The Wages of Guilt

THE MERCY OF GOD (310 pp.)--Jean Cau--Atheneum ($5).

On the floor of the prison cell, the cockroach struggles frantically to escape its burning bed of straw. "Confess you're not a saint," shouts one convict hovering over the minuscule pyre, "or else the fire of heaven will consume your flesh amid hideous sufferings." Cries another: "Confess that the Prince of Evil has appeared to you and seduced you, but that you see the light and that repentance floods your heart." But the roach says nothing and goes up in flames. "She's damned. God forgive her."

So four men cooped up in a single cell pass the time. They call their quaint little game The Torture of Joan of Arc, and it is a symptom of their terrible sense of guilt, which consumes them as the flames consume the roach. A preoccupation with guilt is nothing new for modern French novelists, but Jean Cau. 37, examines the meaning of guilt more exhaustively than even Camus or Sartre--though not always with their clarity. A controversial journalist as well as a novelist and playwright, Cau won the 1961 Prix Goncourt for The Mercy of God.

The Crime of Birth. Cau's four characters are so overwhelmed by guilt that they cannot recall the actual crimes that landed them in prison. They cannot distinguish between the people they felt like murdering and those they actually did murder; they feel as guilty for their thoughts as for their deeds. In brooding conversations in their cell, they mull over the infinite possibilities of their guilt in the neorealist manner made familiar by Robbe-Grillet's Last Year at Marienbad.

In one flashback it appears that Alex, the boxer, killed an opponent in the ring. But later it turns out that his victim may have been a prostitute who humiliated him or a homosexual whom he feared.

Match, the gambler, may have killed his possessive mother--or was it his indifferent father? The doctor may have pushed his brother over a cliff, or did he strangle his mistress? Eugene, a crane operator at a construction project, thinks he stabbed his faithless wife; on the other hand, he may have dumped a load of iron beams on his foreman, whom he suspected of being her lover.

With rare insight, Cau traces the growth of guilt in his characters. After the death of his brother, his parents' favorite child, the doctor fell ill and tried to atone by dying. In his sickbed, he saw (or did he imagine?) his mother trying on her mourning finery and soothing him: "You're going to go away to be nice to Mama, aren't you, my love? You won't get well like a bad little boy . . ." Match was sure he had insulted his parents by being born ugly: "I was never entitled to the qualities of a child. I will always regard myself as a duty or a crime." Once he thought he was shrinking, instead of growing like other children, and was overjoyed at the prospect of returning to nothingness.

The Chains that Release. For these men, prison is not so much a confinement as a release. "It pleases me that everything should be forbidder," muses one of them. "I want to be forbidden to raise my little finger. I want exact count to be kept of my coughs, my glances, my sighs. I want no one to forget the slammed door, the lost handkerchief, the hidden cigarette, the broken shoelace; I want to be bound so tight that at the slightest movement the chains will bruise my flesh. I want to be pierced by light, I want to be absolutely pure."

In Sartre's play No Exit, three people imprisoned together for eternity conclude, bitterly, that "Hell is--other people!" But it is other people that make Cau's prison bearable and a bit like heaven. By unburdening themselves to one another, by being able to share their guilt, the four prisoners achieve a happiness they never had outside prison.

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