Coover and the work of Mailer occupy very different places in the landscape of contemporary American fiction: the former is usually pigeonholed—often so as to dismiss it—as postmodern, while the latter is often associated with the New Journalism (or excoriated by feminists for patriarchal sexism).11 One knows that such labels are all but useless when it is a question of inventive, strong, and varied oeuvres like those of Coover and Mailer. All the same, it would seem safe to say that The Executioner’s Song, the “true life novel,” with its sober reporting of witnesses’ accounts, could hardly be at a further remove from The Public Burning, with its exuberant linguistic style and exaggeration of absurdities. Yet, strangely, there is a very strong affinity between them when one looks a little closely, or not even all that closely.
For instance, each deploys extensively the metaphor of the circus, whether it is the circus emceed in Times Square by Uncle Sam in The Public Burning or the circus of media that compete for the story of Gilmore’s final act in The Executioner’s Song. The circus, of course, was once the circled stadium where the Romans staged, among other spectacles, executions by gladiator of condemned prisoners who had been offered the chance to fight for their lives. These are like the spectacles and festivals that Nietzsche places near the origin of punishment, at which creditors exacted what their debtors owed them in the currency of cruelty.12 This ancient scene of punishment finds distant echoes in both novels, where the circus draws crowds for the spectacle of cruelty that is an execution.
Indeed, in 1960 Norman Mailer had half-seriously proposed that the U.S. president just elected (John Kennedy) introduce a bill “for a New Capital Punishment,” adding that the bill “would never pass, but a new idea might be alive. Nothing is more exceptional than to introduce a new idea into America.”13 In fact, this “new idea” was essentially the ancient idea of gladiatorial combat. Here is Mailer’s proposal:
I would like to see a law passed which would abolish capital punishment, except for those states which insisted on keeping it. Such states would then be allowed to kill criminals provided that the killing is not impersonal but personal and a public spectacle: to wit that the executioner be more or less the same size and weight as the criminal (the law could here specify the limits) and that they fight to death using no weapons, or weapons not capable of killing at a distance. Thus knives or broken bottles would be acceptable. Guns would not.14
Mailer comments that such a reform “might return us to moral responsibility,” an idea that is then further elaborated, in terms that are going to be echoed in a poem he first published in 1964 with the same title, “The Executioner’s Song,” which fifteen years later he would give to his novel. Leaving these echoes aside until we encounter the poem in all its detail in Chapter 4, I quote the rest of the proposal, which explicitly evokes gladiators:
The benefit of this law is that it might return us to moral responsibility. The killer would carry the other man’s death in his psyche. The audience, in turn, would experience a sense of tragedy, since the executioners, highly trained for this, would almost always win. In the flabby American spirit there is a buried sadist who finds the bullfight contemptible—what he really desires are gladiators. Since nothing is worse for a country than repressed sadism, this method of execution would offer ventilation for the more cancerous emotions of the American public. (11)
Like Nietzsche, then, Mailer understands that pleasure taken in the other’s pain—sadism—is the repressed motive of punishment. Or as Nietzsche put it: “Without cruelty there is no festival: thus the longest and most ancient part of human history teaches—and in punishment there is so much that is festive!” (Genealogy, 67).
The figure of the execution circus, however, is not the only feature shared by these novels. There is also the invention of what, on the one hand, Mailer calls “true life” and, on the other, the real events and historical actors that Coover redeploys under the cover of his fiction. This adherence to historical record, if only to the first draft of history in the newspapers from which both novels cut and paste extensively, seems calibrated by the calculations that count down precisely to a time of death as history has recorded it. This countdown structures each novel with a similar precision. The structure of calculation from a sentenced, predetermined end is also, and in general, a foundational element of conventional narrative, which plots the end from the beginning and vice versa. Both Coover and Mailer take over this plot but, I would venture, in order to write over it, by which I mean both to superimpose their writing over it and to unwrite it or write it over, changing everything and nothing, like Pierre Menard’s Don Quixote. In the overwriting carried out by their respective fictions, the interest of the death penalty plot—its circus appeal—shows up its threadbare weave throughout the fabric of post-Gregg American society.
This effect is especially evident in The Executioner’s Song, which is not surprising, because Mailer was writing in such close proximity to events the novel recounts. By eschewing, however, the first-person subjectivism of New Journalism, which Mailer had pioneered in the 1960s with works like Armies of the Night and Miami and the Siege of Chicago, The Executioner’s Song manages a degree of “objective” recording that may be audible or readable only at a distance such as ours from what the novel was picking up like background noise in its recorded chronicle of Gilmore’s brief life and grisly death by firing squad. A new regime of the death penalty post-Gregg was also ushering in the coming era of punishment, which would be characterized by mass incarceration and by the stigmatization of the criminal, especially the black criminal. It is the era that Michelle Alexander has so searingly named the New Jim Crow, when a new complex of “colorblind” laws and policies takes over the task of social control of an underclass that is made up disproportionally of persons of color.15
Although published more than forty years before the era that Alexander documents, Richard Wright’s best-known novel, Native Son, can be read, with little resistance, as if addressed to this posterity. Significantly, one of the clearest moments of this prescient address comes in the form of a vision that the protagonist Bigger Thomas has in prison:
Standing trembling in his cell, he saw a dark vast fluid image rise and float; he saw a black sprawling prison full of tiny black cells in which people lived; each cell had its stone jar of water and a crust of bread and no one could go from cell to cell and there were screams and curses and yells of suffering and nobody heard them, for the walls were thick and darkness was everywhere. Why were there so many cells in the world?16
It is a vision full of darkness—“dark vast fluid image” and “darkness everywhere”—but also blackness: a “black sprawling prison full of tiny black cells.” The repetition of “black” vehicles a metonymy, indeed the metonymy of a metonymy: It is a black prison because it is for black people, just as they are black cells because they hold black convicts. In a 1930s Chicago that has yet to learn the code of colorblindness, the explicit stigma of blackness is the necessary and sufficient cause of everything that happens in the novel, from the opening scene of the rat infestation that Bigger’s family must regularly endure to the execution of Bigger the “black ape” (342, 422, 426, 517) that looms at the end.17 And the “Black Belt” that divides the city restrains like a prison the movement of those forced to live within it, a condition Bigger reflects on when he is on the run from the police hunting him:
How easy it would be for him to hide if he had the whole city in which to move about! They keep us bottled up here like wild animals, he thought. He knew that black people could not go outside the Black Belt to rent a flat; they had to live on their side of the “line.” No white real estate man would rent a flat to a black man other than in the sections where it had been decided that black people might live. (314)
This is mass incarceration in a previous guise, which is also to say that mass incarceration is redlining and black belting in a later guise, the colorblind guise of the New Jim Crow.18
Clearly Native Son speaks still to American experience. And like the other novels explored here, it is a story that ends in a death sentence executed by the state. Or rather, it ends on the eve of this execution, leaving the reader, like Bigger, to imagine the end:
He had been told by one of the guards not to worry, that “eight seconds after they take you out of your cell and put that black cap over your eyes, you’ll be dead, boy.” Well, he could stand that. He had in his mind a plan: he would flex his muscles and shut his eyes and hold his breath and think of absolutely nothing while they were handling him. And when the current struck him, it would all be over. (533)
The novel’s continued relevance or pertinence is, I would say, the hallmark of literature, that is, of writing that goes on interpreting, allegorizing, fictionalizing any present, like past, experience. Literature is writing that we as a reading culture—which is perhaps becoming extinct—take care of and preserve, keep available for any and all readers (Native Son has not gone out of print since it was published in 1940), and carefully restore in each and all of its original words (Native Son was initially issued in a Book-of-the-Month Club censored version). But of course somewhere we believe that such pragmatic indicators merely imply a prior judgment of the quality called literature, which a work simply does or does not exhibit. That is, works are preserved and restored because they are literature, rather than the other way around. Finally, however, can this difference be decided, and doesn’t it come down to the same thing?
Yet Native Son perhaps excepts itself from this reasoning. This may even be what James Baldwin sought to articulate when he positioned Wright’s novel in a line of descent from Uncle Tom’s Cabin in his 1949 essay “Everybody’s Protest Novel.”19 In a related essay a few years later, “Many Thousands Gone,” Baldwin reserves the phrase “protest literature” for certain writing “written by Negroes,” of which the first, and only, example given is Native Son.20 Baldwin’s critique of the novel is severe and argues that it essentially fails to do what a novel should do, to “journey toward a more vast reality” and reveal the complexity in which we can “find at once ourselves and the power that will free us from ourselves. It is this power of revelation which is the business of the novelist, this journey toward a more vast reality which must take precedence over all other claims” (“Everybody’s Protest Novel,” 15). But Baldwin was no doubt being unjust. He came close to admitting as much when he wrote in the aftermath of Wright’s death.21 Abdul JanMohamed, for one, protests vigorously against the dismissive label of “protest literature” and against Baldwin’s critique in his own lengthy study of Wright’s fiction.22
As I said, I did not set out to shadow recent chapters of the American death penalty or carceral regime through the pages of its literature.23 I thus determined not to subject Wright’s death penalty novel to any longer reading here. And with that decision I also dropped whatever designs I might have had on Albert Camus’s famous novel The Stranger, except for some brief analysis of it in Chapter 1. I had come to relate these two works, not all that implausibly, and not only because Camus would become an admirer of Wright’s novel, but also because their protagonists follow such similar trajectories, however different their circumstances. And like Native Son, The Stranger ends famously on the eve of the protagonist’s execution with Meursault, the condemned man, reflecting in his cell:
I opened myself for the first time to the tender indifference of the world. Feeling it so much like me, so fraternal in the end, I felt that I had been happy, and that I was happy still. For everything to be fulfilled, for me to feel less alone, there remained for me to hope that there would be many spectators on the day of my execution and that they would greet me with cries of hatred.24
As Alice Kaplan has pointed out, The Stranger assumed shape out of an obsessive vision that Camus lent initially to Patrice Merseult, the protagonist of his aborted first novel A Happy Death. This precursor of Meursault claims “a man condemned to death was living and breathing inside him”: “I see that man. He is inside me . . . He is living and breathing with me. He is afraid with me.”25 Camus’s writing was born when that man condemned to death moved onto the page.
Every somewhat alert reader of Camus’s famous novel understands that Meursault is condemned not because he killed the unnamed Arab man on the beach but because of his seeming indifference to the death of his mother.26 For the Algerian writer Kamel Daoud, this injustice was the premise for his own novel published in French in 2013, Meursault contre-enquête, translated in English as The Meursault Investigation. Daoud’s narrator is Haroun, the surviving younger brother of Moussa/Zoudj, “the Arab” killed by Meursault on the beach that day in 1942. In a bar in Oran, he is telling his story to a literary scholar come from Paris to do research on the author of the book in which Haroun’s brother died and was forgotten. Here is how his recital begins:
It happened, and everyone talked about it. People still do, but they mention only one dead man, they feel no compunction about doing that, you see, even though there were two of them, two dead men. Yes, two. Why does the other one get left out? Well, the first one was such a good storyteller, he managed to make people forget his crime, whereas the second one was a poor illiterate God created for the sole purpose, it seems, of taking a bullet and returning to dust—an anonymous person who didn’t even have time to have a name.27
Daoud’s novel goes on to shadow Camus’s in ways too numerous and too complex to summarize.28 Suffice it to say that it does something of which there may be no other examples in our literary traditions when it attaches itself, without parody or satire, to the earlier work like a version to be read between its lines. Or, as Haroun puts it,
I’m going to do what was done in this country after Independence: I’m going to take the stones one by one from the old houses the colonists left behind, and build my own house, my own language. The murderer’s words and expressions are my vacant property. (2; trans. modified)
I am nearly done accounting for the fictions that are taken up, or not, in this book. Its concluding chapter attempts to reflect in some general terms on literature of the death penalty, with the help once again of Derrida. His 1985 essay “Before the Law” has been on this book’s mind, so to speak, since its inception, but this preoccupation surfaces only briefly in Chapter 4 before providing the key articulations for a reading of Charles Baudelaire’s prose poem “A Heroic Death” in Chapter 5. It is the occasion to ask again what a literary text is doing, performatively, when it comes before the law of the death penalty, but also to ask what happens to the law that has to appear before a literary work. These are the questions that all of the chapters have taken as their guides to reading each time a singular work.
1. Jacques Derrida, Séminaire, La peine de mort, Volume I (1999–2000), ed. Geoffrey Bennington, Marc Crépon, and Thomas Dutoit (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 2012).
2. See the website of the Death Penalty Information Center for a wealth of statistics about the death penalty in the United States: http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/documents/FactSheet.pdf.
3. See my “Protocol: Death Penalty Addiction,” Southern Journal of Philosophy 50, Spindel Supplement (2012): 5–19; and “The Heart of the Death Penalty,” Oxford Literary Review, ed. Peggy Kamuf, 35, no. 2 (2013).
4. Jacques Derrida, The Death Penalty, Volume I, ed. Geoffrey Bennington and Thomas Dutoit, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013); hereafter DP I. The translation benefited immeasurably from the collective efforts of the Derrida Seminars Translation Project at two summer workshops, in July 2010 and 2011.
5. This seminar, conducted at the University of Southern California in the spring of 2014, was offered in the Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture Doctoral Program as CSLC 602.
6. In the second year of his seminar, this preoccupation with literature has largely receded. Instead, Derrida devotes far more space than he had in the first volume to psychoanalytic texts by Freud but also Theodor Reik and Sándor Ferenczi. Derrida calls attention to this change of focus when, toward end of the second year, he recalls the “question that we posed last year, namely, the following: how is it that the abolitionist cause has more often been served, publicly served, by poets or by writers than by philosophers and even politicians?” The Death Penalty, Volume II, ed. Geoffrey Bennington and Marc Crépon, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 232.
7. Nabokov was caustic about the failings of translation, including his own. His poem “On Translating Eugene Onegin” begins: “What is translation? On a platter / A poet’s pale and glaring head, / A parrot’s screech, a monkey’s chatter, / And profanation of the dead.” New Yorker, January 8, 1955.
8. Cyril Barton, Literary Executions: Capital Punishment and American Culture (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014); David Guest, Sentenced to Death: The American Novel and Capital Punishment (Oxford: University Press of Mississippi, 1997).
9. Stuart Banner, The Death Penalty: An American Institution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003).
10. See DP I, 257–258; see also Gwynne Fulton, “‘Phantasmatics’: Sovereignty and the Image of Death in Derrida’s Death Penalty Seminars,” Mosaic 48, no. 3 (September 2015); and Michael Naas, “The Philosophy and Literature of the Death Penalty: Two Sides of the Same Sovereign,” Southern Journal of Philosophy, Spindel Supplement, vol. 50 (2012); as well as “Comme si, comme ça: Following Derrida on the Phantasms of the Self, the State, and a Sovereign God,” in Naas, Derrida from Now On (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008).
11. Most famously by Kate Millett, in Sexual Politics (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1970). Mailer responded to the chorus of his feminist critics in his Prisoner of Sex (New York: Little, Brown, 1971).
12. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1989), 363; see also Derrida, DP I, 154ff.
13. Norman Mailer, The Presidential Papers (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1963), 9.
14. Mailer, The Presidential Papers, 11.
15. Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, rev. ed. (New York: New Press, 2012).
16. Richard Wright, Native Son (New York: Perennial Classics, 1989), 457.
17. On Bigger’s “beastliness,” see Christopher Peterson, Bestial Traces: Race, Sexuality, Animality (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), chap. 1.
18. David Guest makes a similar point in a chapter on Native Son in his Sentenced to Death: Wright, he says, “depicts the [criminal justice] system as the nation’s primary instrument of racial oppression in the years after slavery. Even when the statutes of the penal code disallow racial discrimination—and in 1940 they seldom did—Wright shows that the racist myths are powerful enough to make the criminal justice system take up the work of racial oppression” (87).
19. “Bigger is Uncle Tom’s descendant, so exactly opposite a portrait that, when the books are placed together, it seems that the contemporary Negro novelist and the dead New England woman are locked in a deadly embrace; the one uttering merciless exhortations, the other shouting curses.” James Baldwin, “Everybody’s Protest Novel,’ in Notes of a Native Son (Boston: Beacon, 1984), 22.
20. Baldwin, “Many Thousands Gone,” in Notes of a Native Son, 31.
21. James Baldwin, “Alas, Poor Richard,” in Nobody Knows My Name (New York: Vintage, 1961). But Baldwin has already signaled his connection, affinity, and debt to Wright with the title of an essay about the death of his own father, “Notes of a Native Son,” in a collection with the same name.
22. Abdul R. JanMohamed, The Death-Bound Subject: Richard Wright’s Archaeology of Death (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 39–42.
23. Had that been the aim, then the choice of fictional works examined in the following chapters would manifestly have been inadequate to the purpose. Fortunately, others, like Guest and Barton, have taken up that task and no doubt studies of American literature in the age of mass incarceration and “the new Jim Crow” will supplement their work before long.
24. Albert Camus, L’étranger (Paris: Gallimard, 1942), 183–184; my trans. Although with this ending Camus might have been nodding toward Wright’s novel, there is a more likely echo of James M. Cain’s 1934 potboiler The Postman Always Rings Twice, which also ends with the narrator, Frank Chambers, awaiting imminent execution. Like Meursault, Chambers is a murderer, but one effectively convicted for a crime he did not commit. On the relation between the two works, see Alice Kaplan, Looking for the Stranger: Albert Camus and the Life of a Literary Classic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 46–48.
25. Kaplan, Looking for the Stranger, 46, 234n3.
26. This “crime” is declared with the dispassionate tone of the very first, and very famous, sentences of the novel: “Today Mother died. Or maybe yesterday.”
27. Kamel Daoud, The Meursault Investigation, trans. John Cullen (New York: Other Press, 2015), 1; trans. modified.
28. As just one index of how closely Daoud shadows (or stalks) Camus’s novel, the 2014 French edition of Meursault contre-enquête (a first edition was published in Algeria in 2013) has exactly the same number of signs as L’étranger; see Alice Kaplan, “‘Meursault, contre-enquête’ de Kamel Daoud,” in contreligne, June 2014, http://www.contreligne.eu/2014/06/kamel-daoud-meursault-contre-enquete/.