“Ces forces obscures de l’âme”
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“Ces forces obscures de l’âme”
FAUX TITRE 311 Etudes de langue et littérature françaises publiées sous la direction de Keith Busby, M.J. Freeman, Sjef Houppermans et Paul Pelckmans
“Ces forces obscures de l’âme” Women, race and origins in the writings of Albert Camus
Christine Margerrison
AMSTERDAM - NEW YORK, NY 2008
Maquette couverture / Cover design: Pier Post. The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of ‘ISO 9706: 1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents Requirements for permanence’. Le papier sur lequel le présent ouvrage est imprimé remplit les prescriptions de ‘ISO 9706: 1994, Information et documentation - Papier pour documents Prescriptions pour la permanence’. ISBN: 978-90-420-2379-6 © Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2008 Printed in The Netherlands
For Peter, Nick and Lucy
Contents Abbreviations
11
Introduction
13
Chapter 1: Early Confrontations with Others: the Écrits de Jeunesse
21
Peopling the Universe The Exotic Woman as a Sexual Partner Women in the Real World Women, Death and an Absurd Sensibility
24 28 35 41 48
Chapter 2: The Death of Woman and the Birth of Culture
51
The Death of Woman The Birth of Culture Racial Purity Le mélange des sangs Cultural Priority Myths of Origin The Mythical Woman
52 58 63 65 67 69 70
Chapter 3: The Man-god and Death as an Act of the Will
75
Bodies without a Soul Lucidity Death as an act of the Will A Homosocial Death The Twice-born Man Absurd Man
78 83 86 88 93 95
Chapter 4: The Dark Continent of L’Étranger
101
Virility Inserting L’Étranger into the Century The Dirty Joke The Dark Continent
103 108 118 122
Chapter 5: Mythical Women in La Peste
129
Myths of Origin The Fatherland: A Misunderstanding Beyond the Absurd Le roman-mythe Woman; that which escapes History Dératisation Passion and the Egoism of Love
129 130 133 136 139 141 145
8
Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus
La Vraie Voie The Dialogues of Men; the Silence of Women Orpheus An Inclination towards the Male The Maternal Stereotype The Battle of the Sexes The Psychology of Women, Intent on Desire and Possession Love rather than Justice
148 149 151 157 161 163 165 166
Chapter 6: Woman, Race and the Fall of Man
169
The Politics of Envy Aristocracy The Gendering of Race Landscapes of La Chute in the Journaux de Voyage Ulysses and the Dream of Ithaca Christianity and Greek Myth The Fall Navigation and the Opium of Sexuality The Pure Space The Nightmares of Colonialism Hell Women, on the Surface of Life Mythical Women in La Chute Redemption Metamorphoses
171 174 179 181 184 187 189 191 194 195 196 201 206 207 210
Chapter 7: Sexual Topographies
215
Domestic Sexuality and Exotic Fantasy The Fat White Woman Sexual Tourism An Orientalist Discourse “La Maison mauresque” Assimilation A Reflection on Laghouat Fetishism and the Footnoted Female The Terror of the Absolute “Le Renégat”: a Drama of the Flesh The Loss of Boundaries The New Aristocracy
215 218 220 227 233 235 238 239 242 245 251 261
Chapter 8: The First Man
263
The Public and Private Spheres Le Fils de roi The First Man The First Murder The Personal and the Political The Matriarchy The Patriarchal Trace
263 272 274 278 280 284 293
Contents
9
The Unnatural Son The Blood of History Mother Earth The Dark Forces of the Soul
294 300 305 311
Selected Bibliography
317
Index
347
Abbreviations Full publication details are to be found in the Bibliography. Except where indicated, all translations are my own. E
Essais (1965 edition)
TRN
Théâtre, Récits, Nouvelles
C1
Carnets I: mai 1935–février 1942
C2
Carnets II: janvier 1942–mars 1951
C3
Carnets III: mars 1951–décembre 1959
CAC 3
Fragments d’un combat: 1938–1940
CAC 4
“Caligula”: version de 1941, suivi de “La Poétique du premier ‘Caligula’ ”
CAC 6
Albert Camus: éditorialiste à “L’Express” (mai 1955-février 1956)
PC
Le Premier Camus: suivi de “Écrits de jeunesse”
PH
Le Premier Homme
YW
Youthful Writings
SEN
Selected Essays and Notebooks
HD
A Happy Death
TO
The Outsider
MS
The Myth of Sisyphus
P
The Plague
F
The Fall
R
The Rebel
EK
Exile and the Kingdom
FM
The First Man
CCP
Caligula: Cross Purpose
Introduction In view of the many books and articles on Camus, it has become customary for writers of new studies to begin by defending yet another publication on this surely over-represented subject. I hope I will be forgiven if I decline this invitation. The main subject of this book – the treatment of women in the writings of Albert Camus – is, of course, not new at all. Rather, since the late 1960s it has been a perennial focus of articles by a number of distinguished commentators, and the occasional doctoral thesis in the US and France. With the possibly sole exception of Geraldine Montgomery’s work,1 such theses rarely become books, which are in any case few in number. During the 1990s, the only single-authored work of which I know is Anthony Rizzuto’s excellent Camus: Love and Sexuality.2 Perhaps this relative paucity is because a focus on the female characters in Camus’s work is an apparently self-limiting subject. This would not arise if the subject under investigation were the treatment of men in Camus’s work: indeed, that would be deemed no subject at all in its own right, as it would encompass every area of Camus’s work. By the same token, my approach has been that no area is beyond the scope of this investigation. Neither have I accepted the assumption that this logically entails an exhaustive analysis of Camus’s plays, simply because this is one of the rare spaces where women actually speak. Any study of female characters must first confront the obstacle that the majority are onedimensional, lacking reality and human complexity, and this is particularly the case in Camus’s theatrical works, which were not intended as investigations of individual human complexity. Camus’s conception of theatre was ideologically driven and concerned with the large scale rather than individual uniqueness; for him the great ages of tragedy coincide with seismic changes in social formations: (L)’âge tragique semble coïncider chaque fois avec une évolution où l’homme, consciemment ou non, se détache d’une forme ancienne de civilisation et se trouve devant elle en état de rupture sans, pour autant, avoir trouvé une nouvelle forme qui le satisfasse. En 1955, nous en sommes là, il me semble. (TRN, 1703) 1
Noces pour Femme seule: le féminin et le sacré dans l’œuvre d’Albert Camus (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004). 2 Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998.
14
Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus (T)he tragic age seems to coincide every time with an evolution where man, consciously or no, detaches himself from an old form of civilization and finds himself in a state of rupture without, for all that, having found a new form that might satisfy him. In 1955, we’re at that point, it seems to me.
He was concerned to depict not the individual life but destiny itself (“le destin tout entier” (TRN, 1733) ). The task of the actor, for Camus, was to be like an empty vessel into which is poured the artist’s vision, and this appears to have been Camus’s stance throughout his theatrical career. His equation of the theatre with sculpture carries overtones, moreover, of Nietzsche’s Apollonian artist god, the divine sculptor shaping this world and creating form from the Dionysian flesh of humanity. For Camus the greatest sculpture seeks to capture “le geste, la mine ou le regard vide qui résumeront tous les gestes et tous les regards du monde” (E, 660) (“the gesture, the expression, or the empty stare which will sum up all the gestures and all the stares in the world”).3 Unsurprisingly then, what he called “psychology” left him indifferent as a playwright (TRN, 1734) – a standpoint he had adopted as early as 1937, when he noted in his reading of Oswald Spengler the “anti-psychological” meaning of myth (C1, 100). While, on the one hand, this perspective stems from the author’s ideological adherences (which will be discussed in the course of this book), it also conveniently justifies the move away from attempted depictions of the interior life of others; a justification and rationalization, perhaps, of his own inability to create a character from the inside (an issue that will also be treated in the course of this book). Camus’s approach to the theatre is in fact indicative of a more general attitude; in an echo of his 1958 preface to the plays, he says in his preface to L’Envers et l’Endroit that in his life he has learnt less about others than about himself because “ma curiosité va plus à leur destin qu’à leurs réactions et que les destins se répètent beaucoup. J’ai appris du moins qu’ils existaient” (E, 10) (“I am interested more in their destiny than in their reactions, and destinies barely differ one from another. I have at least learnt that other people exist”). It is, therefore, unsurprising that women are peripheral to the writings, and marked by a high degree of interchangeability. Although one reason for this is undoubtedly Camus’s rejection of a psychological 3
See my “Camus and the Theatre”, in Edward J. Hughes (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Camus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 67-78.
Introduction
15
dimension in his work, there is also the obvious fact that, with the apparent exception of his short story, “La Femme adultère”, the focus of his concerns lies elsewhere. In my view, the character study, or the categorization of “types” which are then analysed in isolation from their fictional context, risks an emphasis on static conceptions placed into an isolated personal sphere that does not impinge on other aspects of Camus’s work and takes no account of developments in Camus’s thinking. This study was initially oriented not by the fruitless question: “what are these female characters like?” but by the question: “What are the functions of the female stereotype?” I adopted this term from Homi Bhabha’s analysis of the colonial stereotype, because the ambivalence of which he speaks, and the implications of his analysis, are readily applicable to the situation of women, both in colonialism and beyond that arena. The stereotype, moreover, is all too often part and parcel of the critic’s own intellectual baggage, and is to be found in the unexamined assumptions about women in general that are often brought to bear in any investigation of this subject. Psychoanalytical studies in particular return female fictional creations to their supposed originals in the Camus household in order to reconstruct a family drama where virtually all these characters are found to be incarnations of the mother: the grandmother, on the other hand, is deemed to be not a woman at all, but a substitute for the absent father. This wisdom is so widespread that it is certainly not limited to psychoanalytical studies and has become the standard approach for all who prefer to dispense with the trouble of independent thought. A more insidious effect of such acceptance of the ready-made idea is the creation of an intellectual straitjacket that discourages a spirit of inquiry. For me, a further starting point lies in the conviction that the treatment of women is no parochial concern, but sheds light on the writings as a whole, and cannot be relegated to a personal sphere on the sidelines of Camus’s thought. Although women are peripheral, the implications of such marginalisation are not. In his early journalism, for example, Camus examines a number of social problems arising from the colonial system, yet he never discusses one of the most hotly debated issues throughout the entire colonial period in Algeria, which was the condition of the indigenous woman. Such omissions shed a not insignificant light on the limitations of Camus’s concern for justice. Failures to take such inconsistencies into account are indicative of a certain blindness as far as the general significance of women in
16
Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus
Camus’s work is concerned. At several points over the course of this book I refer to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s repeated point that if women are taken seriously as women in any argument, then the shape of the argument itself would undergo a radical change, even a paradigm shift. All too often, the female character is overlooked, or included either as an “honorary brother”, or as a “homogeneous woman” whose characteristics reflect general assumptions about women. Over the course of this book I have pointed to several examples of this exclusion or appropriation, which Spivak identifies as the sign of ideology at work. I began with an investigation of women as women (even these fictional creatures), and everything else in this book flows from that: women in the context of colonialism, questions surrounding assimilation, race, myth. The issues raised here are the direct consequence of my attention to the treatment of women in Camus’s work. My aim is not to isolate women from the framework in which they are placed, but to consider them as women in that framework. This entails seeing what is there, differently; and taking account of that difference. Considerations of ideology bring me to the subject of theory, on which I have relied at various stages in this book. Where it has seemed appropriate, I have used various theoretical insights but, just as my occasional use of Freud does not make my approach a Freudian one, neither has this investigation been determined by any theoretical stance. This book was first completed in the form of a doctoral thesis in 1997. At that time, Camus was approached, in the main, as a French writer who belonged firmly within the French tradition, and it seemed necessary then to stress his colonial roots and their impact on his thinking and writing. During its composition, I found few echoes of my own arguments in the secondary literature – a factor that perhaps explains its occasionally combative tone. I did not know it then, but 1997 also marked the beginning of a wave of reassessments in the Anglophone world of Camus as a colonial figure. Often taking their lead from Conor Cruise O’Brien and Edward Said, many of these writings did not hesitate to condemn Camus because of his colonial connections. Although I cannot defend the reasons why I did not publish this book some years ago, I am grateful that this passage of time has enabled me to revise and clarify my own distance from this constituency. While accepting Louis Althusser’s general proposition that one cannot stand outside of ideology, nevertheless I have tried to avoid the self-righteous and condemnatory stances of some applica-
Introduction
17
tions of postcolonial theory. Certainly, it would be possible, if fruitless, to “convict” Camus for some of his attitudes; ultimately, however, we can only condemn him for being a man of his own age and not ours – the purpose of such moral indignation being merely to congratulate ourselves for belonging to our own times rather than his. Perhaps because of my original sociological training, my regard for literary theory is not as high as my regard for empirical evidence, especially when that evidence disrupts a complacent intellectual consensus. Ironically, events in Algeria itself have overtaken a number of such ideologically driven arguments. The relaxation of state censorship at the beginning of the 1990s, combined with Algerian demands to know the truth about a war whose narrative had hitherto been controlled by the Algerian state,4 have prompted a new wave of scholarship on the Algerian war of Independence. As Martin Evans and John Phillips have recently pointed out, the reduction of complex history to a tale “of heroes and villains” can no longer be justified.5 It is, moreover, an inconvenient truth that exiled Algerians themselves have increasingly embraced Camus as one of their own – as does Assia Djebar when, in Le Blanc de l’Algérie, she places him at the forefront of a Francophone Algerian literature threatened with extinction.6 What Emily Apter describes as a dispute between Algerian secularists and postcolonial critics over an Algerian Camus cannot so easily be dismissed as a frightened and confused response to Islamism.7 But if some cannot take seriously the claims of Algerians themselves, recent historical scholarship as well as the Algerian civil war is sufficient to provoke a more serious re-reading of some of Camus’s political stances.
4
See El Watan, “Trente ans d’amnésie” (5th July, 1992). See also Benjamin Stora, “Algérie: les retours de la mémoire de la guerre d’indépendance”, Modern and Contemporary France, 10 (4) (2002), 461-473. 5 Algeria: Anger of the Dispossessed (London: Yale University Press, 2007), 5. See also James D. Le Sueur, Uncivil War: Intellectuals and Identity Politics During the Decolonization of Algeria (London: University of Nebraska Press, 2002). 6 Paris: Albin Michel, 1995. 7 “Out of character: Camus’s French Algerian subjects”, Modern Language Notes, 112 (4) (1997) (499-516), 501-502. Apter seems to be arguing that the “reinvention” of Camus by those “fearing for their lives” is “rooted in personal stakes”; that they “seem” to be arguing for an “indiscriminate jumble” of exiled or French-identified Algerian writers as a confused response to intégrisme.
18
Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus
Throughout his writing career Camus was aware not of “saying less” (as he wrote in Le Mythe de Sisyphe), but of saying more than he had consciously intended. His reflections on his writing show a constant awareness of this, as when he wrote in 1937 that “j’ai besoin parfois d’écrire des choses qui m’échappent en partie, mais qui précisément font la preuve de ce qui en moi est plus fort que moi” (C1, 60) (“Sometimes I need to write things that partly escape me, but which demonstrate precisely what in me is stronger than I am”). Twenty years later, in his preface to L’Envers et l’Endroit, he named such intrusions “ces forces obscures de l’âme” (“those obscure forces of the soul”), which add richness to an artist’s work, but not without being channelled and surrounded by bulwarks (“digues”) (E, 12). Here, the writer is reviewing the entire body of his work, recognising the battle to control and contain such forces. Reflecting that these barriers are still perhaps too high, he implies a certain lowering of these in his future work. This “obscure part”, that which says at times “more”, escaping the writer’s conscious control (but which is nevertheless written), was increasingly to dominate Camus’s thought. In 1959, when asked in his last interview which aspect of his work had been neglected, he replied: “La part obscure, ce qu’il y a d’aveugle et d’instinctif en moi” (E, 1925) (“The obscure part, that which is blind and instinctive in me”). Although Le Premier Homme remains unfinished, its last chapter clearly suggests that he was to investigate this very same “part obscure de l’être” (“obscure part of the being”), which throughout the years had stirred in him, like the waters flowing beneath the earth (PH, 256). While trying to avoid speculation, and to focus on what is written, the attention of this book is on these other forces in the writings of Camus. If he was consciously able to categorise and control his female characters through their marginalisation and the use of stereotypes, how might the presence of women escape him to say more than he had necessarily intended? How, moreover, can women be integrated into the body of Camus’s work? As this is my focus, it is also the reason why I have concentrated on Camus’s prose fiction. I accept the author’s own judgement that: J’écris sur des plans différents pour éviter justement le mélange des genres. J’ai composé ainsi des pièces dans le langage de l’action, des essais à forme rationnelle, des romans sur l’obscurité du cœur. (E, 1926) I write on different levels precisely to avoid the mixing of genres. Thus I have composed plays in the language of action, essays in rational form, novels on the obscurity of the heart.
Introduction
19
This book is not about the grand ideas associated with Camus’s work. It is consciously about the marginal, and that to which the least importance is usually attributed. At least if commentators on this subject are to be believed, then here is to be found the most a-political and asocial area of his work, the one that relates most closely to the personal life and emotions of the author himself. “Women” have been my starting point, and in the belief that this subject has as wide a scope as any “affaire entre hommes”. From the outset, my intention has been not to judge, but to investigate these connections, and this book has been undertaken not in any spirit of condemnation, but in what I hope to be an objective spirit of inquiry. It is intended as a contribution to an ongoing debate and for this reason, to those readers who will challenge its flaws, correct, extend or overturn its arguments, this book is dedicated to you. July 2007
Chapter 1 Early Confrontations with Others: the Écrits de jeunesse Enfance pauvre. Vie sans amour (non sans jouissances). La mère n’est pas une source d’amour. Dès lors, ce qu’il y a de plus long au monde c’est d’apprendre à aimer. (C3, 98) Poor childhood. A life without love (not without pleasure). The mother is not a source of love. Henceforth, the longest thing in the world is to learn how to love.
In 1954 the Algerian war of independence began and Camus, who saw independence as the death knell for his own community, began to envisage the impending loss of his homeland.1 In 1956, as he was finishing La Chute, he wrote to André Rosfelder “nous dévalons vers l’abîme, nous y sommes déjà” (“we’re sliding into the abyss, we’re already there”); and in 1958 he wrote to Jean Grenier that “c’est sans doute trop tard pour l’Algérie” (“it’s no doubt too late for Algeria”).2 It was in this climate of irretrievable loss that he turned back in his writings to his own origins and those of his community in his unfinished work, Le Premier Homme. In this return to his roots Camus investigates for the first time not only the individual “poor childhood”, but the origins of French settlement itself in Algeria. Moreover, the strong implication is that the book will include a new acknowledgement of the existence of a surrounding, indigenous population – for the question embedded in this search, “Qui suis-je?” (C3, 97) (“Who am I?”), necessarily entails such a recognition. Le Premier Homme demonstrates an unhesitating, if not entirely uncritical, commitment not only to the people amongst whom the writer was born, but it embraces the ties of biology and “tout ce qui ne dépendait pas de lui de choisir” (PH, 309) (“all that he had not been free to choose”).
1
A version of parts of this chapter was first published as “Struggling with the Other”, in James Giles (ed.), French Existentialism: Consciousness, Ethics and Relations with Others (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999), 191-211. 2 Olivier Todd, Albert Camus: une vie (Paris: Gallimard, 1996), 634; Albert Camus– Jean Grenier: Correspondance 1932-1960 (Paris: Gallimard, 1981), 222.
22
Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus
In this respect, however, Camus’s last unfinished work is not a return full circle, and neither does it rewrite L’Envers et l’Endroit, as he had expressed the wish to do in his 1957 preface to that work. The emphasis on that which has been imposed rather than chosen suggests that Le Premier Homme was to have marked a new departure and an unprecedented focus on those “forces obscures de l’âme” (E, 12) (“obscure forces of the soul”) about which Camus was increasingly to speak during the later years of his life. So clearly augured in the last chapter of Le Premier Homme, the abandonment of the barriers that Camus had attempted to construct throughout his artistic career goes far beyond any search for the father to reclaim all that is represented by the maternal blood-line; the irrational world of the emotions, ignorance and poverty, and above all the community they symbolize. Biology here overtakes lucidity and the domain of the intellect in expressing the visceral ties linking the individual with the land of his birth. Thus, Le Premier Homme begins the closing of a breach that can be discerned from Camus’s earliest writings, and which is partly expressed in the well-known conflict between being “solitaire” (“solitary”) and “solidaire” (“solidary”). These two impulses are apparent in his earliest work, where they reflect the writer’s ambivalence towards the men of his own community; his feelings of difference and alienation, and his wish for acceptance amongst these men. In Le Premier Homme this conflict between the individual and the collective is expressed in this way: Et lui qui avait voulu échapper au pays sans nom, à la foule et à une famille sans nom, mais en qui quelqu’un obstinément n’avait cessé de réclamer l’obscurité et l’anonymat, il faisait parti de la tribu. (PH, 180) And he who had wanted to escape from the country without a name, from the crowd and from a family without name, but in whom something had gone on craving darkness and anonymity – he too was a member of the tribe. (FM, 152)
In Le Premier Homme what unites the men of Algeria is the bond of blood – the organic and mystical relationship between them and the soil on which they are born. In the Écrits de jeunesse, on the other hand, the conflict between biology and the intellect (and the need to transcend the physical) is a significant source of ambivalence. In each work “woman” comes to represent this biological tie: in Le Premier Homme the valorised, a-sexual mother symbolizes Algeria itself, and the son’s source of belonging, whereas in the Écrits de jeunesse woman as a sexual being and the mother as the biological origin com-
Early Confrontations with Others
23
promise the god-like status of the fledgling superman – the son who would assert his own superiority and difference, giving birth to himself. Camus’s earliest writings furnish an important source of information concerning these early conflicts and their attempted resolution, and it is my intention in this chapter to investigate how such tensions between the Self and Others are revealed in some of Camus’s youthful writings, which date from 1932 when the young writer was only nineteen years old. Most of these writings remained unpublished during Camus’s lifetime and their main interest lies in the insight they give into the young man’s emotions and vulnerabilities. They are especially valuable because some of the conflicts glimpsed fleetingly here are subsequently abandoned as Camus becomes established as a writer, remaining unresolved until the final stages of his work. This is particularly the case with respect to the colonized population of Algeria, and with respect to women – for the opposition “solitaire-solidaire”, habitually used to express the tension between Self and Others is not, I suggest, generally applicable beyond the confines of what might be categorized as the man “qui lui ressemblait” (PH, 310) (“who resembled him”), and the uneasy resolution between Self and Others in the course of Camus’s writings does not extend beyond these boundaries. Indeed, as these early works show, although the young man may feel alienated from the men of his immediate community, these feelings of alienation stem from the awareness of his own intellectual superiority, while there is no mystery surrounding their existence, whose consciousness is apparently transparent. It is in relation to this group that the writer seeks a form of legitimation, and from here that the notions of fraternal solidarity and collective action are subsequently to develop; factors which are to define what it is “to be a man”. Women, on the other hand, are depicted as having an opaque consciousness which the writer consistently fails to penetrate; woman embodies a secret unknown to the writer, and her interior life is beyond his power to depict or explain. For different but related reasons, which will be investigated during the course of this book, the largely unknown colonized population is likewise perceived as having an impenetrable consciousness, and is therefore less amenable to the type of artistic control the young writer is attempting to exert. In both cases, this awareness of an unknown consciousness seems perceived as an alien and hostile presence entailing, as it does, the capacity for autonomous judgement.
24
Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus
Peopling the Universe Far from showing an initial commitment to the immediate social group, Camus’s youthful works are permeated by a constant “volonté d’évasion” (“wish for evasion”), and the search for “oubli” (“oblivion”). For the young Camus the real world is sordid, and art is valorised as a means of escape from this reality through the creation of a “monde de Rêve, assez séduisante pour nous cacher le monde où nous vivons et toutes ses horreurs” (PC, 149) (“Dream World seductive enough to hide from us the world in which we live with all its horrors”). The creation of a superior and parallel universe confers on the artist a privileged and god-like status, a role the young writer seems willingly to embrace.3 In contrast to this exalted position, other men in the external world are seen as a hostile and undifferentiated herd blindly following convention and living routine and ignorant lives. This distance between the Self and Others is most clear in the series of writings from 1932 entitled “Intuitions”, which, although marked by intense self-absorption, begin to acknowledge the external world of others. Here, the first-person speaker is faced with the choice between divinity or joining the external world of men with whom he feels allegiance if not identification. This conflict is enacted through the creation of a set of internalised others, emanations of the speaker’s own consciousness who rehearse his uncertainties and ambivalence; others external to this consciousness are depicted as a nebulous and abstract entity opposing his desires with the pressure of their expectations that he should conform. In “Intuitions” the speaker, alone in his room, is visited by a succession of others who are projections of the Self, the most significant of whom is that Nietzschean figure, “the Fool”, who voices the speaker’s ambivalence towards others – a mixture of contempt and envy. As the speaker looks out of his window at the men passing by in the street, the Fool exhorts him to abandon “cette animalité stupide” (“those stupid animals”) and to join him instead, when they will both become gods. Despite believing that the Fool is right, the speaker refuses on the grounds that he is likewise a man (PC, 184). However, 3
Although he mentions these youthful writings only briefly, Anthony Rizzuto has illuminated this theme of self-deification in Camus’s early essays in his book Camus’ Imperial Vision (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1981). His comments on this theme in Camus: Love and Sexuality (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998) are likewise of great interest. It will be seen that I am in sympathy with many of his interpretations.
Early Confrontations with Others
25
this decision is presented as a failure of courage and a continuing source of uncertainty; rather than a definitive commitment to other men the persistent question here is “Quand aurai-je le courage de ne plus être un homme?” (PC, 185) (“When will I have the courage to stop being a man?”). Other men in the external world are viewed here as a hostile and ignorant mass, yet contempt for their perceived lack of intelligence is mixed with envy for “ceux qui ne pensent pas et boivent là-bas le soleil, à longs traits” (PC, 182) (“those who do not think and drink up the sun over there, in long draughts”). This ability to live a life purely of the senses is later celebrated in some of Camus’s lyrical essays, particularly in “L’Été à Alger” with its unequivocal endorsement of a virile sensuality. Yet, as Jean Gassin has remarked, Camus’s awareness that he is different remains a factor for separation and exile.4 Likewise, in “Intuitions” the possession of intelligence isolates the speaker from the world and other men, for those without intelligence are seen as being entirely at one with their surroundings. The external world is represented in an abstract way, for the movement of “Intuitions” is not directed outwards towards entry into that world; it is rather an inverse process of re-creation where that “real” world is made imaginary, fictive, and incorporated into the consciousness of the speaker. This process of internalization simultaneously annihilates its threatening Otherness while reinforcing the divine status of its creator, for as a product of the imagination it can be dismissed at will, as is illustrated in the case of one of these characters when he abruptly disappears: “Car il n’était que ce ‘moi’ que j’avais coutûme de regarder agir sous mes yeux. Il disparut, car j’avais enfin uni le spectateur et l’acteur dans un même désir d’idéal et d’infini” (PC, 194) (“For he was only the ‘me’ I was used to watching act beneath my eyes. He disappeared, for I had at last united the spectator and the actor in the same desire for the ideal and the infinite”). Dialogue is limited to communication between Self and Selves in a movement towards a foregone conclusion, so that these “Others” reflect the same doubts and conflicts as the speaker himself, while speaker and Others alternately occupy superior and inferior positions in a shifting balance of power. Equilibrium is reached only through the swallowing up of these alternative selves in a process that reflects 4
L’Univers symbolique d’Albert Camus: essai d’interprétation psychanalytique (Paris: Minard, 1981), 46-47.
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Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus
the relationship between the speaker and the external world: initially perceived as “un tout qui s’opposait à moi” (“a whole entity opposing me”), outside reality suddenly dissolves into countless fragments seeking to reconstitute themselves (PC, 193) – like the speaker himself. Only when this perceived world disintegrates can the speaker begin to unify his own fragmented Self, but in a form of Selfuniversalization that incorporates this outside world as an extension of the Self. Art becomes here the medium through which the real can be approached yet simultaneously kept at a distance. In the role of artist the writer becomes God in a universe of his own creation, able to confront in a controlled environment the conflicts engendered by the unwilling awareness of the existence of Others. It is surely not solely a sign of egocentrism, but of vulnerability that the youthful writer only feels able to confront their existence from this exalted position. Moreover, if the young Camus betrays a conflict between the belief in his own natural superiority and the wish to be a part of the community he apparently despises, then this should be the cause for no surprise, for the contrast is extreme between this future Nobel prize-winner and the men of Camus’s immediate community, who are, generally speaking, ill-educated (often illiterate) and ignorant. Although in “Intuitions” the description of Others remains vague, the indications are that these references are to the men of the French Algerian community, in relation to whom the writer achieves for the first time the beginnings of what might be called fraternal solidarity in the short piece of work entitled “L’Hôpital du quartier pauvre” in 1933. Here Camus moves away from concentration on a single consciousness to the attempted depiction of others in a real world. Both direct and indirect speech are incorporated, giving these voices an apparent independence from their creator, and the effect is one of harmony and unity in the face of a shared threat, the bacillus of tuberculosis. This society is, however, another closed world isolated from the outside, and where the menace of tuberculosis is revealed as a less immediate threat to life than the responsibilities of a wife, children or earning a living. Indeed, for one of these men his failure to fulfill precisely these responsibilities had driven him to attempt suicide: Au début de sa maladie cet homme s’était trouvé empêché de travailler, affaibli, sans ressources et désespéré devant la misère qui s’était installée entre sa femme
Early Confrontations with Others
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et ses enfants. Il n’avait pas songé à la mort, mais un jour il s’était jeté devant les roues d’une auto qui passait. (PC, 242) Early in his illness, the man had found himself prevented from working, weakened, with no resources, and in despair over the poverty that had settled on his wife and children. He had not been thinking of death, but one day he threw himself beneath the wheels of a passing automobile. (YW, 169)
Likewise, the death of another former inmate is linked not with his illness, but with his wife: “(Jean Perès) avait qu’un poumon malade. Mais il a voulu rentrer chez lui. Et là il avait sa femme. Et sa femme, c’est un cheval. Lui, la maladie l’avait rendu comme ça. Il était toujours sur sa femme. (…) Ça finit par tuer un homme malade.” (PC, 242) (Jean Perès) had only one bad lung. But he wanted to go home. And there he had a wife. And his wife, a horse of a woman! As for him, the sickness had made him like that. He was always after her. (…) It ends up killing a sick man. (YW, 169)
This extract was later reproduced in Camus’s abandoned novel, La Mort heureuse, of which Jean Gassin remarks that the wife, symbolically linked with blood and death, is rendered responsible for her husband’s death.5 The degree to which these men are removed from the domestic world of women and work seems a significant factor for harmony between them; despite the overwhelming reality of death, they are also separated from wider society. “L’Hôpital du quartier pauvre” creates a world set apart, characterized by a unified viewpoint where men are interchangeable and women set aside – a utopian dimension that prefigures Camus’s later novel, La Peste, where in the “hospital” of Oran a society of men isolated from the outside world likewise faces the threat of death and, despite their differences, manage to work harmoniously together. As in Le Premier Homme, solidarity is based on the perception of sameness, the attachment to “celui qui lui ressemblait le plus” (PH, 193) (“he who resembled him the most”) and “ceux qui lui ressemblaient” (PH, 310) (“those who resembled him”) – the men of his own culture. This early piece of writing begins to establish the collective identity that can be traced through Camus’s subsequent works, culminating in the “je me révolte, donc nous sommes” (“I revolt, therefore we are”) of L’Homme révolté, and finally ressuscitated in Le Premier Homme. Yet, this fragile accomodation with others rests on the per5
L’Univers symbolique, 178. It was commonly believed at the time that tuberculosis led to a heightened libido.
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ception of sameness, a process in which “we” are absorbed by “I”. Although formally distinct, these voices are in practice indistinguishable, seeming like repetitions of the same voice, and this characteristic facilitates their harmonious unification into one viewpoint representative of the human condition. In “La Mort dans l’âme” Camus was to write of his experience of alienation in Prague, and his joyful return to the South: “Ici, j’étais devant le monde, et projeté autour de moi, je peuplais l’univers de formes semblables à moi” (E, 38) (“Here, I was face to face with the world, and, freed from myself, peopled the universe with forms in my own likeness”). This is the activity in which the young Camus is engaged in “Intuitions” and “L’Hôpital du quartier pauvre”. But this “universalizing” project founders when the young writer attempts a similar transformation with respect to those unlike himself. Despite repeated claims to the contrary, these others present an opaque consciousness that resists penetration and absorption, thus undermining authorial control.
The Exotic The proliferation of the Self across the world is not such a smooth process when Camus tries to write about a house of Moorish design in Algiers, for here he goes further into the external world, indirectly to confront the existence of the colonized population of Algeria. Once more, this reality is not the subject of the work, whose central concern is rather the role of the artist himself in transfiguring and stylizing this world. In “L’Art dans la communion” Camus turns to Moorish architecture for an example of the way the architect models a building on its “interior idea”, asserting that the construction of such a house faithfully reflects “une volonté d’évasion (qui) répond justement à l’âme orientale” (PC, 247-48) (“a wish for evasion that responds precisely to the Oriental soul”). This idea is developed in “La Maison mauresque” where, for the first time, the young writer confronts an actual object existing in the external world, and the civilization he perceives as lying behind it. This anthropomorphized house reflects less the “interior idea” of the building than an exterior idea of Arab aspirations and consciousness which replicate the speaker’s own, and in which the theme of evasion from reality is projected onto the “Oriental soul”. Through this selection of Moorish architecture as an illustration of the artist’s perceived role, Camus has chosen the most clear example of Otherness in his daily life. It is not difference he seeks to illustrate, however, but the
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extent to which this external object is an extension of his own creative imagination. Unsurprisingly, then, there are no others here besides the firstperson speaker himself, for the house becomes a metaphor for the Self, and the speaker’s tour around this building is a journey of selfdiscovery. In many ways the colonial context facilitates such a solipsistic enterprise. Commenting on the Colonial Exhibition held in Paris in 1931, Christopher Miller notes attempts to create an illusion of authenticity through the emphasis on the “faithful reproduction” of reality: As Michel Leiris pointed out, it is therefore ironic that the “reproduction” of the Djenné temple was modelled on a building that the French in Africa had already rebuilt according to their own idea of “Sudanese” architectural style: reproductions of otherness always seem to reflect back on the self.6
Built to mark the Centenary of the French conquest of Algeria, the actual house, situated in the Jardin d’essai in Algiers, was itself a reproduction and conforms to this description; its architect, Léon Claro,7 was of European descent and belonged to the Regionalist school of architecture. One might speculate as to what this building symbolized for the European population of Algeria, celebrating in 1931 a century of conquest and possession. Certainly, however “faithful” a reproduction, it may be deemed the concrete projection of a collective idea concerning the meaning of that conquest, and what such possession entails. Ironically, as a building it also represents that aspect of Algerian life that lay beyond the scope of the imperial imagination – the life of the home, an interior reality rather than an external idea. Although “La Maison mauresque” is the first of these previously unpublished writings where an addressee can be discerned, the possibility of an audience amongst the colonized population is excluded by the very manner in which the writer refers to the emotions engendered by a first tour around what he calls “these” Arab houses (PC, 211). This implies that he is speaking to those familiar with the exterior rather than the interiors of such buildings. The familiarity often claimed by this group was in fact nothing more than an illusion, of no greater “authenticity” than the house itself. Indeed, José Lenzini 6
“Hallucinations of France and Africa in the Colonial Exhibition of 1931 and Ousmane Socé’s Mirages de Paris”, Paragraph: A Journal of Modern Critical Theory, 18 (1) (March, 1995), 39-63 (50). 7 Albert Camus: une vie, 57.
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points out that there was very little actual contact between the European population and the colonized one in Algiers. Few Arabs lived in Belcourt, and even fewer Arab children went to school. Lenzini reports that in 1930 Camus discovered the Casbah in the company of Jean de Maisonseul, a young student of architecture. Although he probably learned something of Arabic architecture, these forays seem to have been of a largely “touristic” nature, as the recollections of Camus’s friend Blanche Balain appear to confirm. Camus may have made the perennial remark of the enthusiastic tourist: “ils sont plus civilisés que nous” (“they are more civilized than us”), but he had no intimate knowledge of such a civilization.8 The ambiguous position of the European settler in French Algeria suggests a further symbolism associated with the Moorish house, for the building provides only the illusion of familiarity and authentic knowledge. Excluded in fact from this interior life, excluded most particularly from the women at its heart, how can the conquerors of the Centenary assert legitimate ownership when they are themselves refused full possession of that which they claim above all else to know and understand? In Le Premier Homme Camus for the first time refers to the covert fascination with this colonized population who withdrew into “leurs maisons inconnues où l’on ne pénétrait jamais, barricadées aussi avec leurs femmes qu’on ne voyait jamais (…) avec leur voile à mi-visage et leurs beaux yeux sensuels et doux” (PH, 257) (“their unknown houses where one never entered, barricaded also with their women one never saw (…) with faces half-veiled and their beautiful eyes, sensual and soft”). Thus, the vulnerability of the French in Algeria is revealed, the masters of all they survey and of nothing they cannot see. Camus’s text is marked by a similar profound ambivalence where triumphant claims of intimate knowledge are constantly undermined by the suspicion of impotence in the face of an impenetrable Otherness. The move in “La Maison mauresque”, as in “Intuitions”, is to incorporate the house into the speaker’s own emotional architecture, rendering it no longer a feature of an outside world and the symbol of a different civilization. Exoticism, one means of “domesticating” the unfamiliar and turning it into a product for consumption, permeates Camus’s text and is perhaps indissociable from the touristic enterprise in which the speaker is engaged. That constant theme of Orientalism, 8
José Lenzini, L’Algérie de Camus (Aix-en-Provence: Édisud, 1987), 31, 60, 68.
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the despot in his harem, is profiled in the speaker’s words about the house, which owes its very existence to him; like Scheherazade herself, it had promised new diversions and is threatened with destruction if such promises of pleasure are disappointed: À cette heure où je n’espère plus, j’ai cédé à l’orgueil vain de construire (la maison), quand même espérant dans la séduction de ce nouveau rêve. Je lui avais dit: “Orgueilleuse, vaniteuse, jalouse du monde que tu renfermes, donne-moi de m’oublier”. Mais pour ne vouloir plus oublier, je la hais maintenant. Elle s’écroulera: je la soutenais de ma foi et de mes espérances, disparues. (PC, 207) At this hour when I no longer have any hope, I have yielded to the vain pride of building (the house), trusting all the same in the seductiveness of this new dream. I had said to it: “Arrogant, conceited, jealous of the world you enclose, let me forget myself”. But from no longer wishing to forget, I hate it now. It will crumble: I was sustaining it on my faith and expectations, now vanished. (YW, 144)
Like the all-powerful despot seeking distraction he is also at liberty to destroy what no longer has the power to seduce. This avowed loss of interest, combined with the punitive vengeance about to be exacted, raises the suspicion that it is the choice of architecture itself and the intransigent unknowability of the civilization it represents which remain intractably beyond the scope of the narcissistic imagination. While claiming knowledge, this consciousness constantly evades confrontation with the reality of this world, retreating into a dream of ownership of that which it cannot know except externally. “Je me suis avancé sur une terrasse d’où on surprenait toute la ville arabe et la mer” (PC, 208) (“I advanced onto the terrace from which the whole Arab town took one by surprise”); but the narrative immediately withdraws from the possibility of a peopled Arab town through the invocation not of its inhabitants but of its buildings, and their discordant presence before the sea and sky. Violence, hostility and rebellion are the adjectives associated with this anthropomorphized crowd of houses, but this hostility is translated into a form of metaphysical discord, a quality of the town itself in the face of the natural world rather than a reaction against the speaker and his imperious curiosity. Such is the insistence of the suspicion, however, that the speaker himself is the alien presence in this environment that the reader is exhorted to forget the town for a contemplation of the sea beyond: “Mais il faut oublier la ville et, très loin, regarder la mer, plate, sereine” (PC, 208) (“But one must forget the city and watch the sea, very far away, flat, serene”). The repetition of “il faut la regarder” underlines the ur-
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gency of this need to evade the conflict associated with the houses for a contemplation of nature; but the claim remains unconvincing that the city’s attempts to disturb the fleeting harmony are in vain (PC, 208). This theme of conflict builds in the following passages, to be embodied in a storm from which the speaker shelters in the park beyond the house, and a further evasion from this hostile environment is effected as he thinks about the Arab shops of the Casbah: À cette heure je revois dans les boutiques dorées les bleus et les roses, puis, enfantins, les magiques tissus d’argent et de soie, qui rient sans raison, affinés de lumière. Et l’invariable polychromie des jaunes insolents, des roses insoucieux d’harmonie, des bleus oublieux du bon goût, revit intense en moi comme un appel confus, harem des étoffes, femmes aux idées sans suite et sans confort. Des robes de fête pendent sur des mannequins plats au sourire niais et entendu. (PC, 210) At this hour I see blues and pinks again in the golden shops, then, like children, the magic fabrics of silver and silk made more delicate by the light, laughing without reason. And the invariable polychromy of the insolent yellows, the pinks heedless of harmony, the blues forgetful of good taste, comes to life for me again intensely like a confused call, a harem made of fabrics, women with incoherent, comfortless ideas. Festive dresses hanging on flat mannequins with knowing, silly smiles. (YW, 146)
Here the sexuality obliquely conjured up through earlier references to seduction and power is made more explicit by the mention of the harem itself. This fantasy of the harem (meaning “forbidden”) underlies Camus’s text and is reinforced by the important role of sight in this work. The tour of the house, itself a form of sight-seeing, is an enforced revelation of the secretive and evasive “Oriental soul” about which Camus writes. As Olivier Richon has noted, the look in such a context constitutes a symbolic re-enactment of conquest that invests power in the one who looks: The harem is a place which excludes any foreign look. Western representations of the harem are then the wish to uncover what is hidden. (…) The harem is the exclusive domain of one being, the Despot. The order of the harem is organized around the limitless pleasure of the Master, above all his sexual pleasure which starts with his scopic privilege. Only the Prince has the privilege of seeing women.9
9
“Representation, the Despot and the Harem: Some Questions around an Academic Orientalist Painting by Lecomte-du-Nouÿ (1885)”, in Europe and Its Others, vol.1, Proceedings of the Essex Conference on the Sociology of Literature, July, 1984, Francis Barker, Peter Hulme and Margaret Iverson (eds) (Colchester: University of Essex, 1985), 1-13 (9).
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Neither may the tourist, despite his claims to mastery and knowledge, be anything other than an inauthentic copy of the master, at least as far as the always unseen harem is concerned. Perhaps this recognition translates what is desired yet forbidden into a denigrated object, available for a price and therefore not worth having. Just as the town is emptied of its inhabitants, so the women of the harem, forbidden to the foreign gaze, exist through fetishistic metonymical associations between them and the goods on sale in the shops. The tasteless, inharmonious and discordant colours represent women with “incoherent” and “comfortless” minds, but whose “knowing” smiles suggest an experienced quality; one which will bring no comfort, a promise which promises no satisfactory outcome for the one who spies on them. It is worth mentioning here that the tropes of metaphor and metonymy conform to the analysis of colonial discourse made by Homi K. Bhabha, for here the Arab house is a metaphor for the Self, while the use of metonymy has the aggressive dimension he identifies.10 Whereas in other writings it is precisely the sordidness of the everyday that so offends the young writer, in this setting the sordid acquires an exotic and seductive dimension in a context where the theme of sight is explicitly raised for the first time, with overtones of voyeurism. On leaving the “noxious” melancholy of the garden: (Je) songe que j’avais surpris ce sabbat des couleurs d’une rue noire et rude, d’une rue que j’aimais parce qu’elle refusait de me porter et ne se laissait piétiner qu’en rechignant. Alors, je m’arrêtais dans le soir, je ne savais où poser mes yeux, éblouis par cette joie de la couleur, cette trépidation des tons, le regard heurté, bousculé, choqué et ravi. (PC, 210-11) I imagined such a tumult of colour taking me by surprise on a rough street, a street I liked because it refused to carry me and only grudgingly permitted itself to be walked upon. Then I stopped in the evening, not knowing where to rest my eyes, dazzled by the gaiety of the colour, the vibration of the tones, jarring, jostling, offending and enchanting my eyes. (YW, 146-47)
Although the speaker is assailed just as the sea had been by the houses (“jarred”, “jostled” by the violence of discordant colours), the sexual overtones in this passage are clear, and the speaker’s emotions seem of a different nature; simultaneously shocked and delighted, he is like a sexual voyeur who has seen more than he had expected (or hoped) to see. Jean Gassin long ago pointed to sexual voyeurism as a characteristic of the Camusian hero,11 and “La Maison mauresque” presents 10 11
“The Other Question”, Screen 24 (6) 1983, 18-36 (29). L’Univers symbolique, 179.
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very early evidence of this trait, which functions as a form of control from a distance through the possession of secret knowledge of the Other. I have suggested that this imaginary landscape devoid of humanity is haunted by an Arab population that the speaker and those addressed in “La Maison mauresque” seek to penetrate and know. Further, at the heart of this world the fantasy of the harem is embedded, and the ambiguous image of the Arab woman who is simultaneously available yet forbidden. This sexual dimension pervades the speaker’s itinerary through the house, with the sexual connotations of the subtitles “L’Entrée” (“The entrance”), “Le Couloir” (“The corridor”), and the house itself. In 1957 Camus cites the remark that Arab architecture is “l’art d’un peuple efféminé” (“the art of an effeminate people”) (C3, 202), a commonplace idea in 1930s Algeria, and an important component of the Orientalist discourse around which this work is constructed; the “feminine” becomes a quality of the entire Arab world, in conjunction with the theme of sexual conquest. But this fetishistic allusion to the “hidden” woman of the harem, and the associated disruption of the voyeuristic gaze, is not the only reference in this work to a woman. Whereas the first is created through the device of metonymy, the second mention of a woman is, by contrast, abruptly direct, in the form of an epigraph – the reference to another work by another writer, seeming suddenly to intrude into the text from a mysterious elsewhere. This epigraph is a line from Ibsen’s The Ghosts, where the dying son, Osvald, asks his mother, “Mère, donne-moi le soleil” (PC, 215) (“Mother, give me the sun”). Thus, two contrasting types of woman are opposed in this text: the sexualized woman of race who is “woven” into and hidden in the text; and the Nordic white mother, on its surface and out of context. In an atmosphere of clear ambivalence where claims to power are subverted by feelings of vulnerability and the awareness of hostility, it is as if this sudden allusion to another mother and another son is an evasion back to a certain and fixed point. Homi Bhabha refers to the “myth of historical origination – racial purity, cultural priority” produced as a consequence of the ambivalence surrounding the colonial stereotype. Such desire for a stable and identifiable origin (signified here by the return to the mother) is threatened, he suggests, by differences of race and culture.12 In this case it seems that the epigraph per12
“The Other Question”, 26.
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forms a similar function in the face of the Otherness of a resistant population, for the turn to the mother at this stage seems to authenticate subsequent claims to possession of the Algerian soil. In this early work, where mention of the mother is made for the first time, we glimpse, I suggest, the beginning of a development that is to signify “racial purity, cultural priority”. I shall develop this point further in the course of this book, because this particular triangulation where the white, male speaker serves as the axis point between an occluded “woman of race” (denigrated yet dangerously fascinating) and the pure, “white” woman (who offers the sun, life, health and strength) is to recur in L’Étranger. Here, I want only to say that connotations of purity are far from unambiguous in this instance, for Ibsen’s play concerns the question of inherited degeneration as the result of a sexually dissolute life and the transmission of syphilis from one generation to the next. There, through biology the sins of the father are visited on the son, via the mother’s body. The conflicting symbolism of the epigraph indicates, I suggest, the dual function of the mother figure as, on the one hand, a source of ambivalence with regard to her physical, human and racial status; and, on the other hand, as a pure maternal symbol of the “new race” of European men. Here, as in Le Premier Homme, only as a result of her intercession can the speaker stand before an Algerian sky that he claims as his own (PC, 217). I wish only at this point to underline the intimate conflict between identity and biology, for whatever his aspirations to the status of a god, man is always born of woman, an inheritance not of his own choosing, and via that most “animal” of all forms of congress.
Woman as a Sexual Partner The most cursory reading of Camus’s personal notebooks reveals the extent to which heterosexuality is regarded as a contaminant, a factor widely noted by scholars.13 But, as the reference to the wife of Jean 13
See, for example, Raymond Gay-Crosier, “Camus et le donjuanisme”, French Review, XLI (6) (May, 1968), 818-30; Jean Gassin, “Le sadisme dans l’œuvre de Camus”, Albert Camus 6 (Paris: Minard, 1973), 121-44. Hereafter, this series will be abbreviated as AC, followed by the relevant volume number. See also Alan J. Clayton, “Camus ou l’impossibilité d’aimer”, AC7 (1975), 9-34; Édouard Morot-Sir, “L’esthétique d’Albert Camus: logique de la limite, mesure de la mystique”, in Albert Camus: Œuvre fermée, œuvre ouverte?, Cahiers Albert Camus 5, Raymond GayCrosier and Jacqueline Lévi-Valensi (eds) (Paris: Gallimard, 1985) 93-113; Anthony Rizzuto, Camus: Love and Sexuality.
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Perès in “L’Hôpital du quartier pauvre”, or the later celebration of masculinity in Noces make clear, the male body is not the site of such ambivalence. Latent sexual insecurities discernible in “La Maison mauresque” are likewise present in the fairy story “Le Livre de Mélusine”, which Camus gave to his first wife, Simone, in December, 1934. The couple had been married for six months, and the work is marked by a personal, playful and highly intimate tone that reflects its autobiographical nature. Indeed, when Camus first met Simone she had been nicknamed “Nadja” after André Breton’s heroine, who, in her madness, had believed herself a modern reincarnation of the legendary Mélusine.14 The story of Mélusine can be traced back at least to the twelfth century, and there are a number of variations on this myth. Mélusine was born of a fairy mother and a human father, but she had been cursed by her mother, so that every Saturday she became half-woman, half serpent. Only through marriage to a human might she escape this eternal punishment, become mortal, and die naturally. But the lifting of this curse depends on her husband’s never discovering her secret. If he does so, then Mélusine will reassume the body of a serpent for all time and he will never see her again. In a forest glade by a fountain Raimondin meets three beautiful women, one of whom is Mélusine, and she promises to bring him wealth and power if he marries her, but on condition that he will take an oath never to try and see her on a Saturday. The couple marry, have many sons, and are happy until, through jealousy, Raimondin breaks his oath and spies on his wife as she is bathing in her hybrid form. Mélusine is instantly transformed into a serpent and leaves Raimondin’s house, never to return. The forest glade and fountain provide the setting for Camus’s story and, as in the original, the male character (there, Raimondin, here a child) is finally left alone after the fairy’s transformation or “death”. The reference to this particular myth as the title for Camus’s fairy story seems an unfortunate one, and it is tempting to speculate about what latent problems in this ill-fated early marriage are revealed in this text. Whereas in “La Maison mauresque” the material for artistic elaboration had been an inanimate object, in this case the choice of subject matter is based on a living woman and sexual partner. Yet, although it might be said that the young writer is moving gradually into a real world of Others, this is here achieved through her abstrac14
Herbert Lottman, Albert Camus: a biography (London: Axis, 1997), 63.
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tion from that reality to place her in a fairy-tale world entirely of the narrator’s imagination. Like the Arab house, Mélusine is the means of arriving at a “communion” in which she does not participate because, despite the apparent indication of the title, the subject of the fairy story is not Mélusine but the narrator himself, his inventive powers and his aspirations. Like a child with a doll’s house the narrator is God in his own small universe. Here for the first time, and as distinct from the implied reader of “La Maison mauresque”, the reader is drawn into the text in a complicit “we” which creates a division between “us” and others who belong to the mundane “insolence” of the everyday world (PC, 257). But (in a clear parallel with the Interlocutor of La Chute) this complicity is a necessary component of the power of the speaker, which demands the presence of a compliant and unspeaking “you” to whom he may address himself. It is a demonstration of his power that he is able to predict and forestall the reactions and possible objections of the listener, whose child-like gullibility is assumed as she is warned against giving credence to what others may say about fairy stories (PC, 257). Here, the theme of evasion from the “real” world continues and, although the speaker insists that the fairy must have a human dimension, for “que nous ferait une fée qui n’aurait rien d’humain?” (“what good would a fairy be if there were nothing human about her?”) he makes no attempt to provide her with any more “human” functions (PC, 259). Her most important activity will be to await the intervention of those destined never to arrive; Mélusine is no more than the object of a quest, a function confirmed by the initial refusal to grant her the individuality of a name: “la recherche des noms ou des titres suppose de grandes qualités inventives. Que je n’ai pas. Donc, et pour plus de simplicité, j’appellerai cette fée: Elle” (PC, 257-58) (“the search for names or titles supposes great inventive qualities. Which I don’t have. Therefore, and for greater simplicity, I’ll call this fairy: She”). The signifier “Elle” appears only the empty incarnation of the desires and fantasies of others who seek precisely this absence. The quest is undertaken by two other characters introduced into the story – a cat and a knight, who seem to symbolize a conflict between sexual desire and a higher goal which can perhaps be identified as more truly masculine. I use this term because such are the implications of the description of the knight, redolent of a phallic power directed towards a higher destiny. The phallic imagery is easily discernible in the text:
38
Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus Mais déjà, sous ma plume, le chevalier s’avance, armé avec sa gloire. (…) Il est droit sur sa selle et l’obliquité de sa lance accuse sa propre rigidité. (PC, 259) But already, beneath my pen, the knight is advancing, armed with his glory. (…) He is upright in his saddle, and the slant of his lance emphasizes his own rigidity. (YW, 183)
The first words lend an inexorable inevitability to his march and its purposeful masculinity. The previous line had suggested there was an element of choice about which character should intervene in order to rescue the fairy from her inherent narcissism; the choice makes itself, however – but only with the help of “ma plume”, whose phallic lines merge with those of knight and lance, thus producing an identification between writer and knight as one symbol of male authority is reflected and intensified by the other. But the knight is ultimately to choose a “grand highway” leading off to the sky, instead of the “little pathway” leading towards Mélusine. There, “il peut continuer sa route sans baisser sa lance, comme il l’aurait fait dans la petite allée pour éviter les basses branches” (PC, 263) (“he can continue his route without lowering his lance, as he would have done in the little pathway to avoid the low branches”). This choice between an essentially masculine duty and the emasculating temptations of the sexually seductive female which threaten to weaken or immobilize masculine power permeates Camus’s writings, so that it is no surprise to find it in the first piece of writing whose subject is an attractive woman. Thus sexual desire is retained and transformed to the greater glory of the knight and his destiny – from whom the speaker is careful to protest his difference. Yet, in the case of the cat with whom the narrator later compares himself, this same desire is likewise contained, but towards the goal of its own pleasure, magnified and kept alive through abstention: Il est heureux car il attend le bonheur. Je l’aime d’être heureux sans le savoir. Toujours je le voudrai ainsi. Et puisque je le veux, à chacun de ses pas, les lointains feuillages reculent d’autant. Et sans qu’il le sache jamais, éternellement notre chat vivra dans l’attente et dans la crainte. Il n’atteindra jamais la fée; car comment l’atteindrait-il mieux qu’en espérant? (PC, 263-64) He is happy, for he is expecting happiness. I like him to be happy without knowing it. I should like him always thus. And since I wish it, with each step he takes, the distant foliage falls back in the same proportion. And without ever knowing it, our cat will live eternally in expectation and in fear. He will never reach the fairy; for how could he achieve her better than in anticipation? (YW, 186)
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Necessarily, then, the narrator and the fairy do not have the same desires, because his pleasure lies in the power he holds over his creations; his satisfaction rests in the frustration and control of hers, a feature evident elsewhere in the text. By herself, Mélusine creates “des contes d’homme” (PC, 258) (“man stories”), and he comments that she would no doubt wish one of them to come along. However, this is precisely what he refuses her. His control over her is an integral part of his pleasure, at the expense of any mutuality. But the very presence in this text of another voice, albeit a silent one, may be destabilizing – a problem that likewise surrounds the monologue of La Chute. The fact that a listener is incorporated into the fairy story offers the possibility of dialogue. Even though the narrative constantly closes off such possibilities, this attempt to monopolize control entails the simultaneous recognition of the Other’s possible autonomy, and that she might not share his interest. The very fact that the fairy and the narrator are posited as children in a fairy-tale land suggests the impossibility of sexual consummation. Although this may be seen as the result of the narrator’s will, it is possible that the reverse might be the case; a feared impossibility of sexual consummation may have resulted in this compensatory world of childhood, and the accompanying transference of pleasure into punitive abstention. This underlying fear of impotence is reflected in the portrayal of the knight, for whom attempted entry into the “petite allée” may not only represent fear of the loss of phallic power, but also fear of its revelation as power-less. Likewise, the cat is frozen into seeking, without ever having to act upon his desires. It is not surprising that no external intervention takes place, for although the fairy’s narcissism is an intrinsic part of her attraction it is a major obstacle to the possibility of her desiring anyone except herself. In spite of the narrator’s earlier insistence that some form of external intervention is necessary to prevent her self-preoccupation (PC, 259), it is not at all clear that she needs to be rescued. Her narcissism contains the threat that she simply would not be interested, a suspicion underlined by the eventual choice of her name and its phallic overtones. Half woman, half serpent, Mélusine is perhaps sufficient unto herself. Moreover, in a further echo of Ibsen’s Ghosts, the hybrid body of the legendary Mélusine bred only deformed children. Thus, the apparent self-confidence of the text reveals underlying insecurities that threaten to undermine authorial control. The only intervention certain to have any effect on Mélusine is death itself, which subsequently al-
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lows a concentration on the narrator, who supersedes the fairy in the final section of the work. Through her death the narrator, as a child, achieves the form of communion spoken of in “L’Art dans la communion”, confirming Mélusine’s status as being (like art itself) a vehicle for arriving at the divine. “Le Livre de Mélusine” is the only example in Camus’s work where a woman seems to be specifically addressed as listener, and the resulting “we” is founded on an insecurity. I commented earlier on the monologic quality of the Écrits de jeunesse; dialogue entails the participation of at least one other voice whose autonomy and therefore unpredictability are a necessary ingredient of that Otherness. But these very qualities seem to threaten the author’s fictional universe to an unusual extent. I have already noted tropes of fragmentation in “Intuitions”, where the unity of the Self appears to depend on the disintegration of the outside world, and vice versa. A related phenomenon occurs in La Mort heureuse when the protagonist, Patrice Mersault, is tempted to confide in his friend Bernard, until their conversation alerts him to the fact that they are not of like mind. At this discovery, “Il lui semblait insupportable qu’une partie de lui jugeât l’autre” (MH, 184) (“It seemed unbearable to him that one part of himself might judge the other”). In 1964 Brian Fitch suggested that Meursault’s unease with regard to Others in L’Étranger stems from his inability to conceive of another consciousness which is not his own: Meursault can only accommodate this awareness of others by assimilating them into his own consciousness – as in the case of the young journalist who is staring at him in the courtroom, an incident he can only interpret as equivalent to being looked at by himself. Although Camus’s earlier writings were not then available to Fitch, they certainly confirm his general observations about Camus’s “egocentric and solitary universe”.15 However, although this general problem with respect to other men is to remain in Camus’s writings, and has often since been remarked upon, it finds a partial resolution in the procedure adopted by Meursault with respect to the young journalist; other men seem to become projections of the Self, and for this reason Camus is able to incorporate others in a universalizing vision in his later works. But the problem of the Other is resolved here only with respect to the male settler community; the
15
Le Sentiment d’étrangeté chez Malraux, Sartre, Camus et Simone de Beauvoir (Paris: Minard, 1964), 212, 217.
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treatment of women is quite distinct from this, for they cannot be assimilated in the same way.
Women in the Real World I have examined Camus’s early attitudes towards others in general and suggested that issues of sexuality and race reveal a vulnerability that undermines the artist’s control over his fictional universe. Difference is revealed as a significant obstacle to the project of peopling the world in the writer’s own image. I now propose to consider the earliest attempts to depict women as individuals in a “real” world, and here I shall focus (as does the writer himself) on the mother figure, whose treatment serves as an important template for the depiction of Others. Some of these early portraits of the mother are disturbing, and raise more questions about their author than about the original model herself. For example, the words “elle n’existe plus, puisqu’elle n’est plus là” (PC, 282) (“she no longer exists, since she is no longer there”) tell us nothing about her, but a great deal about the consciousness which cannot conceive that others continue to exist independently when beyond the scope of his own surveillance. Again, the writer expresses his surprise at her ability to act independently in the world, and “il éprouvait combien les autres la sentaient vivre et il s’étonnait que lui la sentît si peu vivante, presque comédienne” (E, 1216) (“he sensed how much others could feel her to be alive, and he himself was surprised that to him she seemed almost like an actress, devoid of inner life”). Thus is this figure deprived of a humanity capable of authentic feeling or suffering. Just as the grandmother is depicted as an actress in “Le Courage” (PC, 219-21) before and after her death, so here this woman only appears to be alive. One simulates death and the other simulates life, each embodying these alien qualities. Such comments, which suggest that the original model of the actor in Camus’s writings is female, are nevertheless disquieting, as is the allegation that she is “incapable de la moindre pensée” (E, 1215) (“incapable of the slightest thought”), an observation that can only apply to the dead. Women most frequently embody a dead consciousness, whether literally, as in the fragment from 1933, “Devant la Morte”, or figuratively, as in the series of portraits Camus attempts in “Les Voix du quartier pauvre”, dated 1934. Basing himself on plans for these writings, Roger Quilliot remarks that Camus probably intended in 1935 to organise his essay around the theme of the mother (E, 1176), an observation confirmed by Jacqueline Lévi-Valensi, who notes the theme
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of confession to the mother in a series of unpublished elaborations on “Les Voix du quartier pauvre”.16 She argues that Camus had planned to write a novel using these early writings, centred around the theme of mother and son. Camus himself refers to a projected novel, “le quartier pauvre”, which he hopes to finish by June, 1935, in a letter to his friend Claude de Fréminville.17 It seems that after the failure of this project the majority of the writings in “Les Voix du quartier pauvre” were rearranged, modified, and incorporated into L’Envers et l’Endroit, Camus’s first collection of published essays in 1937. Such modifications, during which authorial control is reasserted by the elimination of undermining elements and the reinforcement of this character’s “strangeness”, offer an insight into the metamorphosis of this female character. For this reason I propose to consider the Écrits de jeunesse in conjunction with the appropriate sections from L’Envers et l’Endroit.18 “Les Voix du quartier pauvre” begins simultaneously with a portrait of the mother and a judgement on her; this is “la voix de la femme qui ne pensait pas” (PC, 271) (“the woman who did not think”). Hence, the first line asserts the impossibility of such a voice while insisting on its existence, a paradox that remains unresolved because her voice is immediately effaced by that of the narrator speaking not her thoughts but his own. The line has a subversive effect, nevertheless, for we read in anticipation of a voice which is never to materialise, while drawing attention to the narcissism of the narrator and his inability to achieve what he had promised. In his first sustained attempt at realism and the depiction of others in the world, then, Camus begins with a female voice that subverts the intention announced by the title. Consequently, it comes as no surprise that in “Entre Oui et Non” this line is suppressed in favour of an unambiguous focus on the narrator himself (E, 23). Nevertheless, the central characteristic of this woman is that she does not think: En certaines circonstances, on posait une question à celle-ci: “À quoi tu penses?” “À rien”, répondait-elle. Et c’est bien vrai. (PC, 273: E, 25) 16
Albert Camus, ou la naissance d’un romancier (1930-42), Agnès Spiquel (ed.) (Paris: Gallimard, 2006). See also her “La relation au réel dans le roman camusien”, in Œuvre fermée, œuvre ouverte?, 153-86. This theme returns, of course, in Le Premier Homme. 17 Albert Camus: une vie, 71. 18 Where two page references are given these refer to “Les Voix du quartier pauvre” and “L’Envers et l’Endroit” respectively.
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Sometimes, she would be asked a question: “What are you thinking about?” “Nothing,” she would answer. And it was very true. (YW, 193)
Here, an otherwise mundane and innocent response is laden with an unaccustomed, literal significance. The potential multiplicity of meanings inherent in this reply (one of which implies the rejection of the questioner as confidant) is here reduced to its least likely explanation and raises the suspicion that for the narrator she should not think. Otherwise, how can her perceived inaccessibility be explained? In Le Mythe de Sisyphe Camus acknowledges the multiple meanings contained in such an answer, but maintains that only when it is sincere may it be taken as the first sign of the “absurd” (E, 106). A further addition in L’Envers et l’Endroit sheds a different light on the silent mother as the son’s visit to her is recounted. In a passage of direct speech she makes five out of seven attempts at conversation, mundane as they are. His two contributions are firstly an invitation that she should talk about him and his likeness to his father; and secondly, that she continue to talk about him by commenting on his silence: “Tu t’ennuies? Je ne parle pas beaucoup?” “Oh, tu n’as jamais beaucoup parlé.” Et un beau sourire sans lèvres se fond sur son visage. C’est vrai, il ne lui a jamais parlé. Mais quel besoin, en vérité? À se taire, la situation s’éclaircit. Il est son fils, elle est sa mère. (E, 29) “Are you bored? Don’t I talk much?” “Oh, you’ve never talked much.” And, though her lips do not move, her face lights up in a beautiful smile. It’s true, he has never talked very much to her. But did he ever really need to? When you keep quiet, the situation becomes clear. He is her son, she is his mother. (SEN, 44)
This conversation challenges the impression of her as the silent one, yet such is the force of this impression that Herbert Lottman misattributes her words to the son himself.19 Rather than a silent mother, in this interaction we are presented with a silent son, seen fleetingly through her eyes. The irredeemable desolation described in both texts as she sits alone in the half-light (PC, 274: E, 25) would seem to apply more to the son’s feelings about her inaccessibility rather than her condition itself – as a line suppressed from the final version appears to confirm: 19
“When she asks him whether it bores him that she speaks so little, he replies: ‘Oh, you never talked much’” (Albert Camus: A Biography), 29.
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“Pourtant, un des enfants souffre de ces attitudes où, sans doute, sa mère retrouve son seul bonheur” (PC, 274) (“Yet one of the children suffers over these attitudes in which his mother doubtless finds her only happiness”). In a crowded household where communication seems to consist of shouting and swearing (PC, 274: E, 26) one might speculate that such moments of solitude are with good reason her only happiness, but the later text allows of no such possibility. Again, although the earlier version states that no-one is present, it is clear that these moments are known to both the son and the narrator. Although this inconsistency is subsequently eliminated, it reveals the author’s difficulty in placing himself beyond the centre of the text; even her moments of solitude must be known, defined and controlled. But the very impossibility of such a knowledge, of imagining this character from the inside and giving expression to her unknown thoughts, is expressed in the first text by the poignant appeal: “Mais aussi à quoi pense-t-elle, à quoi pense-t-elle donc? À rien” (PC, 274) (“But also what is she thinking of, what is she thinking of just now? Nothing.”). This vulnerable admission of ignorance is replaced in the later text by the claim to absolute knowledge in the statement which is to fix her forever: “Elle ne pense à rien” (E, 26) (“She thinks of nothing”). In each text the inability to depict or decipher her interior life is effaced by a diversion onto the child himself; her consciousness is absorbed by his and the focus is on his emotions rather than hers. The child is an invader who intrudes upon and appropriates her moment of “arrêt” (“pause”). While the focus is on his mixed emotions, her words indicate her own, revealing a relationship of mutual fear; just as he had been afraid at the sight of her, so the situation is reversed when she is startled by him, this strange child who had been standing for “long minutes” in the darkness covertly spying on her. The theme of invasion linked with voyeurism which was apparent in “La Maison mauresque” has here a direct parallel with the mother and her secret soul. Likewise, the feared rejection implicit in that earlier work is here confirmed by her brusque dismissal of him: “Il a l’air idiot à la regarder ainsi. Qu’il aille faire ses devoirs” (PC, 274: E, 26) (“He looks stupid standing there looking at her. He should go and do his homework”). As in “Mélusine”, her inacessibility raises the possibility that the son is himself superfluous in this secret universe – a suspicion to which the writer refers explicitly in Le Premier Homme when, having embraced her son on his arrival, she turns away:
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(E)lle semblait ne plus penser à lui ni d’ailleurs à rien, et le regardait même parfois avec une étrange expression, comme si maintenant, ou du moins il en avait l’impression, il était de trop et dérangeait l’univers étroit, vide et fermé où elle se mouvait solitairement. (PH, 58-59) (S)he no longer seemed to be thinking of him, nor for that matter of anything, and she even looked at him from time to time with an odd expression, as if – or so at least it seemed to him – he were now in the way, were disturbing the narrow, empty, closed universe which she circled in her solitude. (FM, 44)
Le Premier Homme sheds more light on the links between aggression, voyeurism and love already apparent in these early writings – for there the only evidence of love is in those private moments and glances that the child must appropriate and upon which he must impose his own desired meaning. “The mother is not a source of love”: it must be stolen from her. In the scene where she sits alone the child is an intruder who seems perceived by her as a hostile presence, and I have suggested that, although by no means the only emotions, this fear and hostility may be mutual. Not only is he uncertain of his love for her: “Il a pitié de sa mère, est-ce l’aimer?” (PC, 274) (“He feels pity for his mother, is that love?”), but in another fragment describing the same scene she is depicted as staring “abnormally” at the floor (E, 1215), which, if not directly hostile, is certainly a negative portrayal, as is the reference to her “caractère étrange et presque surnaturel” (“strange and almost supernatural character”) recorded by Jean Sarocchi in his notes on La Mort Heureuse (MH, 219). An added parallel in “Entre Oui et Non” makes explicit what was suppressed in this first encounter as the narrator relates the incident where he is called to her bedside after her assault. This scene follows the former one and is linked by a reference to the outside world and the Arab café owner, “dans son coin, toujours accroupi” (E, 26) (“still crouching in his corner”). In the first episode it was the son who had surprised the mother, an incident that had led to a “temps d’arrêt, un instant démesuré” (“moment of pause, a measureless instant”) appropriated by him alone, and behind her back; here, it is a stranger who had crept up from behind and assaulted her as she sat at the window.20 The second scene repeats the first as she sits alone, lost in her vacant thoughts, while behind her the sky darkens. 20
Lottman reports that the actual assault on which this account is based was widely believed to have been carried out by an Arab (Albert Camus: a biography, 29). Although there is no hint of that in this fictionalized version, an Arab is here linked symbolically with the mother.
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The intrusion emanates from a different source but results in what was previously denied to the son; here, aggression leads to a demonstration of her need for him. We are shown a second moment of “arrêt” when the son spends the night on his traumatized mother’s bed, and which, elaborating on the earlier scene, stresses more explicitly the feeling that they are “alone against everyone”. Previously, she had sent him away, but now she is unconscious and dependent; while the “others” sleep, these two breathe in the same fever: Lui ne s’était jamais senti aussi dépaysé. Le monde s’était dissous et avec lui l’illusion que la vie recommence tous les jours. Rien n’existait plus, études ou ambitions, préférences au restaurant ou couleurs favorites. Rien que la maladie et la mort où il se sentait plongé… Et pourtant, à l’heure même où le monde croulait, lui vivait. (E, 27) He had never felt so cut off from everything. The world had melted away, taking with it the illusion that life begins again each morning. Nothing was left, neither studies, ambitions, preferences in a restaurant or favourite colours. Nothing but the sickness and death in which he felt himself plunged… And yet, at the very moment when the world was crumbling, he was alive. (SEN, 42)
Once more the Self attains unity at the expense of the outside world, except that here the mother is incorporated, no longer a person in her own right but becoming “l’immense pitié de son cœur, répandue autour de lui, devenue corporelle et jouant avec application, sans souci de l’imposture, le rôle d’une vieille femme pauvre à l’émouvante destinée” (E, 27) (“the immense pity of his heart, spread out around him, made flesh, and diligently playing, with neither posture nor pretence, the part of a poor old woman whose fate moves men to tears” (SEN, 42-43) ). Further changes to “Entre Oui et Non” intensify the presentation of the mother as strange and unnatural. The first person consciousness is given increased reality by the introduction of a physical location in a world where others exist independently – an Arab café overlooking the sea. This device also allows the passage of a present “real” time in conjunction with the memory of the past. In this present time sits the Arab café owner, silently watching the speaker; later, he indicates that he is going to close. Yet this silent presence intensifies certain resonances of the original text, for he too is unknown to the narrator, equally impenetrable and alien. The description of the café’s walls with its yellow lions and sheikhs underlines the Otherness of his culture, while his very physical position, “crouching” in a corner, and his eyes which “shine” in the dusk (E, 24), link him textually to the theme
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of animality that runs through the essay. The grandmother has an “animal” pride (E, 25); her daughter returns to her with “docility” (E, 25) after her husband’s death; and the child is afraid of his mother’s “animal” silence (PC, 274: E, 25). Such references are intensified by the addition of an anecdote concerning a mother cat and her kittens. It is probable that the incident on which this was based happened in April, 1936, when Camus wrote to his friend Marguerite Dobrenn that his own cat had died, and he had found its rigid body in the middle of a pool of urine.21 In “Entre Oui et Non”, the cat is unable to feed her kittens and they die one by one. One evening the narrator finds the last one dead and half-eaten by its mother. Although this story transparently suggests that the mother herself was incapable of giving emotional nourishment to her children and was destroying their normal development, the textual link is made between mother, Arab and female cat in the lines: Il sentait déjà. L’odeur de mort se mélangeait à l’odeur d’urine. Je m’assis alors au milieu de toute cette misère et, les mains dans l’ordure, respirant cette odeur de pourriture, je regardai longtemps la flamme démente qui brillait dans les yeux verts de la chatte, immobile dans un coin. (E, 28) It already stank. The smell of death mingled with the stench of urine. Then, with my hands in the filth, and the stench of rotting flesh reeking in my nostrils, I sat down in the midst of all this misery and gazed for hour after hour at the demented flame shining in the cat’s green eyes as she crouched motionless in the corner. (SEN, 43)
This repetition of the location “in the corner”, and the reference to the “demented flame” shining in the cat’s eyes retrospectively reinterprets the mother figure (and the Arab), who becomes not simply “strange” but threateningly alien, even further removed from the implied common humanity of reader and narrator constructed by the universal “nous”. Although the cause of great anguish, the perception of the mother as a dead consciousness is ultimately to facilitate her elevation into a symbol. Moreover, it aids her absorption into the consciousness of the writer. Another extract from a related fragment reinforces this view of the mother as an extension of the Self: Le vivant, le cœur de lui-même était ailleurs, dans cette chambre de bonne où sa mère travaillait. Il savait bien d’ailleurs, à réfléchir plus avant, que ce n’était pas encore sa mère, qu’elle n’était là que pour l’aider à s’opposer à ce nouveau lui-
21
Albert Camus: une vie, 105.
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Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus même si gravement et si lentement construit. Pour l’instant elle n’était qu’un instrument, il se servait d’elle contre lui-même et ce qui l’entourait. (…) Déjà il savait que sa mère n’était qu’un symbole. Derrière elle des souvenirs se massaient. Elle était le reflet de cette misère autrefois si dure et maintenant comprise et jugé à sa valeur… (E, 1214) His living being, his very heart was elsewhere, in that maid’s room where his mother worked. Besides, he knew full well on further thought that it still wasn’t his mother, that she was only there to help him to oppose this new self, so carefully and slowly constructed. For the moment she was only an instrument, he was using her against himself and his surroundings. (…) Already he knew that his mother was only a symbol. Behind her, memories piled up. She was the reflection of that misery once so harsh and now understood and valued at its worth…
The insistence, here and elsewhere, on the mother figure as a tool, an instrument in the hands of the narrator, enabling him to follow his own designs, returns power to the Self. Her silence, her apparent lack of an interior life, authorize her transformation into a symbol – but all on condition that she does not speak.
Women, Death and an Absurd Sensibility During the course of this chapter I have several times noted the theme of death, associated with women. Whereas the men of “L’Hôpital du quartier pauvre” contemplated their own demise, the actual experience of death is beyond their knowledge and can only be illustrated through the deaths of others. The death of the subject signals the loss of all consciousness and autonomy, whereas the death of the Other concentrates all power in the one left behind. The first reference to death in these writings is at the Arab cemetery of “La Maison mauresque” where “la seule vertu du silence et de la paix leur apprenait l’indifférence” (PC, 213) (“the sole virtue of the silence and the peace was teaching them indifference”). Previously the inhabitants of the Casbah, outlined metonymically, had been perceived as a discordant and threatening presence; now, in their final resting-place, even the Arabic inscriptions on their graves are reassuring, because impossible to understand (PC, 212). Life, language, and possible threat are extinguished, leaving the unquiet conqueror22 as the sole consciousness and interpreter, unchallenged. Jacqueline Lévi-Valensi has pointed out that many of the observations in the Écrits de jeunesse prefigure Le Mythe de Sisyphe, and she sees in “la voix de la femme qui ne pensait pas” the first awareness of 22
I have borrowed this term from Camus’s “Misère de la Kabylie” (E, 938).
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the Absurd. She further suggests that Camus writes about death as a way of escaping his obsession with it, and to give himself the illusion of escape.23 Similarly, Alain Costes, who had not read the Écrits de jeunesse, suggests that Le Mythe had a therapeutic value for Camus, who, by projecting his own conflicts onto the “screen” of philosophy, wrote it as a means of overcoming the temptation to suicide.24 For Costes, Camus’s entire literary activity is motivated by the unconscious desire to make his mother speak; to speak to and about his mother, so that she will speak to him, and in the extracts from “Les Voix du quartier pauvre” reproduced in the Essais he discovers an unconscious desire to find an appropriate language for this woman.25 Indeed, the anguish produced by the silence of the mother is beyond doubt, but it does not seem to me that attempted communication with the mother is the fundamental problem here. Rather, her silence and her supposed incapacity for thought are necessary requirements for her transformation into a symbol in Camus’s future literary production. Her actual speech subverts narratorial claims to knowledge, while the inability to imagine her thoughts, which reveals a nonomniscient narrator, is replaced by the insistent, if unconvincing certainty that she does not think. Without wishing to reduce the Absurd to the status of a family drama, I believe it pertinent to a consideration of the treatment of women in Camus’s works to point out the extent to which aspects of the youthful writings prefigure comments about the Absurd in the later Mythe de Sisyphe. There is in these early works a constant association between women, death and an absurd sensibility. Many of these associations are most clearly applicable to the mother-son relationship, as when Camus writes in Le Mythe that “l’absurde naît de cette confrontation entre l’appel humain et le silence déraisonnable du monde” (E, 117-18) (“the Absurd is born of this confrontation between human need and the irrational silence of the world”). Again, although Camus attributes to others the feeling that what he fails to understand is “sans raison. Le monde est peuplé de ces irrationnels” (E, 117) (“lacking in reason. The world is peopled with such irrationals”), this flawed logic is clearly followed by the son with respect to his mother. But although the “hostilité primitive du monde” (E, 108) (“primitive hostility of the 23
La naissance d’un romancier, 182. Albert Camus et la parole manquante, (Paris: Payot, 1973), 106, 108, 135. 25 Ibid., 127, 132. 24
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world”) may initially reside in the mother figure, the impenetrability of the colonized population and women in general likewise incorporates a threatening potential which distinguishes them from the European male community. “Le climat de l’absurdité est au commencement” (“The climate of absurdity is at the beginning”), finding its initial focus primarily in the mother figure and in those groups whose difference threatens the observer with superfluity – of being de trop and of disturbing the Other’s narrow, empty and closed universe (PH, 59). “La fin, c’est l’univers absurde” (E, 106) (“The end is the absurd universe”). Camus’s subsequent formulation of the Absurd finds its initial impetus in early preoccupations with death which find their concrete model in the female body. During the process of Camus’s artistic development the specific gradually comes to signify a “universal” condition; man’s recognition of his mortality gives birth to lucidity and the heroic awareness of the Absurd. Nevertheless, as in the case of Mélusine, woman remains the verb in this process (PC, 266), her death functioning as a source of these intimations of mortality which remain unavailable to her as subject. In “Entre Oui et Non” the mother as a symbol of poverty and childhood substitutes for the depiction of an actual woman. However, although representing the beginnings of a resolution of the narrative difficulties inherent in her depiction, this is not a suddenly acquired symbolic status, nor a form of artistic decision on the part of the author, for it is clear that from the very earliest writings woman has the status of an instrument and symbol. The moment of communion depicted in “Entre Oui et Non” is a continuation of the earlier project of transforming and elevating the everyday to the status of art, the contemplation of which leads to “the divine”.
Chapter 2 The Death of Woman and the Birth of Culture The image of the dead woman is to recur throughout Camus’s writings, but during the early phase it is foregrounded to such an extent that Jean Sarocchi calls it an obsession (MH, 210). A similar phenomenon has been noted by A. James Arnold in his research on the early versions of Caligula, where he remarks that the subsequently effaced theme of the dead woman, so crucial to the genesis of this play, has been generally overlooked: to a far greater extent than in L’Étranger, the death of a woman sparks off the action of the 1938-41 versions of Caligula (CAC 4, 134). This notion of a woman’s death as leading to some form of awakening for the always male onlooker, and setting in motion a series of other, more significant events, is a feature of Camus’s early writings in particular. The most striking example of this is, of course, in L’Étranger, but it is my intention here to examine those writings that predate this novel in order to investigate the mechanism by which Camus moves onto the universal level at which that novel has been read. In linking the death of woman with the birth of culture and of the artist in this chapter, I am seeking to outline the particular trajectory through which Camus moves from a concentration on specific problems of interpretation and depiction to a more general and universal plane. Camus’s reputation is indissociable from his concern with a universal human condition, although this status has been challenged in the years since his death, in particular by those writing from the perspective of French colonialism.1 At the same time, I want to reintegrate the question of women into the general framework of Camus’s developing ideas concerning the collective identity of the French Algerian community. In doing so, I will return to those issues raised in chapter 1 surrounding the question of “historical origination – racial 1 See, for example, Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage, 1994); Azzedine Haddour, Colonial Myths: History and Narrative (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000).
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purity and cultural priority”. Through an examination of the historical conflicts surrounding the meaning of assimilation, I shall attempt to outline its contradictions within the Algerian setting – for the collective identity embraced by Camus in the writings up to 1938 is specifically French Algerian, and although he was never directly to address this issue, the symbolic role of women in the “virile” society he portrays can be readily discerned. I shall argue that this shift of level is accomplished through the exclusion of women as thinking, conscious beings from the Camusian universe. Woman is translated into a dead consciousness, carrying the burden of death in a process that entails far more than a simple suppression; it is rather a necessary condition for the rebirth of man and the birth of culture. Whereas in Camus’s early writings there is a constant and repeated attempt to depict the female character, either as a sexual partner or in variations of the mother figure, his later fictional writings show a marked absence of focus on women. This suppression, which coincides with the take-off of Camus’s publishing career, seems to stand as a founding moment, an essential preliminary to the birth of the author.
The Death of Woman The trajectory through which the woman’s death gives birth not only to her male creator but to the world itself is already apparent in “Le Livre de Mélusine”. There, the fairy’s death / metamorphosis is instrumental to the attainment of a divine “communion” experienced by the narrator’s double – the child left alone in the forest. In her selfabsorption, it seems that Mélusine is touched by death alone, and this accounts, perhaps, for the element of pleasure accompanying the description of her impending death with the coming of night: ‘Habillée de l’angoisse de ce qui va passer, ma fée est encore plus belle’ (PC, 264) (“Clothed in the anguish of what is going to happen, my fairy is even more beautiful”). Her death entails a metamorphosis engendering the earth and life itself: Du Rêve jaillit l’existence, mais de moins en moins y vit Mélusine. Sous la joie de la musique, de l’amour et des couleurs se cache Mélusine lentement dégradée, se connaissant de moins en moins. Le Rêve continue, lentement, jusqu’à l’adoration de la terre, se courbe. Le monde jaillit encore. Irréelle genèse dont Mélusine est le verbe. (PC, 266) Existence springs from the Dream, but Melusina lives less and less within it. Melusina conceals herself beneath the joy of the music, the love, and the colours slowly diminishing, knowing herself less and less. The Dream continues, slowly
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bowing to adore the earth. The world still springs forth. An unreal genesis of which Melusina is the verb. (YW, 187-88)
Most importantly, this death engenders the storyteller himself through a non-biological means of Self-creation: “Indigne, impur, jaillit du Rêve enfin celui qui conte pour dire Mélusine, seul moyen de s’en rapprocher” (PC, 266) (“Unworthy, impure, finally springs from the Dream he who tells the tale in order to speak of Mélusine, the only means of coming close to her”). As in the case of the mother figure, it is as if only her destruction and transformation into art will allow the artist the complete knowledge he seeks. But this total power is one of monologue. She is superseded in death by the narrator in the character of a child, her presence dispersed onto music and water. Throughout, the fairy has been compared with these, described as “immatérielle musique, phrase libérée d’une âme enfantine” (PC, 258) (“insubstantial music, liberated from a child-like soul”). Her movements are like those of a stream in which one might: sentir le courant fuir et rester entre les doigts. Mort de tous les instants suivie de renaissance. Miracle renouvelé, ce ruisseau. Car c’est la voix de notre fée qui chantait sans le savoir. (PC, 259) feel the current flow and stop between the fingers. Death of every moment followed by rebirth. Endlessly renewed miracle, this stream. For it is the voice of our fairy, who was singing without knowing it. (YW, 182)
In her death she becomes mist (PC, 264), her robe a trail of silver mist across a lake (PC, 266). This imagery later recurs as the child contemplates “les ombres vertes, lincueil d’Ophélie” (PC, 269) (“green shadows, Ophelia’s shroud”). The constant theme of eternal regeneration recalls an earlier essay, “L’Art dans la Communion”, where art is defined as a moment of pause that conquers the fleeting nature of life itself. Thus, Mélusine becomes the stuff of art itself, and death (as that aspect of the real that art conquers) is integral to her representation. However abstract her initial portrayal, she is finally dispersed further into aspects of the landscape, and the song of the forest heard by the child in his moment of “communion”. This pattern is later to be discerned in Noces, where female sexuality is dispersed onto the landscape. A similar process might be noted in “La Voix qui était soulevée par de la musique”, third of the “Voix du quartier pauvre”, where the woman’s words only have meaning when accompanied by the sound of music. Art elevates her to the status of a symbol, as
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Woman (PC, 281); a process that strips her of her individuality and consciousness. The meaninglessness of her speech, emptied of its content, is reinforced by the comment that those listening to her were moved, not by her words but by this musical accompaniment (PC, 281). Once more, the woman becomes the unwitting means of transcendence, or “communion”, for her listeners. In a prefiguration of the Absurd, we are told that when she leaves: Elle n’existe plus puisqu’elle n’est plus là. (…) Elle va rentrer dans son noir, après en être sortie par le miracle d’une musique sotte. Sa vie nous échappe et sa voix se perd, s’éteint déjà pour nous plonger dans l’ignorance et nous masquer un coin du monde. Et c’est comme une fenêtre qui se ferme sur le bruit d’une rue. (PC, 282) She does not exist any longer, since she is no longer there. (…) She is going back into her darkness, after having briefly emerged because of the miracle of a stupid tune. Her life escapes us and her voice is getting lost, is extinguished already, plunging us into ignorance and masking a corner of the world from us. like a window closing off the noises from the street. (YW, 200-201)
Without the benefit of art, she and her words return to the vacuum of the irrational from whence they came. The first line of this quotation prefigures the observation in Le Mythe de Sisyphe that “faire vivre (l’absurde), c’est avant tout le regarder. Au contraire d’Eurydice, l’absurde ne meurt que lorsqu’on se détourne” (E, 138) (“keeping the Absurd alive is above all contemplating it. Unlike Eurydice, the Absurd dies only when we turn away from it” (MS, 53) ). Unlike men, women incorporate a mysterious secret: knowledge of Mélusine gave access to the secret of the world (PC, 265, 267). Here, however, “Quel est donc son secret sur cette terre?” (PC, 282) (“What then, is her secret on this earth?”), a question that returns with repeated insistence throughout Camus’s early portraits of the mother figure. But in this case: Quelque chose d’inconnu, qu’elle porte en elle, déborde son corps pour rejoindre les autres corps, le monde, quelque chose qui ressemble à une musique ou à une voix qui dirait la vérité. C’est comme un visage que l’on contemple dans une glace et qui paraît dégrossi, affiné, plus divin, je veux dire étrange. (PC, 282) Something unknown that she bears inside flows from her body to join other bodies, the world – something resembling music or a voice that would tell the truth. It is like a face one contemplates in the mirror, which seems altered, purified, more divine, I mean strange. (YW, 200; translation amended)
In these youthful writings, such premonitions of the Absurd are intimately associated with female figures. However, traditional associations between Woman and the emotional and private sphere combine
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to divert attention away from the role of female characters in the construction of the Absurd. Arnold explains changes in the depiction of Caligula himself through reference to Camus’s changing intellectual development; initially cast in the mould of the Dionysian hero of Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, Caligula’s subsequent portrayal reflects Camus’s need to distance himself from Nietzsche (CAC 4, 135). The significance of Drusilla, on the other hand, is explained through resort to psychoanalysis and the supposed need to elaborate a process of mourning – a constant feature and recourse of analyses of the female character in Camusian studies. I draw attention to these differing types of explanation – the one concerned with intellectual development and the other with the unconscious and the emotions – because this reproduces a wider distinction between the traditionally gendered public and private spheres. The treatment of women is thus relegated to a personal and affective sphere of the emotions which seems to discount rational argument. Yet it is clear that on an intellectual plane Camus continues to be interested in finding a more general significance to the death of woman, as opposed to death in general. In 1935 he writes to Claude de Fréminville of his wish to show the “two faces of the same event”: Une femme malade, par exemple: exposer alors très simplement. Et puis le conflit formidable qu’une femme malade, une jeune fille morte crée dans toute conscience sensible; conflit de l’au-delà – d’orgueil ou de résignation (Claudel). Chaque événement est aussi susceptible de deux interprétations.2 An ill woman, for example: to be expressed very simply. And then the formidable conflict that an ill woman, a dead young girl, creates in any sensitive consciousness; a conflict concerning what lies beyond – of pride or of resignation (Claudel). So each event is susceptible to two interpretations.
Camus’s earliest attempt to confront the problem of death was in two short pieces, “Devant la Morte”3 and “Perte de l’être aimé” (dated October 1933), an elaboration of that earlier fragment. These two works serve as a template tracing a movement from concrete depiction in the former towards abstraction and generalization in the latter, reflecting the more general process through which women are effaced from Camus’s writings in favour of a symbolic role.
2
Albert Camus: une vie, 73. In the new Pléiade edition of Camus’s collected works, this is entitled “Voilà! elle est morte”.
3
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In Le Mythe de Sisyphe Camus remarks that we can have no direct experience of death beyond the observation of death in others – which is difficult to apply to ourselves (E, 108). Hence, the recognition of their own future mortality may bind men together in “L’Hôpital du quartier pauvre”, but it is “Devant la Morte” that presents death as a concrete reality, an empirical fact. Legitimately, the focus is not on the dead young woman (who no longer exists) but on the emotions of the young man contemplating her, and her most significant characteristic is that she is now “sans pensée” (“devoid of thought”) (PC, 227) – an attribute that aligns her with Mélusine and the mother figure. In “Entre Oui et Non”, by contrast, the mother speaks: she reacts with fear and hosility to the son’s invasion of her privacy. In their later conversation, moreover, it is she who comments on his silence (E, 29). Such factors undermine the insistence that she does not think. Death, on the other hand, is unambiguous and guarantees the silence of the Other. In such circumstances she is entirely at the mercy of the one observing her, and his narcissistic reactions are legitimated by the fact that she no longer has hopes or fears of her own. Thus, the young man is free to take the measure of death as he chooses, and to “learn” its lesson: Il comprenait au contraire que la morte obscurcissait tout un coin de l’avenir, qu’il voyait maintenant net et lavé comme le ciel après la pluie. De nouvelles aspirations s’élargissaient en lui et lui faisaient une âme neuve et brillante. (PC, 229)4 He understood all too well that the dead woman was darkening a whole corner of the future, which he now saw washed clean like the sky after rain. New aspirations were expanding within him and making him a new and shining soul. (YW, 161; translation amended)
From the physical presence of the dead female body lying before the speaker in “Devant la Morte” we witness in the following essay her suffusion into a wider and more abstract category of “loss” where the gendered “la morte” (“dead woman”) becomes a neutral “être aimé” (“loved one”). “Perte de l’être aimé” is a series of reflections on loss, of which the loss of the loved one is only one example. This effective obliteration allows a concentration on the fact of death in general rather than her death in particular, and attention can be better transferred to the speaker and his feelings. This loss, moreover, is now aligned with “incertitude sur ce que nous sommes” (PC, 231) (“uncertainty about what we are”) and the feeling of release her death had 4
The text here reads “la mort” (“death”), but Lévi-Valensi reads on the original manuscript “la morte” (“the dead woman”), and I have adopted this correction here.
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brought is here elaborated into a reflection on the shared human condition which partly incorporates the earlier text: (L)’être aimé obstruait tout un coin du possible, pur maintenant comme un ciel lavé de pluie. (…) Quand un intérêt de notre vie s’écroule sous nos pieds, nous reportons sur une autre possibilité l’intérêt que nous lui accordions, et de celle-ci sur une autre et à nouveau, sans désemparer. Incessant besoin de croire, perpétuelle projection en avant, cette nécessaire comédie, nous la jouerons pendant longtemps. (PC, 231) (T)he loved one obstructed a whole corner of the possible, pure now as a sky washed by rain. (…) When some interest in our life crumbles beneath our feet, we transfer the interest we had accorded it to another possibility, and from this to another, and again, without cease. An incessant need to believe, a perpetual projection ahead – such is the necessary comedy, and we shall enact it for a long time. (YW, 162)
As in Le Mythe de Sisyphe, initial ambivalence in the face of death is transformed into a heroic quest for experience that prefigures that of Don Juan. The woman’s humanity is erased in favour of the heroic battle of life itself. Already abstracted, she is here integrated into a series of natural or existential phenomena which efface her presence. The original event can then be presented in terms of the reactions of the one who suffers bereavement, themselves transformed into a form of bravery which valorizes the individual and justifies his apparently counterfeit nature. “Devant la Morte” recalls Le Mythe in a further significant way. In his grief and anger at being left with only her body, the young man strikes the cadaver (PC, 228). A variant records: Il regarda sans bienveillance le corps. Une pensée lui vint qui le fit frissonner: sa gifle n’avait laissé aucune trace. Vivante, le sang aurait afflué aux endroits meurtris. Et puis aussi la bonne complexité d’une révolte aurait jailli. Il alla se laver les mains. Il sentait au bout de ses doigts la lourde inertie de la tête. (PC, 300) He looked at the body without kindness. A thought came to him that made him shiver: his slap had left no trace. Had the body been alive, the blood would have rushed to the places hit. And then, too, the good complexity of a reaction would have sprung up. He went to wash his hands. At the end of his fingers he felt the heavy inertia of the head. (YW, 218)
Although completely at his mercy, the dead woman is also completely beyond his power – unaware of his presence, impervious to his touch. I will examine the links between death and pollution in chapter 3, but here my point is that this remark prefigures not only Caligula’s reaction to Drusilla’s death but also the comment in Le Mythe that “de ce corps inerte où une gifle ne marque plus, l’âme a disparu” (E, 109)
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(“From this inert body on which a slap makes no mark the soul has disappeared” (MS, 21) ). Clearly, the provenance of the inert body in Le Mythe can be traced to this early essay, and I suggest that we may here map the beginning of a process of generalization and universalization that is to culminate in Le Mythe. This operation accomplishes the obliteration of women as human subjects from the universe of the Absurd.
The Birth of Culture I have suggested that from a very early stage in Camus’s writings woman becomes a symbol in a move that obviates the necessity to depict her interior life. The transfer of the fact of death specifically onto women reflects a need on the part of the writer to define and control his fictional universe; in the face of the perceived impenetrability of Woman, she is redefined as a dead consciousness. At this formative stage in Camus’s intellectual development, I want to attempt to integrate the treatment of women into a developing framework of ideas, in a wider social and intellectual context, and to indicate a relationship between the subsequent treatment of women and the intellectual rather than the emotional influences on Camus. The Écrits de jeunesse demonstrate a move away from highly introspective concerns towards a growing recognition of the outside world, and the desire to bear witness to the world of “le quartier pauvre”. At this point I want to suggest ways in which some of the earlier conflicts concerning the men of his own community are resolved. At the same time I want to suggest a wider significance of death in this intellectual framework. The aftermath of the First World War led to a profound questioning in Europe of the shared values of Western society. A number of works written at this time were not only questioning Western civilization but also attempting a re-assessment of the “primitive” cultures with which the West had come into contact, in part through the very process of colonization. What seems certain is that a way of thinking about the world had been profoundly shaken.5 One major contribution to this debate was Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West, first translated into French in 1924, and in France as elsewhere, an influential work.
5
See Raoul Girardet, L’Idée coloniale en France 1871-1962 (Paris: La Table Ronde, 1972), 155.
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Camus was 21 years old at the end of 1934 when “Les Voix du quartier pauvre” was dated, and was to develop and refine his ideas during this period, becoming involved in the literary movement later to be known as L’École d’Alger. Already in 1935 the young Camus shows an interest in connecting the individual observation of death with a wider social significance. At the end of that year he mentions to Claude de Fréminville various writing projects, amongst them “quelque chose sur l’expérience de la mort – et sa valeur ‘sociale’ – dans une culture, une civilisation” (“something on the experience of death – and its ‘social’ value – in a culture, a civilization”).6 The lack of explanation here suggests that the two had already discussed such questions, while the apparent distinction between civilization and culture suggests a Spenglerian influence, if not an actual first-hand knowledge. In The Decline of the West Spengler was to connect the fact of death and its social meaning in a manner that is strikingly reminiscent of both “Devant la morte” and “Perte de l’être aimé”: We so often find the awakening of the inner life in a child associated with the death of some relation. The child suddenly grasps the lifeless corpse for what it is, something that has become wholly matter, wholly space, and at the same moment it feels itself as an individual being in an alien, extended world. (…) And thus every new Culture is awakened in and with a new view of the world, that is, a sudden glimpse of death as the secret of the perceivable world.7
Although there is no evidence that Camus had read Spengler at this stage (or that he had not), it is probable that he came into contact with his ideas either through Jean Grenier or his many friends.8 In 1959, when speaking of Grenier’s influence, Camus again associates the recognition of mortality with the discovery of culture. Recalling the impact Grenier’s Les Îles had on himself and his contemporaries when he was twenty years old, he remembers that they lived a life of sensations, on “the surface” of the world (E, 1157). Initiating them into disenchantment, Les Îles taught them that these things would perish: “nous avions découvert la culture” (E, 1158) (“we had discovered culture”). Spengler regarded history as an inevitable process, following an organic life cycle of Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter; hence, culture is defined as the Spring-time of a nascent people, rooted in the 6
Albert Camus: une vie, 97. The Decline of the West, translated with notes by Charles Francis Atkinson, 2 vols (London: Allen & Unwin, 1971), I, 166-67. 8 For further associations, see La Naissance d’un romancier, 122-23 7
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soil and deriving its character from the land on which it develops. In this argument, civilization is the inevitable organic development of all culture – its destiny. In the process, however, civilizations become increasingly dislocated from the soil which gave them birth, becoming the “most external and artificial states of which a species of developed humanity is capable, (…) petrifying world-city following mother-earth and the spiritual childhood of Doric and Gothic”.9 The winter of Western civilization sets in during the nineteenth century with the dawn of the megalopolis, the domination of money, the rise of formless, nomadic masses, and the formation of “Cæsarism”. Written shortly before the outbreak of the First World War and announcing that for the peoples of the “old Europe”, the hour of destiny had irrevocably sounded, it is not surprising that The Decline of the West had such an impact in Europe. From the other shores of the Mediterranean, however, the culture Camus and his friends discover is not the dying civilization of the old Europe, but that of the “new” Algeria, space of the people without a past (E, 74), the fatherless first men. If Europe is in decay then it is from Algeria, undergoing the pangs of birth, that hope for the old continent lies. In this respect Spengler’s ideas only reinforced those already established in Algeria itself that France, worn out by centuries of civilization, might be rejuvenated by contact with a vigorous “barbarism”.10 The early conflicts of “Intuitions” concerning the men of Camus’s own community and their “animal stupidity”, find here a resolution, for these men may be seen as the raw material of a new and vibrant culture in the making which may perhaps offer hope for the peoples of the old world. At the same time, Camus finds his own place as an intellectual and shaper of this new culture: Le contraire d’un peuple civilisé, c’est un peuple créateur. Ces barbares qui se prélassent sur des plages, j’ai l’espoir insensé qu’à leur insu peut-être ils sont en train de modeler le visage d’une culture où la grandeur de l’homme trouvera enfin son vrai visage. (E, 74) The opposite of a civilized people is a creative one. These barbarians lounging on the beach give me the unreasoned hope that, perhaps without knowing it, they are
9
Ibid., 31. See Louis Bertrand’s preface to the new edition of Le Sang des races (Paris: Georges Crès et Cie, 1921), XI. Similar ideas are demonstrated in Le Premier Homme, reflecting this collective mentality: “il n’y a plus d’hommes en France” (“there are no more men in France”) (PH, 168). 10
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modelling the face of a culture where man’s greatness will finally discover its true visage. (SEN, 88)
In 1937 Camus refers to Spengler’s distinction between civilization and culture, noting civilization as the fatal final stage of culture (C1, 50). Although this influence has inevitably been noted, its significance for Camus’s stance towards Europe vis-à-vis the Mediterranean is not generally appreciated. As the general secretary of the newly-formed “Maison de la culture” in 1937, Camus’s inaugural address, “La Culture indigène, la nouvelle culture méditerranéenne” (E, 1321-27) presents the relationship between peoples and their environment as an organic one where man expresses himself in harmony with the land (E, 1322), implying that character is determined by geography – as his contrast between Europe and the Mediterranean demonstrates. The men of the South, Camus says, all belong to the same family, and are quite distinct from the men of the cold North. Camus had spent two months in Central Europe, feeling a “gêne singulière qui pesait sur mes épaules” (“singular unease weighing on my shoulders”) which, he realized, stemmed from the fact that everyone was “buttoned up to the neck” (E, 1322). Such details, he contends, give meaning to the notion of a homeland: La Patrie, ce n’est pas l’abstraction qui précipite les hommes au massacre, mais c’est un certain goût de la vie qui est commun à certains êtres, par quoi on peut se sentir plus près d’un Génois ou d’un Majorquin que d’un Normand ou d’un Alsacien. La Méditerranée, c’est cela, cette odeur ou ce parfum qu’il est inutile d’exprimer: nous la sentons tous avec notre peau. (E, 1322-23) The Homeland is not the abstraction that drives men to massacre, but a certain taste for life common to certain people, through which one can feel closer to a Genoese or a Majorcan than to a Norman or an Alsatian. That’s the Mediterranean, that odour or perfume which it’s useless to try to express: we all sense it through our pores.
Certainly, it is possible to speak of this “Mediterranean spirit” as a nebulous feeling of the heart, as does Jean Grenier,11 but this is no mere sensibility, for Camus’s stance with regard to Europe, the Mediterranean, and their respective cultures grows out of an underlying system of established ideas emanating from the European mainland but developing their particular character within the Algerian context. Throughout his life Camus may have distrusted doctrines or ideologies, just as he may have believed that he was here aligning himself 11
Albert Camus: Souvenirs (Paris: Gallimard, 1968), 125.
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with a certain “taste” for life as opposed to what he called “abstraction”; but this does not necessarily make it so, and neither does this mean that he was immune to ideology, as all too many commentators suggest. It is in the nature of ideology that it be identified as transparently “true”. In this network of ideas where Mediterranean culture has virility as its chief characteristic, we may deduce the place of women who, despite their absence, are not casually overlooked, but allotted a specific role outside of history and the making of this social world. Woman’s sphere is the traditional one, rooted in the organic – the family and the reproduction of the generations. The belief is far more widespread than Spengler alone that “the man makes History, the woman is History”.12 For Spengler, as for many others, the feminine: Is the primary, the eternal, the maternal, the plantlike (…), the cultureless history of the generation sequence, which never alters, but uniformly and stilly passes through the being of all animal and human species, through all the short-lived individual Cultures.13
Although I am obviously not suggesting that Camus derived his views of gender relations from this source, these comments might easily illustrate the role ascribed to the mother in Le Premier Homme, while Spengler’s account of the conflict between the two types of history represented by men and women is likewise applicable to Dora in Les Justes. In a variant of La Peste Camus is more explicit with respect to Rieux’s wife: Elle n’avait connu de la terreur que la séparation, il est vrai. Elle n’avait aucune idée du monde insensé où il avait vécu (…). Mais tout cela était bien puisqu’elle était la femme, c’est-à-dire ce qui échappe à l’histoire. (TRN, 2002) She had known nothing of the terror except for separation, it’s true. She had no idea of the senseless world in which he had lived (…). But all of that was as it should be, since she was woman, which is to say that which escapes history.
Although isolated from that other history of men, as the source of the generations woman is allotted a significant role in the creation and development of this culture living in the trees, hills and in men (E, 1327). Here, the mystical, organic relationship between a people and the soil sheds light on the ambivalent first reference to the mother, noted in chapter 1. There, following Homi Bhabha, I speculated that this was an indirect reference to origin, both biological and cultural, 12 13
The Decline of the West, II, 327. Ibid., 327-28.
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which raised the difficult and nebulous question of “racial purity, cultural priority”. As far as Camus’s address to the “Maison de la culture” is concerned, Jean Sarocchi at least has no doubt: “Bref, cela est affaire de peau. On oserait dire (mais l’auteur de Noces ose le dire) de race” (“In short, that’s a question of the skin. One might dare to say (but the author of Noces dares to say it) of race”).14
Racial Purity The so-called African dimension of Camus’s upbringing was often stressed by his contemporaries with little regard for the realities of the situation, but this strongly influenced how this intellectual circle saw themselves. Emmanuel Roblès recalls that in those days they were all “unconscious Mediterraneans, almost militantly so”, grouped around the bookshop of Edmond Charlot.15 In 1960 Gabriel Audisio stressed Camus’s mixed Spanish and Alsatian origins, commenting that this same diversity was to be found amongst other French Algerian writers, given the mixed blood in the European community there,16 while Jean Grenier writes that it is impossible to understand Camus without taking into account the exuberant climate and the “mélange des sangs” (“mixture of blood”).17 Camus also subscribes to such views when, asserting that Africa begins in the Pyrenees,18 he writes in 1959 that Emmanuel Roblès is therefore doubly Algerian: unissant en lui, comme beaucoup d’entre nous, le sang espagnol et l’énergie berbère. On sait assez que cela donne aussi une race d’hommes qui se sent mal à l’aise en métropole, mais devant qui, aussi bien, les métropolitains se sentent dans l’inconfort. De même manière, cela donne des œuvres particulières qui (…) se distinguent aussi par un air de barbarie, parfois subtil, parfois sans apprêts. (E, 1918)
14 “L’Europe, Exil ou Royaume”, in Albert Camus et l’Europe (OFIL, 1995). These conference papers are available only on floppy disk, and are unpaginated. 15 “Jeunesse d’Albert Camus”, in Nouvelle Revue Française, “Hommage à Albert Camus” (March, 1960), 410-21 (413). 16 “la même diversité se remarque chez les autres écrivains français d’Algérie, parce qu’il y a de nombreux ‘sangs’ plus ou moins mêlés, chez tous les Européens algériens” (“L’Algérien”, in “Hommage à Albert Camus”, 434). 17 Albert Camus: Souvenirs, 167. 18 Such “spiritual” borders might also be found in Jean Hytier’s L’Iran de Gobineau (Alger: Éditions Cafre, 1939), where his essay “L’Orient de Gobineau” begins with the comment that the true Persia begins in Isfahan, not Tehran (19). Hytier was involved in the setting up of the review Rivages, and this collection of essays was published by Camus and his friend Claude de Fréminville.
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Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus uniting in himself, like many of us, Spanish blood and Berber energy. One knows well enough that that also makes a race of men that feels ill-at-ease in the metropolis, but in whose presence Metropolitans feel discomfort as well. In the same way, that engenders works (…) which are distinguished by an air of barbarism, sometimes subtle, sometimes unvarnished.
Thus, Spanish blood becomes itself an “African” credential, in turn a qualification for “Algerianity”. Similarly, when Camus wrote in his “Présentation de la revue Rivages” that “s’il est vrai que la vraie culture ne se sépare pas d’une certaine barbarie, rien de ce qui est barbare ne peut nous être étranger. Le tout est de s’entendre sur le mot ‘barbare’” (E, 1330) (“if it’s true that true culture cannot be separated from a certain barbarism, nothing of what is barbarous can be foreign to us. It all depends on agreement over the word ‘barbaric’”) this appears less an opening out towards an indigenous population, or a “mythical” hope in racial mixture19 than the construction of an appropriated identity in which “Africanity” and “barbarism” are crucial indicators of authenticity. Conor Cruise O’Brien has criticized Camus’s lecture at the “Maison de la culture” on the grounds that his claim of linguistic unity in the region overlooks the presence of the colonized population, and that the Mediterranean culture he espouses is a European one.20 But this criticism of Camus’s reference to a new race with a shared linguistic heritage and origin is misplaced, for in this context (and French Algerian history) there is no confusion. The indigenous population simply does not constitute part of this “new culture” to which Camus refers. Although Grenier insists on the “mixing of blood” for an understanding of Camus, at the same time he notes that there was no mixing with Arab blood in Algeria, since there were no mixed marriages. Although this had caused some surprise to the Frenchman, he notes that only retrospectively had Camus himself been surprised by it, during the Algerian war when he had been studying statistics on the subject.21 According to Jacques Berque, there were no intermarriages, not even any “bastards” during the 1930s.22 Although exaggerated, his comment reflects the atmosphere of the times. There were on average only 45 marriages a year in the four leading cities of Algeria between 193019
Jean Déjeux, “De l’éternel Méditerranéen à l’éternel Jugurtha”, Revue algérienne des sciences juridiques, économiques et politiques, 14 (4) (Dec. 1977), 658-728 (691). 20 Camus (London: Fontana, 1970), 12, 13-14. 21 Albert Camus: Souvenirs, 167. 22 Le Maghreb entre deux guerres (Paris: Seuil, 1962), 341.
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1953, with a drastically reduced rate for Muslim women (who were not legally allowed to marry non-Muslim men until 1932).23 It is very surprising that Camus failed to notice this earlier, but suggests that the notions of “Africanity” and “barbarism” had a purely symbolic significance. Audisio saw this new race as still in its early stages, but argued that the Algerian was already conscious of his unique racial status. This belief appears to have been genuine – to the extent that in the early 1950s he was to deny the existence of this new race on the grounds that there was practically no racial assimilation.24 Other writers treated the subject of inter-racial relationships, yet, as has often been pointed out, the colonized population is hardly represented in Camus’s fictional works, and his protagonists are without exception “des Blancs toujours, de sang indigène impollus” (“always Whites, unpolluted by indigenous blood”).25
Le mélange des sangs My preference for a literal, if awkward, translation of “le mélange des sangs” as “mixing of the blood” arises out of an attempt to underline the biological overtones of such terminology. But, as Jean Déjeux points out, other expressions such as “race”, “people” and “soul” were also in vogue at the turn of the twentieth century.26 Throughout his life Camus was to use the terms “people” and “race” interchangeably, and although he offers no definition, it is certain that he would have rejected the overt racism of those such as Louis Bertrand. Nevertheless, the young man’s use of such words, as in Noces, has an emotive dimension in view of the French Algerian context and the political climate of the 1930s. Racism was perpetrated on two fronts in the Algeria of the early twentieth century. The French character of the European population of Algeria had always been threatened by the large numbers of European immigrants not of French origin, and in 1889 automatic naturalisation had been introduced in an attempt to stem this “foreign peril”.27 Dis23
Alf Andrew Heggoy, “Cultural Disrespect: European and Algerian Views on Women in Colonial and Independent Algeria”, Muslim World 62 (October, 1972), 323-34. As Heggoy points out, it is inconceivable that a process of assimilation was taking place in view of such statistics. 24 Cited by Déjeux, “De L’Éternel Méditerranéen à l’éternel Jugurtha”, 687-88, 692. 25 Le Dernier Camus ou le premier homme, 155. 26 “De l’éternel Méditerranéen à l’éternel Jugurtha”, 672-73. 27 Charles-Robert Ageron, Histoire de l’Algérie contemporaine (Paris: PUF, 1979) 2 vols, II, 118-33.
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crimination against the néos (as those of non-French origin were called) ensured that the autochthonous French maintained their superior position, particularly in an education system which, in 1904, was practically non-existent for néos.28 Racism was certainly not solely directed at the colonized population, and questions of racial assimilation concerned primarily this European group. The Spanish in particular were seen as an inferior race: Par le sang arabe qui coule dans ses veines (…) par son tempérament fanatique et brutal, par son indolence, par son fanatisme, l’Espagnol est à demi africain; n’estil pas à craindre que, l’action de la race s’ajoutant à celle du climat et lui donnant plus de force, le peuple algérien ne devienne plus espagnol que français?29 Through the Arab blood running in his veins (…) through his fanatical, brutal temperament, his indolence, his fanaticism, the Spaniard is half African; is it not to be feared that, the action of the race contributing to that of the climate and giving it more force, the Algerian people might become more Spanish than French?
However, given much smaller numbers of women, combined with the fact that in the Spanish community women outnumbered men until the turn of the century, mixed marriages within the European group increased. In France, as in Algeria, these alliances began to be seen as the formation of a new race. In 1898 it was claimed that a new race was forming in Algeria, whose mentality differed profoundly from that of France. Although seen as full of initiative and energy, they were seen as lacking all the finer sensibilities of the French spirit.30 Only after 1914 did the tensions between these races began to alleviate and this new group began to call itself Algerian rather than French, identifying themselves as separate and distinct from the French mainland population. The new race of which Camus speaks in Noces is this European mixture of French, Italians, Maltese, Spanish – those of the European shores of the Mediterranean. In 1947 he is to write of Algiers, echoing the views of Louis Bertrand: Les Français d’Algérie sont une race bâtarde, faite de mélanges imprévus. Espagnols et Alsaciens, Italiens, Maltais, Juifs, Grecs enfin s’y sont recontrés. Ces croisements brutaux ont donné, comme en Amérique, d’heureux résultats. (E, 848)
28 Daniel Leconte, Les Pieds noirs: histoire et portrait d’une communauté (Paris: Seuil, 1980), 85. 29 Cited in Les Pieds noirs, 85. Given the Spanish origins of Camus’s own mother, it will be seen that he had a personal involvement in such ideas. 30 See Histoire de l’Algérie contemporaine, 131.
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The French of Algeria are a bastard race, made up of unforeseen mixtures. Spaniards and Alsatians, Italians, Maltese, Jews and Greeks have come together there. As in America this brutal interbreeding has had happy results. (SEN, 133)
Clearly, this new stock is derived from a biological fusion or assimilation that is quite distinct from the assimilation supported by Camus and his friends on the political and cultural levels. But with respect to the French Algerians, this emphasis on the mixing of the blood has a significant status in Camus’s early essays, and denotes a commitment to the idea that a distinctive new (European) people is in the making.
Cultural Priority The French civilizing mission, which Camus espoused, was an unashamed assertion of cultural priority. In metropolitan France assimilation was seen as a way of bringing civilization to the Arabs, where an eventual fusion of the races was envisaged. Consequently, colonial demands made in the name of assimilation were viewed favourably. In this view, racial assimilation is a logical consequence of that on the cultural, educational and political levels. Maurice Viollette discusses the question of nationality with regard to the illegitimate children of French soldiers, and asserts that foundlings of mixed race should be subject to the same laws as are applied in France, and consequently they should be declared French. Clearly, for Viollette assimilation entails not only a cultural and educational process, but an eventual biological one also. Unlike Camus in his writings on Algeria, he also confronts the question of the status of women.31 In Algeria itself, however, the prospect of a fusion of the two races raised the spectre of being swamped, obliterated by an overwhelmingly larger colonized population; for the majority of French Algerians there was no question of treating Muslims as future French citizens with equal rights to political representation.32 For the European settlers assimilation referred to the acquisition of land and property rather than people.33 The conquest itself, under the direction of General Bugeaud, had been prolonged and brutal. In 1847 de Tocqueville was famously to report that Muslim society had been rendered more miserable, igno31
L’Algérie vivra-t-elle? Notes d’un ancien gouverneur général (Paris: Alcan, 1931), 382. See also his chapter on “La femme indigène”, 412-18. 32 Charles-Robert Ageron, Les Algériens musulmans et la France (1871-1919), 2 vols, (Paris: PUF, 1968), II, 1231. 33 For a thorough treatment of this subject see Les Algériens musulmans et la France, I, 3-55.
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rant and barbaric than before the French arrived.34 Bugeaud himself had no illusions about how to maintain control over the conquered territory once the military had left; a settlement of soldier citizens. Settlers from France must be enticed to Algeria by the promise of the best lands, in Tlemcen, Mascara, and everywhere where there was plentiful water and fertile land; this was a more important priority than worrying about who these lands belonged to. Bugeaud’s hopes of mass French immigration to supplant the indigenous population were particularly fanciful,35 given what Camus was later to call the “galloping demography” of the indigenous population (E, 1012), which was to increase fifteen-fold after 1830. Founded on the expropriation of native lands, the new European settlements were necessarily in conflict both with the indigenous peoples and with the assimilationist aims of the French government. Their wish was to be freed from the restrictions of military law, yet to remain under the protection of France. In 1845, the territoire civil was assimilated to France and given access to French law. But the colonial conception of assimilation concerned only the French and naturalised Europeans, who were thus given further advantages.36 Until 1870 Algeria was to experience alternating periods of military and civil rule. Although military government was a source of contention for the settlers, who pressed for full assimilation, the colonized population feared the prospect of a civil régime which represented the confiscation of their lands, the loss of their traditional laws, and juries of settlers who would decide on their legal claims.37 One reason for the Kabyle insurrection of 1871 was the generalization of the civil régime in March, 1870.38 This uprising and its consequent suppression put an end to this period of instability, marking, according to Ageron, the definitive defeat of the indigenous population, and the final victory of the settlers. Brutal reprisals were taken against the Kabyle population, many of whom were dispossessed of their lands and reduced to penury. But, as Ageron points out, these acts of dispossession were not the work of the military, but the first political act of the settlers.39
34
Histoire de l’Algérie contemporaine (1830-1994), Que sais-je? 17-18. Les Algériens musulmans et la France, vol.1, 53. 36 Histoire de l’Algérie contemporaine (1830-1994), Que sais-je? 22. 37 Charles-André Julien, Introduction to Les Français d’Algérie, 16. 38 C.-R. Ageron, Politiques coloniales au Maghreb (Paris: PUF, 1972), 222. 39 Politiques coloniales au Maghreb, 228-29. 35
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In Camus’s notes for Le Premier Homme he refers to the insurrection, but only to emphasise the civilizing mission through the observation that the first to be killed in the Mitidja was a schoolteacher (PH, 305), who thus acquires a heroic status and an innocence that sit uneasily in the face of the historical record. Although he was to acknowledge the injustices of colonialism in his journalistic writings he was ever unwilling to confront the full implications of this particular aspect of colonial history.
Myths of Origin Colonial literature in Algeria was to reflect the conflicts surrounding issues of assimilation and race. In 1895, Louis Bertand, himself an immigrant from France, was the first to focus on this “new” European people for whom he created a myth of origin. For Bertrand, the occupation of Algeria is a return rather than an invasion, and the Latin races of the Mediterranean are picking up a history that predates the temporary deviation of the Arab occupation. In this view, the settlers are only returning to a “lost province” of Rome: Héritiers de Rome, nous invoquons des droits antérieurs à l’Islam. En face de l’Arabe usurpateur et même de l’Indigène asservi et refaçonné par lui, nous représentons les descendants des fugitifs, des vrais maîtres du sol, qui débarquèrent en Gaulle avec leurs réliquaires et les archives de leurs églises.40 Inheritors of Rome, we invoke rights anterior to Islam. In the face of the usurping Arab and even the indigenous people, subjugated and refashioned by him, we represent the descendants of the fugitives, the true masters of the soil, who disembarked in Gaul with their reliquaries and Church archives.
It is above all in the light of this myth of Latinity that the Mediterranean counter-myth associated with Camus and Gabriel Audisio must be viewed. While rejecting the racism and developing fascism surrounding the myth of the Latin homeland, the myth of the “eternal Mediterranean”, using the same terminology, nevertheless substitutes a Greek origin for that of Rome. In rejecting this Latin ideology, Camus claims that as far as the Mediterranean is concerned, the error is to locate in Rome what in fact began in Athens (E, 1321). Thus the circle around the Charlot bookshop assumed the same discourse concerning the formation of a distinctive new racial mixture and with a lack of precision that appears to stem from their own confusions.41 40
Preface to Villes d’or, 9. Cited in “De l’éternel Méditerranéen à l’éternel Jugurtha”, 666. 41 Ibid., 687-88.
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The Mythical Woman I have suggested that the idea of death, initially associated with women, gains a symbolic status as it becomes incorporated into a framework of ideas where man’s recognition of mortality leads on a personal level to a form of lucidity or éveil (“awakening”); and on a collective level to a form of cultural awakening. From his earliest attempts to depict the mother figure, moreover, Camus refers to her as an instrument or symbol. To Brisville he remarked that in Le Premier Homme he would speak about women for the first time: “Dans ses livres précédents, les femmes sont, selon lui ‘mythiques’” (“In his previous books, women were, according to him, ‘mythical’”).42 Neither then, nor elsewhere, does Camus offer an explanation of what he means by this term, and it would appear here to be synonymous with symbol. Although on the level of ideas the role of woman in this organic culture can be deduced, at this very early stage in Camus’s literary career it is not surprising that her precise symbolic function remains unclear. Whereas Camus depicts the social life of men in “L’Été à Alger”, “Le Minotaure” and “Amour de vivre”, women are not presented here as subjects, but as the cement of the homosocial bonds between men. Monique Crochet and Fernande Bartfeld have noted the importance of Camus’s attention to Spengler for his development of the mythical aspects in his work.43 Crochet’s analysis in particular sheds light on the reasons why Spengler’s observations might be significant for the treatment of women. She notes Spengler’s argument that the use of myth in Antiquity corresponded to an a-historical perspective where “the history of Alexander the Great began even before his death to be merged by Classical sentiment in the Dionysus legend”.44 As Crochet points out, for Spengler this represented a move away from notions of interior evolution, an interpretation which Camus understands as “le mythe et sa signification antipsychologique” (C1, 100) (“myth and its anti-psychological meaning”). This perspective justifies the move away from attempted depictions of the interior life of others, while the 42
Albert Camus: une vie, 741. Monique Crochet, Les Mythes dans l’œuvre de Camus (Paris, Éditions universitaires, 1973), 45; Fernande Bartfeld, Albert Camus ou le mythe et le mime, Archives Albert Camus 5 (Paris: Lettres modernes, 1982), 22. 44 The Decline of the West, I, 8 (cited by Crochet, 45). Such a perspective, Spengler continues, is impossible for the men of the West. Crochet is referring to a series of quotations from Spengler made by Camus (C1, 99-101). 43
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subsequent use of myth and symbol in Camus’s work establishes a supposedly Greek provenance in keeping with this new culture, and a distinctiveness from that of Europe. Thus, early features of the treatment of women begin to find a new justification on the intellectual level. Woman becomes a symbol of the earthly delights offered to man, one of the pleasures he must experience in quantity during his brief stay on the earth: À l’heure où le goût des doctrines voudrait nous séparer du monde, il n’est pas mauvais que des hommes jeunes, sur une terre jeune, proclament leur attachement à ces quelques biens périssables et essentiels qui donnent un sens à notre vie: mer, soleil et femmes dans la lumière. Ils sont le bien de la culture vivante, le reste étant la civilisation morte que nous répudions. (E, 1330) At a time when the taste for doctrines would separate us from the world, it’s not a bad thing that young men, in a young land, proclaim their attachment to that perishable and essential wealth which gives meaning to our lives: sea, sun and women in the light. They are the bounty of a living culture, the rest being dead civilization, which we repudiate.
As part of its perishable wealth, women are banished from this society, while constituting that part of the natural world which gives meaning to the lives of men. As commentators have often noted, nature itself takes on the qualities of a woman, freely available to man; as in “Noces à Tipasa” man is offered a form of sexual union from which the female partner has been entirely abstracted. Nature equals equivalence, Camus notes (C1, 40), an equivalence that effaces women as subjects: Chaque année, la floraison des filles sur les plages. Elles n’ont qu’une saison. L’année d’après, elles sont remplacées par d’autres visages de fleurs qui, la saison d’avant, étaient encore des petites filles. Pour l’homme qui les regarde, ce sont des vagues annuelles dont le poids et la splendeur déferlent sur le sable jaune. (C1, 226) Each year, the flowering of girls on the beaches. They only have one season. The year after they are replaced by other flower-like faces which, the season before, were still little girls. For the man watching them, they are annual waves whose weight and spendour unfurl on the yellow sand.
As an aspect of the landscape, woman is eternally renewed; through such non-human equivalence she gains a form of immortality that distinguishes her from men. This is the form of immortality ascribed to Don Juan’s conquests, each of whom is eternally replaced by the next. As with the ripe peach in Tipasa (E, 58), women are designed for immediate consumption, after which they are of no further use; they have
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only one season (E, 829).45 Le Mythe presents Don Juan as the heroic agent of such a harvest, gathering in the grain and burning the aftermath: “ces visages chaleureux ou émerveillés, il les parcourt, les engrange et les brûle” (E, 154) (“Those welcoming or wonderstruck faces, he runs through them, garners them and burns them”). The conflation of women with nature confers a form of chastity and purity on this metaphysical sexuality precisely because of the absence of actual women. Unsurprisingly, the lyrical essays are more successful in the presentation of women as an extension of the natural world, as there the focus is on one subjective consciousness, where viewpoint and narrative voice coincide. In these essays Camus is spared the necessity of presenting the individual woman and individual consciousness which the novel form demands. Equally, Camus comments that when young one is more likely to be attached to a landscape than a person because a landscape (silent and unresponding) allows itself to be interpreted (C1, 48). Alan J. Clayton links this approach to an emotional incapacity on the part of Camus himself: in order to overcome an incapacity for love, this emotion is transferred onto a higher level where women become intermediaries between the Self and the world, a process that permits the avoidance of real contact with the Other.46 Raymond Gay-Crosier applies a similar argument to the Don Juan of Le Mythe, which seeks to clarify the right and proper stance of the Absurd hero towards women and the inanimate world in which they belong. Furthermore, he extends this “lack of authentic feelings” to all the heroes of Camus, as well as to the author himself.47 In a long passage that prefigures some of the major themes of La Mort heureuse, Camus was to write in September 1937 of “cette entente amoureuse de la terre et de l’homme délivré de l’humain” (C1, 75) (“this amorous understanding between the earth and man delivered of the human”). For Laurent Mailhot, man “delivered” of the human is delivered above all of woman, sexuality and love.48 This is 45 Here, the lesson of Nietzsche that the superior man must die “at the right time” is given a slightly different interpretation with respect to women. Whereas Zarathustra’s advice is that “one must stop permitting oneself to be eaten when one tastes best”, Camus’s injunction to women seems to be the reverse. See the section “Of Voluntary Death” in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, with an introduction by R. J. Hollingdale (tr.) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), 97-99. 46 “Camus ou l’impossibilité d’aimer”, AC7 (1975), 9-34 (12). 47 “Camus et le donjuanisme”, 825-28. 48 Laurent Mailhot, Albert Camus ou l’imagination du désert (Montréal: Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 1973), 273.
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the story of Patrice Mersault, hero of La Mort heureuse: delivered of sexual jealousy, delivered of human vulnerability, but above all delivered of mortality. Here is the embodiment of pure Will or consciousness, unfettered by social or moral constraints: the man-god.
Chapter 3 The Man-god and Death as an Act of the Will Beginning with the youthful writings, the theme of the man-god, the Artist-god, or the aristocrat is a constant feature of Camus’s work.1 In Le Mythe de Sisyphe, Camus points out that for Dostoevsky’s Kirilov the divinity in question is entirely of this earth. If God exists, then we must not disobey His will: if He does not exist, we are answerable only to ourselves: Pour Kirilov, comme pour Nietzsche, tuer Dieu, c’est devenir dieu soi-même – c’est réaliser dès cette terre la vie éternelle dont parle l’Évangile. (E, 184-85) For Kirilov, as for Nietzsche, to kill god is to become god oneself; it is to realize on this earth the eternal life of which the Gospel speaks. (MS, 98)
By choosing to die Kirilov’s death would be an act of sacrifice, a “pedagogical suicide” that demonstrates this truth; men would finally be enlightened and the earth, now peopled by Tsars, would be illuminated with human glory (E, 185). Kirilov believes, not in an eternal afterlife, but in the eternity of the here and now where, for the enlightened, freedom has no restraints. The Emperor Caligula, for whom everything is literally permitted, is likewise a pedagogue, except that he spreads enlightenment by killing others. His aim is to surpass rather than to equal the gods themselves. But the first “pedagogical” death was no suicide, no act of the unfettered Will. As in “Devant la morte”, the death of a woman is the first cause of individual enlightenment; as there, the young lover advances towards the dead woman’s body, which he touches before, following a moment of reflection, he finally turns away (TRN, 11). But the mighty Caligula has no obligation to play the role of the “broken” man: this death means nothing, he tells Hélicon, except as the sign of a greater truth (TRN, 16). Becoming a man (TRN, 26) entails the rec1
For a discussion of this theme with respect to Camus’s approach to the theatre, see my “Camus and the Theatre”, in Edward J. Hughes (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Camus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 67-78.
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ognition that all men are “condemned” to death. Of equal significance is his further conclusion that “Ah! c’est maintenant que je vais vivre enfin. Vivre, Cæsonia, c’est le contraire d’aimer” (TRN, 28; CAC4, 36) (“Ah! It’s now that I’m finally going to live. Living, Cæsonia, is the opposite of loving”). The final version of Caligula effaces the underlying stages of this “logic” which equates love with death. In the 1941 version of the play, Caligula remarks that of the woman he loved, all that remains are his memories and “sa pourriture” (“her rotting (corpse)”) (CAC 4, 34). Of her living body, all that strikes now is “l’ordure puant que cela est devenu en quelques heures” (TRN, 1761: CAC4, 36) (“the stinking ordure this became in a matter of hours”), words which directly precede the above statement that life and love are opposed. All men are condemned to die, but women, symbol of this fact, teach the physical reality of death; decomposition and its stench, the gradual seeping of bodily fluids into the earth. This reality is not limited to the female corpse; the sexual act prefigures the cadaver’s lack of physical integrity: Tout de même, comme c’est laid d’être jaloux! Souffrir par vanité et par imagination! Voir sa femme qui ouvre les genoux, qui reçoit dans son ventre le ventre d’un autre. Faire tourner l’existence d’un amour autour de ces affaires de muqueuses! (CAC 4, 55: TRN, 1769) All the same, how ugly jealousy is! To suffer from vanity and imagination! To see one’s wife opening her legs, receiving into her body the body of another. To make the existence of a love turn around these mucous affairs!
This image, also in the context of sexual jealousy, is likewise conjured up in La Mort heureuse. Here one can certainly trace an emotional reaction to the infidelity of Camus’s first wife; as Jean Sarrocchi has pointed out, a vengeful stance towards women is expressed in these two works.2 But if here the emotional impulse becomes an intellectual alibi, it must not be forgotten that such links between women and death predate any history of sexual jealousy. In chapter 1 I suggested that one source of conflict lies in the relationship between the superior individual and other men of his community, while woman as biological being and source compromises the identity of the individual who 2
See the section on “Les femmes” in his doctoral thesis, “Le Thème de la recherche du père dans l’œuvre d’Albert Camus” (Paris IV, 1975), 61-65. Unless I am mistaken, this section is not reproduced in his book, Le Dernier Camus ou le premier homme (Paris: Nizet, 1995).
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gives birth to himself. This chapter examines this theme, and the associated argument that in order to realize his own divinity the superior individual must suppress those ties binding him to women: lucidity must conquer biology. Through an analysis of related texts I shall argue that Camus’s own defeat of death in Le Mythe de Sisyphe by an emphasis on lucidity and consciousness is also a defeat of women, whose significance is effaced (although not eradicated) from this point onwards. I have noted an association in Camus’s youthful writings between women, death and an absurd sensibility, and suggested that man’s éveil, which takes as its point of departure the recognition of his inevitable mortality, is illustrated elsewhere in the body of the woman. Despite his continuing “envy” for those who are entirely at one with a world where intelligence has no place, lucidity is increasingly valorized in Camus’s early writings and creates a gendered borderline on one side of which lies life and the faculty for consciousness, and from which the woman, as a dead consciousness (or a body without a soul), is excluded. This banishment, I shall argue, permits man’s glorious revolt against death. In “Devant la Morte” the young man washed his hands after striking the woman’s cadaver, as if to wash away the physical pollution of death. Biology, the sign of mortality and physical decay, reminds us of the impurity of death, an impurity that resides above all in the female body, source of the life cycle. This is what must be thrown away: Un homme aime une femme et il lit sur son visage les signes de la peste. Jamais il ne l’aimera autant. Mais jamais elle ne l’a autant dégoûté. Il y a divorce en lui. Mais c’est toujours le corps qui triomphe. Le dégoût l’emporte. Il la prend par une main, la traîne hors du lit (…). Il la laisse devant un égout. “Après tout, il y en a d’autres”. (C1, 231) A man loves a woman and reads the signs of the plague on her face. Never has he loved her so much. But never has she so disgusted him. He is divided against himself. But it is always the body that wins. Disgust prevails. He takes her by the hand, drags her from the bed (…). He leaves her near a sewer. “After all, there are other ones”. (SEN, 226)
I have suggested that the female character challenges the artist’s omniscient position, revealing underlying vulnerabilities and a recognition of difference that threatens the integrity of the Self. Indecipherable, woman is presented as a body without a soul, becoming the monstrous repository and source of death itself. Julia Kristeva has noted such links between the perception of death and the female body in her work on abjection (“throwing away”):
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Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus The cadaver (cadere, to fall), that which has irremediably fallen, is cesspool and death. (R)efuse and corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live. (…) If ordure signifies the other side of the border, the place where I am not and which permits me to be, the corpse, the most sickening of wastes, is a border that has encroached upon everything. It is no longer I who expell, “I” is expelled. (…) The corpse, seen without God and outside of science, is the utmost of abjection. It is death infesting life. (I)t beckons to us and ends up engulfing us.3
Elements of this particular reaction are equally to be found in Camus’s first published essays, L’Envers et l’Endroit, where strong associations between women and death are to be found.
Bodies without a Soul The old woman of “L’Ironie”4 whose family goes to the cinema is just as terrified at the prospect of being left alone with only the thought of her death (E, 17) as is the talkative old man in the second sketch who cannot be silent without thinking of his imminent end (E, 18). Indeed, he too is “alone, forsaken, already dead” (E, 20) – yet his need to talk bears witness to a determination to demonstrate that he is nevertheless still alive. His desperate attempts to stave off the thought of death inspire compassion in his mysterious observer (E, 19). By contrast, the compassion of the young man listening to the old woman’s complaints quickly turns to unease, irritation, horror, and finally the violent impulse to strike her. Half paralysed after an illness, this old woman only had half of herself in this world while the other was already foreign to her (E, 15). She embraces illness and death, “un grand noir profond où elle plaçait tout son espoir”(E, 16) (“a vast deep blackness in which she placed all her hope”), as a means of gaining attention. When this increasingly dehumanized and baleful figure “who continued to exist behind his back” as he eats (E, 16), tries to retain hold of his hand, it is as if she seeks to drag him into her own vast and deep darkness. I suggest that this threat of being engulfed by death prompts his sudden feelings of violence, his ferocious hatred for this woman arousing the sudden wish to strike her (E, 17). This reaction recalls the “explosion of hatred against the body without a soul” in “Devant la Morte” (PC, 230). Certainly, violent death is central in La Mort Heureuse and L’Étranger, but I know of no instance in Camus’s writings where such violence, when directed towards other men, is accompanied by the 3
Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: an Essay on Abjection, Leon Roudiez (tr.) (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 3-4. 4 This essay incorporates the fourth of “Les Voix du quartier pauvre”, written in 1934.
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emotional outbursts of hatred or fear that are a feature not only in the above examples but, later, of Jacques Cormery’s confrontation with his grandmother in Le Premier Homme, when he is suddenly “mad with violence and rage”, intent upon striking her (PH, 252-53). In each of these cases violence is suppressed, but denotes another moment of liberation marking off the past from the future, and establishing a separate and independent identity. The title piece of this collection, “L’Envers et l’Endroit”, likewise underlines the affinity between women and death. Here, the narrator recalls the story of an old woman who, on inheriting a sum of money from her sister, buys herself a plot in the local cemetery which she prepares for her own use, and on which she has her name engraved. In a regular rehearsal for death she goes into the tomb and recognizes while doing so that she is already dead in the eyes of the world; this is later confirmed when visitors leave flowers on the empty tomb. Her life is a preparation for death in which her daughter finally colludes by dressing her for the funeral while still on her death-bed – before her limbs stiffen: “Mais c’est curieux tout de même comme nous vivons parmi des gens pressés” (E, 50) (“But it’s odd, all the same, how we live amongst people in a hurry”). The only discernible difference between this woman and a corpse is that she is still capable of movement. Death here is transmitted through the female line, via the sister’s legacy to her, and down to her daughter in the next generation. I have already noted that portraits of the mother consistently depict her as a dead consciousness, that place “where meaning collapses”,5 and that one fragment presents her as an actress only playing the role of a living woman (E, 1216). Another passage from “L’Ironie” (“Le Courage” in the youthful writings) picks up this theme of the woman as actress. Here, rather than simulating life, the grandmother is depicted as simulating death. She is another actress, whose subsequently fatal illness is initially treated by her family as one more example of her acting abilities. She had always feigned illness with ease, especially after family arguments, but also had a liver complaint that caused her to “infect life” in a very public fashion: Elle n’apportait aucune discrétion dans l’exercice de sa maladie. Loin de s’isoler, elle vomissait avec fracas dans le bidon d’ordures de la cuisine. (E, 21) She never showed any discretion in the exercise of her illness. Far from isolating herself, she would vomit noisily into the kitchen rubbish bin. (SEN, 36) 5
Powers of Horror, 2.
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Here, that space associated with the preparation and ingestion of food is contaminated by further associations with its physical expulsion.6 When she takes to her bed, although the doctor’s diagnoses become increasingly grave, the younger of the two children persists in the belief that this is only one more example of acting. Here, the viewpoints of the narrator and the child converge, resulting in a confusion of perspective when he declares that those who “play at” being ill sometimes experience it for real and that the grandmother carried her simulation to the point of death. Apparently, this woman is such a consummate actress that she can stage her own death, a final act that is once more accompanied by the emission of her internal physical corruption: Le dernier jour, assistée de ses enfants, elle se délivrait de ses fermentations d’intestin. Avec simplicité, elle s’adressa à son petit-fils: “Tu vois”, dit-elle, “je pète comme un petit cochon”. Elle mourut une heure après. (E, 21-22). On her last day, her children around her, she delivered herself of the fermentations in her intestines. With simplicity, she spoke to her grandson: “You see”, she said, “I’m farting like a little pig”. She died an hour later. (SEN, 36)
At her funeral the grandson cried, but with the fear of being insincere and of telling lies in the presence of the dead (E, 22). This emotion recalls the young man’s feeling of duplicity in “Devant la Morte”, exacerbated by the prospect of the funeral, when he will be expected to play the insincere role of a broken man (PC, 228-29). The burial scene has been regarded as having a key importance in Camus’s work, and it has been argued that here one sees the first evidence of an emotional inability to undergo a process of mourning, later discernible in other Camusian protagonists.7 It is not, however, the mourning but the dying that counts. In “L’Été à Alger” Camus speaks of a collective, matterof-fact attitude towards death revealed in the words “le pauvre, il ne chantera plus” (E, 73) (“the poor man, he won’t sing any more”). Le Premier Homme shows this to be a more polite version of the grandmother’s words: “il ne pétera plus” (PH, 153) (“he won’t fart any more”). This, I suggest, is the sentiment which, like a grim, secret irony rebounds on the grandmother in “L’Ironie”. The old bitch is 6
This association is echoed years later in Le Premier Homme with the uncle’s conviction that his plate smells (PH, 110). 7 See especially Arminda A. de Pichon-Rivière and Willy Baranger, “Répression du deuil et intensifications des mécanismes et des angoisses schizo-paranoïdes. (Notes sur L’Étranger de Camus)”, Revue française de psychanalyse 23 (3) (1959), 409-20; Costes, La parole manquante: Gassin, L’Univers symbolique.
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dead; her farting days are over and her infectious corruption will henceforth be confined to her own body, beneath the soil. The memory of her will be forgotten and her power in this life is at an end. Here is an exorcism without mourning, a cleansing that once more leaves the future purified “like the sky after rain”. That is surely the true connection to be made in the lines from which Costes derives his equation between Nature and the beloved Mother: “Le cimetière dominait la ville et on pouvait voir le beau soleil transparent tomber sur la baie tremblante de lumière” (E, 22) (“The cemetery dominated the town and one could see the fine, transparent sea trembling with light”).8 What is revealed by this very private joke – the satisfaction at her death and the wish for her death – is undermined by the haunting uncertainty as to whether she is really dead. If he is playing the role of grieving mourner, this performance fades in comparison to those of which Woman is capable. Woman, the dead consciousness, is also the first actress, the template for all dramatic roles. If she can act the roles of a living woman or a dead woman, who better to see through his own act? The word “liar” resonates through the childhood of Le Premier Homme, and the grandmother is the one who uncovers these lies, discovering the monster in her grandson. The grandson’s unease at the funeral concerns not her death, but his belief in her uncanny power to survive, simulating death. This scene is another horrifying example of woman as the walking dead. Moreover, it demonstrates not only the instability of the border between life and death but also the extent to which this cadaver continues to infect the living, as is demonstrated by the textual link between the words “she delivered herself” of her intestinal fermentations and the grandson’s inability to follow suit: he could not deliver himself of the idea that the last and “most monstrous” of this woman’s performances had been played out in front of him (E, 22).9 Her contaminating influence does not, after all, die with her, for he has inherited her talent for acting (lying) – as is revealed by the scene where he is asked whom he prefers, his mother or his grandmother (E, 20). This question, reserved for an audience, becomes worse for the child in the mother’s presence, when he names his grandmother while feeling an enormous love for his silent mother (E, 20-21). Verbal expressions of 8 9
La Parole manquante, 41. The verb in both cases is “se délivrer”.
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love are a lie; the one who professes this emotion is an actor, a liar. This is the grandmother’s legacy. When Lucienne of La Mort Heureuse accuses him of not loving her, Mersault’s response is disgust (MH, 162). Love is irrelevant, he proclaims to any woman who will listen. A childhood without love, where the mother is not a source of love; henceforth, the longest thing in the world will be to learn how to love. With Le Mythe comes a resolution of sorts, for Don Juan need never experience the self-doubt of the young man in “Devant la Morte”, nor the conflict of the young child before the grandmother. The inner division felt there is healed by the defiant assertion that love is an act; Don Juan speaks his lines in the full knowledge that they contain no truth and thus he coincides with himself; herein lies control, and the mark of his superiority. The ritualized funeral “game” repeated again and again in Camus’s early writings denotes no unfinished process of mourning but, once more, that first grim satisfaction at being finally rid of the woman, again and again. Kristeva speaks of the clean and proper body, which must bear no trace of its debt to nature, for these are the signs of mortality.10 Woman’s ability to reproduce and nurture human life places her already on a borderline between human and animal, life and death. Ingesting and expelling mortal life, the horror and disgust provoked by the female body is clearly to be read in Patrice Mersault’s reflection that: Ce qui le frappait dans l’amour c’était, pour la première fois au moins, l’intimité effroyable que la femme acceptait et le fait de recevoir en son ventre le ventre d’un inconnu. (MH, 59-60) What struck him about lovemaking was, for the first time at least, the terrible intimacy the woman accepted and the fact that she could receive part of a stranger’s body inside her own. (HD, 25)
A woman’s body is porous; its boundaries are not so clearly, nor so cleanly defined and her potential for promiscuity is inherent in this lack of physical integrity. The life she confers is indissociable from mortality; hers is an inner, physical corruption, an internal decomposition, for woman brings death into the world. This same physical corruption is evident in the illness of Mersault’s mother, her face deformed by terrible swellings, immobilized because of her swollen legs (MH, 39). 10
Powers of Horror, 102.
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Precisely because of her lack of physical integrity the woman threatens to contaminate as, for example, through her traditional associations with the preparation of food, and a number of these writings connect the horror of death with the consumption of food. The integrity of the body is compromised by the ingestion of pollutant foods which break down borders, allowing death to infiltrate the soul. From the young man unable to eat because of his awareness of the old woman behind his back, the grandmother ostentatiously vomiting in the kitchen, or the smell of pickled cucumber in La Mort Heureuse with its greasy-mouthed girls eating (MH, 99-103), the horror of death is intensified by the perceived porosity of the male onlooker’s own body. In “La Mort dans l’âme” when the narrator stares into the “endless abyss”, his actions reproduce those of the mother as he counts the cracks in the floor, stares “madly” at the door handle, his mind “empty” (E, 36). Death infiltrates; the child’s body will be forever “impregnated” by the maternal home with its cockroaches and “stinking” hallway (E, 25). I have noted associations between the maternal and the filth of life in the incident of the cannibalistic mother cat and her putrefying, halfeaten kitten. Just as there the narrator sits, his hands buried in urine and excrement, breathing in the smells of putrefaction (E, 28), so Mersault wishes to immerse himself in the mud of Silesia (MH, 116-17). But if he would declare his solidarity with life in its most filthy and abject squalor, it is not decomposition, putrefaction and disintegration he accepts; impenetrable, its boundaries clearly defined, the “pierre parmi les pierres” (MH, 204) (“stone amongst stones”) is on the other side of that border. Like Empedocles, his death will affirm his divinity; not a body without a soul but a soul without limits.
Lucidity The narrative voice of the final essay of L’Envers et l’endroit clearly indicates the overall lesson to be learned: Laissez donc ceux qui veulent tourner le dos au monde. Je ne me plains pas puisque je me regarde naître. À cette heure, tout mon royaume est de ce monde. (...) Ce n’est plus d’être heureux que je souhaite maintenant, mais seulement d’être conscient. (E, 49) Then leave those who wish to turn their backs upon the world. I do not feel sorry for myself since I can see myself coming to birth. At this moment my whole kingdom is of this world. (…) It is no longer happiness that I now wish for, but only awareness. (SEN, 64)
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Far greater than the contrast between youth and age in these essays is that between men and women, the significance of which is subsumed beneath the generic term “man”: “men” and the tombs they buy (E, 48); “un homme contemple et l’autre creuse son tombeau: comment les séparer?” (E, 49) (“one man contemplates and the other digs his grave: how can we separate them?”). Gender is the only means of separating them, for the only ones “in a hurry” to die (E, 50) are women, already half in the dark abyss. The old man of “L’Ironie” may not be deemed lucid, yet he is conscious of his fate and resists it. Men alone contemplate their death, and they alone have the potential for lucidity, which brings with it a new relationship with the surrounding world: Si j’essaie de m’atteindre, c’est tout au fond de cette lumière. Et si je tente de comprendre et de savourer cette délicate saveur qui livre le secret du monde, c’est moi-même que je trouve au fond de l’univers. (E, 48) If I try to reach myself, it is in the very depths of this light. And if I try to understand and savour this delicate taste which reveals the secret of the world, it is myself I find at the depth of the universe. (SEN, 63)
Despite the “lesson” that courage consists of keeping one’s eyes open equally to the light and to death (E, 49), the polarization of the envers and the endroit of life reveals a gulf in the text between men and women: the latter are associated with death and darkness while the former display at least the potential for lucidity. This allows a privileged access to the here and now, and to a natural world divested of its traditional associations with the feminine – for, in an echo of the Nietzschean eternal return, it is himself the narrator finds at the end of the universe and his own rebirth he witnesses (E, 49). Man is endowed with a potential for consciousness that sets him apart from the object world – a distinction elucidated by J. S. T. Garfitt, who notes of one of Jean Grenier’s essays entitled “Le Chat”, that for Grenier the cat represents “a metaphysical completeness, a coincidence with self and the world, which serves to emphasize his own incompleteness as a human being”. For the cat, mind and body are entirely at one, by contrast with the writer himself, who is “mutilated” – separated from himself because of his capacity for reasoning.11 This is the symbolic sense of the mutilated male bodies in which La Mort Heureuse abounds – from Zagreus himself to the one-armed fisher11
“Grenier and Camus: from Les Îles to La Chute”, in Forum for Modern Language Studies (17) (1981), 221.
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man, Perez, or the blind accordionist of Prague. Besides symbolizing their metaphysical condition (and, as I shall suggest later in this chapter, such mutilation or dismemberment has further mythological overtones), all are active in the world and their injuries are the result of such action. Women, on the other hand, are just as surely and irretrievably relegated to the animal state as is the cat. Hence, in La Mort heureuse the constant parallels between women and cats, as in the case of Rose in her “secret marriage” where woman and cat see the universe through the same eyes (MH, 142); or Lucienne, whose silence reduces her completely to her movements, “perfecting” her resemblance to cats (MH, 144). She perceived with her body what her mind could not understand (MH, 154). Despite the mystical resonances here, it is the superior quality of lucidity that allows man to confront his own death with open eyes. This distinction between an animal world that explicitly includes women and the human one, endowed with consciousness, is repeated in Le Mythe de Sisyphe: Si j’étais arbre parmi les arbres, chat parmi les animaux, cette vie aurait un sens ou plutôt ce problème n’en aurait point car je ferais partie de ce monde. Je serais ce monde auquel je m’oppose maintenant. (E, 136) If I were a tree among trees, a cat among animals, this life would have a meaning or rather this problem would not arise, for I should belong to this world. I should be this world to which I am now opposed. (MS, 51)
Lucienne’s lack of intelligence delights Mersault, who finds something divine in beauty without mind (MH, 144). Such incongruous juxtapositions are made elsewhere in the text, as in the description of Mersault’s ascetic life-style where he arrived at a “pure” state of life, rediscovering a paradise given only to animals of the least or the greatest intelligence (MH, 171). It is unlikely that he places himself in the former category. Such contrasts recall Spengler’s view of the feminine as the “cultureless history of the generation sequence, which never alters, but uniformly and stilly passes through the being of all animal and human species” and which is surely informed by Nietzsche’s Dionysian life force flowing through all creation and given individual form by the masculine Apollonian principle. By virtue of his lucidity man, the potential Artist-god, gives form and meaning to all creation.
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Death as an Act of the Will I noted in chapter 2 that a woman’s corpse is buried in Camus’s essay on the Absurd (E, 109). A variant of the text records: “Mieux vaut un chien vivant…”, cette pensée a du style. Comprendre qu’un être mort est bon à jeter aux ordures, se persuader que les souvenirs n’y feront rien, ce sont là de véritables progrès spirituels. (E, 1433) “Better a living dog…”, this thought has style. Understanding that a dead being is fit only to throw into the rubbish, persuading oneself that memories are no help, is true spiritual progress.
The quotation is taken from the Old Testament: A living dog is better than a dead lion. For the living know that they shall die: but the dead know not any thing, neither have they any more a reward; for the memory of them is forgotten. Also their love, and their hatred, and their envy, is now perished; neither have they any more a portion for ever in any thing that is done under the sun. (Ecclesiastes 9, 4-6)
Perhaps these lines were suppressed from Le Mythe because they suggest too close a connection between the living dog and the Absurd hero. In Noces the situation is reversed when a dead dog substitutes for the female cadaver, while the same dread of pollution is retained: Je me dis: je dois mourir, mais ceci ne veut rien dire, puisque je n’arrive pas à le croire et que je ne puis avoir que l’expérience de la mort des autres. J’ai vu des gens mourir. Surtout, j’ai vu des chiens mourir. C’est de les toucher qui me bouleversait. (E, 64) I say to myself: I am going to die, but this means nothing since I cannot manage to believe it and can experience only other people’s death. I have seen people die. Above all, I have seen dogs die. It was touching them that overwhelmed me. (SEN, 78-79)
Apart from “perfecting” women’s resemblance to dogs, when extended to Le Mythe this reverses the sense of Ecclesiastes, a transmutation where those living lions (the conqueror, Don Juan, the actor) are immeasurably better than both the dead dog and the dead woman. On one side of this divide lies consciousness, emotion, a present and future life: on the other side is the non-sentient, non-human, outside the course of time. As long as this border can be maintained (i.e. as long as men do not die), then, as in “Devant la Morte”, death itself is liberating, opening up new possibilities for the future, and new awarenesses. This is the trajectory of Le Mythe where, when death can be diverted onto the female body, man can profit from this experience through an awareness of his own more distant mortality which, uni-
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maginable, is endlessly deferred. The insistence that the ideal of the Absurd man is to live his life in a succession of present moments (E, 145) thus abolishes future mortality, but carries in its wake a gendering of death that promotes the impression of evasion rather than lucidity. The Fool of “Intuitions” asks whether living is not a sufficient revolt (PC, 182). As in Le Mythe, the response of Camus’s later work seems affirmative when even the instinctual action of eating is presented as a conscious decision in favour of life: “On choisit de durer dès l’instant qu’on ne se laisse pas mourir” (E, 865) (“You choose to stay alive the moment you do not allow yourself to die”). Death seems an act of cowardice or evasion, while living is transformed into an act of heroic revolt. In Le Mythe, by narrowing the range of possible responses to only three alternatives (suicide, faith, or lucidity) Camus prepares his reader for the heroic choice. Hence, the sight of the body without a soul prompts only two apparent courses of action: “Faudrat-il mourir volontairement, ou espérer malgré tout?” (E, 109) (“Must one die voluntarily or hope in spite of everything?”), as if there were a logical connection between the two. Given such unsatisfactory options, the only desirable recourse is the attitude of the Absurd hero who, despite the knowledge that he will one day die, engages in a “revolt” against death. The rejection of suicide, hope and despair all combine in Le Mythe to suggest that Camus’s proposed model, Absurd man, faces his inevitable fate without evasion. Yet, the emphasis on lucidity and awareness of the Absurd is in practice balanced by the focus on suicide rather than the universal inevitability of death (E, 101). The contrast here, based on a conscious attitude towards the question of whether life is worth living, is not between life and death, but between life and one relatively rare form of death, suicide, which (along with murder) is the only instance when death is under the control of the will. Thus, the fact of being alive may be elevated into a heroic choice – surely seductive to those readers who may discover in their own passive inaction a hitherto unsuspected heroism. If the men who hurry towards and embrace death are in practice women this does not, of course, mean that men do not die. Indeed, violent death occurs in “La Mort dans l’âme”. However, of “involuntary” death Camus writes that nothing is more despicable than illness, which is like a remedy against death:
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Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus Elle y prépare. Elle crée un apprentissage dont le premier stade est l’attendrissement sur soi-même. Elle appuie l’homme dans son grand effort qui est de se dérober à la certitude de mourir tout entier. (E, 64) It prepares us for it. It creates an apprenticeship whose first stage is self-pity. It supports man in his great effort to avoid the certainty that he will die completely. (SEN, 78)
This observation is amply illustrated by the old women of the early essays and La Mort heureuse. But neither is the lucid man immune from death; rather, he exerts control by the way he faces it. In The Twilight of the Idols Nietzsche wrote: The invalid is a parasite on society. In a certain state it is indecent to go on living. To vegetate on in cowardly dependence on physicians and medicaments after the meaning of life, the right to life, has been lost, ought to entail the profound contempt of society. 12
Over such an ignominious fate the recommendation is that the “conscious” man should freely choose the inevitable and die “proudly” when he can no longer live proudly. This is the course adopted by Mersault after his illness. Women are hardly so heroic in the manner of their going, and a number of early, unpublished writings describe the lingering death of a woman from diabetes. Mersault’s half-blind mother, with her bloated body, lingers on for ten years in this state (MH, 40), exhausting all the concern of her family and friends. Such “parasites of society” suck the life from those around them. Although the physical disability of such women is superficially comparable to that of Zagreus, the “half-man” of La Mort Heureuse, the contrast could not be greater between their states of mind. Although clinging on to life, he is nevertheless ashamed, admitting that even in his own eyes he cannot justify his existence – a sentiment with which Mersault readily agrees (MH, 69-70). By “sacrificing” Zagreus, Mersault rescues him from his ignoble condition, while in the manner of his own death he exemplifies how to remain lucid until the end. But, as for Nietzsche, this conscious death is strictly “une affaire entre hommes” (MH, 203) (“the business of men”).
A Homosocial Death The virile heroism of Le Mythe is foreshadowed in La Mort heureuse, except that here the tone verges on grandiosity. When Camus writes 12
Twilight of the Idols / The Anti-Christ, R.J. Hollingdale (tr.) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), “Expeditions of an Untimely Man” (36), 99.
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about conscious death in “Le Vent à Djémila” these reflections are not out of keeping with the general tone of the essay: C’est dans la mesure où je me sépare du monde que j’ai peur de la mort, dans la mesure où je m’attache au sort des hommes qui vivent, au lieu de contempler le ciel qui dure. Créer des morts conscientes, c’est diminuer la distance qui nous sépare du monde, et entrer sans joie dans l’accomplissement, conscient des images exaltantes d’un monde à jamais perdu. (E, 65) It is when I separate myself from the world that I fear death most, attaching myself to the fate of living men instead of contemplating the unchanging sky. Creating conscious deaths means lessening the distance which separates us from the world, and entering joylessly into fulfilment, alert to the exalting images which belong to a world forever lost. (SEN, 79; translation amended)
The antithesis to such contemplation is losing oneself in the fate of living men, and a return to the earlier conflicts of “Intuitions” with its dual aspiration towards divinity or fraternal solidarity. Yet, the attempted transposition of such ideas to a fictional format results in obscure and comically heroic allusions to this same unchanging sky, as when Mersault listens to the “strange” story of Zagreus “in front of the sky” (MH, 75). Amongst sketches for the novel Camus had outlined a wider project: “Œuvre philosophique: l’absurdité. Œuvre littéraire: force, amour et mort sous le signe de la conquête” (C1, 40) (“Philosophical work: absurdity. Literary work: force, love and death under the sign of conquest”), while announcing his intention to mix these two genres. In an entry on La Mort heureuse in January 1936 he was to recommend that as one thinks only in images, the would-be philosopher should write novels (C1, 23), an idea repeated two years later in his review of La Nausée where the novel is describe as philosophy in images (E, 1417). Such ambitions are reflected in La Mort Heureuse, whose obscurity can be dispelled only through recourse to Nietzsche.13 The commitment now is not to the interior world of emotions and “psychology” but to the external one of ideas and the “philosopher novelists”. Despite this emphasis on the intellect rather than the emotions, as he was writing La Mort heureuse in 1937 Camus noted his need at times to write things that partly escaped him, and which seemed beyond his control (C1, 60). The equivalence of women, first argued in 1933, assumes the uniqueness of the male observer. If, in his early 13 For an illuminating reading from this perspective, see Maurice Weyembergh, “Une lecture nietzschéenne de La Mort Heureuse”, in Paul F. Smets (ed.) Albert Camus, 3549.
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relationship with Simone, Camus had been chosen over his friend, Max-Pol Fouchet, his later discovery of his first wife’s infidelity taught him that he was himself interchangeable. In Salzburg in 1936 Camus opened a letter to his wife from one of her lovers, receiving what he described as one of the most painful blows of his life.14 His stay alone in Prague and the alienation he experienced there (recorded in La Mort Heureuse and “La Mort dans l’âme”) took place shortly after that, and it is clear that in its initial stages the theme of sexual jealousy was central. In 1937 Camus reiterates this theme when he refers to the novel as a story of sexual jealousy that leads to dépaysement, followed by a return to life (C1, 66). However, as Camus begins to give priority to ideas, the motive for murder is transferred onto an unrelated intellectual level. The barely distinguishable female characters have little reality beyond their symbolic function as ciphers or the embodiment of natural and mystical forces.The stance towards women is nevertheless crucial to the definition of the superior individual and Camus returns incessantly to the task of defining what this attitude should be. La Mort Heureuse begins this project on the level of the novel, and one of its major arguments is that happiness is not to be found in heterosexual love: on the contrary, the superior individual must transcend the emotional ties binding him to women. In order to realize his own divinity he must suppress those ties binding him to woman: lucidity must conquer biology. Women are put in their place from the outset. Marthe is presented as the instrument of Mersault’s self-esteem, a status symbol whose beauty elevates him in his own eyes. The admiration she inspires, with her “flower-like face” and “violent beauty”, is reflected onto him, and his ownership of her serves to aggrandize him in his own eyes (MH, 52). The fragility of such happiness is revealed, not on his discovery of her infidelity but merely because she acknowledges another man in the cinema. This innocuous gesture arouses a jealousy based not on the fear of losing her but on the fear of the other man’s reactions. His “panic” at what he might be thinking of him makes Mersault “crumble” inside and he forgets about Marthe, only the “pretext” for his joy (MH, 53-54). What Mersault discovers here is not his vulnerability to women, but to other men.
14
Albert Camus: une vie, 113.
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Simultaneously, the relationship with Marthe reveals the degree to which Mersault has been beguiled and immobilized by the self-image such relationships transmit. This has already been indicated with respect to Mersault’s mother when, after her death, we are told that when he thought sadly of her, he was really pitying himself (MH, 41); it is more explicit in Cardona’s grief over his own mother’s death, likewise self-referential and incapacitating; when Cardona spoke of “Poor Maman” it was himself he was pitying; when he said he loved her, Mersault translated this as “She loved me”; and “she’s dead” as “I’m alone” (MH, 87-88). Like Raymond of L’Étranger, Cardona is unable to move on, remaining instead frozen before this mirror. As if to demonstrate that by contrast, Mersault has broken free of this narcissistic trap and taken action in the world, this passage is followed by the bare statement that the next day he killed Zagreus. Thus begins a process of separation, or in Nietzschean terms, “individuation”, such as is suggested by the words cited earlier from “Le Vent à Djémila”: fear of death is heightened when the individual loses himself in the fate of living men, whereas the conscious death requires “lessening the distance” that separates him from the world, “entering joylessly into fulfilment, alert to the exalting images which belong to a world forever lost” (E, 65). Mersault’s cultivation of his superior potential is a long process only perfected towards the end of his life, when one mark of success is that he can finally think with equanimity that after he is dead Lucienne would give herself to the first man who put his arms round her (MH, 200). An important object of Mersault’s quest is not only to transcend his emotions, but to attain precisely the form of chaste sexuality achieved in L’Étranger – a sort of bodily hygiene that has no greater significance than any other physical function and where one woman is equivalent to the next. Chastity is what he seeks at the “Maison devant le Monde”, while he clearly regards his stay there as a temporary stage in his conquest of perfection: Comme d’autres ont besoin de solitude avant de prendre leurs grandes décisions et de jouer la partie essentielle d’une vie, lui, empoisonné de solitude et d’étrangeté, avait besoin de se retirer dans l’amitié et la confiance et de goûter une sécurité apparente avant de commencer son jeu. (MH, 120, my emphasis) As other men need to be alone before making their great decisions and playing the crucial match of their lives, he, poisoned by solitude and alienation, needed to withdraw into friendship and confidence and to enjoy an apparent security before beginning his game. (HD, 59)
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This initiation ritual involves a preliminary process of purification. Roger Dadoun has compared the “Maison devant le monde” to a harem centred around Mersault the demi-god,15 except that this Don Juan exerts the rule of chastity, sharing perhaps a similar pleasure in his power as does the narrator of Mélusine. This is the form of control Mersault seeks after his early crisis of jealousy, and the text affords him numerous opportunities to teach his women-friends that love is antithetical to happiness and to life. To Marthe he points out that love is only for impotent old age (MH, 62); to Catherine he explains that he is leaving because he would risk being loved, which would be an obstacle to his happiness (MH, 155);16 when Lucienne, like Marthe before her, asks whether he loves her, this gives him another opportunity for the didactic message that love is irrelevant (MH, 161-62). As these repetitions suggest, women erroneously equate love with happiness when all that really counts is the power of the individual Will: une sorte d’énorme conscience toujours présente. Le reste, femmes, œuvres d’art ou succès mondains, ne sont que prétextes. Un canevas qui attend nos broderies. (MH, 178) a kind of enormous, ever-present consciousness. The rest, women, art, success, are nothing but pretexts. A canvas awaiting our embroideries. (HD, 91)
If women achieve a form of immortality through integration into the object world (or Dionysian life force), this is not the apotheosis he seeks. The Artist-god as sculptor is derived from Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, and represents an active and divine (Apollonian) force shaping this world, creating form from the imperfect “clay” of humanity. As an artist, Mersault is his own creation: Comme un pain chaud qu’on presse et qu’on fatigue, il voulait seulement tenir sa vie entre ses mains. (…) Lécher sa vie comme un sucre d’orge, la former, l’aiguiser, l’aimer enfin. (MH, 124) Like warm dough being squeezed and kneaded, he wanted only to hold his life between his hands. (…) To lick his life like barley-sugar, to shape it, sharpen it, love it at last. (HD, 62)
15
“Albert Camus: fondations d’anarchie”, in Camus et la politique, Jean-Yves Guérin (ed.) (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1985), 257-65 (264). 16 Astonishingly, Geraldine Montgomery’s exuberance for the author leads her to the claim that this conversation incorporates a feminist statement addressed, via Mersault, to all women. See Noces pour femme seule, 121.
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Like the Fool of “Intuitions”, or Kirilov in Le Mythe, Mersault has a truth to impart to men, just as the artist, having lovingly created his work, feels the need to show it to other men (MH, 181); and like the actor of Le Mythe who “sculpts” his characters, of all the individual men Mersault had carried in him, “il savait maintenant lequel il avait été” (MH, 199-200) (“he knew now which one he had been”). The superior man embodies this potential for divinity whereas woman is only a passive conduit for the divine (Dionysian) principle flowing through all creation; hers is an unthinking, animal divinity (MH, 61). Lucienne, the painted goddess in whose eyes shine an animal stupidity (MH, 54), is of a kind with the dancer of Palma in “Amour de vivre”. Whereas a man’s beauty represents inner, functional truths that express what he can do, a woman’s face expresses only “magnificent uselessness” (MH, 52). Mersault’s project is directed towards unity with no maternal principle but with a masculine Apollonian force, shaping that primal Oneness of which Nietzsche speaks in The Birth of Tragedy. As the artist of his own life, Mersault gives birth to himself. This theme is underlined on the mythological level, which denies the biological role of women.
The Twice-born Man I mentioned that Camus’s reading of The Birth of Tragedy sheds light on the novel’s more obscure themes. There, Nietzsche outlines two metaphysical forces, the Appollonian and the Dionysian; under the Dionysian influence, which Nietzsche compares to intoxication, the individual forgets the Self to merge with the chaotic life force running through all creation. The coming of Spring, the drinking of intoxicants, were all associated with these bacchanalian rites throughout the ancient world. In the non-visual arts, as Camus noted in his youthful writings, this ecstatic experience is most closely related to that of listening to music. In La Mort heureuse the name Zagreus is a clear reference to the dismembered Dionysus of the ancient Eleusinian mysteries; he is the god who undergoes: the suffering of individuation, of whom the marvellous myths relate that he was dismembered by the Titans and that, in this condition, he is worshipped as Zagreus. This suggests that dismemberment, the true Dionysiac suffering, amounts to a transformation into air, water, earth, and fire, and that we should therefore see
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In this sense we might interpret Zagreus’s physical state as a “half man”. However, the argument of The Birth of Tragedy is that this chaotic Dionysian “torrent” needed to be tamed and given form precisely through that “individualizing principle” represented by Apollo, god of all the plastic arts – the chief amongst which is sculpture. For Nietzsche, Greek tragedy reached its most perfect stage only through the union of the Dionysian with the Apollonian. In the highest form of tragedy “Dionysus speaks the language of Apollo, but Apollo finally speaks the language of Dionysus”. In this melding of the two principles is “the supreme goal of tragedy and art in general” attained.18 On this level, then, Mersault’s sacrifice of Zagreus transcends the Dionysian through the affirmation of this Apollonian principle. Lucidity, that masculine quality, charts the pathway to the divine. Although initially this union is fleetingly compared by Nietzsche to the duality of the sexes,19 there is no question here of any union between “masculine” and “feminine”. Common to all the myths surrounding the Orphic Zagreus-Dionysus and Dionysus is that he is not of woman born. Zagreus-Dionysus was torn to pieces as a child and eaten by the Titans: only his heart remained, from which he was reconstituted. In other myths, the mother of Dionysus was killed before his birth, and the unborn child sewn into the thigh of Zeus, his father. Hence, he was known as the “twice born”.20 The god of wine and orgies, his savage female followers were known as the Maenads (“Madwomen”), who, on the orders of Dionysus, murdered their husbands and tore Orpheus limb from limb. If the twice-born Dionysus owed his birth to no woman, this rejection of the maternal role is further reinforced by Apollo, who famously argued in The Eumenides that: “The mother is not true parent of the child which is called hers. She is a nurse who tends the growth of young seed planted by its true parent, the male”.21 This judgement was upheld by Athena, herself born from the head of her father Zeus, and who declares that because 17
The Birth of Tragedy (10), 52. The Birth of Tragedy (21), 104. 19 Ibid. (1), 14. 20 See Robert Graves, The Greek Myths (2 vols) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), I, 56. 21 Aeschylus, The Oresteian Trilogy, tr. Phillip Vellacott (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), 657-60, 169. 18
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no mother gave her birth she supports the father’s claim “and male supremacy in all things”.22 The Oresteia overturned the ancient mother-right, in which the primary obligation was owed to the mother because of the biological bonds of blood. If the reborn Dionysus owed his birth entirely to the father, his suffering likewise becomes the source of life. Zeus reduced the Titans to ashes with his thunderbolt as they feasted on the body of the young Zagreus-Dionysus; from these ashes arose humankind. For Nietzsche: “From the smile of this Dionysus were born the Olympian gods, from his tears mankind”.23 Although (as one might expect from a first, abandoned novel) the themes of La Mort heureuse remain obscure, the form of transcendence Mersault achieves through his death is an affirmation of these masculine principles. In his Dionysian return to the truth of motionless worlds he embodies also that Apollonian principle of individuation as the “pierre parmi les pierres” (MH, 204) (“stone amongst stones”), thus asserting in all things the primacy of the male. Just as commentators have detected Christian overtones of sacrifice and resurrection in Caligula or L’Étranger, so the myth of Dionysus has been linked with early Christianity.24 But if Patrice Mersault is to become, in a second, perfected incarnation as the Meursault of L’Étranger, “le seul christ que nous méritions” (TRN, 1928-29) (“the only Christ we deserve”), then this is the son of no Christian God.
Absurd Man Camus was never again to refer to La Mort Heureuse after the novel’s abandonment. While continuing to assert in Le Mythe that great novelists are philosophers, he was to insist that this underlying philosophy should remain unexpressed: the “true” work of art is that which says “less” (E, 176). This withdrawal of the Self is illustrated in the dispassionate presentation of the Absurd hero in Le Mythe de Sisyphe; although the question of “donjuanisme” is often analysed in terms of Camus’s personal preoccupations, these do not intrude into the text. If resentment against women underlies “donjuanisme”, as a number of
22
Ibid., 172. The Birth of Tragedy (10), 52. 24 See, for example, Marcel Detienne, Dionysos Slain, Mireille Muellner, Leonard Muellner (trs) (Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press, 1979), 68-69. 23
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commentators suggest,25 then these emotional elements have been excised from the section on Don Juan. This increased control is certainly facilitated by the difference in genre, yet Camus’s first published work of fiction likewise achieves this goal of saying “less”. In both cases the status of women needs no longer to be demonstrated or argued but is assumed as a given. Marie is a further development of the women of La Mort heureuse. Like Marthe with “her face of flowers and smiles” (MH, 51), Marie with her “flower face” (TRN, 1148) and her constant smiles, shares these characteristics. An important difference between Marie and the women of La Mort Heureuse is that she is divested of sexuality. Although they sleep together on the first night, there are no descriptions of this physical experience. Their first sexual encounter is introduced very discreetly: “En sortant (du cinéma) elle est venu chez moi. Quand je me suis réveillé, Marie était partie” (TRN, 1139) (“On leaving (the cinema) she came to my place. When I woke up, Marie had left”). Marie appears passively to accept Meursault, for of her own sexual desires we know nothing. Indeed, we know so little about her motivations that many of the opinions expressed about her are dependent not on textual evidence but on assumptions about women in wider society. Patrick McCarthy may claim that “Marie’s strong sexuality contrasts with her silly romantic ideas about love” but as we do not know what prompts her questions about love and marriage we can characterize them neither as silly nor romantic. Neither would it be possible to find evidence for the interpretation that “by confusing sexual desire and love Marie is indulging in a false romanticism, which blinds her to her body and her situation as a working class woman” because here Meursault’s sexual desire is confused for Marie’s sexual availability – which may be completely divorced from desire.26 Such comments apply not to Marie but to a general stereotype concerning women. For no apparent reason, and only a matter of days after the beginning of their relationship, Marie is also concerned by the question of love: Elle m’a demandé si je l’aimais. Je lui ai répondu que cela ne voulait rien dire, mais qu’il me semblait que non. Elle a eu l’air triste. Mais en préparant le déjeu-
25 For example, Gay-Crosier finds the first cause of Don Juan in an unconscious wish for vengeance against the mother rather than the sexual partner, and as a response to the deprivation of maternal love (“Camus et le Donjuanisme”, 826). 26 Albert Camus: the Stranger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 83, 27.
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ner, et à propos de rien, elle a encore ri de telle façon que je l’ai embrassée. (TRN, 1151) She asked me if I loved her. I told her that it didn’t mean anything, but that I didn’t think so. She looked sad. But as we were getting lunch ready, and for no apparent reason, she laughed again, so I kissed her. (TO, 38)
Possibly serious discussions with Marie concerning both this and the question of marriage are resolved by her smiles, for Marie is as much “image” or surface as the women of the earlier novel in the sense that Meursault’s complete lack of curiosity about her means that the reader can glean very little about her life, her thoughts and her motivations. This one-dimensional status makes her unthreatening, as she has few opinions and desires that might conflict with those of the hero. Meursault has already reached the stage of detachment or indifference to which Patrice Mersault aspires. Towards the end of the novel, thinking of Marie for the first time, it occurs to him that she might be ill, or dead, which seems to him in the order of things; all that bound them together was physical proximity, and, once separated: “À partir de ce moment, d’ailleurs, le souvenir de Marie m’aurait été indifférent. Morte, elle ne m’intéressait plus” (TRN, 1206-207) (“From that point on, anyway, the memory of Marie would have meant nothing to me. Dead, she would no longer be of interest to me”). He has never been the victim of a crisis of jealousy such as that experienced by his predecessor. At Marie’s apparent attempt to make him jealous (or at least to arouse his curiosity about her life) he fails even to notice the invitation. Having openly expressed his admiration for the other women on the street, and having sought her agreement (to her own equivalence), Meursault wants Marie to stay with him. Although, when she says she has things to do, Meursault fails to show the slightest interest in this invitation to ask about her life, her reproachful look quickly changes to laughter (TRN, 1155-157) and possible disagreement is diverted. Meursault is here entirely unconscious of sexual jealousy – of either having aroused it in another, or feeling it himself. This is underlined at the end of the book when he asks what it matters that Marie might be kissing “a new Meursault” – a recognition likewise made by his predecessor, but only after the painful process of development charted in La Mort Heureuse. Discussions of marriage here avoid the didacticism of La Mort Heureuse while demonstrating more clearly the degree of control Meursault has in his relationships with women. He has no need to argue the unimportance of such questions as his predecessor had done,
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confining himself solely to responding to Marie’s questions. Moreover, his eventual consent to marriage underlines more surely its irrelevance. The reasons why Patrice Mersault marries Lucienne remain inexplicable, since she has expressed no such desire. When he decides to leave Algiers, asking her to remain behind but to put herself entirely at his beck and call, she accepts this arrangement. Despite her acquiescence, Mersault tells the apparently uninterested Lucienne that if she so wishes he will marry her. In the face of her apathy and his own declaration that such an action is pointless, he inexplicably does so a week later (MH, 154). In Le Mythe de Sisyphe and L’Étranger Camus presents an absurd hero who has been “depersonalized”, purified of the writer’s own subjective emotions. With respect to women this quest for depersonalization may be regarded as a form of exorcism through which the author attempts to deliver his fictional kingdom from the phantoms which haunt it: fear of rejection by a mother whose inner world is beyond his reach; her denial of love and the consequent view of himself as unworthy of love; fear of sexual rejection by a partner for whom his presence is perhaps superfluous; above all, the fear of being on the outside of a female world which exists independently and lies beyond his powers of explanation or control. These ghosts are eliminated through the excision of an autobiographical Self and replaced by an object world devoid of “psychology” where “I see equals I believe” (E, 59). The mystical associations between women and nature are toned down in L’Étranger, which stresses rather physical vitality in the depiction of Marie as brown-skinned, athletic and wholesome. Here, there is no mystery surrounding women, who are no longer the source of some secret. Rather, a woman’s external appearance is her only truth, an unthreatening “truth made of flesh”.27 Like the impersonality sought by Patrice Mersault (MH, 71), Camus’s search for depersonalization is a quest for invulnerability in a world where the intangible emotions have no place. Out of La Mort heureuse emerges an authorial voice apparently divested of the presence of the sexually threatening female character. In Le Mythe woman is unproblematically constructed as an object, while no ambiguities in this depiction subvert the presentation of the 27 Cf. “Je veux délivrer mon univers de ses fantômes et le peupler des vérités de chair dont je ne peux nier la présence” (E, 179) (“I want to deliver my universe of its phantoms and people it with truths of flesh and blood whose presence I cannot deny”).
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Absurd hero. In this essay, Camus uses the metaphor of water to describe the personality: Ce monde, je puis le toucher et je juge encore qu’il existe. Là s’arrête toute ma science, le reste est construction. Car si j’essaie de saisir ce moi dont je m’assure, si j’essaie de le définir et de le résumer, il n’est plus qu’une eau qui coule entre mes doigts. (E, 111) This world, I can touch it, and I likewise judge that it exists. There ends all my knowledge, the rest is construction. For if I try to seize this self of which I feel sure, if I try to define and to summarize it, it is nothing but water slipping through my fingers. (MS, 24)
This metaphor is employed in 1957 when he writes in the preface to L’Envers et l’Endroit that the work of art must use the dark forces of the soul – but not without channelling or creating a dam around them so that their levels rise (E, 12). If the portrait of Meursault’s relationship with Marie would appear to signify that Camus has successfully rid his fictional universe of the phantoms associated with women, the significance of the treatment of women in L’Étranger lies precisely in the channelling of these “obscure forces of the soul”.
Chapter 4 The Dark Continent of L’Étranger Comme les grandes œuvres les sentiments profonds signifient toujours plus qu’ils n’ont conscience de le dire. (TRN, 105) Like great works, deep feelings always mean more than they are conscious of saying. (MS, 17)
In his review of Sartre’s Le Mur in 1939 Camus expressed unease about the gratuitous use of sexual description (E, 1420),1 a complaint that could not be levelled at his own work. On the contrary, depictions of sexual behaviour are rare. Despite the preponderance of female characters in La Mort heureuse, references to sexuality are virtually non-existent: they are either expressed in generalisations, or confine women once more to the symbolic status of intermediary between man and nature. Exceptionally, in the depiction of European women there is no suggestion of this mystical dimension and description of the sexual act itself is restricted to the encounter with Helen (MH, 119-20), the European prostitute, where geography isolates her from the women of the South. Helen’s disinterested kiss is, both then and later, enigmatically described as pure (MH, 166). Jean Daniel has spoken of Camus’s attraction to brothels, where he would listen attentively to the conversation of prostitutes, saying that only they were honest.2 Presumably, this honesty relates to the fact that they at least have no pretensions. The sexual act is a transaction and all women engage in this with ulterior motives (whether for love, marriage, or money). Throughout his life Camus was to compare cities, landscapes and countries with women. Above all, he is increasingly to equate the land of his birth with his own mother, a further ingredient in the equation made between Algeria and innocence.3 “Être pur, c’est retrouver cette patrie de l’âme où devient sensible la parenté du monde” (E, 75) (“Be1
Cf. his condemnation of the sexual crudity in some modern novels (E, 1136). Parts of this and chapter 3 were first published as “The Dark Continent of Camus’s L’Étranger”, French Studies, 55 (1) (2001), 59-73. 2 “Imagine Camus Happy”, BBC Radio 3, n.d. 3 See Jean Grenier, Albert Camus: Souvenirs, 181.
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ing pure means rediscovering that homeland of the soul where one becomes sensitive to one’s kinship with the world”) writes Camus in “L’Été à Alger”, where the purity of sexual desire is certainly associated with Algeria. In commercial Europe (C3, 329), by contrast, sexual relations become a form of commodity transaction. As far as women are concerned, a topography of sexuality can begin to be traced over this spiritual landscape, in conformity with this EuropeSouth opposition. As I have argued, the woman of French Algeria, purified of sexuality, occupies a significant role as the biological source of the new culture and guardian of the generations. The European peoples of the Mediterranean are all from the same “family” (E, 1322), and this model governs relationships at “la Maison devant le Monde”, resting as it does on the simultaneously paternal and sibling nature of relationships there. Alluding to the above quotation from Noces Jean Sarocchi writes instead that “être pur, c’est retrouver cette patrie de l’âme où devient sensible la parenté du sang” (“being pure means rediscovering that homeland of the soul where one becomes sensitive to the kinship of the blood”) in a suggestive misreading4 – for Algeria constitutes here a spiritual landscape based on the bonds of blood. The form of chaste sexuality spoken of earlier is, I suggest, intimately bound up with notions of racial purity and cultural priority, because the women of Noces and “La Maison devant le monde” are French Algerian, equally unmarked by the stigmas of race and carnal sexuality. I have spoken of the ambiguous mixture of assimilation and competition with respect to indigenous identity in Noces. The brown skin of Marie in L’Étranger is the mark of such authenticity, in contrast to the white skin of Raymond and the people of Paris. But this form of authenticity, as I have pointed out, does not signify the racial mixture for which Audisio hoped. In a reversal of Homi Bhabha’s comments on the colonial subject, authenticity requires that this colonizing population must be “almost the same, but not quite”.5 In my examination of the treatment of women in L’Étranger I will focus on this opposition between purity and sexual pollution as it operates through the distinctions between French Algerian women (Marie and Meursault’s dead mother) and the sexualized woman of 4
Camus (Paris: PUF, 1968), 48. “Of Mimicry and Man: the Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse” in Modern Literary Theory: A Reader, Philip Rice and Patricia Waugh (eds) (Edward Arnold: London, 1992), 234-241 (235). This article was first published in October (28) (Spring 1984).
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race, Raymond’s mistress. The presence of these figures recalls “La Maison mauresque”, where I hypothesized that the ambivalent turn to the mother there follows the perceived hostility and resistance of the colonized population. The mother symbolizes birthright, authenticating subsequent claims to ownership of the Algerian soil and sky. Accordingly, the maternal symbol necessarily represents a “pure origin”. Yet, questions of pollution through biological inheritance already surface in that text. In L’Étranger this conflict finds a partial resolution through the suppression of the actual mother at the beginning of the book. Nevertheless, her trace remains, and I propose to show that in L’Étranger these same issues of biology subvert the overt purity of the maternal stereotype, underlining the fact that via female sexuality all women are “sisters beneath the skin”. The discourse of masculinity in L’Étranger and “L’Été à Alger”, with its emphasis on “being a man” (E, 72), is presented as a distinctive feature of Camus’s new Mediterranean culture. This particular brand of masculinity, whose chief characteristic lay in its machismo, was common to all the races and, as Jacques Berque points out, when transplanted to the French metropolis, young students of both communities were united by inflated estimations of masculinity and sexuality that distinguished them from their metropolitan counterparts.6 But if masculinity represents a shared “taste for life” (E, 1322) casually applied to all, then the realities of cultural difference undercut superficial similarities, for male sexuality was an arena where both patriarchal and colonial conflicts were expressed.
Virility Germaine Tillion also remarks on this excessive valorisation of virility, prevalent throughout Southern Europe and North Africa; the blood feud, which compelled male relatives to murder in revenge for dishonour, was indissociable from a “scenario of female infidelity”. The strict segregation of the sexes in the Muslim community led not only to a universal (if silent) acceptance of prostitution, but to what she calls a sexual obsession on the part of men, who made advances to any woman if the opportunity arose.7 According to Fadela M’Rabet, in the eyes of Arab men there are only three types of women: sisters, wives and prostitutes. The relative freedom of European women made them 6 7
Le Maghreb entre deux guerres, 338-39. Le Harem et les cousins (Paris: Seuil, 1966), 117-19
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seem an easy and available prey, and M’Rabet suggests that they were coveted either as a sign of personal status, or for a form of sexual revenge.8 For their part, European men found the absence of Algerian women a source of humiliation: the domestic and religious lives of the indigenous population were taboo for the settlers. For Pierre Nora, the absence of women was a source of heated fantasy, as his own remarks illustrate: La femme musulmane se dérobe derrière son voile, mais elle n’en attire que davantage. Sa réputation de docilité amoureuse est d’autant plus énervante que toute idée de conquête militaire et de rapports féodaux s’accompagne du traditionnel espoir de cuissage, rendu plus séduisant par un exotisme oriental qui (…) se nourrit encore du mirage d’un Orient lointain, des images de harem et de mille et une nuits. Et quel homme ne serait pas jaloux d’une société polygame?9 The Muslim woman hides behind her veil, but is all the more attractive. Her reputation for sexual submissiveness is more especially frustrating, as every idea of military conquest and feudal relations is accompanied by the traditional expectation of the droit du seigneur, made all the more seductive by an exoticism which (…) is nourished by the mirage of a faraway Orient, images of the harem and the 1001 nights. And what man would not be jealous of a polygamous society?
As to this, I cannot say, but such issues have persistently held sway over the male imagination. Malek Alloula records fantasies of the harem in the postcards sent from Algeria to France, depicting Algerian women in the first half of the century.10 As Carol Shloss notes, Alloula’s reaction seems provoked more by the perceived dishonour to Algerian men than concern for the women themselves, whose recirculated and re-exposed images leave them “still silent, newly imprisoned by the very text that purports to liberate them”.11 I have suggested that Camus’s dream of the new Mediterranean race of men ignores the realities of the colonial situation. Not only were mixed marriages extremely rare, but during the 1930s the separation between the races widened as the rich colons left the land for the suburbs and the Europeans left the inner cities. The influx of the indigenous population into the towns as a result of increasing poverty began to threaten traditional patriarchal relations as men began to lose control of “their” women. In the face of cultural disapproval, women
8
La Femme algérienne (Paris: Maspero, 1965). Les Français d’Algérie (Paris: Julliard, 1961), 175. 10 Le Harem colonial: images d’un sous-érotisme (Paris: Slatkine, 1981). 11 “Algeria conquered by postcard”, New York Times (January 1987). 9
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sought the only employment they could find as maids (fatmas).12 At this same time, Muslim men, in the face of their treatment in the wider society, were turning to their family as a last refuge and source of selfesteem.13 It was not only as a result of economic forces that the traditional patriarchal system of indigenous males was being threatened, for on the political level the long-term aims of France were a consideration. Algeria was unique amongst the French colonies in North Africa because it was officially defined as an extension of the French mainland, and it became three departments of France. As Kenneth Jan Dorph points out, this French assimilation of Algerian territory created a contradiction, particularly with regard to the status of women. It had been French policy to respect the “private” customs of its conquered territories, customs which generally referred to religious beliefs. This division between public and private essentially concerns gender relations, given the relegation of women to the family sphere. Hence, Article 1 of the Senatus Consulte in 1865 makes specific reference to the traditional status of women: “the practice of the Muhammedan religion will remain free... and... their women will be respected”. The status of women in nineteenth century France was in many ways comparable to that of Algerian women; even polygamy, alien to the French legal system, had some similarities with concubinage. However, as French women were to gain more rights over the course of the twentieth century, including in 1945 the right to vote (Algerian women first voted in 1958), this political contradiction was to become ever more apparent. In 1931 the Algerian Court of Appeals overturned some elements of the formerly inviolate personal law, such as the marriage of Muslim women to non-Muslim men, and reforms in the laws governing marriage and divorce were encouraged.14 After the liberation of Algeria from French rule these were among the first reforms to be overturned. Hence, a major cause of conflict in the context of colonialism (and the looming war of independence) concerns the status of women and the patriarchal power of men. The symbol of the veiled woman was rapidly becoming one of the few re12
Alf Heggoy, “Cultural Disrespect: European and Algerian Views on Women in Colonial and Independent Algeria”, Muslim World, 62 (October 1972), 321-35 (32930). 13 Ibid., 330; Le Maghreb entre deux guerres, 339. 14 “Islamic Law in Contemporary North Africa: A Study of the Laws of Divorce in the Maghreb”, Women’s Studies International Forum, 5 (2) (1982), 169-82 (170-71, 172).
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maining sources of power for the Muslim man.15 It must be acknowledged that in reality indigenous Algerian women were neither a homogeneous group nor the passive victims of a conflict between two sets of patriarchal interests. Indeed, many took advantage of the new laws passed by the French to ameliorate their situation. Yet (as with the imagery of the harem), the discourse of both sides in this struggle has clear ideological and political overtones which entirely discount the interests of women themselves. In a different context, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak speaks of “woman as the ideologically excluded other” and she comments that “if the ‘she’ is seriously introduced” into a discussion, then the shape of the general argument might change.16 I have attempted to illustrate this point in chapter 3; in this instance, there can be little doubt of the degree to which Algerian women and their interests have been ideologically excluded in arguments over the veil and its symbolism. As Pierre Nora’s comments illustrate, men’s preoccupations with the supposed fantasies of other men seem often highly charged with a combination of moral outrage and vicarious pleasure. In the course of the colonial conflict, the writings of Franz Fanon reveal the importance this “woman” had assumed, and he relates the colonization of Algeria to the symbol of Algeria “unveiled” without any apparent recognition of the all-tooclear subtext concerning control over women. Fanon records that the “battle over the veil” began in the 1930s with the attempt to change the status of women and win them over to French values. Still in 1959, he writes, the dream of a “total domestication” of Algerian society with the help of unveiled women “complicit” with the occupier, continues to haunt the makers of colonial policy (but not, apparently, its most vocal male subjects).17 It is not only in Orientalist discourse that Algeria is equated with the Algerian woman.18 Western “penetration” into this sphere is, in this view, like a castration of the indigenous male: each veil thrown aside uncovers horizons hitherto forbidden to the colonizers and shows them, piece by piece, Algerian “flesh” laid bare. In stark opposition to his over15
Le Maghreb entre deux guerres, 400. “The Politics of Interpretations”, in In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (London: Methuen, 1987), 118-33 (129). 17 “L’Algérie se dévoile”, in Sociologie d’une révolution (l’an V de la révolution algérienne) (Paris: Maspero, 1968), 20. 18 Assia Djebar powerfully makes this point in her “Regard interdit, son coupé”, in Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement (Paris: des femmes, 1980). 16
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heated fantasy of a colonial strip-tease, Fanon contends that the indigenous man does not “see” the veiled woman,19 an assertion flatly denied in the writings of Djebar. Thus, while uncovering at length the supposed sexual fantasies of the European male when faced with the veil, he passes over in silence the attitude of the indigenous male. Heggoy, on the other hand, notes that unaccompanied women of all races are likely to be approached in the streets, but that European women in particular were accosted.20 (His view of such behaviour as a “normal, simple impulse” is one Camus himself shared. It will be remembered that he normalises this form of sexual harassment in La Mort heureuse, while he noted the difference between the U.S. and his own culture in terms of this “Mediterranean trait” while lecturing to an audience in America.21) Berque also notes that for Algerian men, the European woman (equally forbidden and unknown to them as was the Algerian woman for Europeans) seemed to encapsulate all that colonialism had destroyed.22 Exacerbated by the increased separation of the races and reports of syphilis among the Muslim population, a new trend became noticeable in the 1930s which became more explicit after independence: “This was the attempt by many Algerian men to gain revenge for their hurt pride” and they felt it proper “to conquer the denied yet despised object, the European woman”.23 Although certain cultural activities such as football brought men together in an apparent social harmony, Daniel Leconte records an atmosphere of violence underlying all European-Arab relations: La vie est menacée mais l’honneur l’est aussi, car ce “barbare” qui voile ses femmes n’hésite pas à courtiser celles des autres. Les regarder même constitue souvent pour l’Européen une agression.24 Life is threatened, but honour is as well, for this “barbarian” who veils his women does not hesitate to court those of others. For the European man, even looking at them often constitutes an aggression.
19
“L’Algérie se dévoile”, 24, 26. “Cultural Disrespect”, 332. 21 Lottman records that during a question and answer session at Columbia “Camus said that he had visited several European capitals where men would stare at women on the streets, but it didn’t seem to happen in New York and he wanted to know why. The question was greeted by embarrassed silence” (Albert Camus: a biography, 383). 22 Le Maghreb entre deux guerres, 342. 23 “Cultural Disrespect”, 332. 24 Les Pieds-Noirs: histoire et portrait d’une communauté, 161-62. 20
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Calls for independence, first voiced in Algiers around 1930, are integrally bound up with this battle for power over women, a significant source of antagonism throughout colonial rule. In La Mort heureuse the women of the North are associated with money, while those of the Mediterranean constitute earth’s bounty. Set mainly in Algeria, this novel effaces colonialism so completely that, apart from one reference to a maid (MH, 137), the indigenous female population is not represented at all. However, given the covert references to Arab women in “La Maison mauresque”, it seems that the Arab woman also has her price. Camus must have known of the status of Algiers at the turn of the century as a centre for the sex trade, much of which was concentrated in the Casbah. Berque notes that each town had its special district, set aside for the purpose, and to which peasant women flocked in defiance of convention. A form of segregation operated even in the brothels of the Maghreb between Muslim women and Jews or Europeans, as it was not unknown for the prostitute to refuse foreigners. However, increasing poverty provoked a rise in the repudiation of wives and the sale of daughters, leading to the breakdown of these conventions as prostitution spread.25 The association between Raymond and an Arab woman appears highly unusual, nevertheless. She is introduced in the context of money, the root cause of Raymond’s conviction that she has cheated him. Thus the suppressed theme of sexual jealousy resurfaces, diverted onto a minor character, in a sordid context more reminiscent of “commercial” Europe than of bountiful Algeria. The Arab woman conforms to a racial stereotype of the times, yet one which has been reduced to a squalid reality far removed from any fantasy of the harem.
Inserting L’Étranger into the Century Pourquoi diable aller chercher dans le siècle ce qui, en critique littéraire, se trouve dans les textes?26 Why the devil go looking into the century for what, as literary criticism, is to be found in the texts?
In the decades since its first publication, L’Étranger has been exhaustively analysed, often without saying anything new – which is perhaps 25
Le Maghreb entre deux guerres, 304-05, 340. Alain Costes, “Le double meurtre de Meursault”, in Albert Camus: Œuvre fermée, œuvre ouverte? 55-76 (66).
26
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understandable given the wealth of attention it has aroused. One factor that has encouraged a diversity of explanations is, as Alec Hargreaves suggests, bound up with the post-war process of decolonization: “From their different positions in time and space, Camus’s readers have inevitably approached L’Étranger with markedly contrasting horizons of expectations”.27 It is not surprising, then, that issues of colonialism and race have most starkly demonstrated the impact of a changing readership whose concerns reflect wider social changes over time. Nor should it be the cause for surprise that this has caused some tension with those who would preserve their idea of a “pure” literary criticism, immune from wider concerns. By contrast, differences between men and woman are conceived of as natural and perennial, and hence more easy to overlook. Hence the Freudian critic Alain Costes can question the validity of looking towards the “century” as opposed to a hermetically sealed literary criticism while at the same time inserting through his analyses one of the most powerful social theories of the twentieth century which, although itself bearing the marks of its own class and cultural origin, universalises relationships between women and men for all time. The publication of L’Étranger in the years leading up to Algeria’s war of independence focused attention on other social contradictions it seemed to embody. The virtually non-existent Algerian readership of the early 1940s is not that of the 1960s onwards, and once these new reading communities were established, along with a greater political awareness on the French mainland, attention was focused on the book’s central event – the murder of and Arab – in a way that has not always been welcomed by established critics.28 What is of interest here, it seems to me, is not whether it is possible to “convict” Camus of the charge of racism (or, indeed, of misogyny), but precisely this tension between a critical establishment which was, in part, based on a personal admiration for the writer himself, and conflicting interpretations which have more interest at times in making political points. The interpretation of L’Étranger was for a long time shaped by Sartre’s 1943 “Explication de l’Étranger”, where Le Mythe de Sisyphe 27
“History and Ethnicity in the reception of L’Étranger”, in Adèle King (ed.), Camus’s L’Étranger: Fifty Years On, 101-12 (102). 28 Reactions to Conor Cruise O’Brien’s book, Camus (London: Fontana, 1970), are particularly instructive. See, for example, André Abbou’s review, “D’un mirage l’autre, ou les pièges de la critique symptomale” in AC 5 (1972), 179-87: Jean Gassin, “Camus Raciste?” in AC 5 (1972), 275-78.
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is viewed as the commentary on the novel, one being seen as the experience of the Absurd and the other as its philosophical justification.29 Only towards the end of the 1950s did commentators begin to break away from this influence, which has nevertheless remained strong. Additionally, Camus was himself anxious to correct early (and in his view, erroneous) interpretations of his central character. Hence, in his avant propos to the 1955 American edition of the book, his famous assertions that Meursault, the only Christ we deserve, refuses to lie and dies because of his passion for the truth (TRN, 1928-29). Such repeated interventions are perceived by Philip Thody in 1961 as a source of conflict for literary criticism per se.30 This conflict becomes even more urgent in the late 1970s as Thody considers the growing rift between the author’s publicised intentions and certain segments of his readership. It was not until 1961, he comments, that “any critic suggested in print that Camus’s L’Étranger could be read as a ‘racialist’ novel”. Conor Cruise O’Brien’s book is “one of the best examples of the way in which a work of art can, with the passage of time, take on a meaning which is completely different from the proclaimed intentions of its author”.31 Despite his earlier comments, Thody appears to marshall in defence of Camus a mixture of authorial intention (Meursault is a martyr to the truth, who is not executed for shooting an Arab but for his failure to cry at his mother’s funeral), the reader’s identification with Meursault (with whom “we” sympathise) and Camus’s own political credentials (he was the first French writer “seriously to concern himself with the Algeria problem”). Such preliminary remarks soften the disturbing recognition that: (T)he racialist undertones of L’Étranger become so easy to detect that one wonders why critics should have taken so long to point them out. (...) For what actually happens in L’Étranger, when seen from the standpoint of the Arabs, is a peculiarly unpleasant example of both racialist and sexual exploitation.32
Such ambivalence is subsequently resolved by the call to another authority: “I have yet to find any recognised scholar of Camus’s work who is prepared to give (the charge of racialism) any serious consideration whatsoever”.33 It appears that Thody recognised an aspect of 29
“Explication de l’Étranger”, Situations I (Paris: NRF Gallimard, 1947), 100. “Meursault et la critique”, in Albert Camus: Configuration critique 5 (Paris: Revue des Lettres Modernes, 1961), 11-23. 31 “Camus’s L’Étranger revisited”, Critical Quarterly 21(2) (1979), 61-69 (61). 32 Ibid, 62. 33 Ibid., 65. 30
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the novel that he found difficult to confront, in part because of the pressures of recognised scholarship.34 The integrity of this critic is not in question, and it is for this reason that I cite this example as an illustration of how the weight of a prevailing orthodoxy may stifle continuing debate. Although today, even in Camusian circles, it would be impossible not to associate Camus’s prose fiction with colonialism, much of this debate has taken place outside of these circles. What rarely varies in such discussions, on the other hand, is a continuing ideological exclusion of women. I have pointed out in this chapter the degree to which women themselves have been discounted in arguments over the veil. Spivak further identifies as a mark of ideology at work “excluding or appropriating a homogeneous woman”,35 a procedure which consistently recurs in Camus’s works and their interpretations. With respect to the dead mother in L’Étranger, it is precisely her exclusion as a living being that allows her appropriation as a symbol. By resituating women in the social context from which Camus’s female characters are drawn, I have tried to show that this dimension is far less negligible than is often supposed. The depiction of the Algerian mistress reflects discourses about indigenous women while simultaneously indicating a highly charged political dimension hidden in the novel. This is easy to overlook precisely because it is rooted in the sexual and racial stereotype. If the racial stereotype has since acquired political significance, the same cannot be said of the sexual stereotype in Camusian studies, and critical assumptions about the Algerian mistress are de-politicised once these stereotypes converge in this figure. The power of the stereotype lies precisely in the fact that it relies on shared social prejudices and beliefs. Unchallenged assumptions about women continue to permeate the secondary literature, and to shore up the supposition that the female figures in Camus’s works are of importance solely with regard to a personal and emotional (a-political and non-intellectual) dimension. As my concern is with the treatment of women in this work, I propose to examine the female character most often overlooked and yet who functions, I suggest, as the touchstone for all the others in the book; Raymond’s mistress functions not only as a foil, conferring pu34 Cf. Louise K. Horowitz, “Of Women and Arabs: Sexual and Racial Polarization in Camus”, Modern Language Studies 17 (3) (1987), 54-61. 35 “The Politics of Interpretations”, 120.
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rity upon Marie and the dead mother, but her presence also reveals an underlying connection between all women that undermines their representation as pure. The recognition of her importance in L’Étranger partly entails “searching into the century”, as I have done, in order to restore the sexual, social and political dimensions of the novel. As I have argued, not only was the Muslim woman a major preoccupation of both communities at this time, but she above all symbolised the brewing conflict. Although attention has focused on the murder of the Arab, the likelihood is that the sister herself was the first ingredient in the book. It is well-known that for a time work on La Mort heureuse overlaps with writings which eventually went into L’Étranger, and that some scenes from the abandoned novel were re-used. From the evidence of the Carnets the first two pieces independent of La Mort heureuse to be textually incorporated into L’Étranger are as follows. In May, 1938, the first fragment concerning the old woman in the home appears, along with the Arab nurse and the old man (here a gravedigger) who is to become Thomas Pérez. This is followed by notes for “L’Été à Alger”, and between August and December, 1938, three scenes entitled “Belcourt”, the third of which concerns the “histoire de R.” (C1, 12223). This outlines the story that will go into L’Étranger, incorporating details about money, his ill-treatment of the woman, and many of Raymond’s own words, along with the comment that Raymond is a “tragic” character because of his wish to humiliate her (C1, 123). The last sentence of this section is “c’est une Arabe”. The final positioning of this short sentence throws the entire emphasis on her race, and serves as a comment on what has gone before. Given the context of the scene (life in Belcourt, extracts not unlike “Les Voix du quartier pauvre”) and the period during which it was written (when Camus was working on Noces) it seems highly likely that this insertion of an Arab woman serves a dual purpose: importantly, it demonstrates that Raymond is not racist, as it is the anonymous narrator and not he who draws attention to this.36 The choice of an Arab as the victim in L’Étranger has been the cause of much debate, and explanations range from the need for a “forgettable” murder, to the hypothesis that in choosing the Arab, Camus was revealing his own repressed desire to eradicate the indigenous population from the face of the country. This 36
In Le Premier Homme Camus again depicts brawls between Arabs and Europeans as not motivated by racial hostilities, despite the belief of Arab bystanders (PH, 258).
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entire incident appears consciously selected in order precisely to demonstrate that race was not a factor in this particular conflict. Apart from speculations about the substitution of the term “mauresque”, there is no indication of racial motive on the part of Raymond or Meursault in the initial plan to punish Raymond’s mistress. Far from demonstrating an inexplicable insensitivity to the implications of his plot, at a time when he himself had been involved in reporting on the famine in Kabylia, it would seem plausible to suggest that Camus was here concerned to show through the medium of fiction that the average French Algerian man in the street was not implicated in the oppression of the colonized population. A second purpose served by the insertion of the Arab woman is that it again takes up the preoccupation with the story of sexual jealousy from La Mort heureuse. The incident concerning the Arab woman becomes isolated from her race, serving as a cautionary tale about the dangers of placing too much emphasis on one woman alone: had Raymond adopted a more “lucid” view, such as that espoused by Meursault in his association with Marie, then he would not have been trapped in this obsessive relationship, with the consequences that ensue. On the surface, then, her race is not a factor. Yet the combination of sexuality and race here suggests a dangerous sexuality which again contrasts with the domesticated form displayed in the character of Marie. As I have earlier noted, the scenario depicted is central to actual hostilities between the French Algerian and the Arab male population, which concern both colonial and patriarchal power. Thody’s pinpointing of “racial and sexual exploitation” in 1979 was preceded in 1961 by the recognition that Meursault, this “martyr to the truth”, lies not to save a “mate” but to facilitate the persecution of an indigenous woman who “might well be innocent”.37 In 1946, Cyril Connolly’s introduction to the first English edition of L’Étranger raises the “failure of sensibility on the part of Camus that the other sufferer in his story, the Moorish girl whose lover beats her up and whose brother is killed when trying to avenge her, is totally forgotten”.38 As consensus develops about the meaning of the book, she takes her place as a minor character in a story that raises larger issues. In the main, she remains totally forgotten, “political” or “per37
“Meursault et la critique”, 15. Introduction to the first English edition of The Outsider (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1946), 10 (my emphasis). 38
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sonal” interpretations having overshadowed her. When circumstance dictates she, along with other minor female characters, may be exhibited to sustain differing interpretations. Thus, Jan Rigaud uses this character to defend Camus from charges of racism. With no textual evidence to support his claim, he remarks that Raymond was disliked not because his mistress was an Arab but because he was a pimp. “More significant(ly)”, he argues, she is protected by both the French Algerian community and by French law: Regardless of the victim’s racial background, justice for Camus must prevail for all and should know no boundary. While a maudlin woman, who could have been charged with prostitution, is let go, a baffled Raymond is ordered to appear at police headquarters.39
I cite this curious comment because it demonstrates how defending the “good name” of the author has so often conflicted with the interests of literary criticism per se. On a more general level, unexamined social stereotypes allow this same critic to categorise her treatment as a “personal and domestic conflict”40 and hence by a mysterious process isolated from the social and political dimension. Patrick McCarthy likewise makes this arbitrary distinction, while reversing Rigaud’s conclusion. He comments that as we do not at first know the race of the mistress we interpret the fight as an issue of control over women. The discovery of her race then invites us to re-read the previous pages and to re-interpret them in terms of colonial politics.41 Thus McCarthy conflates two distinct forms of oppression into the presumably more important political one. In Alain Costes’s attempt to exonerate Camus of charges of racism, he confronts the question of why the victim of the murder is an Arab, and why Meursault “kills” him twice. He finds in Camus’s earlier works nine versions of the inability to mourn the death of a mother, and six versions of a sadistic brother who forbids his sister to see the man of her choice. In L’Étranger, he suggests, this brother becomes an Arab who strictly supervises his sister.42 Noting that Arab women are even rarer in Camus’s works than Arab men, Costes draws attention to the 1933 text, “La Maison mauresque”. Here, what he alights 39
“The Depiction of Arabs in L’Étranger”, in Camus’s L’Étranger: Fifty Years On, 183-92 (187). Raymond is close here to being viewed as the tragic figure suggested in the Carnets. 40 “The Depiction of Arabs in L’Étranger”, 188. 41 Albert Camus, The Stranger, 48. 42 “Le Double meurtre de Meursault”, 57-62, 64.
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on is not the evocation of the very Arab woman whose absence he has noted, nor the frame of reference of the Casbah, city of prostitutes, which a “search” into the century might reveal, but the colour blue (which is linked with Arabs). Costes’s interpretation of the murder43 paints the woman as flighty and promiscuous, her brother as a powerful overseer who wishes to control his sister’s amorous adventures.44 However, this brother, if he is so fiercely possessive of his sister, must also be a miserable failure in this respect as she is already linked with Raymond: if he is protecting her honour then he is, to say the least, a little slow. Moreover, this analysis entirely effaces what appears to be the actual reason for the brother’s grievance, i.e., Raymond’s habitual mistreatment of her and his threat that this is not over (TRN, 1150). It is not my intention to suggest here that although the brother was previously happy about his sister’s behaviour, he objects only to the violence done to her (a cursory glance in the direction of the century would suggest otherwise), but to point to the reversal of the actual situation whereby Raymond becomes the third party in a quarrel essentially between siblings. Additionally, Costes’s analysis diverts this network of relationships onto the psychological relationship between mother and son. Indeed, the mother herself has become an all-purpose symbol not unlike the Arab woman. Although psychoanalytical approaches have made a rich contribution to the study of Camus, the troubling tendency of such analyses to reduce all female figures to avatars of the mother45 recalls Spivak’s identification of the homogeneous woman, excluded or appropriated, as a mark of ideology at work. With respect to women, there is unity on both sides of the “racism debate”. In McCarthy’s discussion of the Arab nurse he effectively effaces her from the social map through her association with the mother figure. Her disease, he contends, “removes her from history” by contrast with Raymond’s mistress, who is the object of political (but not sexual?) 43
Briefly, the murder of the Arab is firstly an oedipal killing of the brother as brother and paternal figure: secondly, it is a killing of the Arab as aggressor of Camus’s own mother. 44 “Le Double meurtre de Meursault”, 71. 45 Cf. Vicky Mistacco, “Mama’s Boy: Reading Woman in L’Étranger”, in Camus’s “L’Étranger”: Fifty Years On, 152-69. Mistacco contends that such psychoanalytic interpretations “have instituted and reinforced a kind of doxa, a rigid hermeneutic grid that only permits repetition of the same, phallocentrism, and generates the greatest degree of critical excitement around the ideas of incest and castration” (152-53).
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oppression.46 Through an analysis of the text, and reference to “Entre Oui et non”, McCarthy establishes a link between this nurse, the mother figure and the Arab. In “Entre Oui et non”, he suggests, “the Arab (shares) in the authenticity with which the mother is endowed”. He concludes that the nurse, through association with Meursault’s mother, unites the psychoanalytical and political components of the novel: If Meursault may be said first to kill his mother and then in the second half of the book to atone and (...) to be reconciled with her, then the way he achieves this is to strike at her other self, the Arab. If the murder of the Arab is the act of a piednoir community seeking to assume the authenticity that it admires and resents in the Arab, then this can only be done by striking at the mother.47
Here, the mother, Arab, and the Arab nurse are conflated in a manner that robs each of a separate identity or function, making them interchangeable. The invitation to see the mother as a symbol is of course proffered by Camus himself, who not only presents her as a symbolic figure but describes her in this way in a fragment of his earlier writings (noted in chapter 1) where she is seen as his “instrument” linking him with his childhood world of poverty. Although I have suggested that this figure represents a form of authenticity, I shall argue that in L’Étranger she “authenticates” the protagonist in a different way: her presence diverts attention from the Arab and effaces his presence. On the other hand, her similarities with Arab women destabilise the notion of authenticity as being “like, but not quite”.48 In 1970 Roland Wagner pointed out that “it is almost too easy to psychoanalyze The Stranger”.49 Indeed, psychoanalytical interpretations have proliferated, all based on the mother-son relationship, and in a manner which diverts attention from other features of the book.50 From the first sentence of L’Étranger our attention is drawn to the 46
“The First Arab in L’Étranger”, Celfan Review /Revue Celfan, 4 (3) (May 1985), (23-26), 24. 47 Ibid., 25, 26. 48 “Of Mimicry and Man”, 235. 49 “The Silence of the Stranger”, 31. 50 The earliest reviews of the novel focused on this aspect of the novel. See, for example, Fieschi, “L’Étranger par Albert Camus”, N.R.F. 30 (343) (September 1942), 36470. In “The last four shots: problems of intention and Camus’s The Stranger”, American Imago 45 (4) (1988), 359-74, George Makari pertinently notes that such attempts to unravel Meursault’s desires lead to a perverse collusion in which “nearly every critic (addresses) the inner workings of the murderer’s mind, while dismissing his victim as mere narrative device” (369).
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significance of this maternal figure, and the son’s relationship to her. We are invited to read the book from this optic, and to look for clues as to the son’s feelings about his mother. Indeed, in part 1, this relationship is not only central in the first chapter, but chapters 2-5 conclude with references to the mother. Likewise, the scene of the murder in chapter 6 expressly compares the day to that of the funeral (TRN, 1166), and is reinforced by numerous symbolic references that have often been pointed out. The second part of the book makes such “hidden” references explicit by judging Meursault as a son rather than a murderer. It is this fact that makes the protagonist seem innocent, for although his feelings about his mother are ambivalent this does not mark him either as abnormal or as having killed her. Thus, his punishment is excessive and unjust, and in this sense he is an “innocent murderer”. This effect is produced by thematic parallels between the two parts which overlay its structural disjunction. René Girard long ago pointed out this structural flaw in the novel, commenting that: (T)he irritating cult of motherhood and the alleged profundities of the absurd must not obscure the main issue. (...) Do we really believe that the French judicial system is ruthlessly dedicated to the extermination of little bureaucrats addicted to café au lait, Fernandel movies, and casual affairs with the boss’s secretary? 51
Two narratives run concurrently in the book; the first concerns the death of a mother, and the son’s reactions to this death; the second concerns his involvement in a dispute over the possession and control of an Arab woman, and the resultant blood feud. The outcome of this second sequence of events is murder, yet the logical chain of cause and effect is here dislodged so that the trial becomes a pretext not for the examination of the murder, but for the examination of the son’s emotions. This first narrative overlays the second and appears to provide a coherent sequence of events which diverts attention from this disjunction, seeming to confirm that “in our society every man who does not cry at his mother’s funeral risks being condemned to death” (TRN, 1928). Hence, the symbolic significance of the maternal stereotype authenticates both the murder and Meursault’s innocence. Furthermore, parallels often noted between the defunct mother and Salamano’s dog divert attention from a much more striking parallel with the living Algerian woman. The introduction of Raymond is directly framed by a 51
“Camus’s Stranger Retried”, 523.
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conversation with Salamano about his dog, and the moaning of the dog (TRN, 1143, 1147). Meursault participates in Raymond’s projected further assault of his mistress by writing the letter to her, which was composed of “coups de pied et en même temps des choses pour la faire regretter” (TRN, 1146) (“kicks and at the same time things that would make her regret”), a mixture of affection and violence that mirrors Salamano’s relationship with his dog: “je la tapais, mais tendrement, pour ainsi dire. Elle criait un peu. Je fermais les volets et ça finissait comme toujours” (TRN, 1145) (“I used to hit her, but in a tender sort of way. She’d cry out a bit. I’d close the shutters and it’d end as it always did”). This is reinforced by textual links between Salamano and his dog and Raymond and his mistress, such as Meursault’s comment one could never know about others’ relationships (TRN, 1142, 1145). But this parallel is effaced by the direct reference to the dead mother at the end of their conversation (TRN, 1146). Meursault’s sado-masochistic impulse can then be interpreted as primarily one against his dead mother rather than as an identification with Raymond and his wish to punish the Algerian woman. The theory that Meursault is unable to elaborate a process of mourning for his absent mother thus obfuscates his actual collaboration in the control and punishment of this present female figure, a form of control at the heart of the discourse of masculinity embodied in the novel and which is seen in “L’Été à Alger” as integral to Algerian everyday life. It is in the spirit that “entre hommes on se comprenait toujours” (TRN, 1146) (“men always understood one another”) that Raymond first tells Meursault about his fight with the other man. The Arab is depicted as speaking the same language of masculinity: “Descends du tram si tu es un homme. (...) Il m’a dit que je n’étais pas un homme” (TRN, 1143) (“Get down from the tram if you’re a man. (…) He told me I wasn’t a man”). Despite the partiality of Raymond’s account, Meursault, usually so neutral, instantly agrees that Raymond was right and the other at fault (TRN, 1144). When Raymond goes on to tell him “his story”, in a context where he has total control over money and strictly regulates his mistress’s activities, it is he who becomes her victim, even though it is he who had beaten her until she had bled (TRN, 1145).
The Dirty Joke Although Meursault might seem the passive and chance third party, he in fact participates in the punishment of the Arab woman through his
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encouragement of Raymond. Indeed, this role of the passive listener is a crucial one, a point made by Freud in his consideration of the smutty joke. Originally directed at a woman who is the object of a hostile or obscene intention, the joke requires a third person with whom it is shared: (I)n addition to the one who makes the joke, there must be a second who is taken as the object of the hostile or sexual aggressiveness, and a third in whom the joke’s aim of producing pleasure is fulfilled. (...) It is not the person who makes the joke who laughs at it and who therefore enjoys its pleasurable effect, but the inactive listener.52
This third person thus becomes his ally, before whom the woman is exposed and, according to Freud, he becomes like the spectator of an act of sexual aggression. The exposure of the woman in L’Étranger is effected by the explicitly sexual language (“il avait encore un sentiment pour son coït” (TRN, 1145) (“he still thought she was a good screw”) and the detailing of the nature of the proposed punishment: “il coucherait avec elle et ‘juste au moment de finir’ il lui cracherait à la figure et il la mettrait dehors” (TRN, 1146) (“He’d sleep with her and ‘right at the crucial moment’ he’d spit in her face and throw her out”). Of such language, Freud contends that “the utterance of the obscene words (…) compels the person who is assailed to imagine the parts of the body or the procedure in question and shows her that the assailant himself is imagining it. It cannot be doubted that the desire to see what is sexual exposed is the original motive of smut”.53 Here, as the recipients of the joke, Meursault and the reader are equally implicated by imagining the situation and filling in the details.54 This degradation of the woman to her sexual function has the effect of making her despicable, so that Raymond achieves “in a roundabout way the enjoyment of overcoming (her) – to which the third person, who has made no efforts, bears witness”.55 This identification does not signify identity. Whereas in La Mort heureuse it is the protagonist who suffers from jealousy and hence dependency on women, in L’Étranger this mark of inferiority is trans52
Sigmund Freud, Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, James Strachey (tr.), Angela Richards (ed.) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), 143. 53 Ibid., 143. 54 In “Le sadisme dans l’œuvre de Camus”, in AC6 (1973) (121-44), Jean Gassin rightly draws attention to the sadistic and voyeuristic element in Meursault’s behaviour. On Meursault’s part, however, he regards this as directed at the mother. 55 Jokes, 147.
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ferred onto Raymond, leaving Meursault himself untainted. Furthermore, as a disinterested third party, Meursault’s conduct cannot leave him open to charges of being motivated by jealousy as that of his predecessor may be. I previously suggested that Raymond’s unprepossessing white skin sets him apart from those such as Marie and Meursault himself, while the monetary nature of his sexual relationship further distances him from “authenticity” in this new culture.56 Raymond is entangled in a relationship from which he is unable to extricate himself; his vulnerability, translated as the inability to relinquish control over this woman,57 renders him the “tragic” character initially described in the Carnets. Meursault is not Raymond’s “dupe”. Unlike Meursault himself, he falls far short of the discourse of masculinity he espouses, and his attitude towards women is not that of “my pal Vincent” in “L’Été à Alger” (E, 69). Raymond is incapable even of writing his own letter, and constantly worries about the presence of the Arabs. From an apparently disinterested stance Meursault is the one who takes over Raymond’s quarrel, carrying it to its conclusion and thus demonstrating what it is to “be a man”. Meursault’s initial encouragement through his agreement that there had been some some sort of deception, and that he understood why Raymond wants to punish his mistress (TRN, 1145) escalates when he takes Raymond’s place in writing the letter, while this identification is most explicit during the scenes directly preceding the murder,58 to the extent that Meursault takes the place of Raymond in the final confrontation. Brian Fitch suggests that during the course of the trial Meursault begins to see himself through the eyes of others, and he illustrates this by singling out the passage where Raymond’s evidence is examined 56 Meursault, usually so amenable to Raymond, refuses to go with him to the brothel, because “je n’aime pas ça” (TRN, 1150) (“I don’t like that sort of thing”). 57 His threat to the woman that they will meet again (TRN, 1150) belies the insistence that it is now “une histoire finie” (TRN, 1159) (“end of story”), while his feelings are put in doubt by the dual meaning in his words, “tu m’as manqué” (TRN, 1149) (“You’ve let me down” / “I’ve missed you”). 58 This is demonstrated by the use of words such as “our two Arabs”, “our arrival” (TRN, 1163): Meursault’s appropriation of Raymond’s phrase that “pour moi, c’était une histoire finie” (TRN, 1165) (“for me it was the end of the story”); his claim that he had returned to the scene without thinking (TRN, 1165), which is put in question by his earlier suspicion that Raymond knew where he was going (TRN, 1163); and the fact that not only does Meursault take the gun from Raymond without returning it, but he offers to shoot the other Arab for him (TRN, 1164).
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by the prosecution lawyer. Indirect speech disappears and the prosecutor’s use of the word “he” is translated as “I”, so that Meursault himself seems to say that “j’étais son complice et son ami” (TRN, 1191) (“I was his accomplice and friend”). For Fitch, instead of giving us his own point of view, Meursault assumes the judgement passed on him by others.59 Such complexity obscures, however, that this is a statement of fact, a form of indirect direct confession. It will be remembered that when Raymond first recounts his story to Meursault this passage also is rendered in direct speech, unusual for this text, and inviting the direct identification of which I have spoken. The very clear parallel is with Salamano and his dog, which was acquired as a substitute for his wife.60 Yet, as I have pointed out, the reference here to the mother, which introduces the groaning of the dog (TRN, 1147), effects a change in focus that re-interprets Meursault’s participation in the light of this relationship, and from the point of view which the reader is invited to adopt, which is from the vantage point of Meursault’s feelings about the death of his mother. Thus the dead mother “rescues” him from charges of direct involvement in racial and sexual oppression, diverting attention to his assumed unexpressed ambivalence. Race is more convincingly here presented as irrelevant than in the first formulation of the Carnets, where it clumsily drew attention to itself. In this later version it is no longer the anonymous narrator who discloses that she is “an Arab” but Meursault, who remarks upon it, information casually revealed as an indirect result of his writing the letter (TRN, 1146). In this process the question of her race is more effectively erased while exculpating both men of any racist motive. Meursault, then, is entirely detached from any personal involvement. Yet his identification with Raymond undercuts this seeming detachment.
59
“Aspects de l’emploi du discours indirect libre dans L’Étranger”, 87. This parallel is later reinforced by a perhaps coincidental similarity. When Salamano loses his dog (immediately after Raymond has likewise “lost” his mistress), he is advised to seek her at la fourrière (TRN, 1151). “La fourrière humaine” was a term employed to describe the cell in which women were kept after their arrest for prostitution. See Jean-Marc Berlière La Police des mœurs sous la IIIe République (Paris: Seuil, 1992), 31. One might see here a further parallel with the mother, sent to the home. 60
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The Dark Continent In L’Étranger the Arab woman is charged with the representation of a treacherous and fascinating sexuality which acts as a foil in relation to both Marie and the mother figure.61 The way this marginalised character has been ignored in critical reactions parallels the representation of black women in the Hollywood cinema, as traced by Mary Ann Doane.62 In a discussion of the role played by the repression of the instincts as a necessary condition for the development of civilization and a parallel repression of infantile sexuality as the child grows to adulthood, Freud commented that: We know less about the sexual life of little girls than of boys. But we need not feel ashamed of this distinction; after all, the sexual life of adult women is a “dark continent” for psychology.63
Thus he clearly connects female sexuality with the racial notion of “primitiveness”. Doane points out that this trope of the dark continent denotes “an intricate historical articulation of the categories of racial difference and sexual difference”, and, following Sander L. Gilman, she argues that “the exotic and the erotic were welded together, situating the African woman as the signifier of an excessive, incommensurable sexuality”.64 Gilman traces a history of the visual representations of the black woman and the white woman in paintings and literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, showing how the presence of the black woman (often as a servant or child) came to signify the availability of the sexualized white woman in the same painting. The white woman may look beautiful, but the black woman’s presence is the outward sign of the former’s inner corruption. These associations between female sexuality and race were to become manifest with the syphilophobia of the late nineteenth century, of which Gilman com61
In Les Mythes dans l’œuvre de Camus (Paris: Éditions universitaires, 1973), Monique Crochet argues that the traditional motif of the sexually treacherous woman who brings about the hero’s downfall is absent from L’Étranger. Her consideration of the book entirely overlooks the Arab woman. 62 “Dark Continents: Epistemologies of Racial and Sexual Difference in Psychoanalysis and the Cinema” in Femmes Fatales. Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis (New York, London: Routledge, 1991) 209-248. 63 “The Question of Lay Analysis: Conversations with an impartial person” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XX (London: Hogarth Press, 1953), 212. The term “dark continent” is in English in the original. 64 “Dark Continents”, 212-213.
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ments that “black females do not merely represent the sexualized female, they also represent the female as the source of corruption and disease”.65 In L’Étranger, Marie’s purity is established by contrast with the Algerian mistress, while the latter’s presence simultaneously subverts this purity. Of Zola’s Nana, who develops smallpox, Gilman points out that “the decaying visage is the visible sign of the diseased genitalia through which the sexualized female corrupts an entire nation of warriors”.66 These observations return me to a consideration of the first Arab in L’Étranger whose nose has been eaten away by cancer. I earlier referred to the parallel drawn by McCarthy between the mother figure, the Arab nurse, and Arabs in general. But McCarthy’s determination to equate the mother and Arab in a positive form of authenticity blinds him to the ambiguities of their depiction. This is combined with the unwillingness to allow sufficient weight to the sexual oppression on which I earlier commented. He remarks that “rather than making her an object of political oppression like Raymond’s mistress, her disease takes her outside of history”. Further, he suggests that because of her facial disfigurement the nurse, like the mother, is not cast in “an overtly sexual role”.67 On the contrary, the mark on her face places her very firmly in history, and points up the associations to which Gilman refers between race, female sexuality and disease. During the first part of the twentieth century the widespread fear of syphilis amongst the indigenous population in Algeria contributed to the segregation of the races. The “nez rongé” (“decaying nose”) was a common sign in the countryside of such venereal contagion.68 Although the condition was in decline in the 1940s, this particular racial stereotype would have been recognised by a French Algerian readership and it is one that aligns the nurse (and indirectly the mother) with another powerful stereotype, which was that the colonized woman
65
“Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth Century Art, Medicine, and Literature”, Critical Inquiry 12 (Autumn 1985), 204-42 (221, 231). See also Zine Magubane’s important critique of Gilman, “Which Bodies Matter? Feminism, Poststructuralism, Race, and the Curious Theoretical Odyssey of the ‘Hottentot Venus’”, Gender and Society, 15 (6) (Dec., 2001), 81634 66 Ibid., 235. 67 “The First Arab in L’Étranger”, 24. 68 Le Maghreb entre deux guerres, 88-89.
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shared many physical and mental traits common to the European prostitute. Gilman’s article refers to the pathological model that was applied to both female sexuality and race during the nineteenth century; the notion of sexual excess, associated with race, came to be seen as a congenital disease: The model of degeneracy presumes some acquired pathology in one generation which is the direct cause of the stigmata of degeneracy in the next. Surely the best example for this is the concept of congenital syphilis as captured in the popular consciousness by Henrik Ibsen’s drama of biological decay, Ghosts.69
It will be remembered that the first entrance of the mother in Camus’s youthful writings is in the epigraph from this very play, in “La Maison mauresque”, and I commented on its high degree of ambivalence in chapter 1. These observations endow the shared authenticity of mother and Arab with a far greater degree of complexity than McCarthy is prepared to allow, and I suggest that this follows from his inability to differentiate between the maternal stereotype and the physical and human status of this character. Camus may have determined that the mother figure was to become a symbol in his writing, but this move cannot entirely extricate her from the associations of her biological status as a woman and a mother. Camus’s text introduces the colonized woman in a more explicitly sexual manner than in any of his other works. Despite affinities between the white woman and the black woman, as exemplified by the figure of the European prostitute, the white woman is simultaneously opposed as a symbol of purity. Such a polar opposition is apparent in L’Étranger, where the indigenous woman signifies sexual excess, while Marie and the figure of the mother represent an ideal of purity. Marie’s visit to the prison, when she is surrounded by Moorish women (TRN, 1176), further points up such a contrast. I spoke in chapter 3 of the desexualisation of Marie’s relationship with Meursault. Sexual desire is expressed in an innocent (although fetishistic) way: “J’ai eu très envie d’elle parce qu’elle avait une belle robe (…) et des sandales de cuir” (TRN, 1148) (“I really fancied her because she was wearing a pretty dress (…) and leather sandals”). Via the juxtaposition of Marie and the Arab mistress a less “pure” sexuality is exposed in association with Marie. In this same scene, Marie has stayed the night and the two are to eat together. Meursault has heard 69
“Black Bodies, White Bodies”, 218.
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the voice of the Arab woman in Raymond’s room, so that he knows not only what is happening (thanks to Raymond’s earlier lurid description), but what is about to happen. Immediately after hearing the Arab woman’s voice, that of Salamano is introduced: “Salaud, charogne” (TRN, 1148) (“Filthy, lousy animal”) – as if in anticipation of Raymond’s voice. One might speculate that this secret knowledge adds a pornographic spice to Meursault’s relationship with the woman in his room. He implicates the unknowing Marie in this episode by telling her not the story of Raymond but its counterpart, the story of Salamano and his dog – at which, as if sharing this “dirty joke”: (E)lle a ri. Elle avait un de mes pyjamas dont elle avait retroussé les manches. Quand elle a ri, j’ai eu encore envie d’elle. Un moment après, elle m’a demandé si je l’aimais. Je lui ai répondu que cela ne voulait rien dire, mais qu’il me semblait que non. Elle a eu l’air triste. Mais en préparant le déjeuner, et à propos de rien, elle a encore ri de telle façon que je l’ai embrassée. C’est à ce moment que les bruits d’une dispute ont éclaté chez Raymond. (TRN, 1149) (S)he laughed. She was wearing a pair of my pyjamas with the sleeves rolled up. When she laughed, I fancied her again. A moment after, she asked me if I loved her. I told her that it didn’t mean anything but that I didn’t think so. She looked sad. But as we were getting lunch ready, and for no apparent reason, she laughed again, so I kissed her. It was at that point we heard a row break out in Raymond’s room. (TO, 38: translation amended)
The first lines of this quotation underline the function of constant references to Marie’s clothes, disguising the immediacy of cause and effect, for Meursault’s desire is linked to her laughter and her innocent implication in an entirely different sexual scenario. Once more, their own (possible) sexual activity is lost in the silence between the words, for sexual desire is brought abruptly to a full stop, while the following words (“a moment after”) prompt the question “after what?” The sexual charge in this scene depends on the interplay of contrast and similarity between Marie and the Arab prostitute, recalling Gilman’s comments about the presence of the black woman as a signifier of the white woman’s sexuality. Furthermore, Marie’s emotional concerns are diminished in such a setting. Framed by two such examples of “love”, Marie’s question becomes itself a joke, while the truth of Meursault’s response is simultaneously demonstrated by both Salamano and Raymond. Parallels between Meursault and Marie, and Raymond and his mistress have the effect of putting Marie in her “place”, one that cannot compare with the understanding “between men”. Whereas Raymond prepared a meal and shared it with Meursault during the planning of
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the woman’s punishment, when Meursault prepares a meal for Marie this scene ends in Meursault alone eating the food without comment. Her voice is negated by the use of indirect speech: to her expression of horror, Meursault does not reply, and refuses to fetch the police on the grounds that he “didn’t like” them (TRN, 1149). The Arab woman likewise speaks an incomprehensible language: we hear only her “voix aiguë”, but Raymond’s voice is endowed with meaning: “Tu m’as manqué, tu m’as manqué. Je vais t’apprendre à me manquer” (TRN, 1149) (“You’ve let me down, you’ve let me down. I’ll teach you to let me down”): like a dog, “la femme a hurlé, (...) la femme criait toujours, (...) la femme a pleuré” (TRN, 1149) (“the woman howled, (…) the woman was still crying out, (…) the woman cried”). Her only direct speech consists only of the words “il m’a tapée, c’est un maquereau” (TRN, 1150) (“He hit me. He’s a pimp”), which she repeats, while crying, throughout Raymond’s interchange with the policeman. Here, the focus is on his loss of face before Meursault. Both her speech and that of Marie are equally devoid of meaning, and she plays the same marginal role in this scene as she has in the book, which is as a catalyst. It is difficult to see how this “maudlin” woman’s crying could be called the first “cry of revolt”.70 Marie’s individuality has no greater importance than the clothes she wears. During their second conversation about love and marriage this “equivalence” between women is underlined (TRN, 1154), for her importance resides purely in the fact that she is the one who is there. This is reinforced towards the end of the book when Meursault imagines her dead, and of no further interest to him (TRN, 1204-5). In exactly the same way, “le chien de Salamano valait autant que sa femme” (TRN, 1209) (“Salamano’s dog was worth just as much as his wife”). The Arab woman is the one with no substitute, and to her Raymond constantly returns, his punishment of her infinitely prolonged, never completed. As I have pointed out, Meursault’s intervention in this relationship suggests an involvement which belies his apparent indifference towards women. Although his relationship with Marie presents him as “lucid” in his relationships with women, his failure to adopt this such an attitude with regard to the Algerian woman is the ultimate cause of his downfall – a factor that disrupts the portrait of him validated by Marie’s presence.
70
McCarthy, The Stranger, 18.
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At other times, race provides a foil for the character of Marie. Her prison visit is framed by references to both race and marriage. Firstly her letter is mentioned, which informs Meursault that she is not an officially recognised visitor because she is not his wife (TRN, 1175). This prefigures the depiction of Marie as his mistress at the trial, and hence indistinguishable in the eyes of the administration from the Algerian woman. Her visit directly follows the recital of the incident where the other prisoners, mainly Arabs, help Meursault to arrange his mattress (TRN, 1175). Although this scene has been interpreted as an indication of the solidarity between the Arab prisoners and Meursault, and of an understanding for his situation, McCarthy is right to point out that there are no other echoes of this theme,71 nor is it integrated into the book, except during the prison visit where the issue of race is once more foregrounded, and Marie is introduced as being “surrounded” by Algerian women (TRN, 1176). She is likewise set between the figures of the talkative wife and the silent mother and son, whose communication is depicted as intuitive and beyond words (TRN, 1176). Although “surrounded by Arab women”, her immediate neighbours are two pied-noir women, a wife and a mother. As fiancée, Marie stands between the two categories,72 at times smiling and silent like the mother, at times shouting out empty phrases of encouragement like the wife. The valorisation of the mother-son relationship in this scene is clear, and it is contrasted not only with that between Marie and Meursault, but with that of husband and wife. There are three levels of communication in the scene – the murmur of the Arabs, the shouting of the pied-noirs, and the silence of the mother and her son (TRN, 1177). The demeanour of the mother blurs racial categories, universalising her and setting her above such considerations. This idealisation of the mother has been the focus for much critical comment, along with the simultaneous ambivalence in relation to the portrait of Meursault’s actual mother. It is her death, her nonexistence, that allows her idealisation as a symbol, so that the other woman for whom there is apparently no substitute (in parallel with the Arab mistress), is the extinct mother. If death has put her beyond such comparisons, the living woman is always contaminated by her sex. Hence the Arab nurse with whom she has been compared bears the 71
Ibid., 58. Cf. Anthony Rizzuto, “La scène d’amour chez Camus”, in Albert Camus: les extrêmes et l’équilibre, 211-26. 72
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syphilitic mark of her race and gender upon her face, a link further reinforced by the parallels between Arab mistress, mother and Salamano’s dog. While the ideal image of the mother is an a-sexual one, the living mother had also taken on the role of “fiancée” to her friend Pérez, which equates her, albeit ironically, with Marie and ultimately the Arab mistress. It has been suggested that Meursault’s relationship with Marie is an attempt to replace the idealised “lost object” of the good mother, and her symbolic association with the sea, commonly linked with the mother figure, is offered as evidence. But the trial further underlines the lack of distinction between her status and that of the Arab prostitute: in the sight of the law his relationship with Marie is as much “the most shameful debauchery” (TRN, 1193) as the intrigue with Raymond; although Meursault initially greets the reference to Marie as his mistress with incomprehension (TRN, 1196), he later uses it himself (TRN, 1206); and, one might justifiably ask, what is the difference between them, if it is not one of race alone? At the same time, the woman’s apparent infidelity equates her with Marie, whom Meursault pictures in the arms of another Meursault (TRN, 1211). Hence, underlying the opposition between the “white” woman and the Moor, there is a slide into indistinctness: beneath the skin, all are alike. Only the dead woman may function as an immutable symbol of purity. I have emphasised the figure of the Algerian mistress at the expense of the traditional emphasis on the mother figure because it seems to me that she functions as a touchstone by which all other female characters in the book may be judged. In her the ideologically laden categories of race and sexuality are united; while race forms the basis of the contrast between her and the major female figures, her gender betrays the underlying similarities between them. A consideration of her as a historical figure disrupts her stereotyped portrayal, while the blurring of racial categorisations, when taken in conjunction with female sexuality, provides a further disruption to the opposition between the “white” woman and the colonized woman.
Chapter 5 Mythical women in La Peste Myths of Origin Jusqu’ici je ne suis pas un romancier au sens où on l’entend. Mais plutôt un artiste qui crée des mythes à la mesure de sa passion et de son angoisse. (C2, 325) Up to now I have not been a novelist in the usual sense. But rather an artist who creates myths on the scale of his passion and anguish. (SEN, 290)
In chapter 2 I referred to two competing myths of origin connected with two schools of literature in colonial Algeria: Algérianisme, linked with Louis Bertrand, and the École d’Alger, associated with Gabriel Audisio and Albert Camus. As I noted there, although the École d’Alger locates Algerian history in Ancient Greece, thus demonstrating its opposition to the Latin past proposed by Algérianisme (and as a resistance to the fascism increasingly associated with Rome), this myth of origin likewise overlooks the intervening occupation of Algeria by a vast indigenous population. Each literary school thus supplies a history for a new people which has none and establishes historical rights of occupancy over the Algerian soil. This myth of origin is embedded in Camus’s work in the form of mythological allusions. As Jean Sarocchi points out, as a creative artist Camus’s philosophy is expressed in metaphorical, symbolic and mythological ways, as with Sisyphus rolling his rock, Helen in exile, or Ulysses navigating home: “Penser se confond alors avec le poignant retour vers l’Ithaque des certitudes premières”1 (“Thinking merges then with the poignant return to Ithaca of the first certainties”). Ithaca in particular comes to signify this mythical homeland, reflecting the degree to which this space is less a geographical location than a spiritual landscape where “Africa begins in the Pyrenees” and Europe is the cold North, associated with the rule of money and ideologies. Ca-
1
Camus, 16.
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mus had never known his father’s family, “those Germans”,2 but in his address to the “Maison de la culture” in 1937 he claims that geography accounts for the differences between German and Italian fascism, for the Italians are closer to the sea.3 Character is determined by geography but – for the sons of woman – is it also a question of the blood?
The Fatherland; a Misunderstanding Whereas in Le Premier Homme the young Jacques Cormery must ask his uncertain mother the meaning of the word “patrie”, for his French schoolfriend, Didier, there is no doubt: he is keenly aware of the family throughout the generations, and of his country of birth through its history. Jacques, by contrast felt as if he were from a different species, “without a past, or a family home, or an attic stuffed with letters and photographs” and he and his friend Pierre were only “citizens in theory of an imprecise nation”. In the margins of this text Camus notes the discovery of the homeland in 1940 (PH, 191) – a discovery made in exile in France, and in a Europe at war. Yet the meaning and location of this homeland remain ambiguous. In Le Premier Homme Camus will make the distinction between those ties that are freely entered into, and those which are not chosen – the ties of the blood. The vocabulary of kinship and the home, as Benedict Anderson reminds us, is assimilated to the self-sacrificing love inspired by the idea of the homeland through the notion of what is “natural”, instinctive, and therefore unchosen.4 These themes are already apparent in Le Malentendu, where Jan, returning to a bleak Europe after years of happiness in the sun, tells his uncomprehending wife that happiness is not everything; he has the duty, as a man, to rediscover his mother and his homeland (TRN, 124); indeed, he reveals that one cannot be happy in exile or oblivion, living forever as a stranger (TRN, 127). Despite his reasons for not immediately identifying himself to his mother and sister, the need for instinctive recognition appears to be a factor in what he seeks. But in this cold, European 2
Camus had believed his paternal ancestors were from Alsace-Lorraine, and, according to Lottman, this was how his aunt referred to them (Albert Camus: a Biography, 8). 3 In 1955 he repeats this same assertion. Lottman records that in an interview “he spoke of Greece as the source of Mediterranean civilization, again expounded on Mediterranean equilibrium: fascism, when it reached Italy, hadn’t shown the barbarity of German fascism” (Albert Camus: a Biography, 548). 4 Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983), 131.
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setting the ties of blood are overtaken by the language of commerce: a son who entered here would find what any customer is sure to find, his mother tells him (TRN, 139). Despite her claim that age “unteaches” a mother to love her son (TRN, 139), she had not even kissed him goodbye twenty years earlier (TRN, 122). Equally, as a true son of Europe, he had forgotten her without a backward glance (TRN, 143). In their own murderous “career” Jan’s mother and sister repeat his gesture and sever the ties of blood in order to profit from his death. Jean Sarocchi has pointed out the play’s associations with Ibsen’s Ghosts, and Gide’s Le Retour de l’enfant prodigue.5 As I noted in chapter 1, the epigraph from Ghosts in the 1933 “La Maison Mauresque” – “Mère, donne-moi le soleil” (PC, 215) (“Mother, give me the sun”) – is a far from unambiguous “return” to the mother. To be pure is to rediscover that homeland of the soul, to recognize the bonds of blood – but is such purity possible when those blood ties are rooted in the brothel of Europe? In 1942, exiled in his fatherland, Camus rewrites the horrors of Ghosts and the bonds of blood – the inheritance of exile: “L’Exilé (ou Budejovice)” (C2, 59). But from what is Jan of Le Malentendu in exile – from his family or his “true homeland”? If he had said “it’s me, this is my name” (TRN, 1729), would this be an acceptance of permanent exile? The prodigal son returns to the house of his fatherland where he is given beer in return for his money rather than the feast for the prodigal son (TRN, 122). He finds not a home but a “derisory house of bricks” (TRN, 120), an “inn”.6 As in a brothel (or the Europe of La Mort Heureuse) Jan has “the rights of a client” provided he adopts the same language (TRN, 134, 135). Sarocchi has noted the series of gender reversals in this play’s passage from the Biblical parable via Ibsen, Gide and “Noces à Tipasa”. In the epigraph to “La Maison mauresque” the prodigal son asks his mother for the sun. Here, Martha is the one who would kill for it and holds her mother responsible for bringing her into a land of clouds rather than sunshine (TRN, 143). Ibsen’s Oswald, dying from syphilis, carries the fatal mark of his parentage, just as Martha, dying for lack of the sun, has likewise inherited her father’s criminal legacy (TRN, 142). Martha and Patrice Mersault both kill for money, but for Mersault murder is an impersonal act undertaken solely to facilitate the 5 “Le Malentendu par André Gide”, Littératures 22 (Spring, 1990) (191-206), 195. My interpretation of Le Malentendu is greatly indebted to this article. 6 “Le Malentendu par André Gide”, 195.
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birth of a potential Self of his own creation. Martha, on the other hand, hopes to become someone else and her actions are governed by sexual frustration and the emotions of vengeance, envy and resentment for what others have and are. She is the one who stayed behind, while he left their mother without a word; everything life can offer has been given to him: Moi, je suis restée ici. Je suis restée, petite et sombre, dans l’ennui, enfoncée au cœur du continent et j’ai grandi dans l’épaisseur des terres. Personne n’a embrassé ma bouche et même vous n’avez vu mon corps sans vêtements. Mère, je vous le jure, cela doit se payer. (…) Nous pouvons oublier mon frère et votre fils. Ce qui lui est arrivé est sans importance: il n’avait plus rien à connaître. Mais moi, vous me frustrez de tout et vous m’ôtez ce dont il a joui. (TRN, 167-68) Me, I stayed here. I stayed here, eating my heart out in the shadows, small and insignificant, buried alive in a gloomy valley in the heart of Europe. Buried alive! No-one has ever kissed my mouth, and no-one, not even you, has seen me naked. Mother, I swear to you, that must be paid for. (…) We can forget my brother and your son. What’s happened to him is unimportant; he had nothing more to get from life. But me, you frustrate me of everything, cheating me of the pleasures he enjoyed. (CCP, 145-46: translation amended)
Although Sarocchi sees in Le Malentendu a variant of Œdipus Rex,7 this Greek tragedy for contemporary times contains strongly Oresteian echoes, by way of Euripides and Sartre. The scenes between Martha and Jan are reminiscent of Orestes’ first meeting with his sister – his temptation to reveal himself, her resentment that she has lost her youth, and the promise of salvation this unknown stranger brings to her. But here salvation is not the thirst for justice in payment for a father’s death, but for money, the European perversion. The life of this Electra (always the father’s daughter) is overshadowed by sexual frustration, for (as in Camus’s depiction of Europe at “La Maison de la culture”) she has always been “buttoned up to the neck”. Blighted by geography, Martha is not a true woman, for as with all the frigid prostitutes of Europe her actions are transactions conducted in return for money. Kinship is irrelevant, and she would have killed her brother even if she had recognized him (TRN, 168), having learnt her lesson at her mother’s knee (TRN, 167). Martha is not, nor could she ever be, a woman of the South. By dreaming of an identity she can never claim, Martha resembles her brother: “My dwelling is not here” (TRN, 120). Yet, she has known no other home except this “house of no-one” (TRN, 162). By 7
Ibid., 201.
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contrast, Jan can assert the identity she craves (“I come from Africa” (TRN, 131) ), but he is unable (or unwilling) to claim his genealogical inheritance in that “sad Europe” where all are homeless. Despite the joys of his African life something has been lost from which he is in exile. As in Le Premier Homme, his true family is not the one forged through marriage (TRN, 132) but the blood family he left behind; yet this lethal rediscovery means that he will die in continuing exile (“encore dépaysé” (TRN, 157) ). From Camus’s earliest works the mother is connected with the idea of the lost homeland, but this connection is increasingly to present her as a pure symbol, culminating in the equation between mother and Algeria in Le Premier homme. In Jean Grenier’s view, for Camus each composed a past on which he felt an increasing need to lean.8 In L’Étranger the presence of the colonized woman is sufficient to taint the purity of the mother figure. Although Camus was apparently unconscious of the displacement of female sexuality onto the colonized woman, the impossibility of maintaining such a polarization subverts the portrait of both the mother and Marie – for all women are biological beings. The mother above all embodies these contradictions, for she is at once the site of idealization and the biological source. Evidently, Camus did not recognize the ambivalence surrounding the mother figure there, yet in La Peste the idealization of the maternal presence divests her of a physical reality. Likewise, the problem of women as flesh and blood sexual partners is solved by their absence from Oran. In this setting men are freed to fulfill their heroic mission without the distraction of one source of plague. In La Peste purity is restored.
Beyond the Absurd I have commented on the figure of the dead woman in the first cycle of Camus’s work. From the perspective adopted in this book it is impossible not to regard this image as a symbol of the Absurd, while the development of Camus’s writings into the phase of revolt is accompanied by a further metamorphosis in the female role. Maria did not originally appear in the first act of Le Malentendu although Jan refers to her at length in monologues where, as Roger Quilliot remarks, she appears as a certain, generalised conception of Woman; in contrast to a virile taste for adventure, she represents the flesh, is rooted in the 8
Albert Camus: souvenirs, 181.
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earth, and uncomplicated (TRN, 1791-92). In later versions, Camus added the scene between Maria and Jan, during 1943 when he was also rewriting parts of Caligula. E. Freeman finds it significant that Camus was working on Maria around the time he was adding greater weight to Cherea, and he suggests that she was developed by Camus to counterpoise Jan in the same way that Cherea became a focus of opposition to Caligula. However, “a serious defect in Camus’s handling of this relationship in Le Malentendu (…) is that Maria does not exist on the same plane of reality – or rather unreality – as the other three main characters”.9 In his examination of the reworking of Caligula between 1941-43, A. James Arnold notes that the monologue on Caligula as monster disappears (and with that the significance of Drusilla), while he also dispenses with Drusilla in scene 2 (CAC 4, 166-67). Cherea as a resistant is not evident in the 1942 manuscript, where he is more strongly identified with Caligula; but Camus is thinking about both of these plays in December, 1942. His revisions to Caligula in 1943 result from alterations in Camus’s stance towards Nietzsche as a consequence of the war, and with a change of emphasis onto revolt, when Camus needed Cherea to incarnate this theme of resistance. At this time Camus is not only reformulating his definition of tragedy as a balance between two equally legitimate and opposing forces (C2, 103) and retrospectively applying these ideas to Caligula, but he is also developing the role of Maria as a resistant – hence, Caligula’s comment that “my freedom is not the right one” is echoed in Maria’s “your method is not the right one” (CAC 4, 170-74). However, although Maria and Cherea share a similar function, Freeman’s point that “Cherea understood the Absurd and could speak the same language as Caligula in the end; Maria is totally uncomprehending”, underlines the significance of gender in this conception of theatre, for the female character is not integrated into the play “at the same philosophical level” and neither can she challenge Jan on this level.10 For these reasons, I suggest, Cherea rather than Caesonia is transformed and elevated in importance while the significance of Drusilla (and her connection to the Absurd) is effaced. In Camus’s theatrical works the “equally legitimate opposing pole” supplied by female
9
The Theatre of Albert Camus: a Critical Study (London: Methuen, 1971), 68. The Theatre of Albert Camus, 68, 69.
10
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characters represents an emotional, not an intellectual challenge (as I shall argue later in this chapter). Just as in Caligula the early emphasis on the dead woman is suppressed as Camus’s attentions turn towards the idea of revolt, so Camus’s first versions of La Peste focused on the character Stephan, a schoolteacher, writing a letter to his lost (“dead”) wife, Jeanne (C1, 134-48). This letter later forms part of the discourse of Joseph Grand. Although Stephan was conceived before the project of a novel on the plague, it is noteworthy that the development here follows the same trajectory as other works during this period: La Mort heureuse, Caligula and L’Étranger all effect a similar suppression of women. In its beginnings Camus’s meditations on the plague reflect his early preoccupations with women: Un homme aime une femme et il lit sur son visage les signes de la peste. Jamais il ne l’aimera autant. Mais jamais elle ne l’a autant dégoûté. Il y a divorce en lui. Mais c’est toujours le corps qui triomphe. Le dégoût l’emporte. Il la prend par une main, la traîne hors du lit (…). Il la laisse devant un égout. “Après tout, il y en a d’autres”. (C1, 231) A man loves a woman and reads the signs of the plague on her face. Never has he loved her so much. But never has she so disgusted him. He is divided against himself. But it is always the body that wins. Disgust prevails. He takes her by the hand, drags her from the bed (…). He leaves her near a sewer. “After all, there are other women”. (SEN, 226)
Writings in the Carnets during this period (1941-42) are interwoven with misogynous references to sexuality as a form of servitude while the plague is seen as “liberating” (C1, 229). In 1942 Camus writes: La vie sexuelle a été donnée à l’homme pour le détourner peut-être de sa vraie voie. C’est son opium. En elle tout s’endort. Hors d’elle, les choses reprennent leur vie. En même temps, la chasteté éteint l’espèce, ce qui est peut-être la vérité. (C2, 49) Sexual life was given to man to divert him perhaps from his true path. It is his opium. In it everything slumbers. Outside of it, things resume their life. At the same time chastity extinguishes the species, which is perhaps the truth.
Towards December 1942, the first reference to the Orpheus and Eurydice myth are made (C2, 56, 66) and at the end of December Camus decides to rewrite Stephan completely, suppressing the theme of love (C2, 67) and embarking on a second version of La Peste that incorporates this legend. This mythical undercurrent liberates men to follow their “true path” in a real world, while the plague-stricken woman need no longer be left to die in the gutter; instead, she stands outside
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of events and becomes the purified symbol of their tragedy (separation) and of all they are fighting to restore to the homeland. The legend of Orpheus and his attempt to retrieve Eurydice is not, however, the novel’s only mythological underpinning. “L’Exil d’Hélène” might be read as an intertext of La Peste, and the relevant mythological allusions occur in the Carnets as early as 1942, when Camus refers to the Iliad (C2, 15, 16) and the episode in the Odyssey where Calypso offers Ulysses the choice between immortality with her, or the earth of his homeland (C2, 22). Of course, “choosing the earth” has been a constant theme of Camus’s writings, but its direct embodiment in the legends surrounding the Trojan war provides an implicit justification for the absence of women. Moreover, the pure space of these legendary heroes becomes an Algerian one; through the setting of Oran, the “Chicago of our absurd Europe” (E, 188), Camus relocates Europe in Algeria / Greece. From here, the main characters are in a position to defend the values of their homeland against the encroachment of “German ideology” (E, 701-2), in the process rediscovering the higher value of the heroes of Troy; fraternity. The solidarity of “L’Hôpital du quartier pauvre” here finds a coherent amplification and is situated within the course of time; the resistants of the plague enter into history. This sheds a retrospective light on the ambiguities surrounding the status of the conqueror in Le Mythe. Whereas Camus’s previous allusions to conquest seem to lack a concrete model, in La Peste the legend of Troy indirectly explicates the underlying thought. “Myths are made to be given life by the imagination” (E, 196) and this is what Camus achieves; although there is no direct reference to the Trojan war, those fighting the plague demonstrate the parallel through their actions. At the same time, the absence of women permits their transfiguration into the embodiment of disincarnated ideals.
Le roman-mythe John Cruickshank has commented on the extent to which the word “myth”, used indiscriminately in French literature, has come to mean “a widely shared attitude or an idea shaping the outlook of a large mass of people; it is no longer confined to the dictionary definition of an ancient story embodying significant actions performed by legendary figures or supernatural beings”. Despite Cruickshank’s objection to this lack of precision the universalizing dimension of La Peste leads
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him to call this book “one of the most impressive novels of recent times to which the term roman-mythe may be applied”: Camus describes a particular event (the plague) in a geographical location (North Africa), but he handles his subject in such a way that he extends its meaning beyond the particular to the universal. He conveys a general picture of man’s position in the universe, faced by the problem of evil and the necessity of suffering.11
However, this transition from the concrete and specific to the abstract and universal level has often been seen as problematic, and Cruickshank concurs with those who criticized the plague as a symbol of the Occupation on the grounds that “it is powerless to convey a sense of human agency and moral ambiguity”.12 Clearly, Camus’s choice of the plague in particular was intended to recall the catastrophic plagues recorded throughout history, and thus to endow it with a universal and mythical dimension. Ironically, when combined with the real setting in Oran, it is precisely this mythical dimension of the plague that founders, and as a result precisely of human agency. As the exgovernor of Algeria recollects, the plague (and cholera) were easier to deal with than typhus, as long as energetic action is taken: C’est ainsi qu’à Oran, en 1926, 43 cas de peste ayant été relevés en quelques jours, j’ai aussitôt prescrit le cordon sanitaire et l’épidémie a été maîtrisée sans peine. Le typhus est, lui, au contraire, endémique. Il est la conséquence de la misère et dans les années de disette qui ne sont pas encore très rares, surtout dans le Sud, il sévit durement.13 Thus in Oran in 1926, 43 cases of plague having been recorded in a few days, I at once ordered quarantine measures and the epidemic was easily contained. Typhus, on the contrary, is endemic. It is the consequence of dire poverty and during the years of drought, which are still not so rare, especially in the South, it is still rife.
The contrast Viollette makes between the easily contained plague and the much more lethal typhus14 is reinforced by Ageron, who points out that typhus, which often followed on famine, was linked to social conditions (and hence to human agency); endemic amongst the poor, it only became epidemic at times of immense poverty and suffering.15 11 Albert Camus and the Literature of Revolt (Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1978 [1959]), 164, 166. 12 Ibid., 177. 13 L’Algérie vivra-t-elle? 176-77. 14 According to Marie-Louise Blondeau, there were 55,000 cases in 1941, nearly 200,000 in 1942, and 45,000 in 1943 (“Notes pour une édition critique de La Peste”, Roman 20-50 (December, 1986), 80). 15 Histoire de l’Algérie contemporaine, II, 294.
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Although in reality human agency was able to stem the plague, it might also be argued that human agency played a role in the real plague of typhus that beset colonial Algeria. In the novel’s real geographical location, extreme poverty engendered typhus and the lesson learned by those who suffered it might have been of a different nature from that of Rieux.16 On the real level, then, Camus’s choice of setting undermines the universal resonances of the plague. The fictional treatment of the plague in Oran is literally anachronistic whereas on the symbolic level the more realistic choice of typhus would clearly be unsatisfactory because too specific, too familiar, and it would raise all too starkly those issues of human agency for which the novel has been criticized. If, from the viewpoint of recent history, the choice of setting raises problems, this has been further attacked on the grounds that it erases political realities. Camus’s attempt to universalize the setting of the novel is attacked by those who point out that Oran is above all a colonial town where colonial injustice is tangible. Likewise, Conor Cruise O’Brien finds a “serious flaw” in the setting of the plague in Oran, which thus becomes a “never-was city”, and he points out that after the first interview between Rambert and Rieux “the native question is simply abolished, once it has served to reveal the differing standards of two Europeans”.17 Observing that the Muslim Algerians in Oran could have provided “an excellent illustration of an imprisoned people”, Edward Hughes likewise notes that the abstract and a-political level on which debates about human affairs are conducted results in exclusion rather than inclusion.18 The first conversation between Rambert and Rieux not only demonstrates the former’s attitude towards the truth, but it is followed by the suggestion that in the plague Rambert has a more fitting subject for his reports (TRN, 1227, 1287, 1288), implying that whatever the injustices of this situation, its roots are to be found in a greater evil lying in human nature itself. Although this may in part explain Camus’s refusal to address the “plague of colonialism”, the human nature of which La Peste speaks is that of a very particular form of
16 For a consideration of typhus, vagrancy and famine as the “plagues of colonialism”, see Azzedine Haddour, Colonial Myths: History and Narrative. 17 Camus, 47. 18 Camus: Le Premier Homme: La Peste, Glasgow Introductory Guides to French Literature 33 (Glasgow: University of Glasgow, 1995), 44.
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Western man, transplanted onto an Algerian context that is in turn effaced. This select group is then universalized.
Woman; that which escapes History This particular problematical trajectory from the concrete to the abstract and symbolic level finds a parallel in the treatment of women in La Peste. In chapter 2 I noted that Camus attempts to give women a mythical status, although he offers no explanation when he calls his female characters “mythical”. For Roland Barthes, myth entails a passage from history into nature and the reduction of complex human affairs to the “simplicity of essences”; myth, he argues, is a depoliticized form of speech, a metalanguage whose referents are a-political, a-historical and posed in universal terms such as “charity”, or “humanity”: Myth does not deny things, on the contrary, its function is to talk about them; simply, it purifies them, it makes them innocent, it gives them a natural and eternal justification, it gives them a clarity which is not that of an explanation but that of a statement of fact. 19
Woman as “myth” is similarly robbed of individuality and rendered eternal, outside of history and human life itself. In “L’Exil d’Hélène”, this legendary figure is divorced from her context to become all that has been banished from the modern Western city as represented by, for example, a money-fixated Oran. Helen is both Beauty and Nature, upon which the West has turned its back, and symbolizes that homeland of the (Greek) soul contained in the notion of “the true homeland”.20 Here also female figures of justice (the Erinnyes and Nemesis) will punish the excesses of Europe. Woman – an unchanging feminine essence – represents an eternal value in a way that recalls Spengler’s view of the feminine. In his letter to Barthes in defence of La Peste Camus suggests an evolution from the solitary hero to one who engages in collective struggle. He adds that Rambert, who embodies the theme of separation, renounces private life in favour of this community (TRN, 1974). This particular distinction between public and private mystifies the relationship between these two aspects of daily life and abstracts emo19
Mythologies (London: Vintage, 1993), 143. Quilliot has reflected that ever since the summer of 1939 when Camus’s project of visiting Greece vanished, the dream of an inaccessible Greece, “homeland of the soul”, occupied a special place in Camus’s heart (La Mer et les prisons, 251). 20
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tional (heterosexual) relationships from the real. A passage crossed out from the typescript of the second version of La Peste offers an explanation for this contradiction. As the plague begins to recede, Rieux contemplates the prospect of beginning again with his wife, who had no conception of what he had been through: Mais tout cela était bien puisqu’elle était la femme, c’est-à-dire ce qui échappe à l’histoire. Elle était la chaleur et la chair dont il avait besoin après la hideuse abstraction de ces mois de peste. (TRN, 2002) But all that was as it should be since she was woman, which is to say that which escapes history. She was the warmth and the flesh he needed after the hideous abstraction of these months of plague.
The division of human life into a masculine terrain of action, experience and development, and a female preserve of absence and stasis reproduces a consistent dichotomy in Camus’s work, yet this exclusion of all women from daily life and experience does not make history the concern of all men. In “Remarque sur la révolte”, which Camus was writing during the same period, the non-Western world is likewise abstracted from history and, most importantly, from the possibility of revolt. There, he asserts that: Il est évident qu’un paria hindou, un guerrier inca, un primitif de l’Asie, n’ont pas la même idée de la révolte. On pourrait même établir avec une probabilité extrêmement grande que la notion de révolte n’a pas de sens dans ces cas précis. (…) Autrement dit, le problème de la révolte semble ne prendre de sens précis qu’à l’intérieur de la pensée européenne. (E, 1687)21 It stands to reason that a Hindu paria, an Inca warrior, an Asian savage do not have the same idea of revolt. One could establish with very great probability that the notion of revolt has no meaning in these precise cases. (…) In other words, the problem of revolt seems only to have precise meaning from the interior of Western thought.
Given these comments it is clear why both Western women and the indigenous population of Algeria are dismissed from the novel; each category, outside of history, is irrelevant to its concerns. Although the concept of human nature remains implicit in “Remarque sur la révolte”, it is clearly conveyed in the idea that through his movement of revolt man recognizes a humanity common to all – a sense of community greater than himself. This sense of community, on which a very particular concept of human nature is founded, is the province of Western man alone. 21
Cf. L’Homme révolté (E, 430).
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Despite the widely accepted view that it concerns a universal human condition the universalism of La Peste is constructed on a series of exclusions of what might be considered integral to its setting and subject matter. Given the ethnic composition of Oran at the time (when Arabs and Berbers numbered roughly 24%) this instability is most clearly demonstrated by the insistence on the fiction that in this domestic setting there are so few women who either suffer the anguish of separation or carry out their traditional role of caring for the sick.22 As a metaphor for the Occupation, moreover, the implication is that women were in some way immune from suffering or death and incapable of resistance.23 The extent of their engagement in actual physical combat was certainly no less than that of Camus himself.
Dératisation The ejection of women from the town has led Jean Gassin to comment that this puts them to some degree on the same side as the plague itself, and he wonders whether there might be a subtle link between women and the plague.24 Indeed, the first act of dératisation in La Peste is that of the woman as sexual partner. Clearly, as an emanation of an indifferent nature the plague is on the same side as women; as an embodiment of death, moreover, it takes on the role implicitly assigned to women during the Absurd cycle – although, of course, the plague is an active agent of death, and the concrete enemy against which the heroes may legitimately fight. Given the continuing identification between woman and nature it is not surprising to find an equation drawn between women and the rats of the plague. The “flower-like girls” of the lyrical essays are endowed here with other more sinister qualities; just as the faded petals of flowers “were strewn on the dusty pavements” (TRN, 1311), so the dead rats “were strewn on the stairways” (TRN, 1228), while in an echo of Don Juan “the harvest was more abundant every morning”. With “a little flower of blood on their pointed noses”, this link between death and the natu22 As incidental characters, women are usually featured as helpless wives of the sick; although nurses are generally male, mention is made of two female nurses (TRN, 1386); those who suffer the torments of separation, however, are male lovers and mothers, not wives (TRN, 1292, 1458, 1463). 23 This is illustrated by one early note where Camus considers an ending focusing on a woman in mourning whose suffering symbolizes what the men have sacrificed in blood and life (C2, 112). 24 “Le Sadisme dans l’œuvre de Camus”, 137.
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ral world is extended. Simultaneously, their death cries (TRN, 1229) prefigure the human deaths to come. Furthermore, the earth’s loving and maternal embrace is of a different nature in La Peste. Here, the earth seems to overflow its boundaries to pollute and contaminate everyday life. Its emissaries, the plague rats, seem to emanate from the bowels of the earth – from basements, cellars and sewers – as if nature were purging itself of the pus, filth and corruption in its entrails: On eut dit que la terre même où étaient plantées nos maisons se purgeait de son chargement d’humeurs, qu’elle laissait monter à la surface des furoncles et des sanies qui, jusqu’ici, la travaillaient intérieurement. (TRN, 1229) It was as if the earth on which our houses stood were being purged of its secreted humours, thrusting up to the surface the abcesses and pus-clots that had been forming in its entrails. (P, 16)
This passage invites direct comparison with the grandmother of “Le Courage” and “L’Ironie”, vomiting up the fermentations in her intestines (PC, 221; E, 22). Thus, this negative imagery is further charged with the baleful presence of women through the association with the grandmother as judge and the uncanny powers of the woman to be dead-but-alive and alive-but-dead. To be sure, it might be argued that this imagery of the filthy, ratinfested bowels of the earth signifies the terrible vengeance that will be wreaked on those men who have turned their backs on the natural beauty of the world and all that is symbolized by a highly refined and purified stereotype of woman in favour of the pursuit of money and commerce. Such an interpretation is certainly sustained by the description of the Oranais in La Peste, or by Camus’s later “L’Exil d’Hélène”. Furthermore, the Orpheus and Eurydice myth, which is profiled here, suggests that search for reunion with the lost loved one, or lost beauty, which commentators have often noted. Yet this passage, with its evocation of the vile and filthy earth, troubles such analyses and challenges the easy and often-used trope of death as a return to the earth’s maternal embrace. The plague rats themselves carry other disturbing associations; with a similar vocabulary of the body, the factories and warehouses “disgorged” hundreds of dead rats (TRN, 1228). In the town, their bodies “lay in piles, in dustbins, or in long lines in the gutters”, so that orders are given for their removal to the municipal incinerator (TRN, 1229). Such descriptions recall the comments already cited on the dead or dying woman who is herself so
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much ordure, fit only for the gutter (C1, 231). This is also the fate of the doctor’s wife. The opening scenes of La Peste draw a parallel between the plague and Rieux’s wife. When he sees a second dying rat: Ce n’était pas au rat qu’il pensait. Ce sang rejeté le ramenait à sa préoccupation. Sa femme, malade depuis un an, devait partir le lendemain (…). (TRN, 1223) He wasn’t thinking of the rat. That glimpse of spurting blood had brought him back to something that had been on his mind all day. His wife, who had been ill for a year now, was due to leave the next day (…). (P, 9)
The sight of death and blood continues the associations with women established in Camus’s earlier writings. This parallel persists after Rieux’s farewell to his wife, when he meets Judge Othon, and rats and wife merge as the two men consider the dead vermin: “Les rats…” dit le juge. Rieux eut un mouvement dans la direction du train, mais se retourna vers la sortie. “Oui”, dit-il, “ce n’est rien”. Tout ce qu’il retint de ce moment fut le passage d’un homme d’équipe qui portait sous le bras une caisse pleine de rats morts. (TRN, 1226) “The rats…” the magistrate began. Rieux made a brief movement in the direction of the train, then turned back towards the exit. “Yes”, he said, “It’s nothing”. All he retained of that moment was the passing of a railwayman with a box full of dead rats under his arm. (P, 12)
There is a circularity in these two scenes where, on the one hand a dead rat reminds Rieux of his wife, and on the other hand her departure is symbolized by the clearing away of dead rats. His ambiguous final comment (“it’s nothing”) suggests judgement on both. The image of the vile earth purging itself of infestation is followed by the first death – of the concierge, whose dying words, “the rats!” seem to denote the nature of that terrible creature which, “from the depths of the earth, was calling him without respite” (TRN, 1234). Thus, the myth of Eurydice, introduced here, contains a much higher degree of ambivalence than is generally acknowledged. There is only one direct reference to this myth, in Tarrou’s diary where the weekly performance of Glück’s opera is described (TRN, 1379), and as if to underline the contrast between reality and romantic fiction the optimistic ending of the opera is brutally curtailed when the singer playing Orpheus dies on stage immediately after the farewell arias have been sung. In a world at war there are no happy endings, while men are the ones who suffer and die.
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This distinction between the real and the imaginary or unknown is similarly underlined when, in their hasty scene of farewell25 Rieux and his wife find themselves on opposite sides of the train window. It is as if she has already entered that other world: Il la serra contre lui et, sur le quai maintenant, de l’autre côté de la vitre, il ne voyait plus que son sourire. “Je t’en prie”, dit-il, “veille sur toi”. Mais elle ne pouvait pas l’entendre. (TRN, 1225-26) He took her in his arms, then stepped back on to the platform. Now he could only see her smile across the window. “Please”, he said, “take care of yourself”. But she could not hear him. (P, 11-12)
This scene recalls “La Voix qui a été soulevée par de la musique”, when the closed window conjures up a world where “the agitation of men seems emptied of meaning and their gestures ridiculous, almost falling into the void” (PC, 279). Rieux’s subsequent conversation with the judge, when he dismisses the rats (the wife) with the words “it’s nothing”, might be interpreted as a restatement of the earlier observation that “she no longer exists, since she is no longer there. (…) She is returning to her darkness (…). Like a window closing off the noise of the street” (PC, 282). The symbolism of the window pane here separates a rational world of men from the irrational of an intangible “feminine” world. Later, when contemplating with horror the long litany of plagues in history, it is through the window that Rieux looks out onto the world: Le docteur ouvrit la fenêtre et le bruit de la ville s’enfla d’un coup. D’un atelier voisin montait le sifflement bref et répété d’une scie mécanique. Rieux se secoua. Là était la certitude, dans le travail de tous les jours. (…) L’essentiel était de bien faire son métier. (TRN, 1250) The doctor opened the window, and at once the noises of the town grew louder. The brief, intermittent sibilance of a machine-saw came from a nearby workshop. Rieux pulled himself together. There lay certainty, in day-to-day work. (…) The thing was to do one’s job well. (P, 37)
When Rieux opens the window he hears the sounds of everyday, masculine activity through which men give meaning to life, whereas its closure brings him face to face with the indifference and impenetrability of the natural world. The above passage is a reformulation of the earlier “I see equates with I believe” in “Noces à Tipasa”; man exerts control over his environment through his activities in the concrete 25
Here, time accelerates, so that Rieux’s wife seems to depart almost as soon as he returns home rather than the following noon.
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world, whereas speculations about a metaphysical or emotional dimension are fruitless and sterile. On this concrete level lies the “true path” (C2, 49), in a quantifiable and controllable world.
Passion and the Egoism of Love In 1943 Camus reflected that living with one’s passions supposes one has mastered them (C2, 104). In writing La Peste the author was consciously trying to create a new form of classicism, the central aim of which he identified as the domination of the passions (C2, 130). Unsurprisingly, then, a central theme of the novel concerns this struggle for mastery over the emotions. Of Tarrou, Camus notes that he likes the company of the Spanish dancers: “He only loves passion. Naturally, a man must fight. ‘But if he stops loving outside that, what is the point of fighting’” (JV, 46). These words, with slight variation, are attributed to Tarrou in La Peste just before he and Rieux swim together. Paneloux, Grand and Rambert are all driven, in different degrees, by passion but the story of Rambert, the journalist from Paris who has been unexpectedly cut off by the town’s closure, serves as the focal point of this struggle. To some degree, Rambert may be seen as a variant of Grand, also recreating an idealized image of the lost loved one, which becomes more real to him than reality itself. His presence demonstrates above all what it is to live in the Underworld of the separated. In order to carry out the daily task men must master their emotions, and throughout the chronicle we witness Rieux’s own attempts to keep his emotions under control. The consequences of the failure to do so are demonstrated above all by Rambert, although Paneloux’s stance is analogous; his sermon is spoken in a passionate voice (TRN, 1296), and he makes the same distinction as Rambert between “you” and “I”; likewise, he has put all his faith in an idée fixe – a factor defining “the passionate ones” (TRN, 1461) – insisting that men of religion have no need of friends as they have invested everything in God (TRN, 1409). What signals Rambert’s different priorities most starkly is his attitude towards his job; he was not put on earth to write news reports, he tells Rieux; but perhaps he had been put on earth to live with a woman (TRN, 1288). His standards clearly do not measure up to those of Rieux during their first conversation; he is not dispassionate, the implication is, and therefore would be unable to tell the whole truth (TRN, 1226-27). This impression is confirmed when Rambert holds Rieux directly responsible for his quarantine in the town:
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Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus J’ai pensé alors que, pour un cas au moins, vous pourriez défaire ce que vous aviez contribué à faire. Mais cela vous est égal. Vous n’avez pensé à personne. Vous n’avez pas tenu compte de ceux qui étaient séparés. (TRN, 1290) I thought that in one case at least you could unmake what you had helped to make. But it’s all the same to you. You never gave a thought to anybody. You didn’t take those who were separated into account. (P, 74)
Rambert, unable to contain his emotions, is very agitated, raises his voice and speaks impatiently. Rejecting the idea of collective suffering with his words “I don’t belong here”, he tells Rieux “you’re speaking the language of reason, you’re living in abstraction” (TRN, 1289). The dichotomy has been adequately underlined, which is no doubt the reason for Camus’s erasure of the words “you’re speaking the language of reason (and I the language of passion)” (TRN, 1987). Rambert’s emotional priorities blind him to his situation, yet precisely because he is thus blinded he is provided with a distraction from the plague which softens its impact on him. Like the opiate of sexuality itself, however, this distraction is in fact a failure to face reality, so that he becomes like a dead man in the world of the dead; he is “une ombre perdue” (TRN, 1309) (“a lost shade”), wandering aimlessly (TRN, 1308) as if in a twilight world, where his only activity is the sterile, unproductive yearning for lost times. The plight of the separated is a collective isolation: (I)ls flottaient plutôt qu’ils ne vivaient, abandonnés à des jours sans direction et à des souvenirs stériles, ombres errantes qui n’auraient pu prendre force qu’en acceptant de s’enraciner dans la terre de leur douleur. Ils éprouvaient ainsi la souffrance profonde de tous les prisonniers et de tous les exilés, qui est de vivre avec une mémoire qui ne sert à rien. (TRN, 1277-78) They drifted rather than lived, the prey of aimless days and sterile memories, like wandering shadows that could have acquired substance only by consenting to root themselves in the solid earth of their distress. Thus they felt the profound sorrow of all prisoners and exiles, which is to live with a memory that serves no purpose. (P, 61-62)
Although their individual despair saves them from panic, this is an ironic consolation, for they are completely unprepared if the disease takes them: Tiré de cette longue conversation intérieure qu’il soutenait avec une ombre, il était alors jeté sans transition au plus épais silence de la terre. Il n’avait eu le temps de rien. (TRN, 1281) Snatched suddenly from his long, silent communion with a wraith, he was plunged straightaway into the densest silence of the earth. He’d had no time for anything. (P, 65)
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In the necropolis of Oran (TRN, 1359), then, there is an Underworld of spirits who are lost and whose activity is as sterile as love itself (TRN, 1369).26 Those who yearn after their absent loved ones are caught up in a private emotion and the stasis of an idée fixe (TRN, 1461), in the “egoism of love” (TRN, 1368). Indeed, there is literally room for only one ego, given the portrayal of heterosexual love in this novel; Rambert’s obsession is with his own happiness, not a shared one; what he finds most unbearable is the possibility that his girlfriend may grow old before he can rejoin her (TRN, 1341). The notion of heterosexual love as a purely private and one-sided emotion, where the woman is simply objectified, is consistently repeated, rather than presented as a relationship or commitment between two people.27 Hence, it can be unproblematically presented as a selfish search for individual and asocial happiness. Monique Crochet argues that Rambert is reunited with his Eurydice precisely because he has preserved the image of his love. Along with Dr Castel and his wife, she contends, Rambert represents all those for whom human feelings are stronger than the abstraction of evil. For those like Rieux, Tarrou and Grand, the plague has an interior origin, which is that they have become prisoners of their professions and daily activities, and consequently unable to communicate with their loved one.28 This interpretation conflicts with the clear valorization of these principal heroes, alongside a consequent subtle devaluation of those like Rambert, however sympathetic their portrayal. Rambert’s reunion with his lost love at the end of the plague is the moment of Eurydice’s death: Il aurait souhaité de redevenir celui qui, au début de l’épidémie, voulait courir d’un seul élan hors de la ville et s’élancer à la rencontre de celle qu’il aimait. Mais il savait que cela n’était plus possible. Il avait changé, la peste avait mis en lui une distraction que, de toutes ses forces, il essayait de nier, et qui, cependant, continuait en lui comme une sourde angoisse. (TRN, 1462) He would have liked to become again the man who, at the outbreak of the epidemic, wanted in one bound to run out of the town and throw himself at the
26
Such descriptions point up the very strong resemblances between the respective situations of Rambert and Clamence. 27 Anthony Rizzuto makes the point that love, marriage and procreation are social activities to the same degree as politics, yet for Camus marriage and politics are seen as “contradictory and mutually exclusive” (Camus: Love and Sexuality, 102). 28 Les Mythes, 179, 181.
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Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus woman he loved. But he knew that was no longer possible. He had changed, the plague had forced on him a detachment which, try as he might, he couldn’t deny, and which like a formless fear haunted his mind. (P, 240)
His idealized image of her, created in her absence, is destroyed by her actual presence. Moreover, the additional gap between the experiential development of men in the real world and the stasis of women, outside of history, threatens here to be unbridgeable.
La Vraie Voie Rieux is portrayed as sympathetic to Rambert’s plight and his attempts to rejoin his love in the outside world. Hence, we have the impression of differing yet equally valid points of view. Yet the conclusion is clearly conveyed that in times of emergency such as the plague men are constrained by certain necessities which over-ride individual preferences. This fact is underlined by Rambert’s eventual realization that: Il peut y avoir de la honte à être heureux tout seul. (…) Maintenant que j’ai vu ce que j’ai vu, je sais que je suis d’ici, que je le veuille ou non. Cette histoire nous concerne tous. (TRN, 1389) It may be shameful to be happy by oneself. (…) Now that I have seen what I have seen, I know that I belong here, whether I want it or not. This business concerns all of us. (P, 170)
When deluded by the “egoism” of love Rambert had believed himself a free man, able to choose; but the narrator consistently promotes the idea that in such circumstances this is in fact a refusal to face reality; although some continued to believe they could still make individual choices: (E)n fait, on pouvait dire à ce moment, au milieu du mois d’août, que la peste avait tout recouvert. Il n’y avait plus alors de destins individuels, mais une histoire collective qui était la peste et des sentiments partagés par tous. (TRN, 1355) (A)ctually it would have been truer to say that by this time, mid-August, the plague had swallowed up everything. No longer were there individual destinies, but a collective destiny which was the plague and emotions shared by all. (P, 138)
As their memories fade, lovers become increasingly like everyone else, and are forced to recognize this new reality; they had lost the “egoism” of love and the ambiguous advantages it brought them. At least now the situation was clear, the narrator comments: “the scourge concerned everyone” (TRN, 1368-69). Rambert’s final acknowledgement of reality is, then, a belated one; those like Tarrou, Rieux and Grand had recognized this from the be-
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ginning, and thus theirs is the viewpoint that prevails rather than a series of equivalent points of view. Rieux’s behaviour is finally the one Rambert emulates: Rien au monde ne vaut qu’on se détourne de ce qu’on aime. Et pourtant je m’en détourne, moi aussi, sans que je puisse savoir pourquoi. (…) Guérissons le plus vite possible. C’est le plus pressé. (TRN, 1389) For nothing in the world is it worth turning one’s back on what one loves. Yet this is what I am doing, without knowing why. (…) Let’s cure as quickly as possible. That’s the most urgent job. (P, 170-71)
Endless soul-searching is a self-indulgence men cannot afford, for, far from seeking “refuge” in their profession, it is the heroism of men doing their job unflinchingly which transforms the world in a world where love is “useless, burdensome, inert in us, sterile like crime or condemnation” (TRN, 1369). Men’s failure to value love is not the problem here, but their tragic condition as men which necessitates that they have their sights set on a more imposing level of reality. It is what Rambert sees and experiences that changes his mind.29 Happiness and beauty remain goals worth striving for, yet the modern world forces more immediate priorities on men. La Peste does not focus on love, nor even the loss of love; it demonstrates that “the important things lie elsewhere” (C2, 58). During the course of such struggles a greater virtue, “the strong and chaste friendship between men” (E, 167), is born.
The Dialogues of Men; the Silence of Women Through collective struggle men with no other connection but the plague recognize their shared humanity and become friends. Far from being unable to communicate, as Crochet suggests, they confide in one another and reveal their most intimate secrets. Grand discusses with Tarrou and Rieux the work which stems from his most private emotions; Rieux and Tarrou become involved in Rambert’s emotional struggles; Tarrou, of whom none of the inhabitants knows anything, 29 This theme is constantly reiterated: Rieux tells Tarrou that he had had to see someone dying (TRN, 1323); Paneloux speaks in the name of Truth because he has not seen enough death (TRN, 1322); those around the bedside of Othon’s son are changed because they have to look the death of an innocent child in the face (TRN, 1394); and Tarrou asks Rieux whether he has actually seen a man shot (TRN, 1424); the impact of seeing with his own eyes a man condemned to death is the incident that first set him on the “path of truth”. Hence also, of course, the narrator’s insistence that he is only reporting what he has seen and heard.
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confides in Rieux his intimate biography, whilst Rieux himself shamefacedly admits impulses to confide in both Grand and Tarrou. Indeed, in La Peste Camus achieves his first successful portrayal of a social group where verbal communication is of such importance. The importance of speech in the affairs of men is elsewhere demonstrated by the very fact that the rebel is the man who says “No” (E, 1682). In Ni victimes ni bourreaux Camus argues the need for dialogue, claiming that today, no-one speaks out any more (E, 331). Because ours is a “century of fear” the long dialogue between men has ended, while an immense conspiracy of silence is spreading over the earth (E, 332). Indeed, Rieux expressly disassociates himself from this condition by the very act of writing, which he undertook “so as not to be amongst those who remain silent” (TRN, 1473). The emphasis on the importance of dialogue is demonstrated in La Peste by the developing male friendships, which are both a bi-product of and the cement for their collective struggles. Even the silent communion of Rieux and Tarrou during their bathe in the sea is preceded by the confirmation of their friendship through dialogue, when Tarrou confides his private life and emotions. In such relations silent understanding is a consequence of verbal understanding. The situation with regard to women is quite the reverse. In his analysis of the Camusian love scene Anthony Rizzuto demonstrates the extent to which heterosexual love and speech are regarded as antithetical, resulting in a situation where silence underlies the authenticity of love and simultaneously guarantees its future downfall.30 This symbolic petrefaction of women is expressed in the activities of Joseph Grand, whose confidences to Rieux mirror the latter’s own evaluation of love as inevitably a “long habit between two people” (TRN, 1220). The story of Grand’s marriage is presented as a universal one for men, where work must take precedence over love to such an extent that one “forgets” to love (TRN, 1286): La fatigue aidant, il s’était laissé aller, il s’était tu de plus en plus et il n’avait pas soutenu sa jeune femme dans l’idée qu’elle était aimée. Un homme qui travaille, la pauvreté, l’avenir lentement fermé, le silence des soirs autour de la table, il n’y a pas de place pour la passion dans un tel univers. (TRN, 1286) Owing largely to fatigue he let himself go, was increasingly silent, and failed to keep alive the feeling in his wife that she was loved. A husband who works, pov-
30
Camus: Love and Sexuality, 92.
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erty, the gradual loss of hope in the future, silent evenings at home – there is no place for passion in such a universe. (P, 70)
The experience he recalls might be that of Rieux himself, but it is not limited to pre-plague Oran, for the emphasis on fatigue, exhausted silence, and the incongruity of passion reflect the present. This is the permanent experience of men struggling against their plague-ridden lives, and one only another man could understand. Passion – the loss of emotional control – is always “useless” and “heavy to carry” in any such universe. Passion must be transformed and sublimated in order for it to enhance the life of man productively. It is after the loss of his wife that Grand has discovered passion, and thanks to her absence that he has been able to develop a passionate interest in his work. This is apparent long before we know his secret; although he had heard of them, he had not noticed the fate of the rats because he had “other worries” (TRN, 1233); later, when he talks about Cottard, who had seemed to want to talk, he explains his failure to do so because he was “working” (TRN, 1243). It is very clear that he is in the throes of a secret passion when even discussing his work, for his hands tremble and he perspires (TRN, 1304). But whereas the protection afforded to “the passionate ones” is an illusory one, Grand’s obsession does not disrupt his sense of priorities and prevent him from joining the fight against the plague. As he tells Rieux: “There is the plague, we must defend ourselves, it’s obvious! If only everything were so simple!” (TRN, 1328). And he returns to his sentence. This particular diversion also brings relief to Rieux and Tarrou as they involve themselves in the search for the right word (TRN, 1328), an activity Rieux had first engaged in precisely as a means of escape (TRN, 1302).
Orpheus As Camus repeatedly reflects in his notebooks, men and women have a different conception of heterosexual love. Women dream of an emotion that conquers all, enduring beyond the grave (C1, 131). In 1942 he complained of the excessive use of Eurydice in contemporary literature, which he attributed to the fact that never had so many lovers been separated before (C2, 56). In La Peste, however, as if to emphasize the difference between romantic fantasy and reality, the actor playing Orpheus dies from the plague. Camus’s treatment of this myth in La Peste suggests a dismissal and surpassing of Eurydice which parallels his own development as an author.
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Maurice Blanchot has presented Orpheus as a template of the heroic artist who will venture into the unknown for the sake of his art. Eurydice here represents that “feminine” space, “the profoundly obscure point toward which art and desire, death and night, seem to tend. She is the instant when the essence of night approaches as the other night”. This Orpheus does not want Eurydice “in her daytime truth and her everyday appeal”. He wants to see her: not when she is visible, but when she is invisible, and not as the intimacy of a familiar life, but as the foreignness of what excludes all intimacy, and wants, not to make her live, but to have living in her the plenitude of her death.31
Certainly, such an ambition clearly applies to Camus’s very early preoccupations with respect to women; and above all, to that search for total knowledge to which women present such an impediment. But the author of Le Mythe has consciously gone beyond such concerns. There, the emphasis is consistently on the limits of understanding as being circumscribed by the concrete – those truths which the hand can touch (E, 136). Although a consequence of the human consciousness and therefore itself equally a construct of the imagination, the Absurd is presented as a logical deduction based on empirical evidence which, in its very essence, differs from the intangible emotions. To turn away from such a form of knowledge would be an evasion: Abolir la révolte consciente, c’est éluder le problème. (…) Vivre, c’est faire vivre l’absurde. Le faire vivre, c’est avant tout le regarder. Au contraire d’Eurydice, l’absurde ne meurt que lorsqu’on s’en détourne. (E, 138) To abolish conscious revolt is to elude the problem. (…) Living is to keep the Absurd alive. Keeping it alive is above all looking at it. Unlike Eurydice, the Absurd only dies when one turns away from it. (MS, 53)
In their daily activities and their “revolt” against death the combattants of La Peste re-assert these priorities. Eurydice is of no consequence; she is already dead. Although all the major characters bear the mark of Orpheus, the treatment of this legend in La Peste, and particularly the example of Rieux, suggests its repudiation. Rambert may be reunited with his loved one, but “in her daytime truth and her everyday appeal” this was not the woman he sought. Grand, on the other hand, will never suffer Rambert’s disappointment of reunion with the loved one because, like Rieux, he knows al31
“Orpheus’s Gaze”, in The Space of Literature, Ann Smock (tr.) (London: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 171, 172.
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ready that passion fades. Jeanne’s gift to him was her absence, which has endowed him with a creative passion, channelled into art and the impossible desire for perfection. He has not sought Jeanne “in her everyday reality”, but rather to replace her with his perfect woman, and to substitute for the habit of a familiar life the fantasy of the ideal woman. As in “Le Livre de Mélusine”, the quest is of greater importance than the attainment of the desired object, whose absence alone sustains desire. Tarrou’s quest most closely resembles that of Blanchot’s Orpheus. Like Patrice Mersault of La Mort heureuse, he is not enslaved by sexual passion; and, like him, he seeks to lead his life through an assertion of the Will. In a world where all carry the plague everything else – health, integrity, purity – is an effect of the will, which must be unfaltering: L’honnête homme, celui qui n’infecte presque personne, c’est celui qui a le moins de distraction possible. Et il en faut de la volonté et de la tension pour ne jamais être distrait! Oui, Rieux, c’est bien fatigant d’être un pestiféré. Mais c’est encore plus fatigant de ne pas vouloir l’être. (…) Mais c’est pour cela que quelques-uns, qui veulent cesser de l’être, connaissent une extrémité de fatigue dont rien ne les délivrera plus que la mort. (TRN, 1426) The good man, the man who infects hardly anyone, is the man who has the fewest lapses of attention. And it needs tremendous willpower, a never-ending tension of the mind, to avoid such lapses. Yes, Rieux, it’s a wearying business, being plaguestricken. But it’s still more wearying to refuse to be it. (…) But that is also why some of us, those who want to stop being this, feel such an extremity of fatigue from which nothing will deliver us except death. (P, 207)
During such an extremity of fatigue he records his reactions to Rieux’s mother, whose Eurydice-like qualities attract him, reminding him of his own mother: “Ma mère était ainsi, j’aimais en elle le même effacement et c’est elle que j’ai toujours voulu rejoindre. Il y a huit ans, je ne peux pas dire qu’elle soit morte. Elle s’est seulement effacée un peu plus que d’habitude et, quand je me suis retourné, elle n’était plus là”. (TRN, 1446) “My mother was like that, I loved in her the same self-effacement, and it’s her I’ve always wanted to rejoin. Eight years ago, I can’t say that she died. She only effaced herself a little more than usual and, when I turned around she was no longer there”. (P, 225)
This woman’s death is virtually indistinguishable from her life; she has only taken one step further into her darkness. Likewise, Mme Rieux, who “knew everything without ever thinking about it”, is no woman of flesh and blood, but of “silence and shadow”, sitting mo-
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tionless in front of her window, until the dusk turns her into “a black shadow” before finally dissolving her immobile silhouette entirely (TRN, 1446). Tarrou follows this figure into the dark, and her increasing empire over him is evidenced by the fact that he is already beginning to succumb to the plague as he writes these words. Dying, he watches this “little shadow” at his bedside (TRN, 1456), and it is she who assists his passage into the lethal “peace” he seeks. Tarrou had found this only in death, “at the hour when it could serve no purpose” (TRN, 1467). This judgement, passed by the narrator towards the end of the novel, ultimately aligns Tarrou with all who lift their eyes towards the heavens, yearning after the intangible in a quest that will never be realized on this earth. Tarrou’s metaphysical preoccupations are presented as beyond the understanding of the more practical Rieux, whose concern is with the daily reality of diagnosing the sick. Yet Tarrou’s nightmare vision of a world where the plague is simply the human condition, and where, willy nilly, all men are murderers, does not differ markedly from Rieux’s view of a world ruled over by death and where each victory is necessarily provisional (TRN, 1323). The major distinction between them seems to lie in their attitudes towards metaphysical questions – a dimension resolutely rejected by Rieux. I earlier noted the presentation of nature at the beginning of the novel, and the parallels drawn there between women and the plague rats. Such imagery contrasts with the narrator’s self-portrait as a man who firmly rejects those occasional nightmarish fantasies that haunt him. Grand’s defining characteristic, that he seemed to be always seeking the right word (TRN, 1231), is shared by Rieux as narrator, whose “precautions of language” (TRN, 1222) are likewise aimed at making his chronicle “stick to reality” (TRN, 1305), except that he does not seek artistic perfection but objective truth: “he had made hardly any changes for the sake of artistic effect” (TRN, 1365). Rieux’s concern is to base his writing on fact – to “reproduce” reality, and in pursuit of this goal he uses documents, first-hand testimony, and personal experience. Seeing himself as the objective reporter of events, he states that: Sa tâche est seulement de dire “Ceci est arrivé” lorsqu’il sait que ceci est, en effet, arrivé, que ceci a intéressé la vie de tout un peuple, et qu’il y a donc des milliers de témoins qui estimeront dans leur cœur la vérité de ce qu’il dit. (TRN, 1221) His business is only to say “This is what happened”, when he knows that it actually did happen, that it closely affected the life of a whole populace, and that there
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are thousands of eye-witnesses who can appraise in their hearts the truth of what he writes. (P, 7)
In this dispassionate spirit he recounts his daily activities, where practical action takes priority over emotional empathy, and love, memory, pity and “peace” are progressively discarded as serving no useful purpose. Pity is despatched as an unproductive emotion on the occasion of Rieux’s visit to the house of Mme Loret and her daughter (TRN, 1292-93). Whereas at other times his examination is firstly of the armpits or the neck of the victim, here Rieux knows immediately where to look: Et lui, relevant drap et chemise, contemplait en silence les taches rouges sur le ventre et les cuisses, l’enflure des ganglions. La mère regardait entre les jambes de sa fille et criait, sans pouvoir se dominer. (TRN, 1292) And he, raising the coverlet and chemise, gazed in silence at the red blotches on the girl’s thighs and stomach, the swollen glands. The mother looked between the legs of her daughter and cried out, uncontrollably. (P, 76)
This deathbed scene insistently mirrors so many scenes of childbirth, except that what they witness is not the arrival of new life, but the “microbe” of death itself and that spreading contagion that will contaminate all it touches. Here, a fascinating mise en abyme is created where the mother, as if it is she upon whom the Medusa’s petrifying gaze has been deflected,32 confronts herself as the source of all mortality; all earthly corruption emanates from between the woman’s legs. One might speculate that Rieux’s determined insistence on the “facts”, the primacy of empirical reality and everyday work stems not from a lack of imagination but from an excess of it. Indeed, as he remarks, a doctor has seen more suffering and consequently has more imagination (TRN, 1248). As the narrator of this chronicle, his are the words that conjure up the image of the vile and vengeful earth summoning the concierge into death, and he is the one seeking refuge from the irrational world of the emotions through his insistence that certainty lies in the concrete world. This is an Orpheus who has emphatically turned his back on Eurydice because he has already looked into the void and seen that other night. If Blanchot’s Orpheus cannot do otherwise than turn towards Eurydice because this is what he wants to see, Camus’s Rieux cannot help but turn away, in a gesture that re32 See Freud’s essay “Medusa’s Head”, Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol.18, trans. by James Strachey (ed.) (London: Hogarth Press, 1955), 273-74.
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flects that of the author when he writes in Le Mythe “I want to deliver my universe from its phantoms and to people it with truths of flesh and blood whose presence I cannot deny” (E, 179). On this level the Orpheus and Eurydice myth may be seen as the “elaboration of a process of mourning”. From an initial disbelief at the death of the loved one and the useless quest to bring back the dead, the final backward glance of Orpheus is not the cause of Eurydice’s death. Rather, it is the final stage of a mourning process – the acknowledgement of the fact of death. And beyond that borderline where none can follow and return alive there is “nothing”. For Rieux, in the case of his wife, or for the author in the case of his impenetrable mother, she no longer exists, since she is no longer there. Omniscience requires the exclusion of the unknown. Despite resemblances between them, Rieux’s activities surpass those of Grand because he has chosen a more fitting subject for his writing in depicting the reality of fraternal struggle and the collective passions of his fellow-citizens. Grand’s folly lies not in his ambition, but in his failure to recognize the initial cliché of the perfect love on which he bases his creative efforts, and hence by striving to create the perfect woman in a world of which he knows nothing (TRN, 1305). His attempted ressuscitation of a dead love dooms his effort to failure. Heterosexual love is founded on silence and there are no words to revive it: “Tant que nous nous sommes aimés, nous nous sommes compris sans paroles. Mais on ne s’aime pas toujours. A un moment donné, j’aurais dû trouver les mots qui l’aurait retenue, mais je n’ai pas pu.” (TRN, 1286) “As long as we were in love we didn’t need words to understand one another. But people don’t love forever. A time came when I should have found the words to keep her with me, but I couldn’t.” (P, 70)
Love is a perishable commodity which, once it has died, leaves only “a memory that serves no purpose” (TRN, 1278). Fraternity, on the other hand, is based on both action in the real world and verbal communication; dialogue. The reality man sees changes him, whereas Eurydice dissolves before his eyes because she is already a shadow in the world of shades. In the case of both Grand and Rieux the loss of the loved one engenders creative activity, but whereas Grand’s monument to Jeanne is his horsewoman, Rieux’s monument to Tarrou is the chronicle of La Peste. The story of Orpheus does not end with his failure to regain Eurydice. Like Rieux in his friendship with Tarrou, he discovers a higher
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form of love. After the episode in the Underworld he was torn to pieces by women because he had preached the greater virtue of homosexual love.33 But this ignoble death at the hands of women was a punishment of the gods because of Orpheus’ cowardice in not being prepared to die for his love. By contrast, they rewarded Achilles because, in the full knowledge that by killing Hector he would bring about his own death, nevertheless he avenged the death of his friend Patroclus.34 After the account of Orpheus and Eurydice, Plato’s Symposium turns to the question of homoerotic love, distinguishing between two types of love. The love inspired by Aphrodite in her celestial aspect (not of woman born) is “wholly male, with no trace of femininity”, and this attraction is for what is “inherently stronger and more intelligent – an inclination towards the male”.35
An Inclination towards the Male Rieux may not understand his friend’s quest for peace, yet after Tarrou’s death he understands that he himself has lost it forever: Le docteur ne savait pas si, pour finir, Tarrou avait retrouvé la paix, mais dans ce moment tout au moins, il croyait savoir qu’il n’y aurait jamais plus de paix possible pour lui-même, pas plus qu’il n’y a d’armistice pour la mère amputée de son fils ou pour l’homme qui ensevelit son ami. (TRN, 1458) The doctor could not tell if Tarrou had found peace, now that all was over, but for himself he had a feeling that no peace was possible to him henceforth, any more than there can be an armistice for the mother bereaved of her son or for the man who buries his friend. (P, 235-36)
Achilles was the first literary figure to endure such torment. In March, 1942, Camus refers to the Iliad, the death of Patroclus, Achilles’ return to the battle, and his immense grief at the loss of his companion (C2, 15). Having avenged Patroclus and buried his friend, nevertheless the solitary Achilles: Wept still as he remembered his beloved companion, nor did sleep who subdues all come over him, but he tossed from one side to the other in longing for Patroklos, for his manhood and his great strength and all the actions he had seen to the end with him, and the hardships
33 Ovid: Metamorphoses, Mary M. Innes (tr.) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1955), XI (1-85). 34 Plato: Symposium, Robin Waterfield (tr.) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 179d-180. 35 Symposium, 181c.
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Such is his unending grief that Achilles continues still to punish Hector, “killing” his lifeless corpse again and again and dragging it around the tomb of Patroclus. Camus’s reading of the Iliad seems to have inspired his further comment on the “humiliated image” of man that the past 2,000 years of Christianity have brought about, and he asks what man might have been like today if the classical ideal with its admirable image of man had been preserved instead (C2, 16). “L’Exil d’Hélène” contains a reference to this bond of male friendship. In speaking of contemporary times Camus writes: Nous lutterons pour celle de ses vertus qui vient de loin. Quelle vertu? Les chevaux de Patrocle pleurent leur maître mort dans la bataille. Tout est perdu. Mais le combat reprend avec Achille et la victoire est au bout, parce que l’amitié vient d’être assassinée: l’amitié est une vertu. (E, 856-57) We shall fight for that of its virtues that comes from afar. Which virtue? Patroclus’s horses weep for their master, dead in battle. All is lost. But Achilles returns to the fray and victory lies at the end because friendship has been murdered: friendship is a virtue. (SEN, 139-40)
The relationship between Rieux and Tarrou has been forged over time in the course of struggle and shared experiences. When Tarrou suggests they should consecrate an hour to friendship, it is mutually understood that “doing one’s job” takes priority, an understanding that contrasts with Rieux’s guilt over his neglect of his wife. Each man regards this hour as a brief interlude snatched from the struggle and, unlike heterosexual love for the woman outside of history, their friendship has been tempered by that same struggle. Against a background of conflict (cries, shots fired) Tarrou confides in Rieux, thus sealing their relationship through verbal communication. Words are here an essential precursor to the silent understanding defining this type of love, and of which they are an essential part. In chapter 1 I suggested that there is already evidence of the desire for acceptance in the community of men. In “L’Hôpital du quartier pauvre” the all-encompassing narrative voice undercuts possible diversity. In La Mort heureuse Camus makes two more attempts to demonstrate such fraternity with Zagreus and Bernard. Each time there is a quasi-religious, confessional interview between the solitary hero and the other man, but on neither occasion is a shared under36
Iliad, XXIV, 4-9.
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standing achieved. The exchange of confidences leads to the feeling of contempt on the part of one of these pairs (MH, 79, 180-81), and in the interview with Bernard the suspicion that he might despise Mersault for what he has done provokes a form of fragmentation where Bernard becomes like an externalized manifestation of himself (MH, 184). Such problems are by no means resolved in La Peste, where it could be (and has been) argued that each of the principal characters represents an aspect of Camus himself; moreover, the narrator’s control over the text confers on him disturbingly god-like powers of knowing (or insisting on) what others are thinking. However, only in La Peste does Camus succeed in demonstrating an apparent diversity amongst the main characters which is resolved in a harmonious unity, and this is achieved through the presence of an external, unifying factor; rather than a shared “philosophy of life”, these men display unity of purpose. What has been injected into La Peste is that dimension stemming from the experience of war and the feelings of solidarity Camus knew as a result of his activities in Combat. Whereas in his personal notebooks and his imaginative writings up to this point there is no overt political engagement, Camus’s notes for La Peste increasingly find their place alongside notes on revolt that will ultimately be incorporated into L’Homme révolté. Indeed, as commentators have noted, Tarrou’s confession to Rieux picks up the same vocabulary used in Ni Victimes ni bourreaux. 37 Jean Gassin has pointed out the very close textual similarities between Mersault’s bathe in the sea and that of Tarrou and Rieux. In 1976 he cites Alain Costes to the effect that the aim of Camus’s work was to find the right language to declare his love to his mother, and that this impulse arises directly from forbidden incestuous desire.38 Hence, Gassin’s interpretation of the bathing scene in La Peste depends on its relationship to “Entre Oui et Non” and the son’s silence before a mother to whom he is unable to declare his love. Linked with this desire to speak is the œdipal fear of castration as evidenced by the “primal scene” of the night spent with the mother. Given this emphasis on incestuous desire, it is not surprising that elements of homoerotic love present problems for such an argument, and Gassin is 37
Jean-Yves Guérin has demonstrated the extent to which the themes of the novel are reflected in the editorials of Combat, in “Jalons pour une lecture politique de La Peste”, Roman 20-50, 2 (December, 1986), 7-26. 38 “De Tarrou à Camus: le symbolisme de la guillotine”, AC8 (1976), 73-102.
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keenly aware of the difficulty of distinguishing between the incestuous or homosexual nature of this relationship.39 If the object of this scene is the other man rather than the mother, then it would indeed be difficult to sustain this argument, which is nevertheless repeated with little change of emphasis in 1981,40 while Gassin confronts elsewhere the question of homosexuality. Here, “Entre Oui et non” is not mentioned, while the forbidden nature of the swim taken by the two men is given a more explicitly sexual emphasis, and in which Rieux takes on the “feminine” role which had previously alternated between them.41 Gassin is right to point out such ambiguity, and the apparently homosexual undercurrents in Camus’s work, which become more subtle over time. In La Mort heureuse, where the superior attractions of the male body are clearly signalled, they are difficult to overlook. But women are an essential component in the relationships between men, cementing the bonds between them and providing a form of propriety by supplying an overtly heterosexual context – as in La Peste, where the mother presides over the ménage of Tarrou and Rieux. The emphasis in these masculine relationships is rather on chastity,42 and it seems more appropriate to call this bond a homosocial one.43 Although Mme Rieux mère is generally viewed as replacing the wife, she is the necessary forerunner for Tarrou, who eventually moves into the household (TRN, 1375). He has no attachments to any particular woman, although the implication is that he knows how to enjoy life – watching the dancers and following courting couples in the company of Cottard (TRN, 1376-77), who calls him “a man”, the highest accolade of virility (TRN, 1375). Their relationship is sanctified not only by their shared battle, but by the presence of Rieux’s mother, whose instrumental role here is of considerable importance. Her presence often introduces that of Tarrou; in this new household arrangement she becomes the “mother” of both men, who are thus 39
Ibid., 79. L’Univers symbolique, 244-49. 41 “Les facteurs homosexuels de la création littéraire: le cas d’Albert Camus”, Australian Journal of French Studies, 17 (2) (May-August 1980), 181-93. 42 Redmond O’Hanlon, in “The Rite of Friendship: An Analysis of the Bathing Scene in La Peste”, Modern Languages, 61 (3) (Sept. 1980) (120-25), points to the symbolic significance of both the moon and the stars, whose light becomes “the light of purity” (123). 43 I have adopted this term from Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985). 40
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“brothers in arms”; and it is she who voices Rieux’s own inclination to break the rules and keep the dying Tarrou with them (TRN, 1452). Thus the scrupulously law-abiding Rieux twice contravenes the regulations for the sake of this friendship.
The Maternal Stereotype In this masculine society, the only significant female character is the mother herself, whose aura is such that her status is rarely questioned. Indeed, the extent to which Tarrou’s evaluation of her is accepted without comment is cause for surprise. After their first meeting Tarrou notes the colour of her eyes and remarks that a look of such goodness would always be stronger than the plague (TRN, 1312). If the narrator finds such a statement “bizarre”, then this, apparently, serves only to further illustrate his lack of imagination, or the extent to which he takes her for granted. Those of us who are mothers might be more wary of such bizarre propositions. The presence of this maternal figure demonstrates the success of Camus’s attempt to achieve a “mythical woman”. This explains her proclaimed immunity to the plague, just as her apparent lack of interest in events is explained by her undefined “indifference”, which implies an infinite wisdom and understanding. The equation made by Tarrou between authentic truth and silence (TRN, 1314) is exemplified by her. Whereas Rieux feels guilt at his neglect of his wife, he need feel no such burden in the case of his mother, who is content to pass her days sitting in a corner awaiting his return (TRN, 1319). After a moment of animation on his return she falls silent again, thus meeting the requirements of the taciturn Rieux who has no wish to engage in conversation. Here is the ideal mother who has no expectations, makes no demands, and has no apparent interest except in her son. Mme Rieux is not the sole repository of the maternal stereotype, for Rambert also is touched by its aura during his attempts to escape. At the home of the guards, Louis and Marcel, he meets their mother, a wrinkled old Spanish woman full of smiles, whose innocuous questions about his girlfriend give Rambert cause for reflection (TRN, 1385). In his state of uncertainty he moves from this mother to that of Dr Rieux, and from there to Tarrou and Rieux in order to announce his decision that he will not leave. The mother has a benign influence on all her sons, sanctifying their commitment to one another. While “real” women are banished from La Peste, an ideal of woman remains as a talisman to sanction the activities of men. Hence, Rambert’s dis-
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covery that Rieux’s wife is dying out of sight contributes to his change of mind; Grand first confides in Rieux after he catches sight of her photograph (TRN, 1283); and Rieux’s grief over the loss of his friend is conveniently followed by the announcement of her death. Although this is eclipsed by that of Tarrou, Rieux’s emotions can be attributed to and justified by the loss of his wife. Apparently without any recognition that he is doing so, Pierre Nguyen Van Huy gives a detailed description of the maternal stereotype when, overlooking all ambiguity, he embraces the mother figure as a pure expression of the mutual relationship between the author and his mother. Based on an apparently automatic bond, maternal love is regarded as unproblematically unconditional, altruistic, disinterested and universal.44 While there can be no doubt that such an idealization takes place in Camus’s writings (and La Peste is the prime example), Van Huy accepts this at face value as a constant and unambiguous mutual emotion; both on the level of the author’s actual relationship with his own mother and on the fictional level, he confuses this stereotype for reality. With respect to the undoubted association between mother and nature, he first draws a descriptive parallel between the two and, on this basis, makes them an identical force. Thus the term “maternal” becomes entirely detached from any human associations and is applied not only to nature but to the struggle between the (paternal) “German ideology” and the (maternal) “Mediterranean spirit”. He thus arrives at the astonishing and untenable argument that Noces represents a victory for “maternal” values, where in “L’Été à Alger” the values the author defends are those of the matriarchal or gynocratic tradition, and the moral code he both follows and announces is that of Woman.45 According to this view the fight against the plague represents the victory of the “matriarchal camp” over that of the father. It does not seem to occur to this critic that there is something suspect about the use of such terms in the face of a near total absence of women. Again, I return to Spivak’s statement that such an appropriation is the mark of ideology at work. What is the value of this stereotype (this symbol, the “mythical” woman)? Because it applies to no recognizably human figure its attributes become portable, extendable – universal. Because it is non-specific, non-embodied, in cannot be scrutinized in the same 44 45
La Métaphysique du bonheur chez Albert Camus, 94, 89. Ibid., 106-7, 117.
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way as, for example, a character such as Rieux. It is a communal property, finding its meaning less upon the page than in what we all already know – and do we not know the meaning of mother love and its inexhaustible, unconditional altruism? Undoubtedly, the work of Camus makes use of familiar and widespread sexual stereotypes in conformity to Nguyen Van Huy’s syllogistic and patriarchal “maternal” principle, but this is far from the expression of a woman-centred ethical code, as he claims.
The Battle of the Sexes There are two sorts of destiny, two sorts of war, two sorts of tragedy – public and private. Nothing can eliminate this duality from the world.46
When Camus writes (in a comment that follows an extract for La Peste and precedes drafts for his essay on revolt) that the battle of the sexes exists and we can do nothing about it (C2, 122), it is unlikely that he envisaged a battle between two loosely defined “matriarchal” and “patriarchal” camps where gender is immaterial. On the contrary, sexual difference is here a significant indicator of probable character type and social role. This is most clearly evident in the theatrical works, which depict a universe polarized by gender, and where women consistently argue against the more abstract concerns of men. In this traditional division of the world into a political and social “masculine” sphere of ideas and action, and a domestic, emotional, “feminine” sphere, although both Spengler and Camus categorize woman as outside of history, Spengler identifies two kinds of history fighting for power: Woman is strong and wholly what she is, and she experiences the Man and the Sons only in relation to her and her ordained role. In the masculine being, on the contrary, there is a certain contradiction; he is this man, and he is something else besides, which woman neither understands nor admits, which she feels as robbery and violence upon that which to her is holiest. This secret and fundamental war of the sexes has gone on ever since there were sexes, and will continue – silent, bitter, unforgiving, pitiless – while they continue.47
The theatrical works mobilize such a definition of the battle of the sexes; not only is it fitting that this should be woman’s role, but also that she should herself voice the claims of this other history, hence embodying this honourable and “natural” battle. 46 47
The Decline of the West, II, 329. Ibid., II, 327.
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Camus selected two women from the plays (Maria and Dora) when asked who his three favourite characters were (E, 1922), an approval that suggests a clue to the role of his female characters there. His dislike of a psychological dimension in the theatre was often mentioned; in Sur l’avenir de la tragédie he claimed that Euripides upset the classical balance of tragedy by concentrating on individual psychology (TRN, 1707), while in the English-language edition of his plays he expressed the aim of presenting human destiny as a whole rather than that of individuals. “Psychology” left him indifferent (TRN, 1733-34). This conception of classical tragedy was perhaps a justification and rationalization of an inability to create a character from the inside – as in L’État de Siège, for example, where Diego and Victoria are “virtually puppets, only too obviously exemplifying Camus’s evolving philosophy of limits. They are not credible as human beings”.48 In December, 1959, he divided his work in the following way: J’écris sur des plans différents pour éviter justement le mélange des genres. J’ai composé ainsi des pièces dans le langage de l’action, des essais à forme rationnelle, des romans sur l’obscurité du cœur. Ces livres différents disent, il est vrai, la même chose. (E, 1926) I write on different levels precisely to avoid the mixing of genres. In this way, I have composed plays in the language of action, essays in rational form, novels on the obscurity of the heart. These books say, it’s true, the same thing.
This classification suggests a reason for Camus’s fondness for his theatrical characters where the emphasis on the language of action with regard to his theatrical works dispenses with the need for psychology, or the investigation of the obscurity of the heart. I have at several points suggested that through his literary production the author seeks a form of control over his social environment. Perhaps only the creative artist has the possibility of transforming and correcting his universe. Roger Quilliot observed that in Camus’s eyes the entire universe was a vast theatre (TRN, 1689), while Jean Grenier recalls that Camus felt very strongly that the man of the theatre was a second god.49 The theatre is not merely a means of “peopling solitude” but it is a means of recreating, directing and controlling a microcomic universe. In this contained environment where the presence of a female character on stage requires more than silence, the “battle of the sexes” can be played out and stylized as that between two opposing forces, each rep48 49
The Theatre of Albert Camus, 95. Souvenirs, 118.
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resenting aspects of a universal human destiny. Moreover, the role of the women in the plays does not conflict with that allotted to those such as Marie in the fictional works. Marie herself expresses a certain displeasure at Meursault’s refusal to say he loves her, calling him “bizarre”, and this role seems to have been passed on to her theatrical sisters – a contained revolt belonging in an honourable, “feminine” tradition. It is to be noted, furthermore, that all the women in the plays are of European descent and hence racially transparent, as if belonging to no race. Woman defends the claims of the emotions in the theatrical works because, as I have pointed out, she is allotted her role in the traditional, private sphere of the family, the biological reproduction and care of the generations.
The Psychology of Women, Intent on Desire and Possession Despite Camus’s rejection of psychology there is a covert psychological dimension to his female theatrical characters. Without ties of affection to friends, children or other family members, the solitary woman represents private life with a vengeance. Camus presents the “amour du couple” in isolation from any other network of social or emotional support. Woman’s emotional focus is entirely on one man, whom she seeks to detach in turn from his wider preoccupations. Diego asserts in L’État de Siège that the men of his blood belong only to the earth (TRN, 268), but for Victoria “you should have chosen me over the heavens themselves. You should have preferred me to the entire earth” (TRN, 297). Victoria is strong, but all in the service of this “egoism”; she has no concern for and no ties to the community in which she lives: J’ai trop à faire pour porter mon amour! Je ne vais pas encore me charger de la douleur du monde! C’est une tâche d’homme, cela, une de ces tâches vaines, stériles, entêtées, que vous entreprenez pour vous détourner du seul combat qui serait vraiment difficile, de la seule victoire dont vous pourriez être fiers. (TRN, 262-63) I’ve too much to do in carrying my own love! I’m not going to burden myself further with the pain of the world! That’s a task for men, one of those vain, sterile and pointless tasks that you take on in order to avoid the only combat that would be really difficult and the only victory of which you could be truly proud.
Whereas Diego refuses to save himself and Victoria at the expense of the town (TRN, 288), there is little doubt as to the choice she would have made in the same situation; a blind choice that would have brought disaster on all. His love for her has ethical limits, and his selfsacrifice extends beyond this unique emotion, resulting in the libera-
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tion of the town. She would die with him, but only in the name of love. “At least they do not have the obligation for greatness that we men have” (C2, 322). Such concerns and duties are meaningless for women, who are like a human embodiment of the “selfish gene”; yet for this same reason the war of women against men merits respect, for it is the claim of biology and the continuation of the species, in the name of a highly privatized private sphere. Both La Peste and L’État de Siège demonstrate the necessity of overcoming such claims – for man is more than his biology and his instinct of revolt is the only defence against the definitive silence of totalitarianism. Without the capacity for “greatness” in men the instinctive concerns of women would be impossible. For all her force, Victoria is incapable of following Diego’s path and repeating the revolt that saved him from the plague. This “conflict” in fact reveals its complementary nature: “(the world) needs our women to learn how to live. We, we have never been capable of anything except dying” (TRN, 297). The female assistant to the Plague likewise demonstrates this interdependence; a female deity of Classical times, she symbolizes the forces of destiny, perverted by the forces of history (TRN, 293). Women are more easily swayed, more readily seeking compromise with dictatorships – as the female chorus illustrates (TRN, 282). (Indeed, such a judgement might be attributed to Camus himself. Jean Grenier recalled that in Camus’s eyes some men of letters behaved “like women”, their attitudes reflecting that of “weakness impressed by force”. He told Grenier the story of a small girl in Budapest who, when asked which party she would subscribe to later, replied “the most cruel one”; if it won she would be protected and if it lost she would have risked nothing.50) But the secretary retains a memory of her older role and becomes complicit with Diego, helping him to see the value of his revolt and hence to discover his duty.
Love rather than Justice Both Kaliayev and Diego are concerned with duty and honour, for such is the unhappy lot of men. Each aligns himself with the collective and, in so doing, must withdraw from the all-consuming love of the couple. Les Justes demonstrates the tragic consequences for the woman in love who seeks to enter into the “collective passions” of the 50
Souvenirs, 50.
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century and assume the role of a man. There can be no doubt of Dora’s commitment to the cause, nor of her (qualified) acceptance into the fraternity, yet she stands outside of this band of “knights” (TRN, 352) precisely because of her emotional allegiances. Whereas Kaliayev is unable to distinguish between her, the cause and the brotherhood, she (like Victoria) needs to signify an individual rather than a “collective” passion; she needs him to say that he loves her more than justice and the organization – even if she were “unjust” (TRN, 352) – and to commit himself to love before justice (TRN, 383). Her commitment to abstract ideals has resulted in a feeling of fossilization – as if something within her has died (TRN, 384). It seems reasonable to conclude that this concerns her more “feminine” qualities – especially in view of her final question: “Am I a woman now?” (TRN, 392). By aligning herself with revolt and stepping outside of her ordained role woman does violence to her very nature. More ominous, however, is the comparison made by Stepan when he says that Dora resembles him now (TRN, 393). Indeed, despite her clear opposition to Stepan there are also parallels between them, for his hatred is a sign that he is also driven by passion: “Where would I find the strength to love? I have at least enough to hate. That’s better than feeling nothing at all” (TRN, 357). Both he and Dora had sought full details of the execution – she because she loved him, and he because he “envied” him (TRN, 390). In the Camusian vocabulary this is a highly-charged Nietzschean term, and implies that Stepan is like a slave, or a woman. Dora’s metamorphosis is finally accomplished at the end of the play when she renounces her femininity and demands her place in the front line. We cannot know what her subsequent motivations will be, yet the probability is that she has indeed come to resemble Stepan.
Chapter 6 Woman, Race and the Fall of Man In chapter 5 I argued that the absence of women from La Peste is legitimated by underlying mythological allusions which reconstruct woman as “myth”, standing outside of human affairs. The heroes of La Peste are transformed into those of the Iliad fighting to retrieve Helen; Beauty, and all that has been lost in the modern world. From the myths of origin discussed in chapter 2 Camus recreates Greece on the Algerian soil; a land fit for heroes, where women are in their place. In the absence of a physical reality, the maternal symbol confers purity on these men, legitimating their struggle and representing the values for which they fight. In La Chute the fragility of this mythopoetic position is revealed as other political and biographical factors intrude; the furore following the publication of L’Homme révolté leads to a disillusionment with the ideal of fraternity, while the illness and attempted suicide of Camus’s wife as a result of his neglect and many infidelities brings the personal sphere into sharp relief. Above all, the Algerian conflict and the impending loss of his homeland is to cause a personal crisis with far-reaching reverberations. Intertextual echoes between La Chute and Camus’s later writings on Algeria are unmistakable. In his 1958 avant-propos to his Chroniques algériennes Camus was to write that if some of the French considered that France’s colonial past placed her in a state of “historical sin”: (I)ls n’ont pas à désigner les Français d’Algérie comme victimes expiatoires (“Crevez, nous l’avons bien mérité!”), ils doivent s’offrir eux-mêmes à l’expiation. En ce qui me concerne, il me paraît dégoûtant de battre sa coulpe, comme nos juges-pénitents, sur la poitrine d’autrui, vain de condamner plusieurs siècles d’expansion européenne, absurde de comprendre dans la même malédiction Christophe Colomb et Lyautey. Le temps des colonialismes est fini, il faut le savoir seulement et en tirer les conséquences. (E, 897) (T)hey don’t have to appoint the French Algerians as sacrificial victims (“Die, we deserve it!”), they should offer up themselves in expiation. As far as I’m concerned, it seems to me repellant to proclaim one’s guilt, as our judge penitents do,
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Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus not by beating one’s own breast but that of others; vain to condemn centuries of European expansion; absurd to lump together as the same curse Christopher Columbus and Lyautey. The time of colonialism is finished, one need only know this and draw the consequences.
Such modern-day judge-penitents pass “sans transition, des discours sur les principes d’honneur ou de fraternité à l’adoration du fait accompli ou du parti le plus cruel” (E, 897-98) (“without transition, from discourses on the principles of honour or fraternity to adoration of the fait accompli or the most cruel party”). The reference here is to the FLN, which Camus held responsible for atrocities against civilians (French Algerian and Muslim alike) that can only be described as depraved or barbarous. The repressive French response to such acts, and in particular the use of torture, evoked in him a despair that with such nihilism “nous retournons (…) à la jungle où le seul principe est la violence” (E, 893) (“we’re returning (…) to the jungle where the only principle is violence”). In this light, the final words of La Chute, “Il est trop tard maintenant, il sera toujours trop tard. Heureusement!” (TRN, 1551) (“It’s too late now, it will always be too late. Fortunately!”) echo Camus’s words to Grenier, cited in chapter 1, and his inexpressible despair that French Algeria might once have been saved. It is one argument of this chapter that the impending fall of French Algeria underlies La Chute, as well as the short stories of L’Exil et le Royaume. Here, the treatment of women, particularly of female sexuality, reflects and expresses a new and nightmarish vision of a post-colonial world where a future Algeria, unmoored from France and devoid of its settlers, is tied to an Islamic empire (E, 901). In this chapter I shall return firstly to the question of origins, and the superior man who creates himself. This is prompted by Clamence’s reference to his own perceived origin as a fils de roi (king’s son), a figure whose provenance I will trace back to the writings of Gobineau. The fils de roi is the First Man in the sense that he owes nothing to his own direct genealogy, but to a mythical forefather of the distant past. In an examination of Gobineau’s influence (which Camus freely acknowledged) I will point to a further unacknowledged dimension from which vantage point the question of race may be viewed. Although Camus may have been drawn to the aristocratic overtones of the fils de roi, in its original context this figure is the symbol of “historical origination – racial purity, cultural priority”. From this angle I will examine Camus’s attitudes towards race as they
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are expressed during his stay in South America, and the possible consequences for his own view of Algeria and the literary myths he and his contemporaries embraced. Such questions are brought into sharp relief after the post-war worsening of the Algerian situation and the onset of colonial war in 1954. While continuing to focus on the mythological undercurrents in Camus’s work I will argue that a new dimension associated with women enters into La Chute, which is an “African” paganism emanating from Brazil. Woman as a sexual and racial being retrospectively pollutes the purity of La Peste. When considered in conjunction with the Christian imagery often noted by commentators, Camus’s third, unrealized cycle, Nemesis, seems profiled in La Chute. There are two levels to the depiction of women in La Chute. On the one hand, this is the first work where the discourse of the protagonist centrally concerns his own dealings with women, and in this sense women are the subject of his monologue. Underlying this discourse, on the other hand, La Chute continues the construction of the mythical woman through allusions to Greek mythology, the Bible, and more contemporary mythical figures who enter the writings at this point. Here, a chaotic hybridity underlies and undermines the rational order of Clamence’s discourse.
The Politics of Envy “Adoration” of the cruellest party is not the sole preserve of contemporary political commentators and intellectuals. As the female chorus of L’État de siège illustrates, women are more easily swayed, more readily seeking compromise with dictatorships (TRN, 282). I noted in chapter 5 Camus’s judgement that some men behaved “like women”, their response one of “weakness impressed by force”; and his anecdote about the girl in Budapest who, when asked which party she would subscribe to later, replied “the most cruel one”, because, whatever the outcome, she would have risked nothing.1 In chapter 5 I also pointed out that Martha is driven by envy to murder her brother, because he has what she cannot have, and he is what she can never be. I suggest that such is the fate of women in the theatrical works of Camus, and in their “silent, bitter” war against men their overriding impulse is of envy for that other world they will never comprehend and of which they can never truly be a part. 1
Souvenirs, 50.
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Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus There is and ever will be a secret politic of the woman (…) that seeks to draw away her male from his kind of history and to weave him body and soul into her own plantlike history of generic succession – that is, into herself.2
In his preface to L’Envers et l’Endroit Camus speaks of resentment and satisfaction as the two dangers threatening the artist; as for himself, the sun that had reigned over his childhood had deprived him of resentment (E, 6). In the following two pages he further illustrates what he means by resentment, for which he substitutes the word “envy”. Indeed, in L’Homme révolté we see the importance ascribed to envy as an ingredient of resentment when he comments that envy is strongly tinged with resentment (E, 427). The high degree of defensiveness in Camus’s preface gives pause for thought; why should Camus go to such lengths to defend himself, his family (and his community) against charges that have not been made? Ironically, such denials seem to anticipate the more perceptive analyses of some Camusian scholars who have detected, on the contrary, a profound resentment about the poverty into which he was born.3 In late 1949 Camus wrote an early draft for this projected preface which makes no mention of such themes, although he speaks of the mother’s central importance in his work (C2, 297-98). In 1950, a reflection on his family begins to suggest the significance with which the terms “envy” and “resentment” are laden: Près d’eux, ce n’est pas la pauvreté, ni le dénuement, ni l’humiliation que j’ai sentis. Pourquoi ne pas le dire: j’ai senti et je sens encore ma noblesse. Devant ma mère, je sens que je suis d’une race noble: celle qui n’envie rien. (C2, 326) With them I have felt neither poverty, nor deprivation nor humiliation. Why not say it: I have felt and still feel my nobility. When I am with my mother, I feel that I am of a noble race: one that envies nothing. (SEN, 290)
Here, the absence of envy is the defining characteristic of nobility. Maurice Weyembergh sheds light on these terms when he argues that in L’Homme révolté Camus is trying to go beyond some of Nietzsche’s theories while seeking to maintain this philosopher as an ally.4 Weyembergh focuses on Nietzsche’s central theory of ressenti2
The Decline of the West, II, 328. See, for example, the section of Jean Sarocchi’s doctoral thesis (“La Recherche du père”) entitled “Les quatre points cardinaux du ressentiment”; and Gassin, L’Univers symbolique, 158. 4 “Révolte et ressentiment”, in Albert Camus, 12 (1985), 65-82. What follows is a summary of his comments (68-70). For an assessment of Nietzsche’s influence in Le Mythe de Sisyphe see also his “Camus et Nietzsche: évolution d’une affinité”, in Al3
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ment, according to which Western history is one of decadence initially set in motion by the triumph of Christianity after the fall of the Roman Empire. The driving force is the resentment of the weak against the strong; the revolt of the slave is a reactive denial through which what is good is defined (and therefore governed) by the denial of the master’s values. Hence, the decline of Western history is conditioned by the revolt of slaves. Nietzsche’s solution to this decadence is through the education and production of masters rather than slaves, and he identifies two systems of education, dressage and élevage. Dressage entails the elimination of instinct and of all links with nature and the jungle, which, according to Nietzsche, was the method of Christianity, and led to the production of slaves and criminals. Élevage, on the other hand, is based on strict laws aimed at the conservation of castes and the exclusion or extermination of those of mixed race.5 This, Weyembergh argues, is the direct consequence of the theory of resentment, in turn a central component of his philosophy. Yet, Camus fails to address this crucial problem except through the intermediary of Max Scheler, to whom he attributes this theory of resentment (and in spite of the fact, Weyembergh points out, that Scheler himself is citing Nietzsche).6 In the attempt to avoid this negative revolt of the slave, fuelled by resentment, Camus is at pains to stress the simultaneity of affirmation and negation in the initial movement of revolt, and thus his model of revolt differs from Nietzsche’s. However, Camus passes over in silence Nietzsche’s theory of resentment.7 Camus does not deny the existence of this slave mentality. Rather, his concern is to defend a certain group from this charge. Although Weyembergh points to the substitution of Scheler for Nietzsche, he ignores the further diversion of Camus’s argument onto the “feminine” nature of resentment (a view likewise shared by Nietzsche): Scheler lui-même met l’accent sur l’aspect passif du ressentiment, en remarquant la grande place qu’il tient dans la psychologie des femmes, vouées au désir et à la possession. À la source de la révolte, il y a au contraire un principe d’activité surabondante et d’énergie. Scheler a raison aussi de dire que l’envie colore forte-
bert Camus 1980, Raymond Gay-Crosier (ed.) (Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 1980), 221-31. 5 Ibid., 74. 6 Ibid., 66. 7 Ibid., 68. Camus’s direct comment on dressage and selection is that such considerations are “puerile” (E, 477).
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Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus ment le ressentiment. Mais on a envie de ce qu’on n’a pas, tandis que le révolté défend ce qu’il est. (E, 427) Scheler himself emphasizes the passive aspect of resentment, and remarks on the prominent position it occupies in the psychology of women, bent on desire and possession. The mainspring of revolt, on the other hand, is the principle of superabundant activity and energy. Scheler is also right in saying that resentment is always highly flavoured with envy. But we envy what we do not possess, while the rebel defends what he has. (R, 23)
If resentment is the natural quality of women, then it can be encompassed in the Camusian model of revolt, as women are not the makers of history and do not, in Camus’s eyes, participate in revolt. Revolt, by its very nature, is the business of men. This diversion of the slave mentality onto the female section of the population raises another issue concerning the relation of the non-Western world to revolt. Just as women represent a different form of history, so this world is relegated to a space outside the conditions of revolt. To be outside of history is lauded in the idea of the Mediterranean as a Greek homeland. But Camus’s construction of Algeria as a land without a past ignores the pre-existing population, which has no sure place in the confusion between the imaginary French-Algerian space outside of history and the world of “the sacred” where revolt is inapplicable. Here enters the female slave mentality which gives the virility of the indigenous Algerian male its equivocal status. Other indications in L’Homme révolté, such as the emphasis on speech as a sign of revolt, further equate silent Arabs with silent women. Insisting on the differences between Camus and Nietzsche, Weyembergh maintains that Camus’s conception of history is not that of the philosopher: “à la vision d’un déclin toujours recommencé il opposerait, dans nos sociétés, ‘l’accroissement dans l’homme de la notion d’homme’” (“against the vision of an ever-renewed decline he would oppose, in our societies, ‘the increase in man of the notion of man’”).8 Camus is the one who limits such a development to the West alone (E, 430), thus excluding women and those who share their slave-like and “feminine” characteristics.
Aristocracy The notion of grandeur, from whose obligations women are exempt, is linked for Camus with a certain ideal of aristocracy, and there are numerous references in the Carnets to this ideal. All of Camus’s male 8
“Révolte et ressentiment”, 76.
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protagonists exemplify forms of this aristocracy, from the supermen Caligula and Mersault to the chivalric circle of those orchestrating the fight against the plague in La Peste, or injustice in Les Justes. The artist in particular has a privileged status, as the parallels between artist and rebel reveal in the section on revolt and art in L’Homme révolté. During his voyage to South America in 1949, Camus told a correspondent in Santiago that he was convinced that, both during and after the coming “chaos”, it is to writers, philosophers and artists that the task will fall of reaffirming the value of the spirit and of life, in the face of oppression.9 This historic mission is again profiled when Camus writes of the “creators”, who will have to fight when the “catastrophe” comes: Si c’est la défaite, ceux qui auront survécu regagneront les terres où il sera possible de rassembler la culture: Chili, Mexique, etc. Si c’est la victoire: le plus grand danger. (C2, 337) If there is defeat, those who have survived will reach the lands where it will be possible to reassemble culture: Chile, Mexico, etc. The greatest danger is in victory.
Again, in South America Camus asserts that one of the directions of history today is the struggle between the artists and conquerors, between words and bullets.10 For Camus there are two possible forms of aristocracy, that of the intellect and that of labour (C3, 105), yet in his writings the extent to which such nobility is a consequence of inheritance or of the individual will remains unclear. With respect to Nietzsche, Camus is not entirely without models. Spengler’s The Decline of the West (mentioned again in his notebooks in 1954) seems to have exerted a continuing influence on his thought. Although his ideas parallel Camus’s distinction between Civilization and Culture, as expressed in 1937, Camus’s diagnosis of Western civilization in L’Homme révolté diverges from Spengler as he envisages the Mediterranean world as a source of regeneration for the dying West. His comments during his stay in South America further reflect both his divergence from and debt to Spengler, in a way that places into doubt Weyembergh’s assertion that Camus does not support the view of history as a cyclical process of decline and regeneration. Fernande Bartfeld reports that during his voyage Camus comments that the savoir-vivre of the South Americans placed them in a good posi9
Ercilla, 23.8.49 (cited by Fernande Bartfeld in Camus voyageur et conférencier, 31). Ibid., 71.
10
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tion to transform the mechanistic nature of modern life into something living and perhaps more powerful: to transform civilization into culture.11 The notion of aristocracy is central for both Nietzsche and Spengler. For Spengler “the coming of a Spring-time consistently coincides with the birth of a primary nobility”, so that the birth of Culture is identified with the advent of this group, growing “plant-like” from the soil in which it is rooted.12 This first nobility “is the fine flowering of the people, the vessel in which the national character – unconscious, but felt all the more in its cosmic pulse – receives its destined Style”.13 Such comments are easily applicable to Camus’s earlier hopes for his own community as outlined in chapter 2. A further widespread influence in Algeria during Camus’s childhood was Joseph Arthur de Gobineau, who likewise claimed the natural aristocracy of certain groups. As far as I am aware, Camus never expressed an opinion about the nature of these ideas, but the impression made on him as a young man by Gobineau’s novel Les Pléïades cannot be doubted.14 In 1946, after his first visit to the U.S., Camus sent a copy to the young writer, Patricia Blake.15 The publication in 1939 by Camus and his friend Fréminville of Jean Hytier’s collection of essays, L’Iran de Gobineau, further testifies to the attraction he held for those grouped around the École d’Alger, as did the term “calender, fils de roi” (calender, king’s son), used by Hytier without definition.16 Camus uses this expression himself in 1951 when, in his recollection of André Gide, he writes that Gide seemed like the model of the artist, “le gardien, fils de roi, qui veillait aux portes d’un jardin où je voulais vivre” (E, 1118) (“the guardian, the king’s son, who kept watch over the gates of the garden where I wanted to live”). This association with Gide may lie in the fact that between February and May, 1938, Hytier also gave a series of six lectures on this author at the university in Algiers, later published by Charlot.
11
Camus voyageur et conférencier, 8. This comment was taken from El Mercurio, 16.4.49. 12 The Decline of the West, II, 338. 13 Ibid., 172. 14 Les Pléïades, introduction and notes by Jean Mistler (Monaco: Éditions du Rocher, 1946 [1876]). 15 Albert Camus: une vie, 417. 16 L’Iran de Gobineau, 21.
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Les Pléïades introduces three such sons of Kings, European travellers whose paths cross. The young Englishman, Wilfrid Nore, bestows this label on himself and his companions, pointing out that in Arab storytelling the one claiming such a title is more often than not “a poor devil” with no paternal inheritance. By using this formula he is claiming “particular and valuable qualities” that raise him above the vulgar masses.17 What is important is not the status of the father, the King, but that of the son; this cannot be measured in terms either of environment or direct descent. One of his companions understands this: whereas true kingship is now only a memory, an ideal barely recognisable in the modern world, its essence remains indissolubly linked to the qualification of: (F)ils de Roi. C’est celui qui a trouvé les qualités que vous avez dites, pendues à son cou dès le jour de sa naissance; celui-là, incontestablement, par un lignage quelconque, a reçu du sang infusé dans ses veines les vertus supérieures, les mérites sacrés que l’on voit exister en lui, que le monde ambiante ne lui a pas communiqués.18 “King’s son”. He is someone who found the qualities you mentioned fastened round his neck from birth; and undeniably, through some lineage or other, he has received from his heredity the superior virtues and lofty destination which can be seen in him and which can’t have been transmitted to him by those around him.19
In this rejection of the father the fils de Roi is a variant of the First Man. Jeanine Parisier Plottel focuses on the intertextual references between Les Pléïades and the passage in La Chute where Clamence calls himself a fils de roi (TRN, 1490), pointing to the insecurities revealed there which suggest an element of doubt lying between the claim to being a King’s son and the possibility of being rather one of the slaves in Gobineau’s mass of humanity.20 Such ambivalence would likewise explain the defensiveness in the preface to L’Envers et l’Endroit. However, Parisier Plottel’s concern is limited to an intertextual comparison with one passage from La Chute, overlooking the wider importance of Gobineau’s argument, which is founded ultimately on biological inheritance. 17
Les Pléïades, 19. Ibid., 20. The story is that of the three Dervishes, “The Porter and the three girls of Baghdad”, in Tales from the Thousand and One Nights, N.J. Dawood (tr.) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973). 19 Sons of Kings, Douglas Parmée (tr.) (London: Oxford University Press, 1966), 14. 20 “Intertextuality in Albert Camus”, in Critical Essays on Albert Camus, Bettina Knapp (ed.) (Boston, Mass.: G.K. Hall, 1988), 116-27. 18
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The seven stars of the Pleiades shine in the firmament, and are the guide for seafarers – the one sure reference point for the voyagers of the Iliad and the Odyssey, guiding Ulysses towards Ithaca. This is how the sons of kings function in the universe of Gobineau, as stars and leaders of men, whose superiority derives ultimately from biological inheritance. This is: Une réunion complète en sa personne des éléments nobles, divins, si vous voulez, que des aïeux anciens possédaient en toute plénitude, et que les mélanges des générations suivantes avec d’indignes alliances avaient, pour un temps, déguisés, voilés, affaiblis, atténués, dissimulés, fait disparaître, mais qui, jamais morts, reparaissent soudain dans le fils de Roi dont nous parlons.21 A mysterious, innate mixture within himself, a complete combination of noble or, if you like, divine elements that earlier ancestors possessed to the fullest degree and that later generations by cross-breeding in unworthy unions had for a time disguised and covered up, weakened, diluted, hidden, driven away, but which, never dying, suddenly reappear in the king’s son of whom we are speaking!22
By contrast, most of the population is degenerating into a chaotic mass whose lives are worth nothing. Gobineau’s chief claim to fame is as the author of the infamous Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines,23 which he saw as the precursor to his novel. There, he argues that all human beings are descended from the race of Adam, of which all knowledge has been lost (I, 120). After some form of cosmic cataclysm (I, 140) the races were separated into three main groups, the black, yellow and white races. Throughout human history there has always been a degree of assimilation between the races, and this fact is responsible for the development of civilization. Predictably, the black and yellow races are permanently inferior to the white race (I, 142-3), although they may have other qualities, such as a more highly developed imagination and sensuality (I, 21415). Such variations give assimilation a beneficial effect, particularly for the non-white races who, otherwise, would have crawled forever at the feet of the white nations (I, 217).
21
Les Pléïades, 20. Sons of Kings, 15. 23 Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1940 (1853). Further references to this book will be incorporated into the text. Gobineau was a friend of Richard Wagner, whose son-in-law, Houston Chamberlain, became president of the Gobineau Vereinigung, an inner group of the Wagnerian circle. The “Prophet of the Third Reich”, his book, Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (1899), contributed to the growth of Nazi racism. 22
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All civilization results from the infusion of white blood, wherever evidence of civilization is to be found (I, 220). Biological assimilation is facilitated by the fact that although the races feel a natural repulsion, they are also mutually attracted (I, 172, 176) – an attraction that seems in practice to be on the side of the (male) white race: Les penchants essentiellement civilisateurs de cette race d’élite la poussaient constamment à se mélanger avec les autres peuples. Quant aux deux types jaune et noir, là où on les trouve à cet état tertiaire, ils n’ont pas d’histoire, car ce sont des sauvages. (I, 153) The essentially civilizing tendencies of this elite race constantly pushed it to mix with other peoples. As to the two yellow and black types, where they are to be found in their tertiary state, they have no history, as they are savages.
The Gendering of Race The “civilizing” activities of the white race are further explained by the categorization of the races into male and female types, and the belief that every human activity has its source in one or other of these two male or female currents. Although all races possess elements of each characteristic in varying degrees, maleness is the quality essential to the establishment of culture and ultimately civilization (I, 88). Here, whiteness equates with masculinity. Robert Young sees in this attribution of gender to the races a naturalisation and justification for the oppressive relationships between them: “the orthodox hierarchy of gender is confirmed and reaffirmed at the level of race, which then in turn feminizes males and females alike in the black and yellow races”, while sexual difference is “translated into the sexual division of race, so that the white male’s object of desire has been relocated across the racial divide”.24 As Young points out, if all the non-white races are female, then the gender of individuals becomes immaterial and “as so often in the colonial arena, civilization thus begins with an inter-racial homo-eroticism”.25 Young’s comments parallel Pierre Nora’s analysis of FrenchAlgerian attitudes towards the “weaker race” in Algeria. The almost complete absence of women from the public arena led to an atmos24
Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London: Routledge, 1995). My interpretation of the relationship between gender and race in this instance owes much to this account (99-117). See also Christopher Miller, Blank Darkness: Africanist Dicourse in French (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1985) who also investigates Gobineau and this “gendering” of race. 25 Colonial Desire, 109.
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phere of competition between the men of both races in the “supervirility” stakes, thus leading to a heightening of violent tensions. At the same time, this absence of women led to erotically charged social relationships between men where aggression was accompanied by a intimate and profound “tenderness” felt by the French Algerians towards their Arab workers.26 This attitude may offer some explanation for the homosocial strand in Camus’s work noted by some commentators. In Gobineau’s writings this sexual variant of the civilizing mission has a dual implication. If the spread of civilization depends on assimilation then its benefits for the supposedly superior white race will be limited, for once assimilation has reached a certain level this race begins to degenerate (I, 218), and anarchy results. In a passage that directly reflects the conversation earlier cited from Les Pléïades, Gobineau argues that invasions, commerce and colonialism have all contributed to the creation of this chaos: Voilà le phénomème offert par les grands nations civilisées, et on l’observe surtout dans leurs ports de mer, leurs capitales et leurs colonies, lieux où les fusions s’accomplissent avec le plus de facilité. À Paris, à Londres, à Cadix, à Constantinople, on trouvera (…) en se bornant à l’observation de la population qui se dit indigène, des caractères appartenant à toutes les branches de l’humanité. (I, 154-55) There the phenomenon offered by the great civilized nations is to be found, observable especially in their seaports, their capitals and their colonies, where fusions are most easily accomplished. In Paris, London, Cadix, Constantinople, one will find (…) by limiting oneself to the so-called indigenous population, characteristics belonging to all branches of humanity.
At the expense of the races of princes whose “subdivided and impoverished” blood is the “dishonoured” element in such a metamorphosis, racial mixing continues apace as men form new mediocrities in increasingly debased alliances: of this is born a confusion which, “like Babel, ends in the most complete impotence, and leads societies into the oblivion against which there is no remedy” (I, 219-20). The degeneration of language and civilization, symbolized by Babel in the above quotation (or the gorilla / barman of La Chute who cannot understand the speech of his client) reflects this disintegration. Bars such as the Mexico-City with its clientele of pimps and prostitutes, the cosmopolitan ports through which degeneration is transmitted to the European capitals such as Paris, these are the landscapes of Gobineau’s universe, and perhaps an illustration that “The end of history 26
Les Français d’Algérie, 176.
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our men of progress speak of is the orgy” (C3, 153). This is the Underworld of La Chute, where woman, the instrument of such assimilation, has brought about the downfall of man. Gobineau is describing the Fall of Western man; of those who, once Kings upon this earth, now leave only the occasional trace amongst their distant heirs, and at long remove down the generations. A line of direct succession no longer exists, and the search for the father (the King) is impossible, as he is lost in the mists of time. Each man demonstrates himself to be the son of a King only by being the First Man; those belonging to the Pleiades hold membership by virtue of the purity of their blood, a line of racial purity, natural aristocracy, which distinguishes them from their countrymen and women. Les Pléïades transfers the theory of racial inequality into a fictional format, but it is not this Camus discusses when he refers in L’Homme révolté to the novel (E, 667). Again, one might agree with Weyembergh that Camus is unwilling to confront some of the influences of his youth.
Landscapes of La Chute in the Journaux de Voyage In late 1948 Camus makes a further reference to Gobineau in remarking that although we are not descended from monkeys, this is what we are becoming (C2, 251). This does not suggest a general belief in “the growth in man of the notion of man”. Camus briefly hopes for a cultural rebirth in Brazil: the future is not “with us”, he writes, and there is nothing we can do against this irresistible movement: L’Allemagne a perdu la guerre parce qu’elle était nation et que la guerre moderne demande les moyens des empires. Demain, il y faudra les moyens des continents. Qu’y faire? Le seul espoir est qu’une nouvelle culture naisse et que l’Amérique du Sud aide peut-être à tempérer la bêtise mécanique. (JV, 91-92) Germany lost the war because it was a nation and modern warfare demands the means of empires. Tomorrow, the means of whole continents will be required. What is to be done? The only hope is that a new culture might be born and that South America might help to temper this mechanical madness.
Although Camus’s voyage to South America is usually associated with the writings of L’Exil et le Royaume it must not be forgotten that La Chute had been originally intended as part of this collection, and there are many direct parallels with this récit. Camus was suffering from bouts of depression and ill-health during this voyage and there are numerous references to fever, gin, neon lighting (JV, 63, 92, 94, 95), all of which reoccur in La Chute. Likewise, the prostitutes of La
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Chute, the “ladies behind these windows” have been transposed from Brazil, where they are likened to birds in cages (JV, 117). The macumba ceremony described in the Journaux de Voyage, which entails calling down the gods to earth, recalls the people of Holland praying to the gods of Indonesia (TRN, 1480), as well as the hopes of Clamence that the doves will descend to him. Above all, exotic sexuality and the macumba ceremony are fused with and superimposed onto the activities of the prostitutes and their clients: “Vous entrez, elles tirent les rideaux et la navigation commence. Les dieux descendent sur les corps nus” (TRN, 1481) (“You enter, they draw the curtains and the navigation begins. The gods descend onto the naked bodies”). Sexuality, in the form of miscegenation, is a constant underlying preoccupation of the South American journal. But the theme is not one of cultural rebirth; rather it is of being swamped, of degeneration. Brazil: avec sa mince armature moderne plaquée sur cet immense continent grouillant de forces naturelles et primitives me fait penser à un building, rongé de plus en plus avant par d’invisibles termites. Un jour le building s’écroulera et tout un petit peuple grouillant, noir, rouge et jaune, se répandra sur la surface du continent, masqué et muni de lances, pour la danse de la victoire. (JV, 109) with its frail modern structure plastered over this enormous continent swarming with natural and primitive forces, makes me think of a tall building, increasingly gnawed away by invisible termites. One day the building will crumble and an entire mass of little people, black, red and yellow, will swarm across the surface of the continent, masked and brandishing spears, for the dance of victory.
Elsewhere Camus speaks of ever-increasing crowds on the surface of the world “qui finiront par tout recouvrir et s’étouffer” (JV, 94) (“who will end up covering and stifling everything”). He is constantly struck during this voyage by the degree of miscegenation, and the “multicoloured” population. Even black people become mildly repellent by virtue of their imagined whiteness: J’aime les noirs a priori et suis tenté de leur trouver les qualités qu’ils n’ont pas. Je voulais trouver beaux ceux-ci, mais j’imagine que leur peau est blanche et je trouve alors une assez jolie collection de calicots et d’employés dyspeptiques. Abdias confirme. La race est laide. (JV, 93) I like blacks a priori and am tempted to find in them qualities they don’t possess. I wanted to find these ones handsome, but I imagine that their skin is white and then I find myself faced with a fine bunch of peddlers and dyspeptic employees. Abdias confirms. The race is ugly.
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Yet the immediate further reference to mixed-race women who come and drink at their table, of whom one or two are pretty, recalls Gobineau’s belief that these are amongst the most attractive of women (I, 155), which Robert Young diagnoses as a “covert obsession with sexual transgression between races”.27 Submerged sexual desire surfaces in the account of the macumba ceremony, where Camus is particularly delighted by one of the dancing women whose cries remind him of those of a bird and whom he calls a “black Diana” (JV, 106). Of course, this figure has been associated with her counterpart in “La Pierre qui pousse”; but she also has associations with the prostitutes compared to caged birds, and hence to the women of La Chute. Sexuality, embedded in the primitive, is a property of Brazil as Camus recalls his conversations with Oswald de Andrade and his view that Brazil is peopled by “primitives”, which is “for the best” (JV, 115). He proposes cannibalism as a “world vision” and, in response to the failure of Descartes and science, a return to primitive fecundation: matriarchy and cannibalism (JV, 117). Here, Freud’s dark continent of female sexuality aligns with the traditional Western stereotype of the primitive and irrational, in conjunction with the nightmare of biological assimilation. Although Camus leaves no details of their actual conversation, Andrade was associated with the modernist movement in Brazil, whose method he had outlined in The Brazilwood Manifesto and The Cannibalist Manifesto.28 This consisted of swallowing and absorbing what was useful from a culture and excreting what was unwanted. The model for this relationship between Brazil and the outside world was the supposed cannibalism of the indigenous population (and Camus notes Andrade’s account of early missionaries who had been eaten by the locals). Some parallels between Algeria and Brazil might be observed here, as the whites in Brazil were outnumbered three to one by the black and mulatto population. The hope was that through a process of assimilation the black would be absorbed by and disappear into the white population.29 Ideas such as this were widespread; Benedict Anderson records the nineteenth century Colombian liberal, Pedro Fermín de Vargass as expressing the wish that the Indian population 27
Colonial Desire, 115. See Zita Nunes, “Anthropology and race in Brazilian modernism”, in Colonial Discourse / Postcolonial Theory, edited by Francis Barker, Peter Hulme and Margaret Iversen (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), 115-25. 29 Ibid., 119-20. 28
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might be extinguished by miscegenation with the whites.30 Thus, cannibalism as a form of assimilation where, for the good of the other race, the white man “eats” the mulata31 here reflects Gobineau’s thesis. This resembles the aim of the French civilizing mission, except that in this case the black is seen not as indigenous but as external to the nation.32 Although in 1931 some voiced the idea that a slow process of miscegenation with the French might lead to assimilation,33 if applied to Algeria such a theory would entail in practice the absorption and disappearance of the Europeans themselves; the Mauresque would eat the white man in a nightmarish version of assimilation. Thus, in Brazil Camus meets a different and more threatening form of paganism from his Greek model. Cannibalism recurs in La Chute with the reference to the piranha of Brazil as the primitive present is transposed to Amsterdam to express the condition of urban man. The dream of the new culture, last hope for modern civilization, cannot develop in Brazil: Pays ou les saisons se confondent les unes avec les autres, où la végétation inextricable en devient informe, où les sangs sont mélangés à tel point que l’âme en a perdu ses limites. (JV, 128) Land where the seasons merge with one another, where the inextricable vegetation become formless, where the blood is mixed to such a point that the soul has lost its boundaries.
This is the landscape of La Chute.
Ulysses and the Dream of Ithaca As I noted earlier, the mythological figure identified with the Mediterraneanism of the École d’Alger is above all Ulysses, “true prototype of Mediterranean man”. Gabriel Audisio saw Ulysses, this symbol of the Eternal Mediterranean, as being above all a navigator.34 For Jean Déjeux the emphasis on the universal and the flight to the sea both furnish examples of an evasion that he considers characteristic of the École d’Alger. Indeed, the sea for Camus has an ambiguous status, at 30
Imagined Communities, 21. “In Brazilian slang comer (eat) means to have sexual intercourse; the couple is rarely a white woman and a black man” (Nunes, 124). 32 Brazil received 37% of all the African slaves brought to the Americas, compared with 5% for North America (ibid., 115). 33 Albert Camus: une vie, 49. 34 Jean Déjeux, “De l’éternel Méditerranéen à l’éternel Jugurtha” Revue algérienne des sciences juridiques économiques et politiques, 14 (4) (1977), 658-728 (689). 31
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times associated with freedom, at times with exile and threat: “j’ai toujours eu l’impression de vivre en haute mer, menacé, au cœur d’un bonheur royal” (E, 886) (“I have always had the impression of living on the high seas, threatened, at the heart of a royal happiness”). Nautical imagery is widespread in Camus’s work, often in conjunction with the two poles of the voyage; setting sail, and the homecoming. The contemporary artist has embarked in the galley of his times where he must take his turn at the oars, on the high seas (E, 1079). In a variant of L’Homme révolté the reference is directly to Ulysses, who, to escape the stifling confines of his island “quitte sa patrie et prend la mer, ‘la haute mer sans bornes’” (E, 1661) “leaves his homeland and takes to the sea, ‘the boundless high sea’”). “La Mer au plus près”, conceived during Camus’s journey to South America, is a log-book of the sea voyage, while in “Retour à Tipasa” Tipasa is the “refuge and port for her sons, of whom I am one” (E, 872). In an echo of this return, Camus elsewhere compares the return of the Jews from the concentration camps to an Odyssey where Ithaca is surrounded by barbed wire and Ulysses bludgeoned (E, 718). The star further symbolizes Ulysses, for it is the only navigational guide and the only means of return to Ithaca. When Camus writes in 1950 that instinctively he has always followed an invisible star (C2, 303), the unexpressed comparison is with this navigator. In 1952 he expresses his disillusion in the same terms: Ce qui m’a toujours sauvé de tous les accablements c’est que je n’ai jamais cessé de croire à ce que, faute de mieux, j’appellerai “mon étoile”. Mais aujourd’hui, je n’y crois plus. (C3, 59)35 What has always saved me from being overwhelmed is that I have never ceased believing in what, for want of a better word, I’ll call “my star”. But today I no longer believe in it.
As I pointed out, the star is the mark of the aristocrat, the one who has been appointed. In the case of Jonas his creativity marks him out, setting him literally above the increasingly overpopulated Europe where he lives. It is not my aim here to supply a potentially endless list of quotations with the redundant goal of claiming that Ulysses and Ithaca oc-
35
Cf. Carl A. Viggiani, “Notes pour le futur biographe d’Albert Camus”, in Albert Camus 11 (1968), 200-18, where Camus speaks of having a particular star (206).
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cupy a central place in Camus’s thought; this much is well-known.36 Even after the second World War, when Camus perceives an increasingly polarized and unstable world (and despite bouts of pessimism), the dream of a new Ithaca and faith in the possibility of a new culture continue to sustain him. Yet this dream, outlined in L’Homme révolté, begins to disintegrate during the 1950s, in part because of Camus’s travels in South America, where he confronts a different form of paganism and an assimilationist model more akin to a nightmare. Tied to the wider trend towards de-colonization throughout the post-war world, events in Algeria give this question a new urgency. Since the Sétif massacres of 1945 the possibility of Algeria as a new space has increasingly receded, finally to disappear with the outbreak of the Algerian war of independence in 1954. Camus tells Quilliot that in the event of Algerian independence he will leave France altogether for Canada.37 But this dream was always destabilized by what Camus calls in Le Premier Homme the permanent and unspoken danger of the Arab presence, the invisible menace one could smell in the air (PH, 257-58). My immediate purpose in making these observations is to draw a parallel between Ulysses and Clamence, the one-time fils de roi who has lost his star. Before turning to La Chute I propose one more comment concerning Ulysses – for he, too, is known as the man of two faces, homo duplex. His cunning was legendary, and for Audisio he embodied a duality and ambivalence that was the essence of Mediterranean man, “two Ulysses in one”: La Fiction et la Réalité, l’Amour et l’Infidélité, l’Aventure avec le Foyer, la Mer avec le Terroir, la Bravoure et la Peur, la Douce-mort et la Mort détestée.38 Fiction and Reality, Love and Infidelity, Adventure and the Hearth, Sea and Land combined, Bravery and Fear, the sweetness of Death and the horror of Death.
The constant references throughout La Chute to duality, hypocrisy and the impossibility of separating the truth from lies appear to reflect this duality; Clamence, the hero of our times, is a degraded version of Ulysses masquerading as God because he is afraid to “learn how to die 36
See, in particular, Maurice Weyembergh’s excellent analysis of La Chute in Albert Camus ou la mémoire des origines (Brussels: De Boeck University, 1998). 37 Albert Camus: une vie, 723. 38 Ulysse ou l’intelligence (Paris: Gallimard, 1946) 56, 57. In his illustration of these pairs Audisio dwells on the nature of Ulysses’ amorous affairs, pointing out that (as in La Chute) his “navigation” consists mainly of this (ibid., 69-89).
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and refuse divinity” (E, 1661). He admits as much by claiming as his sign a dual face, a charming Janus (TRN, 1499); this reference to the Roman god indicates the extent to which the Greek ideal has been corrupted, for it is in the Roman Empire that Cæsarism is born. No man today can claim to be a true son of Greece; at best he is a “renegade son” (E, 854). Clamence has reversed the choice made by Ulysses, for he has chosen Calypso and the illusion of immortality: Calypso lui offre l’immortalité et l’amour sans fin. Mais Ulysse regarde au loin de l’autre côté des eaux. Le goût de la terre, les souvenirs de la chère Ithaque remplissent alors sa bouche. Il refuse l’immortalité, renonce au rêve et à l’impossible et prend à nouveau la mer. (…) Ulysse revient vers la terre où l’on meurt. (E, 1662) Calypso offers him immortality and endless love. But Ulysses looks far across the waters. The taste of the earth, memories of his dear Ithaca fill his mouth. He refuses immortality, renounces the dream and the impossible and once more takes to the sea. (…) Ulysses returns to the earth where one dies.
The consequence of modern man’s failure to choose the earth and mortality (or to risk death in the waters of the Seine) is silence, monologue and a society of slaves.
Christianity and Greek myth C’est un destin bien lourd que de naître sur une terre païenne en des temps chrétiens. C’est mon cas. Je me sens plus près des valeurs du monde antique que des chrétiens.39 It’s a heavy destiny to be born in a pagan land in Christian times. That’s the case for me. I feel closer to the values of the Classical world than to Christian ones.
In La Peste, underlying mythological references are extremely subtle and most easily accessible through a familiarity with the wider body of works, as it is in Camus’s imaginative essays that such allusions are more direct. When such intertextuality is taken into account, it is all the more surprising that La Chute seems marked by a relative paucity of such allusions, especially in the light of Camus’s insistence that Clamence indicates himself to be Sicilian and Javanese, not at all Christian (TRN, 2011). Critical attention has been drawn instead to the Christian symbolism in this book, which (in contrast to that of La Peste) is far from subtle. The imagery of Nietzsche’s “slave” religion may be foregrounded, but this does not preclude the existence and significance of pagan dimensions. 39
Albert Camus éditorialiste à “l’Express”, 121.
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In 1956 Camus envisaged La Chute as a precursor to his third cycle of work, “Nemesis” (C3, 187), which would address the mixture of paganism and Christianity in the modern world. Jean Grenier noted that in 1951 Camus was thinking of a new essay, provisionally entitled Le Mythe de Némésis, which was to consider the relative gains and losses brought by Christianity to Hellenism: Jamais dans l’histoire de l’humanité, il n’y eut un tel tourment, un changement aussi capital. Comment une sensibilité aussi nouvelle a-t-elle pu faire son apparition, une sensibilité aussi différente de l’ancienne?40 Never in the history of humankind had there been such a torment, such a capital change. How had such a new sensibility been able to make its appearance, a sensibility so different from the ancient one?
It will be remembered that Camus’s student dissertation (to which he refers in this conversation) had concerned this very subject (E, 1224313). Hybridity is what strikes Camus during his visit to South America, where the religious practices in Brazil seem to him a mixture of Roman Catholicism and African paganism, with a heightened sexual component resulting from this fusion. This mixture of religion and sexuality is pointed out to him (JV, 74), while of the macumba ceremony he notes the fusion of the Catholic religion and African rites (JV, 83-84), whose goal is to achieve the descent of the god by means of a state of trance induced by dancing and chanting (JV, 83). These “degraded rituals” (JV, 106) are first alluded to at the beginning of La Chute, which has its own mixture of Christianity, primitive paganism and sexuality. I use the term “primitive” here to distinguish between that pagan world of Greek myth, characterized in La Chute by its chastity and purity (its masculinity), and the savagery of “African rites”, where women do not stay out of sight but participate in and lead the ritual dancing. Algeria is perhaps not after all a part of France, home of the new Greece; it is also (as it ever was) Africa and, further South, the land of the cannibal. Does the domesticated “femme adultère”, in her own orgasmic rite, intuit this? If my analysis of L’Étranger has revealed a dark continent of women, then La Chute enters into this heart of darkness. In the Olympian religion the old female deities (the Erinnyes) had lost their archaic power; instead they were allotted an honourable yet contained role in the new patriarchal religion (a gesture repeated in Camus’s theatrical works). In “L’Exil d’Hélène” Nemesis and the Er40
Souvenirs, 134.
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innyes will punish the excesses of modern Europe in the name of Beauty lost. In the Old Testament Babel was God’s punishment on humankind; this is also Gobineau’s vision of the future of humanity, where we are not descended from the apes but are rejoining them with all speed (C2, 251). The Mexico-City, presided over by a “gorilla”, is both the illustration and cause of such disintegration, for it symbolises the loss of both racial purity and cultural priority. As in every port across the world, this bar receives sailors of all nationalities (TRN, 1477); awaiting their arrival are the prostitutes, pimps (the Clamences) who form its resident clientele. The implied transaction is debauchery, leading to a state of “primitive fecundity” (JV, 117) where “blood is mixed to such a degree that the soul loses its boudaries” (JV, 128). For this reason Mexico City is in Amsterdam; Babel and Cro-Magnon man are at the “heart of things” as the heart of this darkness transfers to modern Europe. It will be remembered that linguistic unity was one of the factors for cohesion mentioned by Camus at the “Maison de la culture” as being fundamental to the new Mediterranean culture. In La Chute, chaos is reflected precisely in the disintegration of language; the barman’s speech is a series of grunts that Clamence must translate for his new “client”; the “civilized languages” (TRN, 1477) are everywhere spurned, for even this client reacts negatively to Clamence’s educated style of speech (TRN, 1478). Clamence’s linguistic sophistication relegates him to the past; in this space of linguistic chaos, he is himself the sole island of a lost civilization and a lost cultural priority.
The Fall Many projected titles are associated with La Chute, and even after the contract had been agreed Camus was unsure of a title. Only after much discussion was Roger Martin du Gard’s suggestion followed, and the novel finally entitled La Chute. It is unfortunate, however, that this title has drawn so much critical attention towards the vertical trajectory of a fall, so that the whole book is often interpreted in terms of various forms of decline. Such interpretations are facilitated by the apparent division of Clamence’s life into two parts – a time of innocence before and a time of guilt after his “fall”, reflecting the Christian eschatology concerning the fall from Eden (an interpretation which is openly encouraged by Clamence, moreover). Of course, I do not dispute these interpretations, which are based on valid textual evidence, yet such attempts to map, or stabilize, the progress of the fall
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provide only an illusory consolation. As Maurice Blanchot points out, the monologue of the fall challenges above all the certainties of “those who believe they stand and rest among stable things”; if we could for a moment silence “the chatter of the stable life” we might hear that: What (the character who speaks) murmurs grimly behind us is the space in which we are invited to recognize that, without knowing it, we have always been falling without respite. Everything must fall, and all that falls must drag into the fall, by indefinite expansion, all that means to remain.41
This is the permanent condition of humankind; there is nothing outside the fall, no “before” and no “afterwards”. The concept of the fall as a spatial and temporal trajectory between two points (departure and destination, before and after) is rendered meaningless by the permanence of the fall and the absence of all landmarks along the way. For its duration, it cannot be distinguished from flight, while “soaring” (TRN, 1490) might equally be stasis. In such conditions the vertical trajectory is as much a horizontal one – an emphasis more in keeping with Camus’s distinction between Classical and modern, European man, where since the beginning of Western colonialism: À partir de Colomb, la civilisation horizontale, celle de l’espace et de la quantité, remplace la civilisation verticale de la qualité. Colomb tue la civilisation méditerranéenne. (C3, 87) From Columbus onwards, horizontal civilization, that of space and quantity, replaces the vertical civilization of quality. Columbus kills Mediterranean civilization.
This comment recalls an earlier quotation concerning Cecil Rhodes: “Impérialisme est civilisation pure. Cf. Cecil Rhodes. L’expansion est tout” (C1, 50) (“Imperialism is pure civilization. Cf. Cecil Rhodes. Expansion is everything”). Such distinctions between the vertical and horizontal planes and their associated world views are derived from Spengler and encapsulated in his distinction between the Greek “Apollinian” and the modern European “Faustian” soul – a distinction central to La Chute, where the emphasis is on Faustian man. On this horizontal plane without landmarks the shift is also an elemental one from air to water – from the vertical trajectory to the horizontal state of being adrift (“à la dérive”) on the uncertain boundaryspace between water and air, sea and sky. The landscape of La Chute collapses all boundaries of time and space. The primitive is not a past, 41
Friendship, Elizabeth Rottenberg (tr.) (California: Stanford University Press, 1997), 205, 207.
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nor an elsewhere, but the here and now as Mexico and Indonesia invade modern Europe. Cro-Magnon man at the Tower of Babel (TRN, 1475) is not a mythical past, but the cosmopolitan present.
Navigation and the Opium of Sexuality As in the Heart of Darkness where the waters of Africa run in the Thames, in La Chute the sea destroys all boundaries. Holland is not stable ground with clear definition, but “la mer, la mer qui mène à Cipango, et à ces îles où les hommes meurent fous et heureux” (“the sea, the sea that leads to Cipango and those islands where men die mad and happy”); it is “un songe” (a dream) peopled by questing Lohengrins who are both “here” and “elsewhere”. But while these dreamers are in Java, “the distant isle”, the gods of Indonesia to whom they pray “wander at this moment above our heads” (TRN, 1482). The sea breaks down all borders between “here” and “elsewhere”, while the reference to Cipango (the antique term for Japan, so named by Columbus, who first brought America to Europe) breaks down temporal distinctions between a colonizing past and a decolonizing present. (Although not in the orthodox Camusian repertoire, we need not be surprised if La Chute takes a colonial turn, written as it was at this particular historical juncture. If, in post-war Amsterdam, the newly decolonized Indonesia is still to haunt its former colonial masters, then this, too, should cause no surprise. Only in France might one wonder why the Algerian war of independence gives way to other concerns when La Chute is under consideration.) Admitting that “je dérive, moi aussi” (TRN, 1525) (“I, too, am adrift”), Clamence also claims to navigate supply (TRN, 1547); he claims development, progression – in the stages of his confession, or the stages of his life, before and after. Yet all the stages of his life are collapsed into one, and there is no vraie voie from which he could possibly digress; he is always “dans (s)on sujet” (in his subject), whatever the subject. Yet he above all knows that this is a dream; “sur l’eau plate, monotone, interminable, qui confond ses limites à celles de la terre” (TRN, 1531) (“on the flat, monotonous, interminable water whose boundaries merge with those of the earth”) there is no solid ground, “nous marchons sans aucun repère, nous ne pouvons évaluer notre vitesse. Nous avançons, et rien ne change. Ce n’est pas de la navigation, mais du rêve” (TRN, 1525) (“we are walking without landmarks, we cannot evaluate our speed. We advance, and nothing changes. It is not navigation but dream”). In 1949 Camus wrote for his
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“essay on the sea” that the man in despair has no homeland (C2, 290). In that same notation, as in “La Mer au plus près”, he makes clear that such is not the condition of the navigator of whom he writes. Exile is not the homelessness of despair; for Ulysses, as for the heroes of La Peste, exile implies homecoming – the certainty that love exists and is worth fighting for (E, 880). In “La Mer au plus près” where “nous naviguons sur des espaces si vastes qu’il nous semble que nous n’en viendrons jamais à bout” (E, 882) (“we navigate over spaces so vast it seems we’ll never reach the end”), South America may be the final port of call, but this is only temporary, for the homecoming will follow. Clamence is a Rieux with insight, the désespéré, for he long ago made the wrong choice, afraid to “risk the worst” (TRN, 1483). He has despaired of love, allowed Helen to die, and consequently he is alone with no navigational guide on these “limitless spaces” (E, 882), and with no destination, only ports of call. There is no Ithaca. With no landmarks, Clamence is a Ulysses without the stars. He knows this, and for this reason he is a tragic figure. Clamence’s aim may be to entrap his listener (or his reader) and to this end he may navigate “supply” (TRN, 1547); but he also knows this activity has no goal and no destination, for there is no way out of this “enfer mou” (“flabby hell”); “nous ne sortirons jamais de ce bénitier immense” (TRN, 1531) (“we will never get out of this immense basin of holy water”). It is commonly said (following Clamence himself) that through his monologue Clamence aims to confront his listener by holding out a mirror in which the interlocutor will finally recognise himself. Why should he fashion, and to whom should he extend, this far-from-spotless mirror when his Interlocutor already resembles him, and there is no-one other than the “hero of our times”? When the judge is indistinguishable from the judged, when water becomes fog, rain, snow to merge the boundaries of earth and sky, how can he soar above (“planer au-dessus”)? There is no elsewhere, and no Other to be. Jean Sarocchi is right to say La Chute derides the Odyssean myth suggested in L’Homme révolté.42 In La Chute the islands of Circe and Calypso are the only possible destination. (But this is not navigation; we advance towards Circe without movement and nothing changes; the islands are adrift; she is already here.) The first reference to an island is to Java, in Western stereotype the home of the cannibal, and 42
“La recherche du père”, 152.
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quite a different form of paganism from that claimed by Camus for himself. In The Odyssey, islands are the home of the dangerously fascinating sexualized woman – Calypso, Circe, the Sirens, all of whom would prevent Ulysses from returning to Ithaca. Calypso keeps him by force until commanded by Zeus to let him go; Circe reduces men to swine, while of the Sirens she warns Ulysses that the man who “listens to the Sirens singing, has no prospect of coming home”.43 In La Chute such allusions immediately follow the first pagan reference to Java and are clearly signalled in the reference to those islands where men die mad and happy (TRN, 1482). When Clamence asks “Oh! entendez-vous les sirènes du port? Il y aura du brouillard cette nuit, sur le Zuyderzee” (TRN, 1480) (“Do you hear the sirens of the port? There will be fog tonight, over the Zuyderzee”), he is referring to more than the weather, for fog also symbolizes lust. Later, he amplifies on the significance of this. Like the navigators of the Odyssey, lost travellers (fornicators and readers of newspapers) arrive from every corner of Europe: Ils écoutent les sirènes, cherchent en vain la silhouette des bateaux dans la brume, puis repassent les canaux, et s’en retournent à travers la pluie. Transis, ils viennent demander, en toutes langues, du genièvre à Mexico-City. Là, je les attends. (TRN, 1483) They listen to the sirens, vainly try to make out the silhouettes of boats in the fog, then turn back over the canals and go home through the rain. Chilled to the bone, they come and ask in all languages for gin at Mexico-City. There, I wait for them. (F, 13: translation amended)
Clamence has lost la vraie voie and prostitutes himself to ensnare others. But this particular opium of sexuality is not entirely of Greek origin; here, the prostitutes of South America (JV, 117) are transposed to the port of Amsterdam, upon which is further superimposed the quasiCatholic macumba ceremony (JV, 106). Those “ladies” behind the windows symbolize: Le rêve, monsieur, le rêve à peu de frais, le voyage aux Indes! Ces personnes se parfument aux épices. Vous entrez, elles tirent les rideaux et la navigation commence. Les dieux descendent sur les corps nus et les îles dérivent, démentes, coiffées d’une chevelure ébouriffée de palmiers, sous le vent. Essayez. (TRN, 1483) Dream, Monsieur, a dream at small cost, a voyage to the Indies! Those persons perfume themselves with spices. You go in, they draw the curtains and the navigation begins. The gods come down on to the naked bodies and the islands are set 43
The Odyssey of Homer, Richmond Lattimore (tr.) (New York: Harper Collins, 1991), XXII, 39.
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In an era of decolonization where the borders between nations and continents increasingly break down, the colonial past, with its hybrid beliefs, inhabits modern Europe. Andrade’s theory of cannibalism as a method of assimilation is no longer elsewhere but here; the cannibals have come to Europe.
The Pure Space When love is an abstract concept existing elsewhere, man need never face the judgement of woman. With his wife safely out of the way to suffer and die in her own private hell, Rieux need never confront the problems in his own marriage. His inability to voice a “vrai langage du cœur” (TRN, 1280) (“true language of the heart”) becomes instead an expression of the collective condition of all who are separated, an experience that he alone interprets, and which justifies him, while the solitary Cottard becomes the scapegoat for all sins. Basking instead in the warmth of non-judgemental mother love, which requires no verbal explanations, Rieux is free to pity and understand those like Rambert with their unproductive private obsessions, secure in the knowledge that “le plus important est ailleurs”. I cannot agree with Jean Sarocchi’s insistence that La Chute draws a clear distinction between the pagan world of the archipelago and the Christian city.44 On the contrary, and most emphatically, there is nothing but cross-contamination (“hybridization”) of these categories, which have no clear boundaries, for Java and Sicily disrupt the paganism of Greece. Clamence speaks of two types of island and archipelago – those associated with Greece, and those associated with Indonesia (Java, Amsterdam, Paris). Sicily is the link between the two, demonstrating the lack of distinction between them. When Clamence calls himself Sicilian and Javanese and not at all Christian (TRN, 1545), this is the paganism that contaminates both town and archipelago. When read through The Odyssey the term “Sicilian” refers to the race of dealers in slaves.45 In his Carnets long before Camus noted that in politics a certain type of equality is the enemy of liberty: in Greece, there were free men only because there were slaves (C1, 234):
44 45
“La recherche du père”, 152. Indeed, this seems to be the critical consensus. The Odyssey, Glossary, 373,
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À partir du moment où l’esclavage est supprimé, on met tout le monde au travail. Et c’est à l’époque où la prolétarisation de l’Européen est le plus avancée que l’idéal de souveraineté populaire se fait le plus fort; cela est impossible. (C1, 247-48) Once slavery is abolished, everyone has to work. And it is when European man has reached the furthest extreme of proletarianization that the idea of popular sovereignty is at its strongest: this is impossible. (SEN, 259)
Years later, the “Sicilian” slave-dealer dreams of Greece: Il y faut des cœurs purs. Savez-vous que là-bas, les amis se promènent dans la rue, deux par deux, en se tenant la main. Oui, les femmes restent à la maison, et l’on voit des hommes mûrs, respectables, ornés de moustaches, arpenter gravement les trottoirs, leurs doigts mêlés à ceux de l’ami. En Orient aussi, parfois? Soit. (TRN, 1523) There it requires pure hearts. Do you know that there friends walk along the streets in pairs holding hands? Yes, the women stay at home and you often see middle-aged, respectable men, sporting moustaches, gravely striding along the pavements, their fingers locked in those of their friend. In the Orient as well, at times? So be it. (F, 72-73)
In this ordered land, where women and slaves were out of sight, the pure space of La Peste was created and heroic male friendships were possible. But there was no order, and this restoration of Greece on the soil of Algeria was an illusion. Thus, La Chute rereads La Peste, for it challenges not only the idea of such friendships, but recognizes that the barbarians had always been already inside the gates of Oran (of Europe). “Chaque homme a besoin d’esclaves comme d’air pur” (TRN, 1498) (“Each man needs slaves as he needs pure air”). There is no pure air.
The Nightmares of Colonialism When read within the context of Greek myth Sicily contaminates the dream of Ithaca. But Clamence is both Sicilian and Javanese, and here the contemporary reference further pollutes the Greek ideal. In early October 1954, Camus spent two days in Amsterdam; on November 1st the Algerian war of independence began. The contemporary history of Indonesia provides a nightmare model of the future for Algeria, for, after a four-year-long bloody war Indonesia finally gained its independence and drove out the Dutch in 1949. The ideology of Dutch colonialism differed starkly from that of France, for they would have no truck with notions of assimilation. On the contrary, strict segregation was enforced between the Dutch, the Chinese (imported as a labour force because the natives were seen as naturally lazy) and the
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indigenous Indonesians. These other races were not expected to aspire to the dizzy heights of the Dutch language and education system. This archipelago of many islands was marked by its extremely high degree of ethnic diversity, with three hundred ethnic groups speaking their own languages and dialects. By 1957 numerous revolutions were to lead to the imposition of martial law and an authoritarian regime which was to culminate in a totalitarian society. The colonial past invades Amsterdam / Europe, fragmenting the apparent unity of the Dutch, those “nostalgic settlers” (TRN, 1480). Fanon’s colonial brothel returns to Europe, and the vengeance it exacts is that of the ancient matriarchy – not the Greek Erinnyes defending the sacred bonds of blood, but the cannibals of Brazil and Java who engulf the world, destroy the bloodline: Un jour le building s’écroulera et tout un petit peuple grouillant, noir, rouge et jaune, se répandra sur la surface du continent, masqué et muni de lances, pour la danse de la victoire. (JV, 109) One day the building will crumble and a entire little people, black, red and yellow, will swarm over the surface of the continent, masked and armed with spears, for the dance of victory.
Paris is already organized around the principles of cannibalism; a job, a family, organised leisure, and “little teeth attack the flesh, right to the bone” (TRN, 1479). The piranha of Brazil are Clamence’s fellow Parisians. There is no dream of Greece, only nostalgia for what is recognized as an illusion; the “bad dreams” (TRN, 1483) of colonialism are the nightmare of the exotic.
Hell In 1939 Camus’s intention to retrace the steps of Ulysses had been thwarted by the outbreak of war. Instead: J’ai pris ma place dans la file qui piétinait devant la porte ouverte de l’enfer. Peu à peu, nous y sommes entrés. Et au premier cri de l’innocence assassinée, la porte a claqué derrière nous. Nous étions dans l’enfer, nous n’en sommes plus jamais sortis. (E, 842) I took my place in the queue shuffling towards the open mouth of hell. Little by little, we entered. At the first cry of murdered innocence, the door slammed shut behind us. We were in hell, and we have not left it since. (SEN, 129)
The Christian symbolism in La Chute and, in particular, the references to Dante, convey the impression that Hell has a clear location (in Amsterdam) and that Clamence accompanies his client further through these circles of Hell, which are clearly indicated (TRN, 1483, 1518).
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Such clarity would suggest that Clamence’s client was not in Hell before his arrival in Amsterdam (and leaves unanswered the question of why he sits in the Mexico-City at all). Furthermore, it suggests an element of choice on his part; if he resists Clamence, he can go away again – into the “pure” air of Paris? The Christian may find some comfort in Dante’s vision of Inferno with its clarity of stable location, the rigid gradation of the degrees of eternal damnation. But is there any consolation in the knowledge that one is only slightly damned, only slightly in Hell? Hell has no circles. We do not move further into it as the book progresses; it begins and ends in Hell and neither is there any time nor space outside of it. Those bound for Hell do not navigate towards its gates – for “this is Hell, nor are we out of it”.46 There is only the taint of the endless fall; nothing but Hell, nothing but fall: La vie sexuelle a été donné à l’homme pour le détourner peut-être de sa vraie voie. C’est son opium. En elle, tout s’endort. Hors d’elle, les choses reprennent leur vie. En même temps, la chasteté éteint l’espèce, ce qui est peut-être la vérité. (C2, 49) Sexual life was given to man to divert him perhaps from his true path. It is his opium. In it, everything slumbers. Outside of it, things take on their life again. At the same time, chastity extinguishes the species, which is perhaps the truth.
Since its very origin the human race has survived in Hell, through debauchery. Man cannot, like an Olympian god, give birth to himself. Consequently, he can never claim to be a fils de roi, because he is always, inevitably, the son of woman. Hence, the gates of this Inferno are at the origin and the first breath of life. “La vraie débauche” (true debauchery): est une jungle, sans avenir ni passé, sans promesse surtout, ni sanction immédiate. Les lieux où elle s’exerce sont séparés du monde. On laisse en y entrant la crainte comme l’espérance. (TRN, 1528) is a jungle with no future nor past, above all without promise or immediate sanction. The places where it is practised are separated from the world. One abandons, on entering, fear as well as hope. (F, 76-77)
46
Christopher Marlowe, Dr Faustus, Roma Gill (ed.) (London: A & C Black, 1990). I have here adapted the words of Mephistopheles to Faustus in Scene 3. Having seen the face of God, for Mephistopheles Hell is everywhere else. If in 1946 Camus had expressed the belief that the threshold of hell had been crossed with no return (E, 842), this conviction may well have been strengthened by subsequent events in Algeria.
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Debauchery is neither a phase in Clamence’s life, nor a stage in his confession; it is the very context of his seductive monologue. He signals this when he says that he had always lived in debauchery, never having ceased wanting to be immortal (TRN, 1527). Calypso, and the prostitutes behind the windows offer this illusion of immortality – and why else should the bourgeois tourist (the fornicator) stray in these quarters? Reflecting the themes of the first chapter, debauchery is “a long slumber” (TRN, 1529), and ubiquitous. “Ideas and fornication” characterize the rapidly rising population of modern Paris, but all of Europe is already there (TRN, 1479). Marriage itself is a form of institutionalized debauchery, and one of Clamence’s mistresses, from the best society, marries precisely to satisfy her unbridled instincts (TRN, 1529). Another of Clamence’s conquests had been on the point of starving herself to death until: Heureusement, j’arrivai à temps et me résignai à lui tenir la main, jusqu’à ce qu’elle rencontrât, revenu d’un voyage à Bali, l’ingénieur aux tempes grises, que lui avait déjà décrit son hebdomadaire favori. (TRN, 1527) Fortunately I arrived in time and submitted to holding her hand until she met, on his return from a voyage to Bali, the engineer with greying temples who had already been described to her by her favourite weekly. (F, 75)
For man there is no return from Bali. Woman is the only destination. Where all men are criminals, woman is the reward, not of the warrior, but of the criminal: Elle est son port, son havre, c’est dans le lit de la femme qu’il est généralement arrêté. N’est-elle pas tout ce qui nous reste du paradis terrestre? (1526) She is his port, his harbour; it is in the bed of woman that he is generally arrested. Is she not all that remains to us of earthly paradise? (F, 73)
In that earthly paradise, it was Eve who afflicted us with death; sexual life is death. The only alternative is chastity, extinguishing the species. Where debauchery equates with marriage, bourgeois marriage will soon bring us “aux portes de la mort” (TRN, 1529) (“to the gates of death”). Like justice, death is a sexual partner. Clamence succeeds, apparently, in uniting two opposing poles when he claims that he managed to love at the same time women and justice (TRN, 1489). Earlier, he suggests that justice slept with him each night (TRN, 1484); each morning, death was faithful at his bedside, “je me levais avec elle” (TRN, 1522) (“I rose with her”). There is no contradiction here, for death, justice and women are interchangeable. In the absence of
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paradise, justice requires that woman should be the deadly deserts of all who are fallen. Clamence’s monologue is a defence against the feeling of being adrift, with no bearings and no ultimate destination. This condition reflects not only a state of despair or disillusion, but powerlessness. Ultimately, such navigators are at the mercy of the sea. The island is already occupied. Clamence indicates as much when he decides to flee the society of men: “Non, non, je n’ai pas cherché d’île déserte, il n’y en a plus. Je me suis réfugié seulement auprès des femmes” (TRN, 1526) (“No, no, I didn’t look for a desert island, there are none left. I only sought refuge with women”). The island is the space of sexual temptation and irredeemable corruption, but even on the seas of the world woman, the nemesis of man, is inescapable. I have pointed out the destructive role of water in La Chute. It is ubiquitous, uncontrollable, and destroys all boundaries, constantly bringing elsewhere, the past, memory here. I previously drew attention to metaphors of water used by Camus in speaking of the Self and those dark forces of the soul: Si j’essaie de saisir ce moi dont je m’assure, si j’essaie de le définir et de le résumer, il n’est plus qu’une eau qui coule entre mes doigts. (E, 111) If I try to seize this self of which I feel sure, if I try to define and to summarize it, it is nothing but water slipping between my fingers. (MS, 24)
This observation applies most importantly to others, who escape containment and stable definition. Such is the clarity Clamence seeks in his nostalgia for the deserted island – stable ground, fixity, and the impression of permanence (immortality) amongst the flowing seas. The island, never swept away, appears to dominate all that flows, while Clamence from his even higher vantage point can view the surrounding chaos, master of both: La vérité est que je me force à admirer ces canaux. Ce que j’aime le plus au monde, c’est la Sicile, vous voyez bien, et encore du haut de l’Etna, dans la lumière, à condition de dominer l’île et la mer. Java aussi, mais à l’époque des alizés. (…) D’une manière générale, j’aime toutes les îles. Il est plus facile d’y régner. (TRN, 1498)47
47
This reference to the alizés is a further echo of Camus’s voyage to South America. The English “trade winds” better indicates their function, recalling their benefit for early sailors and their many trades. It seems no coincidence that after these allusions to Sicily, Java and the trade winds Clamence immediately turns to the subject of slavery.
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Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus The truth is that I force myself to admire these canals. What I like most in the world is Sicily, you see, and especially from the top of Etna in the sunlight, provided I dominate the island and the sea. Java too, but at the time of the trade winds. (…) In a general way, I like all islands. It is easier to reign there. (F, 34)
The truth is that for Clamence the canals of Amsterdam are the best alternative, as they too give the impression that water and human relationships can be controlled and channelled. In Amsterdam there is no confusion; women are prostitutes and men are pimps, wearing their signs (as in Hell) without hypocrisy. When Clamence ascended the Pont des Arts it was precisely to look at the river and to savour the feeling of being an immortal god. He has already given an ironic description of his previously successful life – which is to say that from the very beginning he destroys the idea of Eden as a space of innocence or purity: what his “good” criminals paid, they were paying to some extent on his behalf: L’indignation, l’émotion, le talent que je dépensais m’enlevaient, en revanche, toute dette à leur égard. Les juges punissaient, les accusés expiaient et moi, libre de tout devoir, soustrait au jugement comme à la sanction, je régnais, librement, dans une lumière édénique. (TRN, 1489) The indignation, talent and emotion I expended on them washed away, in return, any debt I might feel towards them. The judges punished, the defendants expiated, while I, free from any duty, shielded equally from judgement as from sanction, I reigned, freely, in an Edenic light. (F, 21-22)
Clamence associates with the weak (in particular the widow and orphan) in order to confirm his own superiority, while his “good murderers” are usually men who have killed their wives. Indeed, only because he has no wife to kill does Clamence avoid the risk of joining the criminal camp (TRN, 1485). He managed to love both women and justice (TRN, 1489) because, as in the Greek archipelago, this Eden has the clarity of order: “aucune confusion; dans la lumière précise, tout était repère” (TRN, 1525) (“no confusion; in the sharp light everything is a landmark”). In everyday relations (pitying the widow, accepting her gratitude, helping a woman with her luggage) the inferiority of women is established. By defending the wife-murderer in the name of justice, this order is confirmed – an order in which woman lives and dies by the will of man. Later, Clamence is more explicit: “Supposons que j’aie accepté de défendre quelque citoyen attendrissant, meurtrier par jalousie. Considérez, dirais-je, messieurs les jurés, ce qu’il y a de véniel à se
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fâcher, lorsqu’on voit sa bonté naturelle mise à l’épreuve par la malignité du sexe.” (TRN, 1523) “Let us suppose that I have accepted the defence of some pitiable citizen, a murderer through jealousy. Gentlemen of the jury, consider (I should say) how venial it is to get angry when one sees one’s natural goodness put to the test by the malignity of the fair sex.” (F, 69)
As he argues, death is the ideal state for all others, but (as there are no Others) primarily for the woman as sexual partner.48 I have already suggested associations between woman, the island and the sea. Hence, when Clamence recounts his experience on the Pont des Arts, it is not surprising that this is already expressed in terms of sexual satisfaction: Je sentais monter en moi un vaste sentiment de puissance et, comment dirais-je, d’achèvement, qui dilatait mon cœur. Je me redressai et j’allais allumer une cigarette, la cigarette de la satisfaction, quand, au même moment, un rire éclata derrière moi. (TRN, 1495) I felt rising within me a vast feeling of power and – I don’t know how to express it – of completion, which cheered my heart. I straightened up and was about to light a cigarette, the cigarette of satisfaction, when, at that very moment, a laugh burst out behind me. (F, 30)
Such overtones are later reinforced when Clamence turns specifically to his relationships with women, while the full significance of the laugh becomes clearer when he relates his experience of the apparently passive woman.
Women, on the Surface of Life There are two levels to the depiction of women in La Chute. This is the only fictional work where the protagonist speaks about his relationships with women, who are therefore central to the discourse, albeit absent from the récit. Here, Clamence’s activity reflects that of the author himself, and even Brian Fitch, usually dismissive of such interpretations, has argued that this autobiographical dimension cannot be overlooked.49 All too often, however, the autobiographical details chosen for consideration concern the conflicts following the publication of L’Homme révolté. As far as the treatment of women in La Chute was concerned, Francine Camus at least detected a further per48
See José Barchilon, “A Study of Camus’s Mythopoeic Tale The Fall with Some Comments about the Origin of Esthetic Feelings”, Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 19(2) (April 1971), 193-240. 49 The Fall: A Matter of Guilt (London: Twayne, 1995), 23.
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sonal parallel. As she revealed to Roger Quilliot, when he wrote about the woman who drowns in the Seine she remarked to Camus that it was basically their own story. As is well-known, during the early 1950s Camus’s wife had suffered a nervous breakdown, and attempted suicide. Camus told Quilliot the following day that his wife could no longer bear his many liaisons, adding that he did not feel guilty, but he felt responsible. His final words to Quilliot had been that he never should have married.50 The interest of this parallel with the drowning woman lies in how it is incorporated into the novel and its subsequent treatment. In contrast to Camus’s own words to Quilliot, expressing responsibility but denying guilt, the emphasis is reversed; although Clamence is clearly not responsible for the anonymous woman’s suicide, he is apparently plagued by guilt. The reader is invited to draw such conclusions and, as in L’Étranger, the question of guilt is untied from its moorings – the issue of responsibility. The drowned woman is revealed as a narrative device whose function is not unlike that of the mother in Camus’s first published work. Clamence is the one who distinguishes between two levels of reality when he says that he lived on the surface of life, “in words, in a way, never in reality” (TRN, 1501). On the surface of life, meaning can be created. Words impose order on chaos, conveying the impression of clear boundaries and progressions, where life becomes a story in stages, with a beginning and an end, and Hell might be pictured as a Dante-esque inferno. With words Clamence constructs the meaning of his life, and he gives it a purpose; seducing his client through his own confession, he creates a collective experience, the image of universal man into which his client will fall. Of course, his client resists; for Clamence, where would be the pleasure in an easy victory? Watching Clamence’s feverish decline, his listener may feel he is the one who grows in strength. Perhaps, in his laughter, his client pities the deluded and wheedling storyteller with his transparent movement from “I” to “we” (TRN, 1548). But this is only the prelude to the Interlocutor’s own downfall, after he has been lulled into this false sense of superiority. Clamence’s warning that his ravings are “dirigés” (TRN, 1550) (“controlled, directed”) should not be dismissed as ravings, for he is indeed in control. But where is the victory in that? 50
Interview with Roger Quilliot in Albert Camus: combat contre l’absurde, Arte-La 5 (24.4.97). Camus’s reply to his wife was not recorded. For a more detailed account of these events see Albert Camus: une vie. In substance this autobiographical dimension has long been known.
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Clamence’s stated intention in recalling his life is to induce a similar confession on the part of his listener, thereby achieving dominance over him. To this end, a major part of his account takes the form of the confession of a Don Juan; yet one who is unreformed, continuing now as before in the same mode of existence: Je n’ai pas changé de vie, je continue de m’aimer et de me servir des autres. Seulement, la confession de mes fautes me permet de recommencer plus légèrement et de jouir deux fois, de ma nature d’abord, et ensuite d’un charmant repentir. (TRN, 1548) I haven’t changed my way of life; I continue to love myself and to use others. Only, the confession of my crimes allows me to begin again lighter in heart and to savour a double enjoyment, first of my nature and secondly of a charming repentance. (F, 104)
In this way he constantly relives these pleasures. What else can he do? As the storyteller, it is he who controls such disclosures and determines the depiction and classification of the women of whom he speaks (and does not speak), while he alone, like an omniscient god, retains the knowledge concerning their truth. On this level Clamence cynically uses his sexual conquests, and the story of the drowned woman, as material in the furtherance of his own ends. From any perspective, he maintains control over the women in his past, who have no independent voice. This control of the storyteller is further illustrated after the laughter on the bridge, when Clamence delivers his anecdote about the incident at the traffic lights, his related experience of being made a laughing stock, and his consequent sweet dreams of oppression (TRN, 1501504). This, and the preceding discourse on the necessity of slavery (TRN, 1498-500), introduces his disclosures about his relations with women, where he continues to dominate: Je jouais le jeu. Je savais qu’elles aimaient qu’on n’allât pas trop vite au but. Il fallait d’abord de la conversation, de la tendresse, comme elles disent. (…) Je changeais souvent de rôle; mais il s’agissait toujours de la même pièce. (TRN, 1506) I played the game. I knew they didn’t like one to reveal one’s purpose too quickly. First, there had to be conversation, fond attentions as they say. (…) I often changed parts, but it was always the same play. (F, 45)
Clamence’s nostalgia is for order, and an innocence that is located on the football pitch or the stage, where the rules of life are fixed and clear, and where all acknowledge the “game”:
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Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus Je n’ai vraiment été sincère et enthousiaste qu’au temps où je faisais du sport et, au régiment, quand je jouais dans les pièces que nous représentions pour notre plaisir. Il y avait dans les deux cas une règle du jeu, qui n’était pas sérieuse, et qu’on s’amusait à prendre pour telle. Maintenant encore, les matches du dimanche, dans un stade plein à craquer, et le théâtre, que j’ai aimé avec une passion sans égale, sont les seuls endroits du monde où je me sente innocent. (TRN, 1520) I have never been really sincere and enthusiastic except when I used to indulge in sports and, in the army, when I used to act in plays we put on for our own amusement. In both cases there was a rule of the game which was not serious but which we enjoyed taking as if it were. Even now, the Sunday games in an overflowing stadium and the theatre, which I loved with an unparalleled devotion, are the only places in the world where I feel innocent. (F, 65)
As for Don Juan, innocence is the condition of avowed duplicity, where sincerity, enthusiasm and love are nothing more than the reproduction of the counterfeit, without subterfuge. Hence, Clamence the counterfeiter (TRN, 1538) is only truly alive when acting a role: “dans un sens, d’ailleurs, je croyais à ce que je disais, je vivais mon rôle” (TRN, 1507) (“besides, in a sense I believed what I was saying, I lived my role”). As in Le Mythe, this donjuanisme requires the death of the Other, who can be allowed no autonomous life. Death would be the ideal solution: Cette mort eût définitivement fixé notre lien, d’une part et, de l’autre, lui eût ôté sa contrainte. Mais on ne peut pas souhaiter la mort de tout le monde ni, à la limite, dépeupler la planète pour jouir d’une liberté inimaginable autrement. (TRN, 1510) Her death would, on the one hand, have fixed our relationship once and for all and, on the other, removed its constraint. But one cannot long for the death of everyone or, to go to extremes, depopulate the planet in order to enjoy a freedom that is unthinkable otherwise. (F, 50)
Clamence remains in control, while his illustration of himself as a laughing stock concerns a trivial incident entirely divorced from his relationships with women. Thus, the laugh heard on the bridge is most closely associated with the motorcyclist through its narrative proximity, while the second example of losing face is distanced by its insertion within Clamence’s discourse on his sexual success. On this occasion he is attracted by a woman who does not play the game. Despite her passive air, she had confided his sexual inadequacies to another (TRN, 1508). The true scandal of this betrayal rests in the fact that Clamence had wrongly believed her incapable of having an opinion, only to find now that she was capable of judgement. This
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is not part of Don Juan’s bargain with women, who must exist in isolation from social life, without friends in whom to confide and with whom they might display independent judgement. This revelation of an autonomous existence breaks the contract imposed long before on which Absurd man flourished. What man is a hero when the lowliest and most passive of women can judge him and snigger behind his back about his virility? The laughter Clamence hears on the bridge, at the height of his satisfaction, is female laughter deriding him on the level where he feels most alive, most innocent – in the theatre of love. This parallel is underlined by the repetition of the same phrase in dismissal of each incident: he thought about the laughter for a while, then “forgot” about it (TRN, 1495), just as he “forgot” about this woman (TRN, 1506). It matters little that he has described his revenge on her in graphic detail, for he cannot delete her powers of judgement. Memory, furthermore, is not within Clamence’s control; he neither summons up nor dismisses it. It returns to him (TRN, 1501). Although the young woman’s suicide takes place some years earlier, the laughter is the precursor to the woman’s cry. Such parallels are deliberate and designed to focus the listener’s attention on this incident at the “centre” of his memory and presented as an unwilling revelation he can no longer evade (TRN, 1510). Martyrs, Clamence later remarks, must choose between being forgotten, mocked, or made use of (TRN, 1514). Unforgotten, this suicide allows him to present himself as a tragic figure – the man haunted by the cry of a young woman whom he did nothing to save. Indeed, the tragedy is compounded by the fact that he could have done nothing to save her. Although critical opinion is divided on this point, and Clamence is variously seen as responsible and wanting her to die, or responsible only of an “innocent crime”, what is clear is that Clamence is always in control of his disclosures about women. The ambiguity surrounding them is deliberate, as are his final words on the subject: “Il est trop tard, maintenant, il sera toujours trop tard. Heureusement!” (TRN, 1551). On the level of words, and within the terms of the confession, this “real” woman has served her purpose, and: Les auteurs de confessions écrivent surtout pour ne pas se confesser, pour ne rien dire de ce qu’ils savent. Quand ils prétendent de passer aux aveux, c’est le moment de se méfier, on va maquiller le cadavre. (TRN, 1538)
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Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus The authors of confessions write above all to avoid confessing, to tell nothing of what they know. When they claim to get to the painful admissions, you have to watch out, for they are about to dress the corpse. (F, 89)
Although many have argued for Clamence’s deterioration over the course of his monologue, and that the Interlocutor plays a far more active role than might first appear, I have emphasised instead the high degree of control that Clamence exerts over his material and his Interlocutor. If Clamence is defeated, it is surely not by those with whom he comes into contact at the Mexico-City, but by the very pointlessness of the exercise in which he is engaged. The contemporary judgepenitent may proclaim his guilt by beating the breasts of others (E, 897-98), but however guilt (or responsibility) may be apportioned, nothing will retrieve that original loss. One is left forever with only the corpse.
Mythical Women in La Chute I have noted the critical focus on Christian imagery in La Chute. Additionally, Greece is regarded as a strictly delineated pure and Edenic space. However, I have argued that from the outset pagan imagery is intertwined with references to Christianity, the slave religion; not only do the allusions to Dante make clear that the setting of this symbolic space is the pagan world (the first circle of Dante’s inferno is Limbo, where the unbaptised and the virtuous pagans are to be found), but the allusions of the first chapter are to the pagan legends of the Odyssey; fittingly, in view of the fact that Dante’s guide is Virgil. Here, the indirect references are to the women of such myths (the Sirens, Circe and Calypso) who entrap the unsuspecting navigator. The ordered world of the Christian inferno is thus revealed as inapplicable, for this is simultaneously the second circle of Hell – the realm of the lustful, as is symbolised by the rainy and foggy climate of Amsterdam.51 Thus, in contrast to La Peste, La Chute evokes an underside of Greek mythology – not the chastity of the homosocial world where men may walk hand in hand while the women stay at home, but its duality, and 51 My source for these points is Dante’s The Divine Comedy (vol.1): Inferno, Mark Musa (tr.) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971). It is to be noted, moreover, that Ulysses was himself condemned to the 8th bolgia of the inferno (Canto XXVI) because of his duplicity. From there he recounts his final voyage when, having left Circe for the last time, he and his crew are caught up in a storm and wrecked, whereupon “the sea was closed again, above us” (142). This final line resembles those of Moby Dick and recalls Camus’s comment that Melville was the “Homer of the Pacific”. Camus added, however, that with Melville Ulysses is never to find Ithaca again (E, 1909).
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the world of sexual temptation. At the same time, references to Java, the voyages of discovery (Cipango) and the prostitutes of Amsterdam evoke the memory of Brazil and the African paganism of the macumba ceremony. Again, the order of Greece, the Inferno, and the temporal-geographical order are subverted by these contemporary references, while the female figures profiled there are those of “African rites” (JV, 83-84). In the above examples direct references in the text create intertextual links with legendary or mythical female figures. In other cases, as with Helen, the associations are more complex, for this text contains no possibility of Redemption. In the world without Ithaca, female symbols of purity are exiled. Yet, as in the case of the drowned young woman, and as in the case of the Van Eyck painting, their significance is written on the empty space.
Redemption Clamence, who is there when he is elsewhere, most absent when he occupies the most space (TRN, 1520), takes his client to the island of Marken to witness the horizontal lines of universal obliteration, everlasting nothingness made visible (TRN, 1512). This is what really matters: le vide, the void, the emptiness of space where a painting was once hung. Van Eyck’s The Adoration of the Lamb has long been seen as the source of much of the iconography of La Chute,52 and towards the end of his monologue Clamence reveals his ownership of the famous stolen panel from this polyptich, “The Just Judges”. Although a copy of this lost panel with its false judges is displayed for the admiration of a world unable to distinguish true from false, Clamence alone possesses the true one; this, he argues, is right and proper because the judges are on their way to meet the Lamb – and there is no longer a Lamb, nor any innocence (TRN, 1542). He does not court arrest or judgement, nor does he harbour illusions of martyrdom or grandeur. He has no illusions. When innocence is separated from justice, only
52
For a thorough consideration of the painting and its links with the novel see Jeffrey Meyers, “Camus’s The Fall and Van Eyck’s The Adoration of the Lamb”, in Mosaic, 7 (3) (Spring, 1974), 43-51; Burton M. Wheeler, “Beyond Despair: Camus’s The Fall and Van Eyck’s ‘Adoration of the Lamb’”, Contemporary Literature, 23 (3) (1982), 343-64. For an interesting analysis of this painting’s relationship to La Chute, see Jean Gassin’s “La Chute et le retable de ‘L’Agneau Mystique’: étude de structure”, in Albert Camus 1980, 133-41.
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the emptiness of judgement remains.53 Clamence refers six times to this absence in the course of his monologue (TRN, 1478, 1495, 1521, 1542, 1549), like a conjuror inviting us to look in the wrong direction and solve the mystery of what does not matter. What he will never possess is Redemption. Existing now only in the world of La Chute, the lost panel of “the Just Judges” once stood on the margin, at the outermost edge as one of twelve panels, in the lower register of the open polyptich. It is hardly central, and judgement and justice do not always coincide. In Clamence’s world, only they remain, while the absence to which their presence points is The Adoration of the Lamb itself. This is what Clamence knows he will never have; salvation. When closed, the Ghent Altarpiece depicts the Angel Gabriel and the Virgin Mary, above whose head is the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove. This scene announces the beginning of the Redemption, for at the moment of the Annunciation the Second Person of the Trinity, Christ the Redeemer, entered the world: Redemption is the theme of the opened polyptich, which depicts the Lamb in the fields of Paradise, and in the upper register, at the right hand of Christ sits Mary, “the spotless mirror of God”. The Adoration of the Lamb expresses belief in the salvation of humankind. Redemption, then, exists elsewhere, beyond the confines of Amsterdam. The presence of Adam and Eve, standing in the upper register of the painting at the two edges furthest from the centre, points to the origin and purpose of the Redemption. In her hand Eve holds the fruit with which she tempted Adam, and over her head, as if sculpted in stone, is depicted the first murder, by Cain of Abel. At her feet, inscribed in Latin, are the words (the just judgement), “Eve afflicts us with death”. Whereas over the head of the Virgin is the dove (the Third Person of the Trinity, the Rewarder who bestows grace on the elect), Eve carries on her head the first murder and her progeny, the first criminal, who brought Damnation. For the sons of Cain, all that remains of paradise is man’s first disobedience and the eternal fall. In La Chute, Mary, “the second Eve”, will never redeem her mortal counterpart.
53 Nowadays, Camus wrote, the word “justice” has been prostituted, and might be heard on the lips of both the Algerian peasant and the Yemeni slave-dealer (E, 1852). In the twentieth century, judgement only favours cruelty and force.
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Just as “the Just Judges” announce the absence of salvation (The Adoration of the Lamb), so the references to Dante’s Inferno point to the absence of Paradise. The quest for Beatrice is the reason for Dante’s presence in Hell. Like Orpheus, he enters in search of the lost loved one, the “Lady of Grace” whose name signifies salvation.54 Whereas the Inferno is the point of departure in pursuit of a goal, in La Chute there is no exit: we will never leave this immense basin of holy water (TRN, 1532). And whereas the Divine Comedy eventually leads to Beatrice and to Paradise, La Chute extends no further than Hell and the women who belong there. As Claudine and Michel Maillard have pointed out, the theme of the quest (which incorporates not only Dante but the legends of the Grail) is integral to La Chute.55 The underlying master-quest throughout Camus’s later work, I have suggested, is that of Ulysses, initially in search of Helen and subsequently in search of the homeland and Penelope; Lohengrin, with whom the Dutch are compared, underwent many amorous digressions during his search for the Grail – in parallel with both Clamence and Ulysses. As Audisio points out, these women always take Ulysses by force; in spirit he does not submit (but he enters their beds); he cries about it (but afterwards). As in La Chute, navigation is equated with sexual adventure, and eight of Ulysses’ ten years of homecoming were actually spent on this; the navigator takes no vow of chastity. 56 Such allusions to the quest for grace emphasise only its abortion in La Chute, which announces instead its impossibility. There is no Lady of Grace, and the Holy Spirit hovers in the sky with no head on which to alight (TRN, 1512); Mary, the New Eve, will never redeem her mortal counterpart, whose heirs are left since the beginning with the loss of paradise. Afflicted with death, the sons of Cain are mortal and biological beings born from temptation, the fruit of the first murder, and fallen long ago. Man has allowed Helen to die, unwilling to risk his life for those greater values that forge the collective community. When he hears the sound of a body hitting the water and a cry descending the river, Clamence does not even turn around. The hero of
54
Inferno II, 76. Le Langage en procès: Structures et symboles dans “La Chute” de Camus (Grenoble: Presses Universitaires de Grenoble, 1977), 97. 56 Ulysse ou l’intelligence, 85, 23, 80. 55
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our times refuses the moment of choice (Beatrice)57 and consequently he inhabits the vestibule of Hell (in Inferno the realm of the indecisive). The water is cold, the shroud opaque. He is afraid of death. Like the young Camus of “Noces à Tipasa” or Le Mythe, Clamence loves life so much that he cannot imagine anything else: Je l’aime tant que je n’ai aucune imagination pour ce qui n’est pas elle. Une telle avidité a quelque chose de plébéien, vous ne trouvez pas? L’aristocratie ne s’imagine pas sans un peu de distance à l’égard de soi-même et de sa propre vie. On meurt si’il le faut, on rompt plutôt que de plier. Mais moi, je plie, parce que je continue de m’aimer. (TRN, 1514) I love it so much that I am incapable of imagining what is not life. Such avidity has something plebeian about it, don’t you think? Aristocracy cannot imagine itself without a little distance surrounding itself and its own life. One dies if necessary, one breaks rather than bending. But I bend, because I continue to love myself. (F, 56-57)
Clamence had thought himself one of the elect, a King’s son, marked out from the mass (TRN, 1490). Instead, he discovers that he is a slave for whom there is no action worth taking and no values worth preserving if, by doing so, he risks his own life. On décidera alors de ne pas agir, ce qui revient au moins à accepter le meurtre d’autrui, sauf à déplorer harmonieusement l’imperfection des hommes. (E, 415) We may decide not to act at all, which comes down to condoning other people’s murder, plus a little fastidious sorrow over human imperfection. (R, 13)
Metamorphoses Clamence had believed himself “désigné”, singled out as one of the natural élite; instead, he is “appelé” (TRN, 1518) (“called”), but this is not the call to sainthood. From the point at which the woman falls into the Seine to become a symbol, her cry becomes the call of Fate, a disembodied “truth”, or a “misérable tromperie, perdue dans l’océan des âges comme le grain de sel dans la mer!” (“a paltry fraud, lost in the sea of ages like a grain of sand in the ocean”), linking confession to the only possible absolution of death (TRN, 1521). This cry becomes his Nemesis, and associated with water, rain, fog (lust) – all that cannot be controlled. From the water it returns to him, even on the ocean. Mistaking a piece of debris for someone drowning, Clamence resigns himself, without revolt, to the knowledge that this cry which had 57 In The Figure of Beatrice. A Study in Dante (London: Faber, 1943) Charles Williams points out that Beatrice represents this moment of choice, “a choice between action and no action” (123).
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sounded over the Seine years before had never ceased, carried by the river to the ocean, to travel throughout the world, awaiting him: Je compris aussi qu’il continuerait de m’attendre sur les mers et les fleuves, partout enfin où se trouverait l’eau amère de mon baptême. Ici encore, dites-moi, ne sommes-nous pas sur l’eau? (…) Écoutez! N’entendez-vous pas les cris de goélandes invisibles? S’ils crient vers nous, à quoi donc nous appellent-ils? (TRN, 1531) I realized likewise that it would continue to await me on seas and rivers, everywhere, in short, where lies the bitter water of my baptism. Here too, by the way, aren’t we on the water? (…) Listen. Don’t you hear the cries of invisible gulls? If they are crying in our direction, to what are they calling us? (F, 80)
These invisible gulls, Clamence insists, are the same ones that were calling out that day on the ocean. Thus, with her death, the young woman undergoes a series of metamorphoses connecting her with truth (or with trash), with water, and with the cry of birds. I have already noted the associations between women, prostitutes and birds in the Journaux de Voyage, and that these associations are carried over into the first chapter of La Chute. The sexual pleasure offered by women there may be “à peu de frais” (TRN, 1483) (“cheap”), but one of the central themes of Clamence’s discourse concerns precisely such questions of payment, contradicting the suggestion that any transaction with a woman comes cheap. In his work as a lawyer, Clamence’s criminals pay on his behalf whilst he is relieved of any debt, so that, freed from all responsibility, he can reign (TRN, 1489). Likewise, his solicitous attendance at funerals gained him, “à peu de frais”, the sympathy of all (TRN, 1493); no debt is owed to the dead, except that of memory. But this exacts a heavier price than he initially suggests (TRN, 1492). Similarly, in his dealings with women it was as if he extended to all other women the debt he had just contracted towards one – a comment made immediately before he recounts the incident on the Pont Royal (TRN, 1510), and although he derides suicide as an illusory way of “making people pay”, nevertheless he later discloses that women cost him dearly (TRN, 1516). Woman may be the reward of the criminal and “true debauchery” may create no obligation, but at the end of all liberty, there is a sentence (TRN, 1544). Most transparently, this message is conveyed through Christian imagery where Salome stands at the intersection of Biblical and Orientalist myth. When Clamence imagines his arrest for the theft of “the Just Judges”, he again compares himself to John the Baptist:
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Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus (O)n me décapiterait, par exemple, et je n’aurais plus peur de mourir, je serais sauvé. Au-dessus du peuple assemblé, vous éleveriez alors ma tête encore fraîche, pour qu’ils s’y reconnaissent et qu’à nouveau je les domine, exemplaire. Tout serait consommé, j’aurais achevé, ni vu ni connu, ma carrière de faux prophète qui crie dans le désert et refuse d’en sortir. (TRN, 1551) (I) would be decapitated, and I’d no longer be afraid of dying; I’d be saved. Above the gathered crowd, you would hold up my still warm head, so that they could recognize themselves in it and I could again dominate – an exempler. All would be consummated; I should have brought to a close, unseen and unknown, my career as a false prophet crying in the wilderness and refusing to come forth. (F, 107)
Salome, the Biblical figure whose seductive dance brings about this death, has become a symbol of the sexual abandon and duplicity of the East, and in this sense she represents a fusion of Christian and pagan. A series of female metamorphoses in the book (from woman into justice, into death, and into water) is reinforced by a hybridization of the récit’s Christian imagery. In 1958 Camus reflected that the world is moving towards paganism although still rejecting pagan values: “Il faut les restaurer, paganiser la croyance, gréciser le Christ et l’équilibre revient” (C3, 220) (“They must be restored; the balance will be restored by paganizing belief, hellenizing Christ”). Clearly, in speaking of paganism here, Greece and Classical values are the reference point. Yet, such a fusion seems reflected in the religious imagery of La Chute, where a new and hybrid image begins to be connected with women. Gabriel Audisio speaks of the fabulous hybrid monsters of myth, such as the Sirens who were half woman and half bird or fish, and the Harpies – women with the wings of birds.58 Melusina herself was such a being, of course, and Nemesis, goddess of the golden mean, is often depicted with the wings of a bird. Nemesis, in the form of a bird, laid the egg from which Helen was born. She is referred to in L’Homme révolté as the “déesse de la mesure, fatale aux démesurés” (E, 699) (“the goddess of moderation, fatal for the immoderate”), and her profile can be discerned behind the birds who call to Clamence, reminding him of his fate. Commentators have often pointed out that in Christian iconography the dove / Holy Ghost is associated with John the Baptist, who declared Jesus the “Lamb of God”. Jean-Baptiste Clamence’s association of himself with the prophet and his constant references to the doves in the sky of Holland thus leads their presence 58
Ulysse ou l’intelligence, 93.
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to be interpreted in this light. The Maillards have sought to link the seagulls with these doves, and suggest that all these birds are related to the “call”, which is to say to Clamence’s vocation. Yet, as they note, the doves remain ephemeral, invisible, waiting above with no head on which to land. They belong instead to the Van Eyck painting and, beyond that, to the Scriptures.59 However, it must be remembered that in this same network of Christian symbolism the descent of the dove also signifies the descent of lust – as in Inferno, where it is offered as an excuse for infidelity and betrayal.60 Thus, the imagined descent of the doves at the end of La Chute represents a return to the beginning of the book, with its landscape of lust (in the second circle of Hell). Voyez les énormes flocons qui s’ébouriffent contre les vitres. Ce sont les colombes, sûrement. Elles se décident enfin à descendre, ces chéries, elles couvrent les eaux et les toits d’une épaisse couche de plumes, elles palpitent à toutes les fenêtres. (TRN, 1550) See the huge flakes drifting against the window-panes. It must be the doves, surely. They finally make up their minds to come down, the little dears; they’re covering the waters and the roofs with a thick layer of feathers; they’re fluttering at every window. (F, 22)
Here, the term “s’ébouriffent” (“drift”) recalls the palm trees at the beginning, and the first invitation to debauchery, when: Les dieux descendent sur les corps nus et les îles dérivent, démentes, coiffées d’une chevelure ébouriffée de palmiers sous le vent. Essayez. (TRN, 1483) The gods descend on naked bodies and the isles are set adrift, demented, crowned with the tousled hair of palm trees in the wind. Try it. (F, 14)
In this circular trajectory Clamence may savour the eternal return of the last judgement. What else can he do, knowing, as he does, that he is going nowhere? But the birds in the story are not simply “borrowed” from a Biblical elsewhere, and the seagulls are not simply another version of the dove, as the Maillards contend. In pagan beliefs, birds also signify the souls of the dead. When Clamence acknowledges the inescapability of the cry / drowned woman he points out that they presided over this incident just as they preside overhead at his recounting of it (TRN, 1532). Thus Clamence is pursued by his Nemesis. This Greek symbol59
Le Langage en procès, 146-47. Inferno, V, 82-4. In L’Imagination du désert Laurent Mailhot also notes the sublimated sexual role played by the dove in Christian symbolism (300).
60
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ism is reinforced when one takes into account the fact that not merely the sky of Holland, but the “celestial space” is filled by millions of doves waiting the whole year long (TRN, 1512-13). In Greek mythology the seven Pleiades were the daughters of Atlas and were forced to flee from the amorous pursuit of Orion. The gods, to aid their escape, changed them into doves and “set their images among the stars”.61 The name “Pleiades” is believed to derive from the root plei (to sail), and hence refers to the rising of this group of stars when the season of good weather for sailing approaches. From this perspective it is, then, not surprising that Clamence should claim that “the fall” begins at dawn (TRN, 1549), when there is no possibility of seeing the stars. The rising of the Pleiades in May began the navigational year, and their setting in November (the month that marks the suicide and the cry) signalled its end.62 The King’s son has lost his star, and Clamence’s yearning for the descent of the doves signifies the wish to end his state of being adrift, with no celestial guide and no destination. Clamence seeks the end to all navigation, when “je n’aurais plus peur de mourir, je serais sauvé” (TRN, 1551) (“I would no longer be afraid of dying, I would be saved”). In La Chute the optimism of of L’Homme révolté where “nous choisirons Ithaque, la terre fidèle, la pensée audacieuse et frugale” (E, 708) (“we will choose Ithaca, the faithful earth, bold and frugal thought”) is denied. Unlike L’Exil et le Royaume, this is not a story of exile but the message of the damned. In thinking of that earthly paradise of Camus’s youth and the war of independence, I am constantly reminded of the words of Mephistopheles, for whom Hell lies everywhere beyond the existence he had once known: “Thinks’t thou that I, who saw the face of God, And tasted the eternal joys of heaven, Am not tormented with ten thousand hells In being deprived of everlasting bliss!”63
61
Robert Graves, The Greek Myths, vol. 1 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), 152. The Greek Myths, 154, 165. 63 Dr Faustus, Scene 3 (78-81). 62
Chapter 7 Sexual topographies In chapter 6 I suggested that La Chute is haunted by the impending loss of French Algeria. Written in a post-war climate entirely different from the days of Camus’s youth, when it was still possible (if unrealistic) to harbour other dreams of what Algeria and its settlers might become, the spectre that now stands behind Camus’s writing is of a rapidly de-colonizing world; an unknown future for which predictions cannot be made, except the threat of exile and all that this entails. The future is lost, that future kingdom destroyed. I have suggested that such fears are expressed through an imagery of female sexuality; a loss of control, a loss of personal and political boundaries. As far as Algeria itself is concerned, “l’autre Algérie” (“the other Algeria”) for which Camus would never fight, is one “reliée à un empire d’Islam” (E, 901) (“tied to an Islamic empire”). Moreover, if it is too late for French Algeria, then it may also be too late for the Western world, for behind the FLN stands Egypt and the dream of a renascent Arab empire under Colonel Nasser. For Camus (and many others at that time), the Arab Empire means a third World War (E, 1013).1 This other Algeria underlies L’Exil et le Royaume, the collection of short stories that La Chute had outgrown: at times it surfaces, as in “Le Renégat, ou un esprit confus” and “La Pierre qui pousse”. In L’Exil et le royaume the King’s son is replaced (if not displaced) by a series of other “princes without a kingdom” first intimated in Le Mythe (E, 169). While continuing this meditation on the kingdom / homeland, L’Exil et le royaume is also an attempted reconstruction, a “making sense” which presages Camus’s final, unfinished work, Le Premier Homme.
Domestic Sexuality and Exotic Fantasy I earlier suggested that Camus seeks to create an ordered and sexually segregated fictional world, and my analysis of the treatment of women up to this point would predict that women are excluded from this 1
See also Albert Camus: une vie, 714.
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kingdom. Woman is incapable of lucidity, and is rather an aspect of that natural world which constitutes man’s “homeland of the soul”. Yet few commentators challenge the proposition that the ecstatic moment of communion experienced by Janine at the oasis fort was shared by the writer himself, and identical to that described in Noces or L’Envers et l’Endroit. Such interpretations can only be sustained if the category of gender is ignored. Although this short story is recognized as being unique in Camus’s work precisely because the main protagonist is female, interpretations often bypass this factor in order to assimilate unproblematically Janine’s experience into that of Camus himself. As Jean Grenier was famously to remark, “we” have all been, at times, that “adulterous woman”.2 In challenging the equation between Janine’s experience and that of Camus, Peter Cryle has pointed to one distinction that seems clearly gender-related when he notes the crucial role of lucidity throughout the earlier essays.3 “Arid lucidity” is not an obvious consequence of Janine’s encounter with the desert night. In “Retour à Tipasa” the speaker implicitly compares himself to Ulysses, while the constant theme there is of the return and the homecoming. Unlike Janine, the speaker is not a stranger in unfamiliar territory; on the contrary, the text is marked by the repetition of actions such as “finding again”, “seeing again” as past and present unite to annihilate the intervening twenty years. The writer re-enters a familiar landscape of his youth where every step of the journey is filled with memories and sensations. This is no touristic voyage but a homecoming where, in this unchanging space, framed by “always the same” sea and sky, the writer knows what his goal is and finds again “exactly what I had come to seek, and which, in spite of the world, was given truly to me alone in this deserted nature” (E, 872-73). For Janine, on the other hand, the discovery is that the kingdom she believes has been promised to her would never be hers, except in one fleeting moment of spectatorship (TRN, 1570). In Tipasa, the confirmation sought and found is that of roots and identity. Unlike Budejovice, Tipasa, even after so many years, still welcomes and recognizes her own, who willingly claim their heritage in this “refuge and port for her sons, of whom I am one” (E, 872). In this essay the speaker seeks a temporary 2
Correspondance Jean Grenier-Albert Camus (Paris: Gallimard, 1981), 199. Bilan Critique: L’Exil et le Royaume d’Albert Camus: essai d’analyse (Paris: Minard, 1973), 51. 3
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escape, a reaffirmation of roots inextricably bound up with birthplace and blood ties before his return to the conflicts of Europe. This experience is a rediscovery of the Self, the recognition that the light signified by Tipasa burns still within him: “there was in me an invincible summer” (E, 874), an antidote to the night of Europe and its hatred for the light (E, 869, 874). Thus fortified, this latter-day Ulysses can prepare with renewed determination to return to the battle (E, 874). Despite the deliberate ambiguity of “La Femme adultère” it is far from clear that Janine’s experience parallels this. Janine is aligned with the night, her experience belongs to the night – the converse of what Camus is describing in Tipasa. In Le Mythe Camus distinguishes between two types of spiritual night: that conjured up with the eyes closed, in which the spirit seeks to lose itself; and the night born of a lucid despair, a polar night, “veille de l’esprit d’où se lèvera peut-être cette clarté blanche et intacte qui dessine chaque objet dans la lumière de l’intelligence, (E, 146) (“vigil of the mind, from which will arise perhaps that white and virginal brightness which outlines every object in the light of the intelligence” (MS, 63) ). Although she certainly “loses herself” (to the point of incoherence) the intellect plays no part in Janine’s experience. Not only is she associated with Europe (or its Algerian counterpart, Oran), but in Tipasa the night resists description (E, 875). Bearing in mind that Camus himself said in 1943 that he was both unmoved and unpersuaded by those who wrote about “ineffable, inexpressible, infinite” feelings or situations (E, 1663), Cryle rightly points out that although in his lyrical essays Camus could always describe and comment on his experience, that of Janine is “ineffable”.4 Even language is beyond her grasp. Before her solitary night expedition she spoke, but her mouth “emitted no sound”. Indeed, she hardly heard / understood what she was saying herself (TRN, 1572). This incomprehension is extended to Marcel on her return, when she does not understand his words, and he looks at her without understanding (TRN, 1575). It remains unclear, however, whether this lack of linguistic communication between them is the result of her experience, or whether (as the text suggests) it is a feature of their “longue habitude à deux” (“long, mutual habit”), long devoid of any satisfactory form of intercourse. Of Laghouat, Camus wrote of the singular impression of power and invulnerability he had there, because he had come to terms with 4
Bilan Critique, 28.
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death (C3, 70). Despite Janine’s mystical experience, it seems unlikely that the two can be compared – especially in view of the great care Camus takes to emphasise the contrast between himself and his original models in his 1954 preface to the story: J’ai rencontré à Laghouat les personnages de cette nouvelle. Je ne suis pas sûr, naturellement, que leur journée se soit terminée comme je l’ai dit. Sans doute ne sont-ils pas allés devant le désert. Mais j’y suis allé, moi, quelques heures après et pendant tout ce temps leur image me poursuivait et s’opposait à ce que je voyais.5 In Laghouat I met the characters of this story. I am not certain, of course, that their day ended as I have told it. No doubt they did not go forth to the desert. But me, I went there, some hours after that, and during all that time their image pursued me and challenged what I saw.
Marcel and Janine are reminiscent of the citizens of Oran in La Peste or “Le Minotaure”, who have closed the window and shut themselves off from the natural world (E, 828) in favour of the pursuit of commerce. Their one redeeming feature is that they, too, have had their lives turned upside down, and must re-adjust. Marcel, for all his flaws, reflects the indomitable spirit of this emigrant people; although impervious to his surroundings, he adapts, thanks to “his courage in the face of life”, which (we are told), he shared with all the French of that land (TRN, 1560).
The Fat White Woman The particular heroine selected for this unique focus is equally unique in Camus’s works, although she appears fleetingly in the Carnets. She is neither a mother, nor a vocal defendant of the claims of women, and above all she is not one of the French-Algerian “flower-like girls” so closely associated with the Algerian landscape of the lyrical essays. I suggest that Janine derives from a sub-text running through Camus’s writings. Through the details of her life-style, she emanates from: La dame qui a l’air de souffrir d’une constipation de trois ans: “Ces Arabes, ça masque leurs filles. Ah! ils ne sont pas encore civilisés!” Peu à peu, elle nous révèle son idéal de civilisation: un mari à 1200 francs par mois, un appartement de deux pièces, cuisine et dépendances, le cinéma le dimanche et un intérieur Galerie Barbès pour la semaine. (C1, 225) The lady who seems to be suffering from a constipation of three years: “These Arabs, they veil their girls. Ah, they’re still not civilized!”
5
Cited by Lottman, Albert Camus, 549.
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Gradually, she reveals to us her ideal of civilization: a husband on 1200 francs a month, an appartment with two rooms, kitchen and mod cons, the cinema on Sundays and a Galerie Barbès interior for weekdays.
Such a woman clearly goes too far in her pretensions to concern for social justice. The claim that the Arab woman (by day beast of burden, by night Beauty6) is in some mysterious way oppressed is dismissed here in favour of an attack on the one making the claim. Because of who she is and how she lives, her words are little more than the cover for racism. Elsewhere, this attribution of racism is given clearer expression in a deleted passage from Tarrou’s diary. There, the woman concerned is a Parisian and her social circle, who are all agreed that the plague emanates from the squalor caused by Jews, Arabs and outsiders to the town (TRN, 1983-84). Not only their class, but their gender excludes such women from the sphere of political discourse. The (middle-class, middle-aged) housewife is incapable of compassion, and her true concern is for the acquisition of material goods, and not by her own efforts, for she is parasitical on her husband. She enters briefly into Camus’s journalistic works when the young journalist undertakes a tour around the convict ship, Le Martinière. His closing reprimand to a group of women onlookers rests equally on this same stereotype of the parasitical woman. There, Camus is a reporter and not an idle voyeur: the women are tourists, treating as spectacle the sight of a human misery they could never understand (CAC 3, 362).7 Camus reserves a special contempt for the customers of the Galerie Barbès, which he associates with the petty-minded and pettybourgeois – as is demonstrated in 1945 when he urges the working classes never to aspire to the sort of bourgeois life-style of which this furniture is, for him, one symbol (E, 1545). It seems no coincidence that Janine’s own home is filled with this furniture (TRN, 1562). Precisely because it is so widespread, such a stereotype remains unremarked, explaining why Jean Onimus can speak of humour, insignificance, and Emma Bovary without questioning the “mystical” nature of Janine’s experience at the fort. However, much of the humour in this story hinges on the comical impossibility of someone like
6
This North African saying is quoted by Berque in Le Maghreb entre deux guerres, 33. 7 “Ces hommes qu’on raie de l’humanité”, CAC 3, 358-362. See my “Albert Camus and ‘Ces femmes qu’on raie de l’humanité’: Sexual Politics in the Colonial Arena”, French Cultural Studies, 10 (2) (29) (June 1999), 217-30.
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Janine committing adultery.8 For precisely the same reasons that the Algerian woman of L’Étranger has been called a “maudlin” woman, another critic has described Janine as suffering from a “menopausal depression”. But Janine’s status derives from a much larger stereotype than this, combining parasitism and racism, for it is also widely assumed that, as Pierre Nora confidently remarks: La femme, parasite du rapport colonial auquel elle ne participe pas directement, même si elle travaille, est généralement plus raciste que l’homme et contribue puissament à interdire le contact entre les deux sociétés.9 The woman, parasitical on colonial relations in which she does not participate directly, even if she works, is generally more racist than the man and strongly contributes to the taboo on contact between the two societies.
Although often less bluntly expressed, this convenient view of the role of women in colonialism is widespread, and seems to have been supported by Camus. In Le Premier Homme emigrant women are presented as the victims of a historical process they have played no part in making, crying in the night (PH, 301) and afraid of the unknown (PH, 172) – as if the men were not. In the history of colonial conquest, trade precedes the arrival of the military men, while tourism is likewise parasitical on the existence of an already pacified indigenous population, and this form of passive consumption is more readily associated with women. Marcel arrives at the oasis in order to work; Janine, with no children or any meaningful activity in her life, follows him, and has nothing to satisfy except her idle curiosity. She embarks on an accidental voyage of discovery, for she is in the desert not by design and with no purpose except sightseeing.
Sexual Tourism Alfred Noyer-Weidner has underlined the symbolic significance of physical appearance in this collection, a “coded technique” that demonstrates the degree of control Camus imposes. He suggests that the dénouement of all the stories is already suggested by the first physical descriptions of their characters.10 In “La Femme adultére”, the combination of this title, her name, and her physical appearance work to define and fix her. Her own name seems to her like a comment on her 8
“The Adulterous Woman and the Starry Sky”, in Judith Suther (ed.), Essays on Camus’ “Exile and the Kingdom” (Mississipi: University of Mississipi, 1980), 129. 9 Les Français d’Algérie, 175. 10 “Albert Camus in his Short Story Phase”, in Suther, 62-63.
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“tall and sturdy” body (TRN, 1560), making her feel ridiculous, for it defines a woman other than she. The term “adulterous woman” also defines a woman other than she, except perhaps in her dreams. Ultimately, of course, her only adultery will be with herself and an onanistic yearning for what she can never have and never be. This “metaphysical” adultery is likewise a comment on her physical body, for how can a romantic heroine be reconciled with a woman whose ankles swell, and who cannot bend without gasping for breath (TRN, 1560)? Already, on the bus, marriage is opposed to the “free” life she had abandoned twenty-five years earlier (TRN, 1560). Whatever her regrets, however, there is no indication that the choice of marriage she made then, and the reasons for it (fear of being alone, of growing old alone and unloved), would change were it to face her again. As her later assurance to the hotel concierge reveals (TRN, 1573), she always intended to return to Marcel. We already know the probable nature of Janine’s dissatisfactions, her desires, age and physical state, before she notices a soldier on the bus who is looking at her: Il l’examinait de ses yeux clairs, avec une sorte de maussaderie, fixement. Elle rougit tout d’un coup et revint vers son mari qui regardait fixement devant lui (...). Elle s’emmitoufla dans son manteau. Mais elle revoyait encore le soldat français, long et mince (…) un mélange de sable et d’os. (TRN, 1561) His grey eyes were examining her with a sort of glum disapproval, in a fixed stare. She suddenly blushed and turned back to her husband, who was still looking straight ahead (…). She snuggled down in her coat. But she could still see the French soldier, long and thin (…) a mixture of sand and bone. (EK, 11)
This mature woman behaves like a blushing young girl, her reaction once more ill-suited to the reality of who she is. The reason for her blushes is soon made clear: Pourtant, elle n’était pas si grosse, grande et pleine plutôt, charnelle, et encore désirable – elle le sentait bien sous le regard des hommes – avec son visage un peu enfantin, ses yeux frais et clairs, contrastant avec ce grand corps qu’elle savait tiède et reposant. (TRN, 1561) Yet she wasn’t so fat – tall and well-rounded rather, plump and still desirable, as she was well aware when under the gaze of men, with her rather child-like face, her bright, naïve eyes contrasting with this big body she knew to be warm and inviting. (EK, 11-12: translation amended)
This illustration of “the gaze of men” could not be more at odds with her own belief; not only does her husband repeatedly fail to notice her, but nothing in the soldier’s behaviour suggests he finds her desirable.
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Moreover, her assertion of her own attractiveness is comical, prefaced as it is by the consolatory statement that she is not so fat! Such concerns are entirely in her head – unless the soldier’s subsequent offer of a cachou might be taken as some form of declaration (or the only one Janine is likely to get). On their arrival in the town, Janine is disappointed when, instead of the salutation she expects, the soldier passes her by without even looking at her (TRN, 1564). Brian Fitch has pointed out that in this unique text where a woman is the central character, she is also the only character whose inner experience is directly shared by the reader; she is more accessible than any of Camus’s male protagonists.11 It is precisely because of this accessibility that Janine is rendered ridiculous. From the outside, events on the bus have no significance, while the soldier’s later failure to acknowledge her is equally insignificant. Only because we know her thoughts do such incidents derive their importance, which reflects directly on Janine and her desires. Had the narrator indicated that she were out of place in this environment (that indeed she takes up altogether too much space) this would be an overtly negative and judgemental presentation. Instead, through the style indirect libre, just as she herself draws attention to the incongruity of her own name, so she herself is the source of statements that are neutrally related by a narrative voice that has no need for judgement: “she did not know where to put her bag, where to put herself” (TRN, 1564). Because events are seen entirely through her eyes, the story’s realism is directed at and against her, underlining the disparity between her desires and reality. She had dreamed of palm trees and soft sand; the reality is a biting wind, stone everywhere, and dust (TRN, 1562). The major contrast in her mind is between precisely this harsh reality and her previous expectations, so that “nothing had happened as she expected” (TRN, 1561) becomes a refrain throughout the text. The dream of love and marriage, of her own desirability, or of the desert oasis (tourist’s paradise), nothing resembled her expectations (TRN, 1565). What exactly she had expected remains undefined, except through reference to her disappointments, which centre around her marriage and a husband whose “true passion” she believes to be money and business. Her present hopes appear to revolve around sexual desire and a certain “free11 ‘“La Femme adultère’: a Microcosm of Camus’s Solipsistic Universe”, in Albert Camus’ “L’Exil et le royaume”: The Third Decade, Anthony Rizzuto (ed.) (Toronto: Paratexte, 1989), 118.
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dom” which is the antithesis of marriage. This is encapsulated in the romantic and phallic dream of “a sea of erect and flexible palm trees rippling in the storm” which contrasts starkly with this “heavy” woman and her “thick” legs (TRN, 1565). The exotic sexual adventure symbolized by these trees in La Chute is not on offer to her. In reality, when she actually catches sight of them the bitingly cold wind makes her shiver, and she turns back to Marcel, whereupon a related dream is immediately dashed by the “jackal-soldier’s” failure to notice her (TRN, 1564). Her lot and her fantasy are ironically figured on the wall of the dining room with its painted camels and palm trees against a garishly pink and violet background (TRN, 1565). Her dreams concern that young girl she can no longer be, and the contrast could not be greater here between Janine and the speaker of “Retour à Tipasa”, for he acknowledges the impossibility of such a return. While she dreams of what she has ceased to be (and the text implies that she never was in fact this young girl of her imagination, for the reasons for her decision to marry twenty-five years before provide no contrast with the timid woman of the present), the speaker in Tipasa “re-finds” what he already is. What he discovers is his own legacy, bequeathed years before. Janine – as is the wont of Camusian woman – seeks what she never was, and never can possess. In this society devoid of women, Janine might reasonably have imagined herself the subject of interest: on the contrary, she is simply out of place, in the way. She is not even the object of spectacle when, outside the hotel, with no female face in sight, she feels that she has never seen so many men. Not one looks at her, and even those who turn towards her seem not to see her: Ils tournaient ce visage vers l’étrangère, ils ne la voyaient pas et puis, légers et silencieux, ils passaient autour d’elle dont les chevilles gonflaient. Et son malaise, son besoin de départ augmentaient. (TRN, 1568) They turned that face towards the foreign woman, they didn’t see her, and then, light and silent, they walked around her as she stood there with swelling ankles. And her discomfort, her need to leave, increased. (EK, 21)
The realistic presentation of this woman does not extend so far as to make her the object of a traditional and universally remarked sexual harassment. Yet the reference to her swollen ankles juxtaposes a curious “realistic” dimension. Roger Quilliot rightly stresses the place of the body in this work, which roots the characters in the real, protecting them from abstraction (TRN, 2040). Yet, as with the reference to the pork and wine she had consumed, which “lui donnaient aussi de
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l’embarras” (TRN, 1566) (“also bothered her”), the realistic physical details of this female body find no counterpart elsewhere in Camus’s works. As Brian Fitch has remarked, her experience of her body is distinctly atypical; unlike Meursault, Rieux or Tarrou, she is not at ease in her own body.12 Viewed in this light, such physical details, when combined with insight into her thoughts, clearly indicate Janine’s role and function in this story. Immediately before this incident, she has had an equally humiliating encounter with a tall Arab, before whose imperious stride the couple must hastily retreat. This man, who behaves as though they are invisible and makes no attempt to avoid them, is not unlike the French “soldat-chacal”; only his turban distinguishes him from the French officers she had admired in the past (TRN, 1568). As a French couple and representatives of colonialism they are both humiliated (“they think they can do anything now”, Marcel grumbles). But she is further annulled as a woman and her own erotic fantasies rendered ridiculous. In the face of this obliteration of herself as a sexual being, she thinks of flight and the security of her home. Thus, the idea of visiting the fort is a further evasion from the reality of sexual indifference. There, from the height of the tower and above this level of human relationships, she can leave the reality of the face-to-face encounter behind in favour of a further fantasy as she looks far out over this deserted “kingdom of stone”. The sight of an encampment some distance away allows fantasy to fasten on a new and more suitable object in the form of the unseen nomads whom she does not risk meeting. Precisely because she has not seen them, she can think only of them, and their life-style, so different from her own, acquires a heroic aura: Elle n’avait pas même vu les hommes qui vivaient là, rien ne bougeait entre les tentes noires et, pourtant, elle ne pouvait penser qu’à eux, dont elle avait à peine connu l’existence jusqu’à ce jour. Sans maisons, coupés du monde, ils étaient une poignée à errer sur le vaste territoire qu’elle découvrait du regard. (TRN, 1570) She hadn’t even seen the men who lived there, nothing was stirring among the black tents and yet she could only think of them, whose existence she had barely known about until this day. Homeless, cut off from the world, they were a handful wandering over the vast territory that her look uncovered. (EK, 23: translation amended)
Without knowledge, Janine is free once more to romanticize. This is her glimpse of the kingdom, which simultaneously entails the recogni12
“Camus’s Solipsistic Universe”, 119.
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tion that it would never again be hers except in that fleeting moment of spectatorship. The “authenticity” of which I spoke in chapter 4 returns here with her acknowledgement that she is “too fat, too white” (TRN, 1571), unlike the golden Apollos on the Algiers beaches in “L’Été à Alger” (E, 69). Frankly, Janine is too fat and old, too “menopausal”, too female. A child, the young girl, the dry man, the furtive jackal were the only creatures who could silently walk that earth (TRN, 1571). But here that young girl is replaced by the fearful European housewife with her swollen ankles, her sexual frustrations and her clichéd desires. The relationship of Janine and Marcel lacks any real communication or understanding, as their conversations demonstrate. Even their love-making has produced no children, and no role for her except as a mother-substitute, and the silent witness of Marcel’s humiliations. Janine takes a secret pleasure in such occasions (TRN, 1560), something for which she has many opportunities. Janine’s saving grace is her silence. She sees, nevertheless, how he demeans himself when trying to sell his wares, becoming like a woman (TRN, 1567), as if this is what the reversal of power relations entails; or his humiliation in the face of the Arab in the square. She is capable of independent judgement. Amidst Marcel’s running commentary on the deficiencies of the Arab way of life, he asks the old, perilous question and receives the now standard response: “‘What are you thinking about?’ Janine was thinking of nothing” (TRN, 1565). Although in this instance no insight is given into her thoughts and the narrator withdraws into ironic speculation, the element of threat surrounding previous occurrences of this question is deflected here onto a man who might be deemed deserving of the hidden meaning in the word “nothing”. The reader has a privileged access into the woman’s mind that is denied to her husband, while overall control is exercised by the narrator. Throughout the story, Janine’s thoughts have concerned her dissatisfactions with her marriage and husband, culminating in the recognition that they had never loved and should have separated long ago (TRN, 1572). In this context, the narrator has asserted a control unparalleled in previous instances of this interchange, where narratorial claims to knowledge were unconvincing. Not only are Janine’s unvoiced thoughts known to him above all, but their negative content is deflected onto a kind of man for whom Camus had always expressed contempt; there is no possibility there of confusing character with author. Furthermore, the woman who finally thinks could not possibly be
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mistaken for the mother figure or for Mélusine (who most certainly have no such interior life). Rather, she is the kind of woman who would marry a man like Marcel, and, as I have noted, her present incarnation derives from the Carnets. In this case, a persistent doubt concerning this interior life of women is addressed in a context far removed from its source. Within this same “other” framework the question of heterosexuality is also for the first time addressed from the point of view of a female character. Again, this is far removed from that outlined in Noces or “Amour de vivre”; it belongs (fittingly, for a European couple) to the night and darkness, where they made love in the dark without seeing one another (TRN, 1572). Pleasure plays no part in this exchange, which reflects rather their mutual vulnerability, clinging to one another in the face of a threatening post-war world, and in fear of mortality. Janine needs only to be needed, while her diagnosis of male sexuality recalls La Chute, where women do not condemn, rather they try to disarm men. For this reason woman is man’s “port”, his “harbour” (TRN, 1526). La Chute (chronologically later than this story) develops this aspect of bourgeois marriage as a form of modern debauchery and death, briefly alluded to here. But Janine herself is already indirectly associated with death, as is symbolized by her attraction to the French soldier who resembles a jackal. In an earlier version this pagan symbolism had been more overt, and the “jackal” named when “Anubis smiled at her” (TRN, 2041). In Egyptian myth, Anubis was the conductor of souls into the underworld. His Greek counterpart is Cerberus, yet the choice of this other pagan deity here suggests a link with the other paganism of La Chute which closely associates barbarism, female sexuality and death. The reference to this gatekeeper of the underworld presages Janine’s night-time experience, and influences the way in which it is read. I have pointed out that whereas “Retour à Tipasa” is associated with the light and the day, the events of this story take place in the evening and the night. Janine may wonder if there is a different kind of love from that of the darkness, one which might cry out in the light of day (TRN, 1572), but she will never know the answer. Her night-time return to the fort does not signify her final possession of “the kingdom”, as most critics seem to believe, but the only kind of adultery this woman is likely to achieve – with her fantasy of the anonymous nomad. It is, moreover, far safer than the real thing. Events are under her control,
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and she returns with the same precaution as when she had left (TRN, 1575). Roger Quilliot notes that over four successive versions Camus emphasizes the sexual nature of this final experience (TRN, 2040). Although English Showalter is surely correct when he says that little attention has been paid to the sexual nature of this experience,13 a focus on a specifically female sexuality would entail a recognition of difference that militates against Janine’s assimilation into previous writings. Edouard Morot-Sir has insisted on a clearly gender-specific representation of Janine’s experience. In his opinion, when Camus refers to the “obscure centre” of Janine’s being, this is no metaphysical allusion, but rather a specific reference to her genitals, which become “liquid” before “shattering in a primitive language of jouissance”.14 The example of La Mort heureuse supports Morot-Sir’s argument that the passive form of transcendence undergone here is far removed from the active, ascetic and essentially chaste experience of male protagonists.
An Orientalist discourse I noted earlier that gender itself is rarely a tool of analysis in orthodox readings of this story. When the fact that Janine is a woman is highlighted, this move often permits interpretations that pile one stereotype onto another, transforming this female character into “Woman”, “the Feminine”, “the Maternal” (inevitably), and all the familiar permutations that have dogged and stultified Camus studies for so many years. They are not my concern. The positive exclusion of women in, for example, Camus’s depiction of Absurd man, is usually overlooked in favour of an implicit adoption of women as “honorary brothers”; a habit that is invisible only because it is habitual. Conversely, one might smile at Grenier’s claim that “we” have all been this adulterous woman, but this is precisely because such apparent gender neutrality, visible only when reversed, is inapplicable in either case. If this were to be taken seriously, however, the problem lies in knowing how to interpret what are in practice such gendered categories and concepts as Absurd man, the Rebel, or even “the tourist”. In a discussion far removed from Camus, Spivak speaks of the unpredictable consequences if, rather than being included as honorary brothers, women as women 13
Exiles and Strangers, 25. “La double transcendance du féminin et du masculin dans ‘La femme adultère’ d’Albert Camus”, Dalhousie French Studies 19 (1990) (51-60), 55. 14
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were inserted into an argument.15 This is my concern: not to isolate women from the framework in which they are placed, but to consider them as women in that framework. This entails seeing what is there, differently; and taking account of that difference. The treatment of women in Camus’s work sheds light not on a purely emotional or personal domain, but has political and social repercussions also. Predictably, analyses that focus on the colonial dimension in Camus’s work generally bypass the issue of gender. In such analyses, Janine the tourist becomes indeed an honorary male, or a gender-neutral “questing European”, because what is important about her is not her sex but the position she is deemed to occupy in the colonial hierarchy. Ironically, when Peter Dunwoodie speaks of the significance of the Sahara in the Western imagination, he adapts a line from “La Femme adultère” to illustrate the supposed feeling of predestined possession felt by Western travellers when confronted by this “vast kingdom which had been promised to (them)” (E, 1570).16 But a focus on her as a woman risks the inconvenient recognition that the woman’s place as the subject of history “is different from man’s all along the race-class spectrum”.17 Mary Louise Pratt has drawn attention to strong similarities between this story and Gide’s L’Immoraliste, and on this basis she places “La Femme adultère” into an Orientalist literary tradition.18 Pratt argues that it fits an Orientalist model for which the template in European literature is Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. She refers to this model as the “Voyage South”, where a European is sent to the underworld of Empire to be tested, and there discovers its forbidden fruits – sexuality, crime, irrationality, a lost childhood. She further points out the opposition between a “cerebral” North and a “sensual” South, where an ideological map is superimposed on the geographical one. Her examination of this genre focuses on parallels between “La Femme adultère” and L’Immoraliste, where the initial journey has the same symbolic connotations: “the South resists the intruder and challenges their physical and spiritual complacency”. The experience undergone produces the ritual death or loss of the Self, leading to a
15
Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 32, 38. Writing French Algeria, 41. 17 Death of a Discipline, 130. 18 “Mapping Ideology: Gide, Camus and Algeria”, College Literature, 8 (2) (1981), 158-74. 16
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resurrection or rebirth.19 Pratt argues, however, that Camus’s more realistic portrayal amounts to “a systematic denial” of the colonialist paradise created by Gide. Paradoxically, Camus simultaneously preserves this notion by relocating it further South – an apparent contradiction that she explains by the complexities of the writer’s position, in that he is of European descent but born on Algerian soil; he wanted a French, yet non-colonial, Algeria. Hence, the kingdom is re-located in the land of the Bedouins, “simultaneously visible yet off limits (...) to his questing European”. For Pratt “a rejection of European colonialism and its stereotypes is conceived and expressed in terms which are European and colonialist in origin”.20 Following her, Jack Murray argues that the subject matter itself belongs so firmly within the Orientalist paradigm that Camus is unable to escape it, whatever his intentions may have been. Camus’s own allegiances and upbringing inevitably condemn him to such Eurocentric models, with their inevitable ideological baggage.21 Murray locates the body as the source of this contradiction, noting that the typical colonialist mode of description “appropriates the site and its distinctive qualities by an insistence on bodily enjoyment and absorption of it”, a feature that can likewise be found in Camus’s earlier lyrical essays.22 He argues that in Camus’s story disquiet is reflected in the representation of the body, which is no longer the vehicle of appropriation but an impediment, and thus the locus where the ideological limitations of such models are chiefly expressed is the body itself. As he points out, Janine is never able to escape her awareness of the hostility of those around her and “settle comfortably into the tourist role”. For Murray, once the text moves from the realism with which this confrontation is presented, to her experience on the fort, the story “stalls ideologically”. The shift away from the colonized setting is underscored by the excision of any potential partner at all.23 It is very surprising that in their discussions of a type of literary discourse whose central focus is sexual discovery, neither Murray nor Pratt addresses the major shift from male to female protagonist that has taken place. Hence, the significance of such a shift remains unex19
Ibid., 159, 166. Ibid., 167, 169, 171. 21 “Colonial Bodies: Gide’s L’Immoraliste as an Intertext of Camus’s ‘La Femme adultère’”, Modern Language Quarterly 52 (March 1991), 71-85 (79, 85). 22 Ibid., 75. 23 Ibid., 80-82. 20
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plored – in spite of Pratt’s initial comment that the typical protagonist is almost always male.24 Moreover, in her later book on travel writing, gender is a necessary component of the power relations she identifies, as is the role of sight, where the male traveller exerts a visual command over the landscape, free to look without being looked at; thus, a relation of mastery is established between the seer and the seen in what she calls the “monarch of all I survey scene”.25 This description recalls Janine’s own momentary appropriation of the kingdom following her “discovery” of the unseen nomads, who wandered “sur le vaste territoire qu’elle découvrait du regard” (TRN, 1570) (“over the vast territory that her gaze uncovered”). But this brief investment of power in the one who looks is almost immediately followed here by the recognition of her own exclusion, that this illusory kingdom would never be hers again. Crucially, the reasons for this exclusion revolve around her sex, not her position in the colonial power structure: she is a woman, judged by her age and attractiveness. The “tourist role” is no empty category, blind to the gender of its occupant. As Pratt points out in Imperial Eyes, this is a gendered practice. Here, two competing sets of power relations collide; those of colonialism and those of gender. Just as the negative connotations of the term “tourist” derive from its association with a passive (and more inherently “female”) form of consumption, dependent on the prior occupation of the military, and distinguished from the supposedly active self-reliance of the solitary traveller, so Janine’s occupation of the imperial role is (to recall Nora’s words) “parasitical” on the status of her husband; she does not authentically occupy it in her own right.26 Whether on the levels of colonialism or of gender, the power invested in the predominantly male gaze is inaccessible to her. Whereas the “voyage South” is traditionally associated with the pleasures of voyeurism and the exercise of power through a touristic gaze that signifies possession, here, in a reversal of the usual paradigm (but in conformity with a paradigm of gender), Janine’s desires concern being seen and affirmed as a desirable woman. But on each level (as an inauthentic representative of imperial power, or as a non-existent “jeune fille”) in this masculine public space “le regard des hommes” (“the 24
“Mapping Ideology”, 158. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992), 201-204. 26 See Alf Heggoy, “Cultural disrespect: European and Algerian views on women in colonial and independent Algeria”, Muslim World (October 1972), 321-335. 25
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male gaze”) is denied to her as a subject. On the contrary, she is the object of an unseeing gaze, as her experience outside the hotel demonstrates. Even her husband fails to “see” her – looking out of the window, straight ahead, preoccupied with the luggage, he only twice actually looks at her (TRN, 1568, 1575), each time without comprehension; and even their lovemaking takes place in the dark, “sans se voir” (TRN, 1572) (“without seeing one another”). Janine certainly sees without being seen, but the power relation traditionally identified in the one who looks is here overturned; except for that one occasion at the fort, her gaze is not one of entitlement or possession. Conversely, as a woman her desire to be seen is rejected; she is simply not worth looking at. Certainly, this withdrawal of recognition is applied to Marcel as well, when they encounter the tall Arab crossing the square who neither acknowledges their presence nor attempts to avoid them, so that they are the ones who must scurry out of the way (TRN, 1568). But Marcel suffers only a momentary humiliation. His selfesteem depends on commercial success, individual achievement. I suggest that the apparent paradox identified by Pratt and Murray in “La Femme adultère” arises not out of unconscious restrictions on the part of the author, or his inability to escape Eurocentric models, but from the deliberate choice of protagonist to fulfill the role of “questing European”. The insertion of a woman as a woman changes the shape of the argument. The moment on the fort is not, of course, the culmination of Janine’s quest, for the following day the couple will be travelling still further South, after the conclusion of Marcel’s business at the oasis (TRN, 1565). There, Janine will once more be forced to confront the reality of the Arab population. This same phrase is repeated in the context of her fantasies, when Janine feels that something is awaiting her further South: Là-bas, plus au sud encore, à cet endroit où le ciel et la terre se rejoignaient dans une ligne pure, là-bas, lui semblait-il soudain, quelque chose l’attendait qu’elle avait ignoré jusqu’à ce jour et qui pourtant n’avait cessé de lui manquer. (TRN, 1575) Over yonder, still further south, at that point where sky and earth met in a pure line – over yonder it suddenly seemed there was awaiting her something of which she had never been aware until now, though it had always been lacking. (EK, 22)
These two references work in conjunction to point up the contrast between reality and fantasy. The disappointments of her journey thus far
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threaten to repeat themselves the further South she goes, where again her fantasy will clash with reality. Murray is only partly right when he distinguishes the same pattern in the earlier lyrical essays, which reproduces the cerebral North / sensual South division, and where the response to the North African setting privileges the body over the mind,27 for he overlooks the emphasis there on the mind and lucidity. Furthermore, as I have remarked, the indigenous population there is entirely abstracted in favour of an implied sexual partner who is French Algerian (neither European nor Algerian). The ideological / geographical map of which Pratt speaks acquires a far higher degree of complexity in the case of this Algerian-born writer. Murray, Brian Fitch, and John Erickson all stress the significance of the lack of sexual partner in Janine’s act of adultery. For Fitch this is more evidence of the general solipsism in Camus’s works, while for Murray this ideological model is so well-established that the place itself becomes the sexual partner rather than one of the inhabitants.28 On the contrary, what should be stressed in both cases is that here for the first time the inhabitants are actually associated with this communion. Janine’s vague romantic yearnings centre around the nonetheless concrete figure of the nomad, and it is precisely his absence that renders her final, orgasmic experience an ironic one – an irony underlined by the bathos of her return and the final judgement that “it’s nothing” (TRN, 1575). Here, the fantasies of woman are more firmly tied to carnal sexuality than those of the youthful speaker in the lyrical essays, where sexual union is of a mystical nature and with an unpeopled landscape. Their futility is underlined by the fact that a concrete sexual partner is simultaneously signalled and denied to her. The nomads remain romantic figures, untouched by the realism of “La Femme adultère”. While this housewife’s identification with them is comical, the “kingdom” over which they reign is preserved in the story by its location outside the town, on the shifting horizon (always further South, beyond her reach). Camus’s own encounter, on the other hand, seems to have been empowering – not only, as I noted earlier, in Laghouat, but also when he records his feelings about BoghariDjelfa, the route to Laghouat, with its extreme and “royal” poverty:
27 28
“Colonial Bodies”, 84. “Colonial Bodies”, 83.
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Les tentes noires des nomades. Sur la terre sèche et dure – et moi – qui ne possède rien et ne pourrai jamais rien posséder, semblable à eux. (C3, 52) The black tents of the nomads. On the dry and hard earth – and I – who possess nothing and could never possess anything, am like them.
A man such as Camus could not covet Barbès furniture. I suggest that the realism in this story is less a “systematic denial” of the colonialist paradise than a systematic denial of the middle-aged housewife’s right to entry. The thematic elements at work in the text that disturb the body’s appropriation of the locale relate to the fact that this particular body is “menopausal”, with swelling ankles – a female body, too fat and too old. The relocation of this kingdom further South is in fact its preservation from those such as her and its retention as a purer, womanless space. Although “La Femme adultère” is the first text to confront the fact of the colonized population, this “other” South continues to be protected from that reality. It is not the speaker of Noces or the writer of the above entry in the Carnets whose illusions are challenged, but those of the fat white woman whom nobody loves,29 and the unsympathetic businessman, imported from the Carnets or the shadowy margins of La Peste. They are the ones who act out the alienation of the settler from the place of his birth. Via this intermediary Camus returns to “La Maison mauresque”.
“La Maison mauresque” Camus frequently stressed repetition and return in his work, which he saw as following a spiralling course, constantly returning along “old pathways” in order to advance (E, 1614-15). “La Femme adultère” is not an extension of “Retour à Tipasa”, nor of the lyrical essays of Camus’s youth. It returns to a different source, and over a similar temporal distance of twenty years. The Casbah of “La Maison mauresque” is relocated far beyond the cosmopolitan town of Algiers – as if Camus were afraid of finally confronting the unseen Arabs of that essay.30 But the substitution of a female character for the youthful male tourist in that earlier work provides a further protection from that possibility, for the underlying hostility intimated there is here deflected onto her. 29
I am, of course, here citing the poem by Frances Cornford, “To a Fat Lady Seen from the Train”. 30 I have here adapted Sarocchi’s remarks about L’Étranger in Le Dernier Camus ou le premier homme, 151.
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The hostility and resistance felt there remain material for a “voyage into the Self” which is equally solipsistic and ultimately concerned not with others but with the Self – except that Camus is himself removed from this drama. As in “La Maison mauresque”, this “journey” is associated with the desire for discovery of the alien and unknown Arab world, yet culminates in an invocation of what lies beyond this town in the landscape of Algeria itself. If, as Camus claimed, his work takes the form of a spiral, then the wish for evasion, so central to those youthful writings and voiced again here, has provoked a detour of twenty years before returning to this source, for Arabs are marginal to Camus’s fictional works, either eliminated or confined to unsavoury roles.31 Although “La Maison mauresque” may be seen as a precursor of “La Femme adultère”, the significance of this “story of exile”32 lies in the major differences between these two works. Whereas in the earlier work the Arab inhabitants entered the writing metonymically, here the town is peopled and the central character is forced to confront their presence and her own lack of impact upon this society. Janine is no adventurer, no conqueror. Yet she is anxious to decipher the desert and its peoples: Tout autour, un troupeau de dromadaires immobiles, minuscules à cette distance, formaient sur le sol gris les signes sombres d’une étrange écriture dont il fallait déchiffrer le sens. (TRN, 1569) All around them a group of motionless dromedaries, tiny at that distance, formed against the grey ground the black signs of a strange handwriting, the meaning of which had to be deciphered. (EK, 22)
But her clear inability to do so only underlines her alien status. Brian Fitch has regarded the above reference as a metaphor for the act of literary creation, and details numerous examples of this trope.33 But its first occurrence is in “Mélusine” and “La Maison mauresque”, where it seems to represent the illegibility of woman and of Arab civilization respectively. In “La Maison mauresque” the meaning of a “natural” mystic writing is apparently known to the speaker, where “in a great, disorderly handwriting the bats were beginning to trace their mechanical despair on the sky” (PC, 214). Such ease of interpretation does not 31
I am here paraphrasing the words of Sarocchi, Le Dernier Camus ou le premier homme, 149-50. 32 It is perhaps worth pointing out that, according to Camus at least, the sole theme of all the stories in this collection is exile (TRN, 2039). 33 “Camus’ Desert Hieroglyphics”, Proceedings of the Comparative Literature Symposium, 8 (1976), 117-31.
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extend to the “alien” civilization whose Arabic tombstone inscriptions are reassuring precisely because they are incomprehensible to the young tourist (PC, 212). Janine alone is faced with the possibility that the inscription of this other people and culture contains a possibly intelligible meaning. The text of “La Femme adultère” clearly indicates that she does not belong; if she could do so, is this what she would read? More threateningly, was this the same hidden message of the tombstones and the Arab town, long before? With the onset of war, moreover, this message is no longer unintelligible. In L’Exil et le Royaume the writer attempts to decipher the indigenous culture of his native land. Yet the possible danger of such an undertaking is diverted here onto the female body of the “adulterous” woman. Although the Arabs of “La Femme adultère” remain part of an anonymous group, nevertheless they are depicted as belonging within their own social structure, going about their own business and masters of their own social milieu and natural environment. Some access is given into their public life, but it should be cause for no surprise, given the situation and point of view, that we learn nothing more. Arabs are here for the first time at the centre of their own social universe, rather than peripheral to that of the European, and their dignity contrasts markedly with those of the town (TRN, 1566). In this situation, upon this territory, the Europeans acquire inferior status, becoming the supplicants – itinerant traders who must please their prospective customers. Marcel becomes like a wheedling woman, while previous rules of behaviour are overturned in the near-collision with the Arab on the empty square: “they all had that air of pride, but this one was really exaggerating” (TRN, 1568). Thus the hostilities repressed in the town (where Arabs are outnumbered) here find expression.
Assimilation This oasis is the last outpost of empire and its inhabitants remain colonized, as the presence of the soldier indicates. The dividing lines are blurred, however, in two respects, for it is the point of intersection between the Arabs of the town and the nomads beyond; between freedom and colonization. In this border region men become indistinguishable as geography once more creates a people. Like the native inhabitants, the French soldier (the “soldat-chacal”) is: long et mince, si mince, avec sa vareuse ajustée, qu’il paraissait bâti dans une matière sèche et friable, un mélange de sable et d’os. C’est à ce moment que (Janine) vit les mains maigres et le visage brûlé des Arabes. (TRN, 1561)
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Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus tall and thin, so thin in his fitted tunic that he seemed constructed of a dry, friable material, a mixture of sand and bone. Then it was that she saw the thin hands and burned faces of the Arabs. (EK, 11)
Similarly, the Arab crossing the square is barely distinguishable from the type of French soldier Janine had often admired. On this frontier where racial and social distinctions merge an organic form of assimilation is taking place. All who live on this “ideological map” combine to underline the extent to which the European couple are out of place. Yet, despite the unsympathetic portrait of Marcel he, too, has shown signs of adaptation. He is engaged in a form of interaction with the local community, and feels some identification with their lot. His insensitivity to his environment is often remarked on, and indeed he is both insensitive and racist. Yet if he fails to be touched by the exoticism of the Arab shop that is because to him it is as commonplace as it is for its Arab occupants themselves. Despite the negative portrait of Marcel, he is no tourist and his presence demonstrates the interdependence between colonizer and colonized who must each enter into the Other’s world and make it, to some extent, their own; hence his grudging identification with them, as when he admits that life is hard for everyone (TRN, 1567). Much more than Marcel, Janine is the one who is out of place in this world of male activity. As with the colonial process itself, such a form of assimilation is “an affair between men” which obviates the need for physical congress, biological union. Men assimilate with one another by virtue of shared lives, hardships, activities. The covert sexual desire touched upon in “La Maison mauresque” is confronted again in “La Femme adultère”, but with a reversal of the personae. There are no Arab women, while the European woman is the one attracted to the men of this desert landscape, who fail to notice her, neither inviting nor reciprocating her attention. Her adultery is entirely in her head, yet its symbolic significance extends beyond a purely solitary and metaphysical experience. Martha Lynch equates the institution of marriage with colonialism, in the light of the Algerian war of independence. She suggests that the question raised in this story concerns the possible future of Algeria: thus, just as Janine realizes that she must divorce, so the colony must break all ties with France. For Lynch, Janine symbolizes the nation, and hence her development parallels the possibilities open to Algeria
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itself.34 Although this interesting argument is only sustainable in isolation from the rest of Camus’s works, nevertheless her reference to the traditional symbolism of woman to represent the nation is pertinent to my analysis. Pierre Nora’s earlier comments are not, as they might appear, a simple dismissal of the role of women in colonialism, for this particular stereotype is likewise inherently unstable (as the statistics concerning mixed marriages importantly demonstrate).35 For both communities woman is charged with responsibility not only for the reproduction of the race but for the maintenance and transmission of its cultural specificity. Nora more charitably describes the Muslim woman as the best “sentry” of the Muslim world36 but in both cases the implications are the same. Leaving aside its truth value, Nora’s vehement assertion that it is the European woman who forbids contact between the two societies suggests that it has the weight of ideology. The possibility that the European woman, on her own account, may desire a sexual contact remains beyond articulation. Yet this is the possibility raised in “La Femme adultère”, as has often been noted. For Erickson “the act of adultery is no more nor less than her congress in her thoughts with the exterior world of the Arabs and her own assimilation to that world”.37 For Murray “betrayal of the spouse is made to appear at the same time as an institutional defection in which the whole (colonialist) culture the renegade represents is cast aside”.38 Marthe LaVallee-Williams suggests that “Camus might have blanched a bit at this social and cultural miscegenation” – but the “fleeting union” she perceives is precisely what does not take place.39 The prospect of such “adultery” may be raised, but it is simultaneously ridiculed and dismissed, rendered beyond the bounds of the possible. Perhaps for the same reasons Janine is introduced as a childless woman, sterile; questions of racial purity do not apply. Hence Camus
34
“L’Image du colon dans ‘La Femme adultère’”, A C 14 (1991), 151, 139. Although few in number, many more European women entered into mixed marriages than men (see chapter 2). Statistics certainly do not support the view that European women were more racist; they might, however, underline a source of insecurity with regard to the stereotype of woman as guardian of the race and culture. 36 Les Français d’Algérie, 175. 37 “A Discourse of Exteriority”, 82. 38 “Colonial Bodies”, 83. 39 “Arabs in ‘La Femme adultère’: from Faceless Other to Agent”, 10. 35
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once more returns “par d’anciens chemins” to another old source of vulnerability.
A Reflection on Laghouat I have noted the different connotations of the terms “tourist” and “traveller”. Whereas the tourist is regarded as engaging in a form of passive consumption, moving from one safe place to another and enjoying the spectacle of ready-made and suitably adapted entertainment (such as the fantasia, originally a type of war dance), the traveller is of a different species entirely. Usually male, and usually solitary, this figure seems to stand behind Camus’s own visit to the oasis towns, which may explain his insistence on the difference between himself and the European couple in his early preface to the story. Although coincidentally, Camus was following in the footsteps of Eugène Fromentin, one of the earliest travellers to explore this still perilous region during the 1840s.40 Fromentin returned to Laghouat in June, 1853 – six months after the bloody siege that ended in the town’s fall to the French. There, he finds a charnel house still polluted by the “fetid odour” of hastily buried, decomposing bodies, and is warned to beware of walking over bones.41 During his stay in the half-deserted town, Fromentin is told about the recent carnage, and imagines walking through blood with hundreds of bodies blocking the pathways.42 On leaving Laghouat a few weeks later, he comes across the bodies of three women, dragged from their make-shift graves by dogs, and a hand hanging by a shred from one of the corpses. He takes the hand and hangs it on his saddle as a memento of the “sad ossuary of ElAghouat”.43 Those familiar with Camus’s near-contemporary, the Algerian writer, Assia Djebar, will know that historical accounts occasionally fall into other hands, and other ways of seeing. Djebar retrieves the bones of her female predecessors, while noting the passage of Eugène Fromentin: (A)u sortir de l’oasis que le massacre, six mois après, empuantit, Fromentin ramasse, dans la poussière, une main coupée d’Algérienne anonyme. Il la jette ensuite sur son chemin. 40
He refers to Fromentin’s impressions of the region in 1953 (C3, 93). “Un été dans le Sahara”, in Oeuvres complètes, Guy Sagnes (ed.) (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), 77, 78. 42 Ibid., 134-35. 43 Ibid., 181. 41
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Plus tard, je me saisis de cette main vivante, main de la mutilation et du souvenir et je tente de lui faire porter le qalam.44 (A)s he is leaving the oasis which six months after the massacre is still filled with its stench, Fromentin picks up out of the dust the severed hand of an anonymous Algerian woman. He throws it down again in his path. Later, I seize on this living hand, hand of mutilation and of memory, and I attempt to bring it the qalam.45
The centenary of this siege was also marked by unrest in the area, and because of this Camus had been forced to delay his visit to the South by several days. A century later, such reminders of Laghouat’s bloody history remain external to the text. If, in “La Femme adultère”, Camus presents a certain variety of the homogeneous woman, it seems to me that he also repeats the final gesture of Fromentin and reburies the presence of women in colonialism.
Fetishism and the Footnoted Female The scene of fetishism is also the scene of the reactivation and repetition of the primal fantasy – the subject’s desire for a pure origin that is always threatened by its division, for the subject must be gendered to be engendered, to be spoken. The stereotype, then, as the primary point of subjectification in colonial discourse, for both colonizer and colonized, is the scene of a similar fantasy and defence – the desire for an originality which is again threatened by the differences of race, colour and culture.46
If Janine is out of place and in the way in the colonial setting, the presence of women on the colonial scene presents similar obstacles for theorizations of colonial intersubjectivity. Homi Bhabha’s insight into the ambivalence of colonial relations, and the consequent instability of the colonial stereotype have been of crucial significance. Yet, as numerous commentators have pointed out (Bhabha the first amongst them) his exclusive focus is on the relations between men; as he acknowledges in a footnote, “the body in this text is male”.47 From an initially keen awareness that the issue of sexual difference might have (profound) implications for his own analysis, Bhabha eventually dis44
L’Amour, la fantasia (Paris: Albin Michel, 1987), 255. A qalam is a writing instrument. 45 Fantasia: an Algerian Cavalcade, Dorothy S. Blair (tr.) (London: Quartet, 1985), 226. 46 Homi Bhabha, “The Other Question”, 27. 47 Ibid., 18. I owe the expression “footnoted female” to Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (London: Routledge, 1995), 183.
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avows the difference as this hitherto perennial footnote finally exits from his essay, “The Other Question”.48 This problem is of particular relevance precisely because Bhabha’s analysis of colonial discourse arises directly out of the Freudian account of sexual fetishism according to which the male child, at the supposedly traumatic sight of the mother’s apparently castrated genitals, may adopt a fetish object to substitute for the mother’s missing penis in order to ward off the fear that he himself might be similarly castrated. Bhabha argues that the colonial stereotype is analogous to this Freudian fetish: Fetishism is always a “play” or vacillation between the archaic affirmation of wholeness / similarity – in Freud’s terms: “All men have penises”; in ours “All men have the same skin / race / culture” – and the anxiety associated with lack and difference – again, for Freud “Some do not have penises”; for us “Some do not have the same skin / race / culture”.49
Whereas the recognition of sexual difference is indispensable to Freud’s account, in the above quotation the issue of gender is isolated and erased, as if the colonial subject were not primarily a gendered subject. Yet sexual difference is not the ingredient in a different recipe; it is omnipresent in this scenario also. This problematical presence is foregrounded when one considers that other “median” category likewise banished from Bhabha’s account – the settler, whose allegiances are torn, identifying at times with the colonized population against the metropolitan colonial power and at other times with that power against the colonized. I have noted the degree to which sexual difference (through the emphasis on virility and “being a man”) governs such encounters. Relations of power are articulated through perceptions of sexual difference in Camus’s work – as when Marcel, in his dealings with the shopkeepers, is perceived as being like a woman precisely because he is in a subordinate role. Again, although such encounters are rare, the feminization of Arab characters has frequently been noted (as in L’Étranger or “L’Hôte”), and although such instances are often interpreted as evidence of homosexual undercurrents, these factors should not be isolated from race and the gendering in nineteenth century racial theory which led to the stereo-
48 See Bart Moore-Gilbert, Post-Colonial Theory: Contexts, Practices, Politics (London: Verso, 1997), 140-151. 49 “The Other Question”, 27.
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typing of non-white races as female. Sexual and racial differences become interchangeable, the one frequently substituting for the other. In Camus’s work the fetish of virility might unite the men of all races in Algeria, setting them in opposition to the men of metropolitan France; yet confrontation with differences of skin / race / culture in the face-to-face encounter arouses further anxieties which are expressed in terms of sexual difference: “some men do not have the same skin / race / culture; they are (or, more worryingly, we are) therefore like women”. Insecurity arises from the uncertainty as to who exactly occupies this female role. In such instances the scenario is entirely between men, but a further complication arises with the presence of women – not those of the domesticated white variety, but the template of the species, the one who, in that trajectory further South, becomes increasingly who she really, originally is. The imaginary woman of Africa is not characterized by “lack”. This is the voracious matriarch of cannibalism, and if she threatens to castrate it is not because of what she lacks, but because of what she has. In “Le Renégat” race and gender combine, as do the original meaning of the term “fetish” and its Freudian reinterpretation. Numerous commentators have traced the etymology of this term, which was first applied to primitive cultures by Charles de Brosses in 1760, who distinguished between the idol as the representation of the god, and the fetish as its actual embodiment.50 Christopher Miller points out that the notion of idolatry was central to the Western understanding of Africa, which was associated with immanence and the flesh as opposed to the mind and transcendence: “Sexual abandon and idolatry are both functions of a perceived failure to transcend and dominate the lower regions”.51 In 1905 Freud, for whom the sexual fetish was analogous to “the fetishes in which savages believe that their gods are embodied”, reinterpreted the fetish as “a substitute for the woman’s (the
50 Du Culte des Dieux Fétiches, ou Parallèle de l’ancien Religion de l’Egypte avec la Religion actuelle de Nigrité (1760). 51 Blank Darkness: Africanist Discourse in French (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1985), 43. See also William Pietz, “The Problem of the Fetish, I”, Res 9 (Spring, 1985), 5-17; Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (Routledge: London, 1995), chapter 4.
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mother’s) penis”.52 Indeed, not until the late nineteenth century were the fetish and phallus equated.53
The Terror of the Absolute The question of sexual difference is central to “Le Renégat, ou un esprit confus”. Virility is alien to the protagonist of this story; on the contrary, his characteristics are those of the “womanish” slave. His confrontation with the barbarous South reveals and confirms this condition. The story concerns a French Catholic missionary who journeys to the desert city of Taghâsa, renowned for its barbaric cruelty, in order to convert the idolatrous savages to the one, true religion. Instead, he is himself converted and enslaved, his life henceforth dedicated to the service of the fetish, their god. Despite its complexity, this story is clearly a continuation of Camus’s attack on the worship of ideologies and totalitarianism: as Victor Brombert pointed out in 1960, “Le Renégat” is a parable of the modern Western intellectual, heir to a humanist tradition, who betrays his culture in a gesture which simultaneously reveals “the poison of ideological absolutes” and “the deep-rooted suicidal impulses of the intelligentsia”, in a masochistic submission to totalitarian systems which negate their own values.54 This point is well taken, as well as his comment that the terror of the absolute is one of Camus’s permanent themes. Whereas, at the time Brombert was writing, this was more readily applicable to the Cold War and Communist ideologies, more recently Camus’s arguments in L’Homme révolté have been applied to the rise of Islamism, and a new totalitarian ideology, by political commentators such as Paul Berman.55 Following Berman, the journalist Nick Cohen has argued that the traditional Left has abandoned its old anti-fascist principles, and is now in thrall to a “death cult” that it fails to recognise as such precisely because it does not fit the traditional parameters of anti-imperialist struggle.56
52 Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality and Other Works (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), 66, 352. 53 “The Problem of the Fetish, I”, 6. 54 “‘Le Renégat’ or the Terror of the Absolute” in Albert Camus, edited by Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1988), 11. This article was first published in 1960. 55 Terror and Liberalism (London: Norton, 2004). 56 What’s Left? How Liberals Lost their Way (London: Harper Collins, 2007).
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Reading “Le Renégat” in the twenty-first century, then, one notes different, more contemporary resonances. Despite the accuracy of Brombert’s diagnosis, the question remains as to why Camus gave his parable this particular form and non-European location. In a variant of his avant-propos to Actuelles III Camus wrote that: Le mot de liberté commence à reprendre du sens dans le monde mais le mot de justice y est toujours aussi prostitué puisqu’on le trouve aussi bien dans la bouche du pauvre fellah de mon pays que dans celle du marchand d’esclaves du Yemen. (E, 1852) The word freedom is beginning to get back its meaning in the world but the word justice is still as prostituted there, since it can be found in the mouth of the poor fellah of my country as well as in that of the slave dealer of the Yemen.
Such mystifications, he continues, explain why many intellectuals have concluded that these values are meaningless, and that words contain only the meaning imposed on them by force. Russia is Camus’s main target in the passage published in his avant-propos (E, 898), which may explain why this reference to slavery was not included. But the issue resurfaces in Camus’s fictional story: Ce sont eux les seigneurs! Ils règnent sur leurs maisons stériles, sur leurs esclaves noirs qu’ils font mourir à la mine, et chaque plaque de sel découpée vaut un homme dans les pays du Sud. (TRN, 1583-84) They are the lords and masters! They rule over their sterile homes, over their black slaves that they work to death in the mines and each slab of salt cut out is worth a man in the regions of the South. (EK, 36)
Legal under Islamic law, the slave trade in the Yemen (and in Saudi Arabia) was not abolished until 1962, two years after Camus’s death.57 The Muslim slave trade from Africa was of similar proportions to the Atlantic slave trade, and expanded after the abolition of the latter.58 “Strangely neglected” today,59 slavery was a major cause of conflict between Europe and the Regencies of North Africa in the centuries preceding the conquest of Algeria, whose wealth derived almost entirely from this trade. Because (unlike the Atlantic slave trade) records were rarely kept, it is difficult to arrive at firm figures for the numbers of Europeans kidnapped and enslaved, either on the high seas or from 57 According to organisations like Human Rights Watch, although now illegal, slavery still continues in the Yemen, along racial lines. 58 http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/islam/history/slavery_4.shtml 59 Robert C. Davis, Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, The Barbary Coast, and Italy, 1500-1800 (London: Macmillan, 2004), xxiv.
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the coastal regions of Europe – from Iceland to Ireland and the newly independent United States, but particularly from the coasts of Spain and Italy. Recent work on this subject has estimated that between 11½ million Europeans were abducted into slavery between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries.60 Only fourteen years before the French fleet sailed into Algiers, the biggest naval bombardment in history until that point, under Lord Exmouth, had forced the Dey to release 1000 slaves from inside the city itself.61 As Davis points out, for those Europeans living during this period, slavery was equated not with skin colour but with a very real personal threat. In this light, the conquest of Algiers was widely greeted in Europe as a restoration of freedom, lifting the threat of slavery. The significance of the previous quotation is reinforced by a further point that appears to have escaped the attention of commentators. Although Brombert notes orgiastic rituals culminating in scenes of mutilation, a brutality of “hysterical proportions”, the presence of “sadistic women” who assist in torture and rape of others, the privileging of this story as a “drama of the mind”62 diverts attention from the concrete details through which it is constructed. Certainly, as a monologue that takes place entirely in the mind of the garrulous yet silenced slave, the uncertainty as to whether or not this is in reality the “long, long dream” of a fevered imagination (TRN, 1593), along with the title’s emphasis on his confusion, encourage a reading in terms of the individual psyche – especially as the priest’s itinerary moves, apparently, from the real to the fantastic; from the familiar and concrete geographical locations of the seminary at Grenoble and the city of Algiers to a city built of salt that seems entirely the product of nightmare. But however apparently fantastic, Taghâsa, was not a product of the imagination. This ancient town, built indeed entirely from slabs of salt, was located on the Central Saharan trade route. Recorded as early as the eighth century, Taghâsa was for centuries the chief source of salt for areas like the Sudan; from there it was transported 500 miles 60
See also Linda Colley, Captives: Britain, Empire and the World 1600-1850 (London: Random House, 2003); Bernard Lewis, Race and Slavery in the Middle East (Oxford University Press, 1994); “The Crows of the Arabs”, Critical Inquiry 12 (1) (Autumn 1985), 88-97. 61 See Oded Löwenheim, “‘Do Ourselves Credit and Render a Lasting Service to Mankind’: British Moral Prestige, Humanitarian Intervention, and the Barbary Pirates’, International Studies Quarterly 47 (1) (2003), 23–48. 62 “The Terror of the Absolute”, 12, 9, 11.
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to Timbuktoo and exchanged for gold and slaves. Destroyed in 1591, the salt mines were owned by the Berber Masufa tribe, who used African slaves to work them.63 The town’s location on a dry river bed explains the references to its lying in a basin (“cuvette”). Thus, the whole of time in this story becomes literally one “long, ageless day” (TRN, 1588); set in a chronologically indeterminate present that simultaneously incorporates a biographical past, the French colonial conquest and a much earlier era of Islamic imperialism, slavery and oppression – as if all of history is distilled into the present of the monologue. In this way, “Le Renegat” anticipates Camus’s presentation of History in Le Premier Homme as an ever-renewed cycle of conquest, oppression and enslavement that stretches back to the first murder. With strongly Spenglerian overtones, this cyclical history also hints at a possible future. During the post-war period the terror of the absolute lay primarily in the Cold War divide. However, Camus was also of French Algerian upbringing, and he located the seeds of a future world war in what he saw as Arab imperialism, or an Islamic empire. If, in his avantpropos, the subject of continuing bodily slavery seems somehow out of place in a discussion of ideological enslavement, these two poles are united in his most obscure fictional work, where ideological enslavement is expressed in that most potent and concrete metaphor of this trade in flesh. What Hannah Arendt identified as the “speechlessness” of totalitarian violence is literally scored upon the flesh when the priest’s tongue is cut out.64 This enables a further condensation of religion and gender: between the slave religion, Christianity, and the Nietzschean belief in the essentially “womanish” nature of the slave.
“Le Renégat”: a drama of the flesh Although of little significance in Algeria itself, the Christian missionary who risks his life in order to convert the natives is a perennial figure of colonialism, bringing to mind the first bishop to arrive in Bahia who was eaten by the locals (JV, 117). Recalling as they do the rituals of Brazil, the details of this short story rehearse some of the archetypal scenes of colonialism, while harking back to the beginnings of Euro63 Mentioned by Ibn Battuta in 1352, there is a wealth of information about Taghâsa and its salt mines. See, for example, Ian Blanchard, Mining, Metallurgy and Minting in the Middle Ages, vol. 1 (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2001). 64 “Where violence reigns absolutely (…) everything and everybody must fall silent”, On Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), 18.
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pean imperial conquest. Thus temporal uncertainty is created, and reinforced by the depiction of those stereotypes of “pre-civilization”; the sexual orgy, barbaric cruelty, idolatry and above all fetishism. This “drama of the mind” is communicated through a drama of the flesh that flirts with one of the founding nightmares associated with the civilizing mission – cannibalism, and an alternative version of the Freudian “primal scene”. Here, in the flesh, is that other colonial scene to which Camus persistently returns in his fictional writings after 1950 – the nightmare of the lustful savage (cannibalism and matriarchy), that irremediable Other who challenges the fiction of racial purity, cultural priority. In this nightmare their uncivilizing mission will prevail: Ils vaincront la parole et l’amour, ils remonteront les déserts, passeront les mers, rempliront la lumière d’Europe de leurs voiles noirs (…), et des foules muettes aux pieds entravés chemineront à mes côtés dans le désert du monde sous le soleil cruel de la vraie foi, je ne serai plus seul. (TRN, 1592) They will conquer the word and love, they’ll spread over the deserts, cross the seas, fill the light of Europe with their black veils (…), and dumb crowds with shackled feet will plod beside me in the world-wide desert under the cruel sun of the true faith, I will not be alone. (EK, 47)
The apocalypse predicted here is not of European origin: rather, it retraces the underlying nightmares of La Chute and foreshadows another in the Appendix of Le Premier Homme, which seems to echo Oswald Spengler’s predictions about the inevitable decline of the West: Demain, six cent millions de Jaunes, des milliards de Jaunes, de Noirs, de basanés, déferleraient sur le cap de l’Europe… et au mieux (la convertirait). Alors tout ce qu’on avait appris, à lui et à ceux qui lui ressemblaient, tout ce qu’il avait appris aussi, de ce jour les hommes de sa race, toutes les valeurs pour quoi il avait vécu, mourraient d’inutilité. (PH, 310) Tomorrow, six hundred million yellow people, billions of yellow, black, and darkskinned people will pour on to the shores of Europe… and at best would (convert her). Then everything that had been taught, to him and to those like him, also everything he had learned, on that day the men of his race, all the values he lived for, would die of uselessness. (FM, 248-49)
The renegade’s monologue expresses the nightmare of Islam for the European brought up in a rationalist and humanist, secular tradition,65 while the idolatrous nature of the religion depicted here resituates this 65
Jean Sarocchi, “L’Autre et les autres”, in Anthony Rizzuto (ed.), Albert Camus’ “L’Exil et le Royaume”: the third decade, 98.
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society still further South, at the beginning of history, in the “eternal childhood” of the savage. Thus, once in Taghâsa the missionary finds that time and the notion of progress itself seem to stand still, becoming a “long, ageless day” (TRN, 1588) that only begins again with his escape. Andrade’s “cannibalism as world vision” in response to the failure of rationality and science is here returned to its origin in that “other Algeria” of Africa itself. This nightmare location is reinforced by the fact that the Taghâsan religion involves fetish worship, seen as the point zero of primitive religions. Fetishism (the belief that the worshipped object has inherently magical powers) and idolatry (the worship of a representation of the god) are associated with the body, animal instincts and passions, as opposed to the mind and intellectual contemplation. Not only is fetishism the Other of religion, but the fetish is “produced by a people stuck at the beginning of time, in a ‘perpetual childhood’, that is, a pure anteriority. The fetish represents the total otherness of a world where everything has become God”.66 The equation between fetishism and childhood repeats the ideological map of which Pratt speaks with respect to “La Femme adultère”. Furthermore, it reflects the distinction incorporated in a Freudian analysis where the primitive equates with childhood and femininity and non-Western societies become a pre-history of the West. Thus, “Le Renégat” has been read as a refusal of adult, genital sexuality.67 Gassin and Costes each regard the scene with the sorceror as a re-enactment of the primal scene; Costes even suggests that the priest’s castration follows immediately at the sight of the female genital organs without his having had the time to identify himself with the sorceror. This abruptness is such that, for Costes, the homosexual fixation of the missionary is confirmed.68 Clearly, for the missionary the actual fetish and his own God are symbols of phallic power, as is blatantly revealed in the claim that his Seigneur is bigger than the savages’ fetish: La mission, ils n’avaient que ce mot à la bouche, aller aux sauvages et leur dire: “Voici mon Seigneur, regardez-le, (…) c’est le plus grand des seigneurs, choisis-
66
Blank Darkness, 179, 43, 133. See, for example, Albert Camus et la parole manquante; Laurence Joiner, “Camus’s ‘The Renegade’: A Quest for Sexual Identity” in Research Studies, 45 (3) (September 1977), 171-76; L’Univers symbolique, 162-63. 68 Albert Camus et la parole manquante, 197. 67
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In itself, such fetishism indicates already his female condition. In chapter 4 I commented on the great discretion with which Camus illustrates scenes of sexuality and suggested that such restraint only breaks down when sexuality combines with the exotic, as briefly in L’Étranger. “Le Renégat” provides a second example. I spoke in chapter 6 of the trope of cannibalism in connection with the theme of assimilation, and the related fear that in an Algerian setting biological assimilation would lead to the swallowing up of the vastly outnumbered settler community.69 As Bartfeld has elsewhere remarked, the writings subsequent to Camus’s voyage to South America are profoundly marked by his experience there.70 I have identified the crucial factor as the confrontation with a “miscegenated” world, and the allied image of cannibalism – not as a sadistic impulse to devour, nor as a passive return to the safety of the womb, but as an explicit threat to the Self through being devoured.71 The terms “cannibalism and matriarchy” enter Camus’s writings together in the context of that voyage, binding together the poles of race and gender. Fear and desire co-exist in the missionary’s sexual obsessions and unmastered passions. Already in Europe he wanted to be offended and martyred by the young girls he passed: Je pensais alors “qu’elles me frappent et me crachent au visage” mais leurs rires, vraiment, c’était tout comme, hérissé de dents et de pointes qui me déchiraient, l’offense et la souffrance étaient douces! (TRN, 1580) At such times I would think: “Let them strike me and spit in my face”, but their laughter, to tell the truth, came to the same thing, bristling with teeth and quips
69
Although they use different approaches, both Jean Gassin and Fernande Bartfeld have noted this theme of swallowing, which they interpret differently. See Gassin’s “Le Sadisme dans l’œuvre de Camus” (AC 6, 1973), 122-23; and Bartfeld’s Albert Camus ou le mythe et le mime, Archives des lettres modernes (Archives Albert Camus 5) (Paris: Minard, 1982), 58, 62. 70 Camus conférencier et voyageur, 37. 71 For Freud, the aggressive element of the sexual instinct “is in reality a relic of cannibalistic desires”. See Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality and Other Works, (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962), 72.
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that tore me to shreds, the offence and the suffering were sweet to me! (EK, 31-32)
Female sexuality is associated with being violently torn apart. Like Clamence, the priest sees his debasement as a way of rising above and ruling over others; he dreamed of absolute power (TRN, 1581). The girls of Grenoble and the savages of Taghâsa are equated in his mind, the latter being a more exciting version of the former because more “barbaric” (TRN, 1581). Janine’s is a cautious and fleeting desire to go native, an unthreatening defection. In “Le Renégat”, by contrast, the reality of this dark continent is confronted as the male protagonist enters into a veritable harem ruled over by a despot in the form of the Sorceror. Here, a distorted version of the Brazilian macumba ceremony is further superimposed through the ritual of his dedication to the fetish, when he is made to drink a potion, is anointed with oil, and violently beaten (TRN, 1586). Like Janine, “I imagined them differently, these barbarians” (TRN, 1582), he reveals. Also like Janine, what he had imagined differently was his own role in this dream of sexual power – for in this barbaric harem the missionary is its eunuch, unable to overthrow the despotic sorceror who alone has no substitute in his sexual conquests of an endlessly renewed line of “equivalent” women. In his Journaux de Voyage Camus’s attention is constantly caught by the participation of women in religious rituals. What the Western onlooker might suspect is made manifest in this fictionalization of the macumba ceremony with the brutal rape of the young woman, who seems in a trance (TRN, 1586-87). The fantasy of the sado-masochist is here triumphant, for these women not only victimize the missionary but collude in their own victimization – as he does himself. Having seen the sorceror’s power, the missionary is henceforth denied this scopic pleasure and must daily confirm his own impotence by his presence at these rituals he cannot watch. Without the imposition of external control the missionary is unable to master his own passions, giving in to the same bestiality when left alone with temptation in the form of a woman whose face, covered by a tattoo of the mask of the fetish, expressed nothing but “the unpleasant stupor of an idol” (TRN, 1588), thus giving the confusing impression that the god itself is embodied in her. But (as so often in Camus’s works) sexuality is a false god, and woman is the agent of man’s downfall, leading here to a symbolic castration of an all-too physical reality when he is punished by having his tongue cut out.
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However, this particular scene is not the source of the European priest’s castration but confirmation of his pre-existing state. Despite previous fantasies, during his first confrontation with the Taghâsans he was already reduced to silence. His religious fanaticism is an attempt to align himself with a power he does not possess. He does not yet know himself, he is told while still at the seminary, and his subsequent actions are not a fulfillment of his own potential, nor his own innate qualities. “For want of character”, like a woman he identifies with something greater than himself, escaping his own identity in that. For these reasons he misrecognizes cruelty and barbarism as power and misattributes its source. The role he seeks is that of an idol: “à travers moi saluez mon Seigneur” (TRN, 1580) (“through me salute my Lord”). Thus his counterparts are the women themselves, for the fetish is worshipped through the use of their bodies. More importantly, his savage counterpart is the woman with the face of the idol, his mirror image: L’idole, sans rien dire, me regardant toujours de ses yeux dilatés, s’est renversée peu à peu sur le dos, a ramené lentement ses jambes vers elle, et les a élevées en écartant doucement les genoux. (TRN, 1588-89) The idol, without a word, still staring at me with her dilated eyes, gradually slipped onto her back, slowly drew her legs up and raised them as she gently spread her knees. (EK, 42)
In La Peste Rieux was unmoved by a similar scene, diagnosing death with indifference. Here, in the eyes of the missionary her tattoo makes her indistinguishable from the fetish, she is subsequently confused for an idol, and only at the end of this sequence is she indisputably only a woman. This slippage between fetish, idol and woman suggests a contradictory belief on the part of the missionary: the woman is only a woman, but at the same time she is perhaps also the source of power, for she is woman as fetish / god. From a Freudian perspective, such contradictions might signify the power of the woman / mother in the land of childhood. Equally, it underlines the difference between the despised young girls of Europe and the magnified power of woman in the fantasized land of cannibalism and matriarchy. But, of course, this slave is in no position to know the difference, for he is himself a woman, identifying out of self-interest with the most cruel party; like the young girl of Budapest in Camus’s anecdote to Jean Grenier. With his own religious fetishism, the priest has always been a slave governed by hatred for his family and identification with the powerful; he left Algiers without ever finding out “who he
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was”, with the result that, unlike the virile rebel, he has no Self to affirm. “Le Renégat” confirms M. Veillard’s observation that there are no men left in France (PH, 168).
The Loss of Boundaries Pays ou les saisons se confondent les unes avec les autres, où la végétation inextricable en devient informe, où les sangs sont mélangés à tel point que l’âme en a perdu ses limites. (JV, 128) Land where the seasons merge together, where the inextricable vegetation becomes formless, where the blood is mixed to such a point that the soul has lost its boundaries.
This geographical landscape introduces “La Pierre qui pousse”, denoting the same spiritual climate that threatens to engulf its protagonist. The opening pages of this story concern another strange and primitive “monde sans âge” (TRN, 1680) (“ageless world”) where, just as the appearance of an aeroplane seems out of place, so does that of the car in which an anonymous white “colossus” and his black driver voyage through the darkness. This watery jungle landscape is only gradually revealed as Brazilian forest (TRN, 1660) and, instead of a bridge, black men and mulattos must ferry the car across the river on a wooden raft. Life is not contained within stable physical categories but seems in a constant state of flux or metamorphosis, as when the all-pervading rain blurs the distinctions between this “vegetal” sea, the land itself and a sky in which the stars were “swimming”. Bodily boundaries are invaded by stale odours of indeterminate origin, either from the land or the “spongy” sky, while they can still taste the red dust that had blown in their faces all day (TRN, 1660). The ears are similarly permeated by unidentifiable animal noises and the strange cries of red-eyed birds which throw themselves from time to time across the windscreen. If fetishism denotes the total Otherness of a world where everything has become God, here nature itself is the scene of such transmutations where the inanimate and the insentient seem capable of harbouring alien life, as when the “savage” river seems like a snake with “shining scales” and “long, liquid muscles”. The underlying animism in this initial presentation is complemented by a mythological dimension that recalls the voyages of Ulysses, or of Dante; the men had undertaken a, long “navigation” over a red desert, arriving on the other shore of the great river as if “toutes amarres rompues, ils abordaient une île dans les ténèbres, après des jours de navigation effrayée” (TRN, 1660) (“all moorings lost, they
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reached an island in the darkness, after days of frightened navigation”). The liquid landscape itself, in a constant state of metamorphosis, recalls that of La Chute with its lack of clear definition. Moreover, they later pass through “Japan” (Cipango?) (TRN, 1661), with its inscrutable yellow peoples (whose behaviour is greeted by Socrate with the explanation that they are yellow), thus reinforcing the impression of a chaotic mixing of the races. These introductory pages seem to invite a mythopoeic reading,72 an invitation that seems to stall with their arrival in Iguape, where the emphasis is on the concrete details of life in the town, poverty and social divisions.73 Yet this atmosphere is integral to the subsequent illustration of the social setting, so that despite its ordinariness and the familiarity of the social problems raised (poverty, inequality, the arbitrariness of social hierarchy), savage and primeval overtones infiltrate the town and its people. Lurking beneath the surface of this endroit lies another reality; a duality embodied above all in the religious ritual to which d’Arrast is invited, dedicated to St George (or the African orisha Ogum).74 Behind the civilized veneer of Christianity stand African gods whose adherents become possessed in their trance by the spirit of the god. In such ceremonies cigars play a vital role, for smoke attracts the gods. When d’Arrast, on his first visit to the hut in the poor quarter, is disturbed by its atmosphere of smoke and poverty (TRN, 1666), perhaps what catches in his throat is this pagan spirit infiltrating his mouth, nose and senses. Certainly, he seems entranced by the young black woman there who offers him a drink, and whose subsequent portrayal likewise alternates ambiguously between predator and victim. Although he does not consider himself a seigneur, d’Arrast, from a long line of nobles, has left Europe because he could not find his place (TRN, 1679). There are no more nobles left in Europe, whose masters 72
A. James Arnold makes this point in ‘“La Pierre qui pousse’: Symbolic Displacement in L’Exil et le Royaume”, in Rizzuto (ed.), Albert Camus’ “L’Exil et le Royaume”: the third decade, 85-94. 73 See David H. Walker, “Image, symbole et signification dans ‘La Pierre qui pousse’”, AC11 (1982) (77-100), for a discussion of how Camus’s use of myth becomes steadily more rooted in the real, as here. 74 See “Symbolic Displacement” for an account of such Afro-Brazilian ceremonies. Arnold notes how Camus misrepresents the nature of the macumba ceremony, while Jaime Castro Segovia points to a number of discrepancies between the actual reality and Camus’s symbolic rendering of it in “L’Image des réalités afro-brésiliennes dans La Pierre qui Pousse, nouvelle d’Albert Camus”, Présence francophone, 7 (Autumn 1970), 105-120.
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are now the police and the merchants, he tells the cook (TRN, 1669) in a conversation reminiscent of that from Les Pléïades (cited in chapter 6). He is one last remnant of that aristocratic European ideal where the nobility of intelligence and work (C3, 105) combine, for he displays not only lucidity (through his final rejection of religious superstition) but practical assistance for the people of Iguape in creating a jetty to stem the floodwaters. It is surely no coincidence that d’Arrast is master of the waves: “Commander aux eaux, dompter les fleuves, ah! le grand métier” (TRN, 1663) (“To command the waters, tame the rivers, ah! What a noble profession”). As the man who will engineer the barrier against floods, the “tamer” of rivers, moreover, d’Arrast represents a form of human achievement much admired by Clamence and symbolized by the canals of Amsterdam. Camus’s preface to L’Envers et l’Endroit likewise suggests that the artist in his work must construct his own barriers against the flood-tides of emotional chaos, so that in this respect d’Arrast’s occupation reflects the work of masculine and artistic creation. On this emotional level is the work that d’Arrast must carry out, for he begins to be seduced even as he enters the hut in the poor quarter, when, like his priestly predecessor, he is offered a libation by the young black woman whom he impulsively wants to prevent from leaving (TRN, 1666). His attitude towards her is characterized by nonrational and unreflecting behaviour; when invited to the feast for St George, where there will be cigars, saints and women, and all rules are forgotten, his immediate response is to ask whether all the women of the town will be there; he feels vaguely disturbed, and on promising to come “without knowing why” he thinks again of the young girl (TRN, 1671). This lack of insight reflects his earlier wish to retain her, when his motives are equally transparent yet presented as inexplicable, as is his subsequent preoccupation when speaking to the cook (TRN, 166667). Again, before leaving for the ceremony, d’Arrast hesitates, as if waiting for her (TRN, 1673). Sexual attraction, never explicitly expressed, is presented as involuntary and mysterious. Jean Gassin has drawn significant parallels between the orgiastic rituals in “Le Renégat” and the ceremonies of “La Pierre qui pousse”. In doing so, he regrets the “banal” use of black skin to symbolize sexual excess, which, he notes, reveals the white man’s traditional sexual insecurity when faced with the black man. Noting this stereotype, Gassin dismisses it as unoriginal in order to concentrate instead on a Freudian analysis of the sexuality of the son and the power of the
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mother.75 But the force of the stereotype arises from its very lack of originality and its mobilization here testifies to what Bhabha has termed: The traumatic impact of the return of the oppressed – those terrifying stereotypes of savagery, cannibalism, lust, and anarchy which are the signal points of identification and alienation, scenes of fear and desire, in colonial texts.76
Perhaps only outside Algeria might this uncertainty, this suspicion of the total Otherness of the colonized population be expressed, and that allied fear that there is no solution, there will be no compromise; there will be no homeland and no stable point of origin, but only the destruction of “everything he had learned” and “all the values for which he had lived”. If the Algerian war brings into sharp relief for Camus the question “who am I?” then it raises with equal urgency the problem of “who are they?” Again, the repetitious nature of this stereotype testifies to the instability of its nature and the need to fix those demons that begin to haunt Camus’s discourse. But this stereotype is above all directed at the black woman. Sander Gilman has suggested that in nineteenth century medical discourse, the preoccupation is not with the sexual organs of the black man, for the absence of interest is “striking” when compared with the focus on the black woman: “the uniqueness of the genitalia and buttocks of the black is associated primarily with the female and taken to be a sign solely of an anomalous female sexuality”.77 During the macumba ceremony the focus is not on male behaviour but on that of the women. Indeed, in the move from the Journaux de Voyage to “La Pierre qui pousse”, whiteness (Janine) is displaced, for the “thick white woman with the animal face” who “barks without stopping” (JV, 90) is replaced by “une Noire épaisse, remuant de droite à gauche sa face animale, (qui) aboyait sans arrêt” (TRN, 1676) (“a thick black woman, moving her animal face from right to left (who) was barking without stopping”. Thus the participation of the white woman is entirely censored here, while the heart of this female sexuality becomes entirely black, unadulterated. Despite the air of mystery surrounding the young black woman, with respect to her original model there is no mystery at all, for Camus openly remarks that she delights him (JV, 106). She later proves cen75
L’Univers symbolique, 163-64, 192-93. “The Other Question”, 25. 77 “Black Bodies, White Bodies”, 218. 76
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tral to the ritual, where on the one hand she is a “black Diana”, a huntress, bearing bow and arrow from which hangs a speared bird. At the same time, through her cry she is herself this bird, while her face reflects an “innocent melancholy”, and thus she becomes like a sacrificial victim undergoing an indescribable initiation ceremony. Her strange bird cry is nonetheless melodious (TRN, 1677), underlining not only this ambiguous status but also the combination of attraction and repulsion felt by the Western onlooker. This association suggests her exotic and pagan nature, while it later becomes the cry of a “wounded bird”, suggesting her unwilling participation. As “the beautiful sleeping one” (TRN, 1678), moreover, she is not responsible for her actions, and thus becomes a vulnerable victim. Hence her status as huntress or prey is as ambiguous as that of the women in “Le Renégat”, at once powerless victims yet active participants and the potential cause of the hero’s downfall. However, what repeatedly characterizes the bird’s call is its very strangeness (TRN, 1660, 1661, 1677, 1678), an exoticism that borders on the unnatural. The strange cries of these birds are first heard at the river crossing, where they intensify the exoticism of this primitive jungle landscape (TRN, 1660). Sexuality is another exotic dimension here, for this imagery recalls Camus’s visit to the red-light area, where he compares the prostitutes behind their multi-coloured blinds to caged birds (JV, 117). Given the perception of the macumba ceremony as a hybrid mixture of religion and sexuality (JV, 74), it does not seem coincidental that similar associations run through this text.78 Moreover, in this context they convey overtones of Dante’s journey into the Underworld, and are threatening reminders of the seagulls of La Chute. These red-eyed birds combine with the references to the red desert and its inscrutable yellow peoples (TRN, 1661) to intensify the atmosphere of the exotic and primeval. Furthermore, this strange and demonic eye-colouring later pervades the religious ceremony, with its “reddening light” (TRN, 1675), the red cassock of the chief (TRN, 1673) who becomes a “great red devil” (TRN, 1675) and the redpainted statue of the horned god (TRN, 1674). Such metamorphoses reinforce the atmosphere of violence and sexuality associated with the 78 Indeed, in the Journaux de voyage the description of this woman also contains the judgement that the ceremony in which she is involved are “degraded” rituals (JV, 106).
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ceremony, while the genesis of the cry, I suggest, is to be found in this same savage ritual, during which some of the dancers: précipitaient leur rythme, se convulsant sur eux-mêmes, et commençaient à pousser des cris inarticulés. Les cris montèrent peu à peu et (...) se confondirent dans un hurlement collectif. (TRN, 1675) quickened their rhythm, bent convulsively backwards, and began to utter inarticulate cries. The cries gradually rose higher and (…) fused in a collective howl. (EK, 138)
As this builds into a violent frenzy, among references to decapitation and dismemberment, they begin to howl with a “long collective and toneless cry” (TRN, 1676). When the women, in a trance, begin to fall to the ground, this signifies their possession by the spirit, while the cry finally degenerates into a raucous barking (TRN, 1676). The overall impression of this entire scene is of degeneration from human to animal, revealing the innate primitivism of this “multi-coloured” population itself, in a land where “the blood and the seasons merged” and time “liquefied” (TRN, 1678).79 The transformation is from individual to primeval horde, a duality surrounding the young woman to whom d’Arrast is attracted – first intimated after d’Arrast’s first encounter with her, when, despite an attractiveness that singles her out, she immediately becomes indistinguishable from the crowd into which she merges. Here, a nightmare concerning racial (sexual) assimilation is clearly apparent. Sexual desire leads to the destruction of categories of selfdefinition in which the soul loses its boundaries. For this reason people resemble the watery landscape, as when the following day the crowd itself becomes a “human tide” against which d’Arrast must fight. This “boiling crowd” is not a collection of people but a manyheaded, Medusan monster – a nightmare “melting-pot” of ages and races covered with eyes and vociferous mouths (TRN, 1682), whose arrival is like the chaotic bursting of a dam. These images reflect earlier descriptions of the “savage river” (TRN, 1660), with its “shining scales” (TRN, 1657) and long, liquid muscles (TRN, 1658). The landscape of Brazil, with its vast forest absorbing water like an enormous sponge (TRN, 1663), reflects the lack of distinction between landscape and peoples, nature and civilization. Integration here is not of a social 79 The initial manuscript version retains the wording from the Journaux de voyage, and better makes the point: “[this land] where the blood and seasons merge, where the soul loses its boundaries” (TRN, 2069).
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nature, but organic and non-sentient: “Life here was flush with the soil and, in order to integrate with it, one had to lie down and sleep for years on the muddy or dried-up ground”. This recognition causes d’Arrast to want to vomit up the whole country (TRN, 1678), as if he had himself partly ingested its contaminating, protean elements – or been “digested” by it. Indeed, despite his initial detachment, d’Arrast had begun to be seduced during the macumba ceremony, dancing without movement or volition before his expulsion. He was himself like “some bestial and benevolent deity” (TRN, 1674). Assimilation here is absorption, being swallowed up, not by the spirit of Saint George but by the pagan and bestial horned, red god. Sexuality (the instinctive) is the mechanism through which this is accomplished, as in the case of d’Arrast, whose actions become involuntary and nonrational. Jean Grenier has suggested that Camus’s work is haunted by a cry,80 while Olivier Todd has further illustrated a biographical parallel in the illness of Camus’s wife.81 Given the origin of La Chute in L’Exil et le Royaume, it is not surprising to find here a variation of this same cry (which also makes a supernatural link between woman and bird). In both cases the cry is double: it is not solely a symbol of the victim in distress, but carries the threat of retribution and vengeance. I have noted the theme of the aborted quest in La Chute, a theme which further characterizes the majority of the stories in L’Exil et le Royaume. Having himself faced failure, when someone was to die because of him (TRN, 1672), d’Arrast also awaits an unknown event – as if his work were a pretext for what has awaited him patiently at the end of the world (TRN, 1668). If this quest is indeed to establish a “fraternity embracing all men”,82 then d’Arrast must first overcome his own instinctive responses and fight against his own absorption. Clearly, as d’Arrast contemplates the black huntress he is drawn in, seduced, “fascinated” (TRN, 1677) – a spell broken only by the external intervention of the now aggressive cook, who orders him out of the hut. Indeed, at this point the macumba seems about to culminate in the secret initiation stage, from which outsiders are prohibited. As in “Le Renégat”, access to the woman is denied. The tourist may enjoy the limited pleasures of voyeurism, but is left only to suspect what 80
Souvenirs, 185-88. Albert Camus: une vie (see chapter 44, “Le Cri du prisonnier”), 638. 82 Souvenirs, 98. 81
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goes on behind closed doors. Here, the change in the formerly affable cook underlines the theme of duality, and in a manner recalling Homi Bhabha’s comments on the colonial stereotype: The chain of stereotypical signification is curiously mixed and split, polymorphous and perverse, an articulation of multiple belief. The black is both savage (cannibal) and yet the most obedient and dignified of servants (the bearer of food); he is the embodiment of rampant sexuality and yet innocent as a child; he is mystical, primitive, simple-minded and yet the most worldly and accomplished liar.83
These features are readily observable in the depiction of the inhabitants of Iguape, or of Socrate the driver.84 The police chief who questions the hero’s papers evinces both aggression and servility: likewise, the smiling judge demonstrates a temper that one would not have suspected (1664). The cook, who shares the same child-like and sunny temperament, also demonstrates this darker side, equally passionate, when his formerly kindly eyes reveal an “unsuspected” avidity (TRN, 1677). Beneath the friendly surface lurks hostility, and beneath the veneer of civilization lies the savage – the nightmare of Western man. The cook himself exemplifies the debilitating effects of passion, by which he is entirely overtaken. He had foreseen this probable lack of control, yet this knowledge does not stop him from attending the macumba. Instead (like a child) he shifts the responsibility for his own behaviour onto d’Arrast, asking him to help him keep his vow (TRN, 1671). Predictably, his passions (his animal nature) transform him, so that he forgets his vow, revealing this true nature. As a consequence, he is defeated by the stone the following day, his resolution ending in tears of powerlessness (TRN, 1684). What had saved d’Arrast from this same fate was his status as a foreigner, for the signs are that he too would have lost all restraint – unless his clear repulsion had overcome his equally clear attraction. Despite such ambiguity, the superiority of d’Arrast is clear, for he not only takes up this burden but by carrying the stone away from the church and into the poor family’s hut he rejects superstition, establishing himself as an example to follow (as the very model of the civilizing mission). On a realistic level, however, as Donald Lazère has noted: The last thing a destitute native family needs is a hundred-pound rock in the middle of their living room. The story reveals no lucid political consciousness of the
83 84
“The Other Question”, 34. See Arnold’s “Symbolic Displacement” for a consideration of this theme.
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colonial situation; its tone on the contrary, is patronizing toward the noble savages.85
However noble, savages are apparently incapable of helping themselves, and need external intervention, thus demonstrating that like a headless worm, the world “is looking for its aristocrats” (C3, 148). In picking up his burden, d’Arrast accepts his duty, thus affirming his noble descent. Savages and women need this guiding hand to lead them through the chaotic childhood of passion. D’Arrast in particular is well-suited to this task, for his technical skill concerns the construction of barriers and the establishment of definition between land and sea, order and chaos. Hence, a link is established between him and the artist who must also create “barriers” surrounding and channelling those “dark forces of the soul” in order to create (E, 12). On a fictional level, he enacts this battle between selfcontrol and “disorder, the violence of certain instincts, abandon without grace” (E, 12). His fight against these internal and external dark forces is sorely taxed by his experience in Iguape, so that even as he turns away from the church and towards the hut where the young girl lives, he acts once more “without knowing why” (TRN, 1684). If his final action confirms his victory over “the lower regions”, characterized by “sexual abandon and idolatry”, then this ambiguity remains until the end – for the relationship with the “black Diana” remains undeveloped.86 In an earlier projected ending of this story the visitor loads the stone onto a boat, sailing towards the virgin forest where he disappears (C3, 42). Although in 1956 Camus wrote to his wife that he had added to the ending a salutation to life,87 this ambivalence remains. I earlier described the sexuality at the heart of the macumba ritual as “entirely black, unadulterated” – a judgement that must now be qualified. If it is the case that (“pure”) whiteness is displaced, nevertheless it is incorporated within the bodies of the participants, for the society and country depicted are characterized by hybridity – black, yellow, mulatto. The cook himself (whose family includes the young woman) has “yellow rather than black skin” and is referred to as both “the Black” and the “mulatto” (TRN, 1669). The participation of the
85
The Unique Creation of Albert Camus, 208. Cf. The Unique Creation of Albert Camus, 209. 87 Albert Camus: une vie, 661. 86
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white woman may have been censored, but the innate hybridity of woman (as underlined by the woman-bird imagery) remains. Taghâsa is the home of the unadulterated race, that most ignoble of savages. Iguape may be a source of contamination but there is perhaps hope in the civilizing mission. The macumba ritual itself is Westernized in so far as it is a mixture of Christian and African beliefs, and Jean Sarocchi is right to point out one conclusion when he says that the Other (and the other culture) with whom understanding is possible is the Christianized “cross-breed”: rather than the Muslim North African, it is the South-American Catholic – the Other who is “elsewhere”.88 But this conclusion holds only so long as such co-existence has clear boundaries, for, as Sarocchi has likewise noted, all of Camus’s heroes are white, “unpolluted by indigenous blood”.89 Although the black Diana retains the same equivocal status as the woman of Taghâsa, there is a suggestion of hope in her depiction. The quest for purity implied in the original but aborted turn towards the virgin forest is here diverted onto this black woman, and the perceived innocence reflected in her face. Despite his disgust at religious supersititions, and the realization that he is faced with a choice between “shame and anger” in Europe or “exile and solitude” there, amongst “these madmen” and their dance of death, she alone offers him hope: Mais, à travers la nuit humide, pleine d’odeurs végétales, l’étrange cri d’oiseau blessé, poussé par la belle endormie, lui parvint encore. (TRN, 1678) But through the humid night, heavy with vegetable odours, the wounded bird’s outlandish cry, uttered by the beautiful sleeping girl, still reached him. (EK, 142)
This recalls the 1952 entry in the Carnets that begins with the words “anti-Europe”, concerning an encounter with an innocent and silent young girl on the Pacific coast of Chile and their “silent lovemaking in front of the sea” (C3, 58). Thus “La Pierre qui pousse” ends on a note of ambivalence where attraction and repulsion are intertwined. The cannibal woman may be the source of a dangerous fascination, but perhaps if she is young enough, innocent enough, she may be lifted out of her pagan depravity. D’Arrast demonstrates himself capable of such a task, for he has overcome temptation, established his will and confirmed his noble status. Here, sexual attraction becomes a form of redemption precisely because it is controlled by the will. 88 “L’Autre et les autres”, 100. In common with many critics, however, Sarocchi fails to take account of the strong pagan elements in this society. 89 Le Dernier Camus, 155.
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The New Aristocracy I have noted at several points Camus’s belief in an aristocratic ideal, combined with his disillusion concerning a mercantile Europe. Europe offers no space for a new and vibrant culture, while such a possibility becomes increasingly unlikely in the land of Camus’s birth. D’Arrast appears to have renounced Europe because it is over-run by commerce and the police, and thus offers no space for the new nobility he represents. In L’Exil et le Royaume a symbiotic and organic relationship between geography and biology renders them indistinguishable. Despite Marcel’s commercial activities, external circumstances suggest the possibility of change, just as the frontier geography forces men into a similar mould. The renegade missionary, however, is irredeemably European. Like Martha of Le Malentendu he seeks the warmth of the sun and to repeat, in fact, the gesture of Jan by leaving his family “at one go” and beginning “to live at last, in the sunlight, with fresh water” (TRN, 1579). The “sour and cold” wine of his homeland symbolizes above all his tainted blood, in a manner reminiscent of Ibsen’s Ghosts. This corruption spreads through the blood and voids the possibility of any good: “Goodness! There was sour wine in me, that’s all” (TRN, 1580). Such is the only possible Eucharist offered by Europe, preparing him already for the ritualistic potion of Taghâsa. However, as the refuge overseas of d’Arrast shows, even those made of nobler stuff cannot survive in the dying Europe. This plight is illustrated by Jonas, “the artist at work” who, despite his noble calling, is differently devoured in the overpopulated Paris.
Chapter 8 The First Man In L’Exil et le Royaume, I have noted female sexuality as a crucial point of intersection connecting the treatment of women and issues of race. In my view, this combination expresses Camus’s increasing disquiet over the atavistic nature of much of the violence against civilians (settlers and Muslims alike) orchestrated by the FLN, and his conviction, voiced after the Philippeville massacre, that this was leading Algeria into a state of increasing barbary. At the same time, these stories of exile might be viewed as a preparation for Camus’s final unfinished work, Le Premier Homme – likewise about Algeria and colonialism; those subjects on which he never ceased to speak throughout the 1950s.
The Public and Private Spheres Despite their differences, what unites all the male protagonists in L’Exil et le royaume is that each is shown carrying out his chosen job of work and all the events illustrated take place in the course of that work. From the perspective of Le Premier Homme, moreover, a further underlying theme is more easily discerned, for this collection portrays a world on the move; a world of emigrant and essentially homeless populations. This theme is apparent even with the sedentary family man Yvars, who, nostalgic for a lost youth, finally looks across the waters and thinks they should have left (TRN, 1608). There is no reason to suppose that the object of this desire is the “dirty Europe”, land of the homeless, for the sea has many shores. The same restlessness, or air of expectancy, afflicts all the main protagonists in this collection. Apart from the tainted renegade and Janine (for obvious reasons), each main character also embodies a form of nobility. Daru, exiled in his own homeland, is a schoolteacher bringing the best of French culture to his indigent young charges; Jonas belongs to the natural nobility of the creators; d’Arrast, of noble blood, brings practical assistance to the poor of Brazil; Yvars represents the nobility of labour – the craftsman whose trade is dying out in the face of mercan-
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tile historical forces.1 The modern world brings new forms of nomadism to these threatened aristocracies, who are all part of a new tribe “making their way through the night of the years on the earth” (PH, 180-81).2 In chapter 7 I concentrated on the theme of female sexuality, as illustrated by two poles of womanhood, and the threat of absorption by this form of “cannibalism”. This is not the only theme relating to women, for L’Exil et le royaume also portrays differing forms of marriage across class and geographical boundaries. Although not always central, these portraits are nonetheless integral to a process of reconstruction underlying this collection. If Marcel’s true passion is for his business affairs, one reason for this obsession stems from his desire to protect his wife financially. In the face of historical forces this ambition may be unrealistic, and Marcel is clearly at fault in many respects, yet his shouldering of this responsibility testifies to the creation of new alliances across class borders within the geographical space of the French Algerian “tribe” profiled in L’Exil et le royaume. Whereas in La Peste the workplace of the men was woman-free, here women become part of the community, or constitute a complementary private sphere with mutual responsibilities. This is the case not only in “La Femme adultère”, but also in “Les Muets” and “Jonas, ou l’artiste au travail”, where women are no longer a nebulous ideal for which men fight, but flesh and blood creatures who either help or hinder their husband in his work. In Le Premier Homme Camus was to write that the Mediterranean separated two universes in him (PH, 181), and these short stories begin to illustrate the nature of that gulf through the presentation of this private sphere and its cultural variations. Fernande is a traditional wife who supports her husband in his dealings in the public sphere. She ministers to his needs, and the expertly ironed shirt with which she provides him is a source of contentment (TRN, 1598). This emphasis on the apparently trivial is to symbolize an important difference between two “races” of women in Le Premier Homme. Patrice Mersault’s earlier preoccupation with his 1
For the mythical status with which such figures are imbued, see Philip Dine, Images of the Algerian War: French Fiction and Film 1954-1992 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). 2 As “La Femme adultère” and Le Premier Homme suggest, this new tribe seems to embrace the “poor and ignorant” Berber peasant, the settler, the soldier, and the landless whites, but excludes “those half-breeds with pointed yellow shoes and scarves who had only adopted the worst of the West” (PH, 320).
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dishevelled appearance will be remembered from La Mort heureuse, while in Le Premier Homme the importance for Mediterranean men of their white shirts and ironed trousers is presented as a tribal characteristic; throughout his childhood Jacques Cormery’s mother had ironed his sole pair of trousers until he went away to the “universe of women who neither wash nor iron” (PH, 60). “Les Muets” brings a new focus on domesticity and this new emphasis prefigures the reconstruction of the notion of community in Camus’s final work. Fernande does not meddle in the affairs of men, and although inquiring about their progress she neither offers her own opinion, nor complains, waiting until he is ready to tell her about his day. During this time he holds her hand as at the beginning of their marriage (TRN, 1608), as if shared adversity has brought them together. There is no suggestion of disloyalty (or of independent thought) in her depiction. Here is the French Algerian working-class wife, the helpmate taking her place by her husband’s side. A further characteristic of this masculine community lies in their stoical assumption of their responsibilites. Much of Yvars’ regret concerns his lost youth rather than his domestic life, even though it is marriage that brought a form of servitude when, to make ends meet, he had worked through his weekends: Il avait perdu peu à peu l’habitude de ces journées violentes qui le rassassaient. L’eau profonde et claire, le fort soleil, les filles, la vie du corps, il n’y avait pas d’autre bonheur dans son pays. Et ce bonheur passait avec la jeunesse. (TRN, 1597-98) Little by little he had lost the habit of those violent days that used to satiate him. The deep, clear water, the hot sun, the girls, the physical life – there was no other form of happiness in this country. And that happiness disappeared with youth. (EK, 50)
Thus Camus returns to his reflections in “L’Été à Alger” concerning the brevity of youth and happiness in this nascent culture. As there, the characteristics of a distinctive new culture can be detected, for these men are all of the same stock, sharing similar values and temperament. Hence, even class differences are effaced by geographical roots, for the boss shares the same fiery temperament and abides by the same masculine code as the others: when Esposito tells him that he is not a man, the “hot-blooded” boss reacts physically and the two men have to be separated; but the workers are impressed (TRN, 1600). This is not the behaviour one might expect from the capitalist classes, but in Algeria the demonstration that one is, or is not “a man” is the only meaningful morality. These shared cultural norms
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are further reflected in physical appearance, as in “La Femme adultère”. The boss is thin and brown, looking at ease in his body, and resembling the inhabitants of the desert. Likewise, in his concern for his child he shares the same protective attitudes towards his family, and sympathy towards him is generated precisely by these domestic difficulties quite independently of the conflict-ridden world of work; in this land all men, regardless of social status, share the same hardships and responsibilities. Here, their duties towards wife and family bind them together, creating a level of collective consciousness that over-rides class differences. On another level, comradeship between workers is stronger than racial division, as demonstrated when Yvars shares his sandwich with Saïd (TRN, 1605). Marcel the businessman may be racist but the struggling skilled artisan is not. This impression, here muted, is addressed in Le Premier Homme, where the writer explains the racism of this group, ordinarily “the most tolerant of men” (PH, 236), in terms of a primeval fight for survival: these “unexpected nationalists” are not seeking domination or wealth and privilege, but only the “privilege of servitude” (PH, 237). In a prefiguration of Le Premier Homme, “Les Muets” demonstrates a culture where men accept their family obligations, while the wife’s role is to support her husband in this task and fulfill her own duties through the maintenance of home life.3 Through this network of mutual co-operation the survival of the tribe is assured. Here, Camus begins to bestow an eternal, a-historical dimension on these people and their social arrangements, which will become prominent in Le Premier Homme. In 1959 he reflected on how his own family remained untouched by technological advances such as radio or newspapers: “As they were a hundred years ago, and hardly more changed by the social context” (C3, 264). When seen from the perspective of Le Premier Homme, much of the ambiguity concerning marriage directly correlates here to geographical location and cultural variation. Just as La Chute paints a European perspective on marriage in a world dominated by ideas and fornication, so this same situation prevails in “Jonas, ou l’artiste au travail”, which is located at the source of the problem in Paris itself. However, here the emphasis is as much on external forces shaping 3
This strict separation of spheres is a feature of Audisio’s new Mediterranean culture in Ulysse ou l’intelligence. The subordination of women, he avers, is a consequence of the differing natures of the sexes and hence only apparently misogynous.
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marriage as on individual problems within marriage, and again the most significant factor relates to the nature of the society in which this personal relationship is placed. In this respect a new note has been sounded, for Camus’s own long-standing ambivalence is widely acknowledged, and in the early Carnets, in particular, marriage is regarded as a form of suicide for a man. In its earlier conception, this was precisely the focus of this story. In 1951 Camus writes of the creator whose over-riding commitment is to his art, for which he sacrifices wife and children. “The day his wife dies in hospital, he adds the final touch and the one who comes to announce his misfortune only hears him say ‘At last!’” (C3, 14). Here, ambivalence is clearly directed at the woman herself as an obstacle to the wider priorities of men. In the mimodrame published in 1953 concerning “La Vie d’artiste” the thinly disguised wish to be rid of the woman is modified, for the artist displays sorrow at his wife’s death. Continuity is nevertheless maintained, for after her death the painter kisses her, then begins to paint her dead face (TRN, 2061). But “Jonas ou l’artiste au travail” turns away from these endings, to emphasize instead the painter’s love for his family: “He loved them! How he loved them” (TRN, 1654) – thus striking a new note. Hence, a move away from the mythical woman prepares the way for a greater realism in the depiction of women in Le Premier Homme, as flesh and blood creatures who fulfill a concrete function in the life of the community. The two poles of individual freedom versus the bondage of marriage are here given much greater complexity as marriage is inserted into a wider social context, and previously excluded Others affect the relationship of the couple. As a social institution marriage is no longer uniform, and demonstrates cross-cultural variations, as the contrast between “Les Muets” and “Jonas ou l’artiste au travail” demonstrates. If geography creates a people, it also determines the nature of marriage across those geographical communities. If I may assume “Les Muets” to be a touchstone here, then the major difference between these two depictions concerns the impossibility of separating public and private spheres. In a European setting such divisions cannot be maintained, so that “the artist at work” becomes also the artist at home: his public admirers merge with his personal friends, while his wife occupies an uneasy border between public and private sphere. Whereas M. Lasalle’s family, or Yvars’ son in “Les Muets” do not intrude, Louise cannot devote herself entirely to her family precisely because of the way these other concerns impinge on
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the domestic sphere. A major contrast between “Jonas” and the other stories in this collection concerns space: elsewhere, the impression is of vast and largely unpeopled Algerian and Brazilian landscapes. In Paris, however, the problem of living space dictates the nature of social life. This reflects a concern elsewhere addressed by Camus when he notes that the population of Europe had more than doubled between 1800 and 1914 (C3, 134), while he elsewhere notes the “galloping” demographic increase of the colonized population of Algeria (E, 1012). Clamence likewise comments on this same phenomenon in Paris: Près de cinq millions, au dernier recensement? Allons, ils auront faits des petits. Je ne m’en étonnerai pas. Il m’a toujours semblé que nos concitoyens avaient deux fureurs: les idées et la fornication. (...) Gardons-nous, d’ailleurs, de les condamner; ils ne sont pas seuls, toute l’Europe en est là. (TRN, 1478-79) Almost five million at the last census? Why, they must have multiplied. And that wouldn’t surprise me. It always seemed to me that our fellow-citizens had two passions: ideas and fornication. (…) Still, let’s take care not to condemn them; they’re not the only ones, all Europe is in the same boat. (F, 7)
La Chute is the lynchpin of several of the stories in L’Exil et le royaume. Whereas “La Femme adultère”, “Le Renégat” and “La Pierre qui pousse” variously illustrate the nightmare of the voyage to the Indies (TRN, 1483), “Jonas” illustrates the nightmare reality of daily life in Paris. Jonas’s marriage is a combination of individual failings and such wider pressures; indeed, what might have been praiseworthy in other circumstances becomes problematical precisely because of social trends. Given the inevitable accomodation crisis, Louise’s success in finding them an apartment, however small, is a considerable achievement. She is, besides, a devoted mother, and her activities are all uncomplainingly directed towards the maintenance of domestic harmony. In these respects there is little apparent difference between her and Fernande; each is following the biological imperative of women. However, in these activities Louise is herself a symptom of the very problem afflicting Europe, for she is part of the rising generation who are particularly inclined at that time to marry and proliferate (TRN, 1634). She quickly makes herself indispensable to Jonas, marries him, and rapidly produces on plan two children, followed by a third. Despite her initial insistence that each has their own work-space, through her the overpopulation of Paris invades the private sphere, so
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that Jonas becomes a nomad in his own home, wandering from room to room in search of somewhere to work. A number of her characteristics reflect those of the Brazilian termite whose unceasing activities will one day undermine the whole edifice of civilization (JV, 109). Her appearance (small, with dark skin, hair and eyes) further aligns her with the small peoples of “La Pierre qui pousse”, in marked contrast to both d’Arrast and Jonas himself. Such hybrid associations are reinforced when she is compared to an ant, thus recalling the termite’s destructive tendencies: Jonas, grand et solide, s’attendrissait sur la fourmi, d’autant plus qu’elle était industrieuse. La vocation de Louise était l’activité. (TRN, 1631) Jonas, tall and rugged, was touched at the sight of the ant, especially as she was industrious. Louise’s vocation was for activity. (EK, 86)
The ant is no more to blame than the termite if the long-term consequences of its reproductive imperative lead to the eventual collapse of the wider society. On the contrary, when properly directed its tireless activity is beneficial to the entire social organisation. Initially, this activity is directed at Jonas himself, and to his benefit, for she complements his own predilection for inactivity. In different circumstances this complementarity might have aided his work, for in that respect Jonas is far from apathetic: rather, he is “devoured” completely by painting (TRN, 1631). Her assumption of everyday tasks frees him to devote more time to his own vocation; yet despite her commitment, her activities are misdirected, as is illustrated by her sudden interest in literature, immediately abandoned once she realizes his interests lie elsewhere (TRN, 1632). As in La Chute, her points of reference are the sentimental press and philosophical reviews (TRN, 1631). Instead of taking a traditional role, she interferes with his work, dabbles in ideas, and thus infects Jonas with this modern disease. Yet the responsibility is not hers alone, for the problem lies in Jonas’s failure to establish a balance; he allows himself to be taken over and overburdened with family responsibilities. In contrast to the Algerian marriage Jonas could never claim to be “a man”, and responsibility for this lies with him rather than his wife; he is not master in his own home. Indeed, his often repeated reply “as you wish” (TRN, 1629, 1634, 1636, 1641, 1652) underlines his passive and “womanish” nature, for this is the response of Lucienne to Mersault’s suggestion that she should effectively prostitute herself for him. This portrait prefigures the comment that there are no men left in France (PH, 168),
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itself recalling Louis Bertrand’s belief in the effeminacy of French men, and that France, exhausted by centuries of civilization could be rejuvenated by contact with the barbarian spirit of Algeria.4 Thus the internal problems in this marriage are generated not by a lack of mutual affection but by the failure of Jonas himself to be a man, set the priorities and fulfill his role as head of the household. Jonas’s marriage follows the European pattern, for the breakdown of his parents’ marriage parallels one of Clamence’s anecdotes; Jonas’s father could not abide the good works of his wife, a veritable “lay saint” (TRN, 1630), while Clamence speaks of an industrialist who murders his perfect wife (TRN, 1485).5 The way his parents are influenced by modern ideas about the effects of broken marriages on children is only one example of the more prevalent “disease” of ideas and fornication. Jonas’s father exemplifies this in his publishing activities, which are guided by the belief that the more people buy books, the less they read them, and that it is sex that sells (TRN, 163031). Equally, the parasitical critics weave a web of elaborate ideas and interpretations around the artist’s work which he himself had never suspected, the end result of which is to elevate the critic as interpreter to the detriment of both the work and the artist.6 Jonas’s agent likewise feeds off his success while failing to appreciate or encourage his actual work, while a wider parallel can be drawn with the landlords of the family’s apartment who profit from the overdemand for housing. The tentacles of these “new princes” extend so far that they not only rent out restricted living space but also sell the soft furnishings with which to make it inhabitable (TRN, 1634). Hence Jonas, initially “devoured” by his work, is increasingly consumed by these pirhana, as in La Chute (TRN, 1479). Thus the fate of Jonas is linked with a number of forms of devourment, and on a number of levels, which range from personal inadequacies to a more general social malaise. Hence, Bartfeld is right to 4
Preface to the new edition of Le Sang des races (Paris: G. Crès et Cie, 1921), XI. Cf. Terry Keefe “Marriage in the later fiction of Camus and Simone de Beauvoir”, 4. See also “‘Heroes of our time’ in Three of the Stories of Camus and Simone de Beauvoir”, Forum for Modern Language Studies, 17 (1) (January 1981), 38-54, for further parallels between these two works. Brian Fitch, in “‘Jonas’, ou la production d’une étoile”, AC6 (1973), 51-65, draws other parallels between the two stories. 6 See Camus’s comments on the destructive effect of this proliferation of commentators in what he calls the “mercantile age” (C3, 96). 5
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suggest that in building his loft Jonas evinces the desire to be relieved of all responsibility, for passivity is an aspect of his personality.7 A further consequence of this trait is that he allows himself to be swallowed up by the demands of domestic life, so that wife and family likewise take on a cannibalistic aspect. Given the lack of clarity between public and private spheres, Jonas is inevitably driven outside of home in order to seek refuge and consolation as his life is reduced to a form of nomadism; in public he seeks solitude, escapes into alcohol, and arrives finally at the inevitable port of fornication. Women “helped” him: Il pouvait leur parler, avant ou après l’amour, et surtout se vanter un peu, elles le comprenaient même si elles n’étaient pas convaincues. Parfois, il lui semblait que son ancienne force revenait. (TRN, 1650) He could talk to them, before or after the love-making, and especially boast a little, for they would understand him even if they weren’t convinced. At times it seemed to him that his old strength was returning. (EK, 110)
This “adulterous man” is shown as the victim of forces beyond his control. However, the sight of Louise’s “drowned face” (TRN, 1650) prompts a change of direction, and because of his love for his family – although it is far from certain that the outcome is any more optimistic. Here, forces combine to present the artist as being faced with insuperable odds in following his vocation. Jonas is “responsible”, but he is not personally “guilty”. Jonas tries to recreate a personal kingdom through constructing his loft: d’Arrast seeks refuge elsewhere; even Yvars dreams of emigration. “Jonas, ou l’artiste au travail” illustrates the fate of those who do not evade the spreading contamination of Europe, and in an echo of Camus’s reflection that those creators who survive the “catastrophe” will have to reassemble culture in lands such as Chile or Mexico (C2, 337). I earlier suggested that the main male protagonists in L’Exil et le royaume embody a form of nobility. Race in the biological sense may be a factor in the depiction of Louise (who, after all, has little time to launder and iron). Race in the sense of nobility is further implicated in the depiction of Jonas, for he belongs to the aristocracy of the creators. The noble d’Arrast has escaped Europe, and for him at least salvation is a possibility; Jonas, on the other hand, becomes progressively more enmeshed.
7
Albert Camus ou le mythe et le mime, 58.
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Le Fils de roi Brian Fitch has shown the central importance of the star in “Jonas”, which he identifies as the origin of the text. This is certainly the case insofar as the notion of aristocracy is a fundamental theme in these writings. Fitch suggests that the image of the star in “Jonas” may derive from the writings of Henry Miller,8 but he need not look so far; for, as I have noted, the star is integral to the fils de roi, in turn a mark of true aristocracy. Clamence’s definition of himself as a King’s son strongly resembles the attitude of Jonas towards his star (TRN, 1629): Je refusais d’attribuer cette réussite à mes seuls mérites, et je ne pouvais croire que la réunion, en une personne unique, de qualités si différentes et si extrêmes, fût le résultat du seul hasard. C’est pourquoi, vivant heureux, je me sentais, d’une certaine manière, autorisé à ce bonheur par quelque décret supérieur. (TRN, 1490) I refused to attribute that success to my own merits and could not believe that the conjunction in a single person of such different and such extreme virtues was the result of chance alone. This is why in my happy life I felt somehow that that happiness was authorized by some higher decree. (F, 23)
Jonas evinces a similar attitude, but likewise fails to recognize his obligations towards this star, so that gradually Louise’s activity supplants the star in Jonas’s life (TRN, 1632). Instead of acknowledging his own responsibilities, the star becomes his excuse: “it’s the star which is going far”, he tells himself, whereas he is staying with Louise and the children (TRN, 1638). If Fitch’s argument concerning wordplay is correct, then it might be said that he begins to worship “false prophets”, and is led astray by the false stars of others (TRN, 1639), instead of identifying and serving his own star. Ultimately, it is far from certain that Jonas is capable any longer of recognizing his true star, and far from certain that the star he thinks he finds before falling from his loft is authentic.9 The central dichotomy in “Jonas” is between the King’s son and the “new princes” of commerce who represent all those forces besetting Jonas. Not only is he led astray by the false stars of success, marriage, and fornication, but this fate is revealed as inevitable and the King’s son is supplanted by these new princes and the powerful forces they represent. A further analogy is to be found in a notation from the Carnets of 1952 whose terminology is strikingly similar to that of Louis Ber8
‘“Jonas’ ou la production d’une étoile”, 51-52. This confusion may be compared to that of Clamence, seeing invisible doves in the sky, or mistaking snowflakes for doves.
9
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trand. France, Camus writes, has leukaemia and her red blood cells are being devoured by the white cells. No longer capable of revolutionary change or waging war, she can only make reforms. Above all else, she needs new blood (C3, 51). A similar image is applied to the outskirts of Paris as a vast cancer absorbing healthy tissue when Jacques Cormery returns. It is compared to a cancer reaching out its ganglions of poverty and ugliness, and “digesting this foreign body” (PH, 44). From this perspective the fate of Jonas transcends the individual and his personal strengths and failings. Europe itself is the problem, dooming all those unable to escape its reach. This is the loathsome Europe that spawned the renegade priest and from which d’Arrast has escaped. Thus “Jonas” echoes the themes of La Chute as Jonas likewise avoids his duty. In La Chute the representation of women has a marked symbolic dimension associated with the themes of judgement and pardon as well as the taint of biological corruption. In “Jonas”, Louise is ultimately portrayed as an individual equally subjected to the same forces as her husband. Carina Gadourek has remarked on her unconvincing elevation from caricature to tragic figure as Camus moves from irony to a more serious tone,10 yet this change also reflects a shifting of focus from mythical to “real” women, and the burden of responsibility is diverted onto the institution of marriage. “Jonas” shifts the perspective from the male protagonist exclusively to reveal that there is suffering on both sides.11 Nevertheless, Anthony Rizzuto seems optimistic in arguing for an evolution in Camus’s attitudes towards women. Leaving aside Camus’s own protestations that Clamence was not modelled on himself (and his contempt for this character), it is not at all clear that with respect to women Camus underwent a process of self-examination during the time he was writing La Peste, or that La Chute was consciously self-denunciatory.12 Certainly, this interpretation has some justification in the Carnets, as when Camus writes in 1959 that it is himself and everything he has believed that he has been subjecting to criticism for the past 5 years (C3, 267). Yet the precise nature of that self-criticism remains unclear, for as far as the conduct of his own life was concerned Camus’s relationships with women continue to 10
Les Innocents et les coupables, 217. In a letter of August, 1956, Camus writes to Francine Camus that he had rewritten Louise’s situation, by which she is also overwhelmed (Albert Camus: une vie, 661). 12 Camus: Love and Sexuality. 11
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display the same personal inadequacies and self-justifications. Olivier Todd’s biography, in particular, reveals a lack of humanity in his behaviour towards women which showed no signs of change. It is tempting, in telling the chronologial “story” of Camus’s fictional writings, to seek a resolution of sorts. On the contrary, in this respect the author continues to show an astonishing lack of insight. Jonas’s love for his family remains ambiguous, for his reflection that he loved them (TRN, 1654) need not necessarily include his wife. In Le Premier Homme the change of emphasis with regard to female characters throws the focus not on individual women as sexual partners, but on the family network, in a context of celibacy. If it would finally appear that there Camus is agreeing with his theatrical women that duty lies with those one loves (TRN, 258) the clarification required surrounds the identity of those loved ones. In Le Premier Homme Camus presents a different “amour du couple” from that represented by Victoria; here, it is not the sexual partner but the mother who returns, and in whom the themes of exile, confession and pardon converge, for the “paradise” denied to Clamence is (in the words of the Coran) at the feet of the mother. Such a move does not denote resolution, however, for this unfinished work is also written under the sign of Orestes.
The First Man In Le Premier Homme the mother figure reappears for the first time since La Peste, and as a symbol of the homeland. Here, her “real” and symbolic aspects combine to suggest an apparent resolution of the conflict between biological origins and the man-god who creates himself, and this is borne out by the treatment of family and origins in this unfinished novel. I have suggested that the recuperation of the domestic sphere in L’Exil et le Royaume prepares the way for a different treatment of women in Le Premier Homme with its new concentration on the family. In this respect Camus seems to move away from mythical women; as he confided to Brisville, in Le Premier Homme he would speak about women for the first time, and their decisive role in his upbringing; in his previous works, by contrast, they had been “mythical”.13 This focus on an autobiographical Self suggests a perspective first taken in “Les Voix du quartier pauvre”, and a return to his first projected novel, referred to as “the poor quarter”. Le Premier 13
Albert Camus: une vie, 741.
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Homme is foreshadowed and presented in strictly subjective and personal terms in the preface to L’Envers et l’Endroit where Camus says that if, after all his efforts, he does not succeed one day in rewriting that work, then he will have succeeded at nothing. In any case, he comments, he continues to dream of placing at the centre of this work “the admirable silence of a mother and the effort of a man to rediscover a justice or a love that matches this silence” (E, 13). The reasons why Camus abandoned his first projected novel are unknown, but if the mother was to have symbolized this community, this suggests one reason for its abandonment. In the early writings she is presented as a unique being of such abnormality that it is difficult to imagine how she could possibly function as a symbol of anything except herself. In Le Premier Homme, she is endowed with humanity while simultaneously presented as ageless and unchanging. This prepares the way for her status as a symbol not solely of the limited “poor quarter”, but of her entire race. At the same time those negative aspects which militate against this positive symbolic function are excised. A number of childhood memories are revived here, as with the description of the barrel-makers’ workshop (PH, 118-21). Camus returns not only to his early notebooks but also to sources predating L’Envers et l’Endroit. Le Premier Homme is marked by intertextual continuities and absences as, “for the first time”, the mother and her blood relatives are endowed with greater reality and humanity. Here, Camus demonstrates a mature understanding of matters more harshly judged in previous portrayals; characters are treated with greater compassion, and reasons sought for their often harsh behaviour. The most negative judgements on this family have been suppressed, most strikingly in the case of the uncle, Ernest, whose previous portraits are marked by an unvarying series of judgements which condemned him as brutal and despotic. Despite remaining elements, the judgement itself is overturned. The portrait of the grandmother shows less variation. In all the early descriptions she is consistently portrayed as domineering and harshly bringing up the children. What is excised from Le Premier Homme is the child’s cynical reaction to her death, which acquires more heroic proportions as we are told only that she died still unbowed (PH, 58). Explanations are advanced for her behaviour, all of which concern the poverty in which she must bring up this family. This is most starkly demonstrated by her search in the primitive toilet for the coin Jacques claims to have lost there.
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Importantly, emotional deprivation is here presented as an inherited characteristic passed down through the generations, rather than an individual flaw. In early notes for Le Premier Homme Camus wrote that they did not know how to love and that his childhood had been devoid of this emotion: “The mother is not a source of love” (C3, 9798). In the case of the grandmother, previously presented as an actress incapable of authentic emotion, she is endowed with characteristics already shared by her daughter and grandson; incapable of the verbal expression of a love she nonetheless feels. Rare glimpses are given of such moments, as when after the long interview with M. Bernard she emerges, wiping away tears from her eyes and, for the first time, clumsily shows tenderness towards him (PH, 152-53). Again, love is not expressed in her relationship with her son, Ernest. Only, one day when the young Jacques catches sight of her watching her son with a tenderness he had never seen before, he realizes that she loved him and admired his physical beauty (PH, 111). In this, she resembles all her race with their “cult of the body” (E, 74). Amongst a number of parallels is the attitude to death, expressed in “L’Été à Alger” by the words “poor soul, he won’t be singing any more” (E, 73) – a more polite version of the grandmother’s “he won’t be farting any more” (PH, 153). (See chapter 2.) Although in this family more negative emotions are readily expressed, there is no “language of the heart”; this must be interpreted by the child, crept up on at unguarded moments and deciphered – as when Jacques catches sight of his mother looking at him with emotion. He hesitates, and flees: “Elle m’aime, elle m’aime donc” se disait-il dans l’escalier, et il comprenait en même temps que lui l’aimait éperdument, qu’il avait souhaité de toutes ses forces d’être aimé d’elle et qu’il en avait toujours douté jusque-là. (PH, 89-90) “She loves me, she loves me then”, he said to himself on the stairs, and at the same time he realized how desperately he loved her, that he had craved her love with all his heart and that until then he had always doubted whether she loved him. (FM, 72)
So unusual, so uncertain are such moments that they inspire fear and flight; what if he is wrong? In such circumstances, only the persistent vulnerability of doubt remains, most clearly demonstrated when the grown son goes to visit his mother and she throws herself into his arms. After exchanging a few words of welcome she immediately turns away:
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(E)lle semblait ne plus penser à lui ni d’ailleurs à rien, et le regardait même parfois avec une étrange expression, comme si maintenant, ou du moins il en avait l’impression, il était de trop et dérangeait l’univers étroit, vide et fermé où elle se mouvait solitairement. (PH, 58-59) (S)he no longer seemed to be thinking of him nor for that matter of anything, and she even looked at him from time to time with an odd expression, as if – or so at least it seemed to him – he were now in the way, were disturbing the narrow, empty, closed universe which she circled in her solitude. (FM, 44)
The emotional insecurity of the son in the face of his mother could not be clearer than in this, their first meeting in the book. Jean Sarocchi points out that in this scene the mother is given a concrete, human status: she has a physical description, grey hair, and an age. At the same time, as if to compensate, a process of idealization renders her ageless, the same as thirty years before.14 Although he profitably compares “Entre oui et non” with this first meeting in the novel, that first scene is also incorporated when, alone in the house, she sits in the growing darkness watching the activity of the street. Here, as he watches her, the child is filled only with a “despairing love” (PH, 159) that replaces previous uncertainty as to whether he loves her at all (PC, 274: E, 26), while none of the particular negativity associated with her remains. She no longer has a strange or supernatural character (MH, 219): she is no longer staring “abnormally” at the floor (E, 1215); neither is her brusque rejection of him recorded here; “He looks like an idiot, watching her like that. He should go and do his homework” (PC, 274: E, 26). Again, the aggressive impulse with which the son apparently identifies is suppressed in Le Premier Homme, which makes no mention of the attack on her in “Entre oui et non”. Instead, a comparison between these two scenes from the book sheds further light on the nature of love in this family. In face-to-face verbal contact the son is left feeling de trop, an intruder in her closed universe. In the second scene, only such intrusions can be the occasion for love, always unexpressed. The son is like the thief in the night, stealing such moments from the insentient mother: voyeurism alone is the source of power and knowledge, for only such instances offer the heavily interpreted confirmation of love. The son must unearth these moments and impose meaning on them. The absence of reciprocation (the death of the mother) is necessary for such moments, for her independent awareness admits the possibility of the wrong response. What 14
Le Dernier Camus, 54.
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has been removed, however, is not only his own ambivalence but also his own moment of certainty that the “truth” of her existence is that there is no existence, and no love: “She knows nothing. She does not think. What is, then, her secret on this earth?” (PC, 282). This particular vacuum cannot be filled, for Camus’s continuing inability to imagine her otherwise remains a central obstacle. At one point the author considers writing the book to the mother, to reveal at the end that she cannot read (PH, 292). Although by no means unusual at that time, illiteracy is her defining characteristic. A sustained address to the mother might have proved difficult to realize, as would the option of alternating chapters giving her a voice to comment on the same events but, he insultingly adds, “with her vocabulary of 400 words” (PH, 312). It is not surprising that Camus appears to have abandoned such options. As in L’Envers et l’Endroit, the mother makes the opening attempts at conversation, and the son, instead of responding, critically assesses the manner of her speech. When she speaks it is as if she “emptied” her head of thought, while her ensuing silence signifies not that her speech has dried up, but the capacity for thought itself (PH, 77). Perhaps only the determinedly wayward reader would think she is perhaps defeated by her treatment at the hands of a son whose only attempt at conversation is to interrogate her about his father and, indirectly, himself. But, as in “Entre oui et non”, the text allows no space for such idle speculation: the “vacuum” of her mind is filled by the narrator’s insistence on its vacuity. These factors problematize the assumption that she will be relieved of her mythical status in favour of a more realistic portrayal. As John Sturrock comments, she is depicted as “practically without a mind” with “no inner life of any kind, and her stoicism seems more vacuous than heroic”; his suspicion of Camus’s motives in creating such a character seems well-founded.15
The First Murder “For the first time”, then, Camus will bring real women into his work, because their role was of capital importance in his own development. Once more, they take up their old role not as the subjects of their own lives but as the vehicle of male self-representation. One might ask what has changed, what is being spoken of here for the first time in this return to the mother as his instrument, his symbol: the mirror that 15
“Something Royal”, New York Review of Books, 16 (17) (8 Sept. 1994), 6-7.
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does nothing but reflect back to the only subject the childhood of poverty from which he has never done anything else but flee (E, 1213)? Like Echo, the mirror reflects only the subject standing before it; although these reflections spread wider now, there is only surface rather than depth. The love that is eternally vacant, eternally turned towards him, this is the blankness Camus seeks to place at the centre of his work; and the silence of death. Under these conditions Le Premier Homme revives the oldest dream of confession, of rescuing “the truth” from the ocean of the ages. In the absence of the father, the mother is presented as the only one who can give absolution, “but you do not understand me and cannot read my words. And I am speaking to you, I am writing to you, to you alone” (PH, 319). The impossibility of verbal communication is forcefully illustrated throughout the work, as in the scene when the grandmother, on seeing her daughter’s new hairstyle, compares her to a slut, and the young Jacques tries to tell her she is beautiful; but she cannot hear him, and waves him away (PH, 116). As if this had silenced forever the verbal expression of love, we read that years later, when Jacques was about to tell her how beautiful she was, he dared not speak (PH, 60). Such poignant moments that stress the son’s continuing fear of rejection and his feelings of being superfluous – his own inability to express his emotions – are, however, far removed from Costes’s insistence on the wish to make his mother speak, to speak to and about his mother so that she will speak to him.16 Confession is predicated on the mother’s exile from the word, written and spoken; perhaps even, the confession may be envisaged only in consequence of this. This recalls Camus’s reflection that a man’s dislike of being judged explains his attachment to his mother; or to the woman blinded by love; or his love of animals (C3, 115). Like Don Juan’s conquests and like Ernest’s dog, the woman who does not think is incapable of judgement. I argued in chapter 1 that the young writer’s attempts to recreate this maternal figure were repeatedly defeated by his inability to imagine her inner life; this failure to give her a human dimension is only resolved by her transformation into a symbol, a final solution that determines her subsequent treatment. Camus’s entire literary activity is predicated not on the wish to make his mother speak but on the death 16
Albert Camus et la parole manquante, 127.
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of the mother, the death of the woman in her, and the death of all impenetrable Otherness.17 From the literal death in L’Étranger to the purely symbolic existence of La Peste or La Chute, there is no longer the need for surprise that others engage in conversation with her, treating her as if she were alive (E, 1216); and no need to confess his own suspicion that she is like an animated corpse. Camus’s literary career is founded on this first “death”, just as his own entry into the world of ideas entailed the death of that first world of ignorance and poverty from which he came. In his long endeavour to bring myths to life (E, 13) it is fitting that this, his final work, should resonate with Oresteian echoes. The Oresteian Trilogy recounts the murder of Agamemnon on his return from the Trojan war, by his wife, Clytemnestra, and her lover. Her son, Orestes, is charged by Apollo to avenge his father’s death, even though by committing matricide he would transgress the sacred blood bond, bringing down upon himself the punishment of the Erinnyes, upholders of the mother-right. This trilogy traces the overthrow of the old matriarchal religion by the newer, patriarchal one of Zeus and the gods of Olympus, which gives priority to the role and rights of the father. The actions of Orestes establish order and the rule of Reason / patriarchy over the chaos of Passion / matriarchy, as signified by the blood feud. In her postscript to Freud’s Totem and Taboo, Luce Irigaray suggests that the murder of the father was preceded by a more ancient crime, the murder of the mother: that this death marks the foundation of Western culture. The horror of Oedipus at his mother’s embrace is prompted not by the paternal taboo against incest but by the memory and guilt of that long-buried first murder.18 In Le Premier Homme Oedipus is replaced by Orestes.
The Personal and the Political Peter Dunwoodie has argued that Le Premier Homme is not primarily a récit d’enfance, but a political text that seeks to intervene politically
17
For a broader view of this subject see Colin Davis, “Violence and Ethics in Camus”, in Edward J. Hughes (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Camus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 107-117. 18 Le Corps-à corps avec la mère (Montreal: Éditions de la pleine lune, 1981). See Kirsteen H. R. Anderson’s “La Première Femme: the Mother’s Resurrection in the Works of Camus and Irigaray”, in French Studies, LVI (1) (January 2002), 29-43, for a different interpretation of the relationship between Irigaray and Camus.
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in the ongoing Algerian war of independence.19 Although posed in terms of a highly subjective return to personal roots, Le Premier Homme is clearly also prompted by events at the historical and political level. Indeed, after the loss of Algeria and the exodus of the settler community, there was a surge in writings mourning this lost homeland whose very existence testifies to the collective nature of that loss.20 Although Le Premier Homme was written before the end of the Algerian war, Camus’s belief that it was politically “too late” for the French Algerians was accurate, while his personal conviction was that once his homeland was lost he would himself be worth nothing (C3, 251).21 As in life, personal and political domains are inextricably merged as a whole community is forced to come to terms with wider historical forces beyond their control. Le Premier Homme is simultaneously a personal testament, a symptom of a collective mourning, and (regardless of Camus’s continuing attempt to maintain the mother as the symbol of a community outside of history) a demonstration of the extent to which no community and no individual are ever outside of history. This change of perspective relocates the family drama onto a wider terrain, moving the presentation of the mother away from a unique human complexity towards a universal, symbolic function. The escape from the closed circuit of the family is reflected in other ways, as with the theme of animality that pervaded “Entre oui et non”. In Le Premier Homme the mother no longer evinces the “animal silence” that linked her, the cannibalistic mother cat, and the Arab café owner, and which was limited to the confines of the claustrophobic family sphere. Instead, the uniquely negative aspects of this theme are suppressed in favour of its extension to an entire community living in a prelinguistic time outside of history. Now, a collective characteristic is reflected in microcosm within this family structure. Hence, his uncle’s “animal” attachment (PH, 118) for all the family is an illustration of the wider, equally instinctive attachment of the settler for his land, or of the relationship between Arab and settler; a mixture of violence and love. Again, if the childhood described in Le Premier Homme is one 19
See “Negotiation or Confrontation? Camus, Memory and the Colonial Chronotope”, in Christine Margerrison, Mark Orme, et al (eds), Albert Camus in the Twenty-first Century (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), 45-60. 20 See Jean Robert Henry (ed.), Le Maghreb dans l’imaginaire français: la colonie, le désert, l’exil (Aix-en-Provence: Édisud, 1985). 21 See Grenier-Camus Correspondance, 222.
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where the intellect has no place, this trait is in itself a collective one, as celebrated in earlier writings. As if in a parallel with the Freudian view of childhood and the development of civilization itself, the world of the family and community is presented under the sign of the id; the passionate outburst, the instinctive bond which has nothing to do with rational choice or verbal reasoning. Such associations extend far beyond the family circle to form the basis for the idea of the nation itself. Commenting on the self-sacrifing love inspired by the idea of the homeland, Benedict Anderson highlights those ties which are not chosen, expressed in the vocabulary of kinship and the home: Both idioms denote something to which one is naturally tied. (In) everything “natural” there is always something unchosen. In this way nation-ness is assimilated to skin-colour, gender, parentage, and birth-era – all those things one can not help.22
This likewise underlies the valorization of the blood tie in Le Premier Homme, where Camus writes about the greater love as that which was not chosen: the instinctive love. Jacques Cormery had loved his mother and his child, everything it had not been within his power to choose: Les êtres que le destin lui avait imposés, le monde tel qu’il lui apparaissait, tout ce que dans sa vie il n’avait pas pu éviter, la maladie, la gloire ou la pauvreté, son étoile enfin. Pour le reste, pour tout ce qu’il avait dû choisir, il s’était efforcé d’aimer, ce qui n’est pas la même chose. (PH, 309-10: my emphasis) The people fate had imposed on him, the world as it appeared to him, everything in his life he had not been able to avoid, his illness, his vocation, fame or poverty – in a word, his star. For the rest, for everything he had to choose, he had made himself love, which is not the same thing. (FM, 248: my emphasis)
Biology is destiny: the star. In earlier writings, the mother as biological origin was a source of ambivalence, compromising the god-like status of the individual man who creates himself. In “La Maison mauresque”, claim to possession of the Algerian soil rests ambiguously on the turn to the mother as origin, and the apparently simultaneous recognition of this as a possible source of contamination. Such hesitancy might be seen in the fragment cited earlier when the son realizes that everything that makes up his sensibility can be traced to the day he recognized that he had been born of this mother, and that she almost never thought (E, 1213). The movement away from these roots 22
Imagined Communities, 131.
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into a world of education and culture is underlined there by a contrast between the emotions and the intellect, and the fact of biological origin is presented as paradoxical. This paradox recalls a similar (although by no means identical) conflict experienced by Nietzsche: When I look for the deepest contrast to myself, the unimaginable baseness of instinct, I find always my mother and sister – to think of myself as related to such baseness would be blasphemy against my godliness.23
There is no such blasphemy in Le Premier Homme where, on the contrary, these very ties are celebrated and, as in the previous quotation, become the essence of the star (PH, 309). Yet, the King’s son must look further afield for his intellectual legacy and become, in this respect, his own pure origin. These are the two separate paths traced in Le Premier Homme, except that now this biological tie is celebrated, and those allied obscure forces of the soul. This change of emphasis marks a major shift in Camus’s work in the presentation of the family, which is no longer a question of heterosexual love, or of the legally sanctioned choice, but of a biological bond imposed willy-nilly by blood. No longer a source of contradiction, the affirmation of biological roots continues the association made in 1950 between this family and a notion of nobility: Près d’eux ce n’est pas la pauvreté, ni le dénuement, ni l’humiliation que j’ai sentis. Pourquoi ne pas le dire: j’ai senti et je sens encore ma noblesse. Devant ma mère, je sens que je suis d’une race noble: celle qui n’envie rien. (C2, 326) With them I have felt neither poverty, nor deprivation nor humiliation. Why not say it: I have felt and still feel my nobility. When I am with my mother, I feel that I am of a noble race: one that envies nothing. (SEN, 290)
The mother-son dyad establishes the bridge between that community / race outside of history and the universe beyond, to which the son now belongs. The “amour du couple” is redefined – based, not on heterosexual or incestuous love, but on the primacy and chastity of the blood tie: Je veux écrire ici l’histoire d’un couple lié par un même sang et toutes les différences. Elle semblable à ce que la terre porte de meilleur, et lui tranquillement monstrueux. Lui jeté dans toutes les folies de notre histoire; elle traversant la même histoire comme si elle était celle de tous les temps. (…) La mère et le fils. (PH, 308) I want to write here the story of a couple joined by the same blood and every kind of difference. She similar to the best this world has, and he quietly abominable. 23
Julian Young, Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Art (Cambridge: CUP, 1992), 151.
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Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus He thrown into the follies of our time; she passing through the same history as if it were that of any time. (…) Mother and son. (FM, 247)
In this distinction between the man thrown into history and the woman who represents the a-historical and unchanging community, it is no coincidence that she “escapes” history to signify the biological continuity of the generations, that “cultureless history of the generation sequence”. This symbolic dimension serves a dual purpose, as her outlook expresses also that attributed to her community who, untouched by modern technology, remain as they were a century earlier (C3, 264). More significantly, who but the mother could represent this theme of blood and soil? But this reconciliation remains a source of tension and conflict, leaving unresolved the paradox of maternal stupidity. The mother’s blood flows through the son’s veins, but what of the endless abyss of her mind? One source of resolution lies on the level of myth. The problem of the blood bond and of that primary instinctive allegiance is tackled otherwise in the Oresteia, which moves towards the judgement of Apollo that “The mother is not true parent of the child which is called hers. She is a nurse who tends the growth of young seed planted by its true parent, the male”.24 Another unnatural son – the fatherless Orestes, son of a king and a stranger in his native land – likewise grew to manhood without a mother’s love. But his return marks the overthrow of the old order, the victory of the intellect over instinct, and the proclamation of the instrumental status of the mother, whose body henceforth is the mere receptacle of a masculine principle.
The Matriarchy Christ did not set foot in Algeria, Camus was to reflect (PH, 292). Yet, the Christian overtones of the nativity scene at the beginning of Le Premier Homme suggest a relocation of the Holy Family in Algeria, the lost Ithaca. Of course, in itself the novel is a work in progress, and with this in mind I only suggest that one might detect traces of Camus’s Mythe de Némésis, the provisional title for an essay of which Camus was thinking from as early as 1951. How had the new religion of Christianity impacted on the older pagan values of Greece? The overt Christian symbolism of La Chute (envisaged as a precursor to his third cycle of work (C3, 187), Nemesis) had been disrupted by two 24
The Eumenides, 632-61.
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types of paganism: that represented by Greek myth; and precisely that mixture of Christianity and paganism that he witnessed in the South American macumba ceremony. There, however, that paganism emanated from Africa, not Greece. It would be as well to remember that Camus shared Nietzsche’s view of Christianity as a slave religion motivated by envy of the powerful, and that the only true Christian was Christ Himself. These details explain, perhaps, the sense of the reflection in the Carnets of May, 1958, where Camus writes that although the world is moving towards paganism it still rejects pagan values; these must be restored, belief paganized, and Christ must be Hellenized (“grécisé”) in order to restore balance (C3, 220). Just as, in conversation with Jean Grenier, Camus had asked how such a new sensibility as Christianity, so different from the ancient one, had been able to make its appearance,25 so one of his aims in Le Premier Homme appears to have been the examination of “ce que deviennent les valeurs françaises dans une conscience algérienne, celle du premier homme” (PH, 314) (“what becomes of French values in an Algerian consciousness, that of the first man”). In the pagan world the sexual act lay at the heart of all creation. On Olympus, Zeus and Hera could dispute which sex derived the most pleasure from love, and the female followers of Dionysus, in their frenzy, tore apart King Pentheus, his own mother ripping off his head. No more than her husband (who, on his return, brought his slaveconcubine, Cassandra, into the home) did Clytemnestra consent to the ten years of celibacy imposed by Agamemnon’s absence at the war. She, who had witnessed his sacrifice of their own daughter in the name of war, took a lover before finally avenging Iphigeneia’s death. This murderous female sexuality is replaced in Le Premier Homme by Mary, the Virgin Mother and the immaculate conception. “All that is left of her loves and desires” writes Irigaray, is “gentleness, tenderness or compassion”.26 There can be no Clytemnestra in Le Premier Homme. In this merger of paganism and Christ (or Clytemnestra and Mary), female sexuality is annulled; the imposition of celibacy permits the return to that female world. Yet, this couple of mother (“who dies to her generation in order to become merely the vehicle for the Other”)27 and son also recalls that earlier Apollonian couple, and Leto, 25
Souvenirs, 134. Luce Irigaray, Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche, Gillian C. Gill (tr.) (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 167. 27 Ibid., 166. 26
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mother of Apollo, torn apart before his birth by the thunderbolt of Zeus. The construction of the family around the bonds of blood renders the (earthly) father superfluous, and the exclusion of the son (a “monster”), by virtue of his intellectual faculties. The ties of blood override those of marriage to establish a family structure that banishes the outsider by blood. As the ascendancy of “blood” over “flesh”, the “amour du couple” relates here to the mother-son and the brothersister tie, which are substituted for those of marriage. After the grandmother’s death Catherine and Ernest live together in mutual harmony, “oui, comme mari et femme, non pas selon la chair mais selon le sang” (PH, 122) (“yes, like husband and wife, not in the flesh but in the blood”). Not incest but chastity is here restored at the very heart of the family. Thus, the chaste environment of “la Maison devant le monde” or the chaste sexuality of Marie and Meursault are returned to the “innocence” identified earlier as structuring a sexual topography. As Clamence noted, Greece requires chastity and pureness of heart. These archaic bonds take precedence over marriage, with an emphasis not on the father or the husband, but on the mother. In economic and political terms power in this society is clearly in the hands of men; equally, the level of male violence, described both here and in earlier writings, governs the behaviour of women. The rule of the matriarch extends no further than the confines of the claustrophobic apartment, while in the public sphere she must be defended by the men of her family.28 However, on the symbolic level the society presented here is that of the primitive tribe, introspective and jealous of outsiders, and the role of the father is transient: this is a primitive matriarchy. Such is the central discovery at the cemetery of St Brieuc, where the adult Jacques discovers himself to be older than his father, and recognizes this man, of whom he had never thought, as “unjustly murdered”. The linear order of time itself fragments to reveal that there was no order, no sense of lineage, but only “madness and chaos” (PH, 30) where the son is older than his father. At his father’s tomb, time dislocates, and “this new order of time is that of the book” (PH, 317), moving backwards towards the beginning, before the father’s death, to the time before his birth. 28 The scene before the restaurant of the man shot in a brawl is returned here to Algiers to demonstrate forcefully the vulnerability of the two women and children (PH, 128).
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In Le Premier Homme this pre-patriarchal framework signifies a return to the primitive world of the tribe where, in mythology at least, the father’s role is a frail one.29 Camus constructs a pre-Olympian culture built around the matrilineal blood bond. After the first World War, the loss of the father is a European-wide phenomenon, and the repercussions of this foreign war reverberate throughout Algerian society as daily, in every corner of Algeria, hundreds of Arab and French orphans are born, who would have to learn how to live without guidance or a paternal legacy (PH, 70). Yet, within Algeria itself these events are no new turn, but a continuation of the established order. Jacques’s father was himself from the orphanage (PH, 65) and estranged from his family. His mother and uncle are likewise fatherless, and the paternal line of their family has died out. This feature of colonization is underlined in Camus’s notes when he writes that of 600 settlers in 1831, 150 died while still under canvas (PH, 267); of these foundlings of colonization Camus remarks, “Yes, that is all of us” (PH, 299). The grandmother had married a man whose own paternal origins were wiped out after the grandfather, a poet, had been shot in the back by mistake. The result of this had been: l’installation sur le littoral algérien d’une nichée d’analphabètes qui se reproduisèrent loin des écoles, attelés seulement à un travail exténuant sous un soleil féroce. (PH, 82) the settling on the Algerian shore of a nest of illiterates who multiplied, far from any school, harnessed to a life of exhausting labour under a ferocious sun. (FM, 65)
The son / grandfather had been no match for his energetic young wife, who bore him nine children: he died prematurely, worn out by the sun, work, and perhaps marriage (PH, 82). His indomitable widow had sold the farm and moved to Algiers with her youngest children. Hence each branch of the paternal line has been successively erased, while the remaining blood line is matrilineal. Thus is traced the history of the mythical founding family; from its inception in 1848 the tribe has been fatherless, and its young men killed off by the violent struggle for the survival of the race: 29
See J. G. Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, abridged (London: MacMillan, 1995). The Golden Bough was highly influential at the beginning of the century, and Camus had read it as a student, as Carl A. Viggiani testifies in “Notes pour le biographe futur d’Albert Camus”, in AC1 (1968), 200-18 (208). It is also extensively quoted by Freud.
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Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus Des foules entières étaient venues ici depuis plus d’un siècle, avaient labouré, creusé des sillons (...) jusqu’à ce qu’une terre légère les recouvre et la région alors retournait aux végétations sauvages, et ils avaient procréé puis disparu. Et ainsi de leurs fils. Et les fils et les petits-fils de ceux-ci s’étaient trouvés sur cette terre comme lui-même s’y était trouvé, sans passé, sans morale, sans leçon, sans religion mais heureux de l’être. (PH, 178) Whole crowds had been coming here for more than a century, had ploughed, dug furrows (…) until the dusty earth covered them over and the place went back to its wild vegetation, and they had procreated, then disappeared. And so it was with their sons. And the sons and grandsons of these found themselves on this land as he himself had, with no past, without ethics, without guidance, without religion, but glad to be so. (FM, 150)
The arrival of the illiterate brood on the Algerian shores marks the end of the old, European civilization and the grafting upon a new geographical space of that culture not yet born, growing plant-like from the soil in conformity to Spengler’s vision of the organic cycle of the birth of culture. Without the Father, Civilization and the Law, maternal biology is the only parental trace. With no forefathers, each man is necessarily the First Man (C3, 142). In spite of the orthodox Camusian position which routinely and conveniently equates the grandmother with the father, this absence of the patriarchal family structure is reflected in Jacques’s own family in the return to an older matriarchal system where emphasis is on the bonds of blood. All the members of the Cormery family are the direct descendants of the grandmother. Although the son, Joséphin, sleeps elsewhere, he eats still in the family home, and it is as if this separate household is a preparation for his later, temporary marriage, which is kept outside the family sphere (PH, 114). Sexuality brings not renewal but threat to the cohesion of the family unit. Two incidents illustrate the banishment of the predatory sexual outsider. The first concerns Catherine Cormery’s friendship with Antoine, and the violent quarrel that ensues between Ernest and the other man. The second concerns the story of Pirette and the perennial nightmare of the guillotine. What marks out Pirette, servant of the family he slaughtered, is his position as an unrelated outsider. The grandmother’s enigmatic denial of the young Jacques’s assumption that he murdered in order to steal (PH, 80) darkly implies an unspeakable sexual motive. Here, the exsanguineous outsider had been admitted into the family, for which they had suffered bloody retribution. Such menace extends to the later massacre at the Raskil farm and that “permanent danger” presented by the Arabs, which is further illustrated when the aunt checks each eve-
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ning that all the windows and doors are bolted against this bloodthirsty intruder (PH, 257) who would destroy the family – a threat implicitly posed by the father himself (or the would-be lover).30 Exsanguineous relationships are temporary – satellites of the central, enduring maternal bond. The matriarch’s semi-divine status is illustrated by the rivalry between the two adult sons. When, during one of Ernest’s rages, she grabs him by the hair, asking whether he would hit his own mother, he bursts into tears, telling her that she is to him like the good Lord Himself (PH, 115). Such deference to the mother reaches back to the origin of the tribe, for it is she who ensures the maintenance and continuation of the race. In this respect all men in this primitive environment are sons of the mother, a factor that likewise resituates Jacques’s father as a son. “Madness and chaos” indeed, but herein lies the crucial distinction between the established civilization of France and the new “barbarians” of Algeria, where each man needs must be the First Man. Chaos denotes the time before the earth’s creation, while in the cemetery of Saint-Brieuc the dawning recognition is that there is no patrilineal descent for any son of Algeria, where all that is represented by patriarchy – education, culture, and ultimately civilization – has not yet had time to develop; the efforts of the men have been entirely diverted into the construction and protection of hearth and home, tribe and race. Literacy is a useless luxury where life, limb and the survival of the species are at stake. This is recognized and glorified in the hunting scene, where Ernest comes into his own (PH, 106). In 1937 Camus had spoken of a new culture, presented under the sign of nature rather than the social (E, 1327). In this light, the grafting of the new culture on the Algerian soil was a primeval and necessary battle for space distanced from the act of colonial expansion or conquest: The plant possesses the ground in which it roots. It is its property, which it defends to the utmost, with the desperate force of its whole being, against alien seeds, against overshadowing neighbour plants, against all nature. (...) The bitterest fights over property occur – not in the Late periods of great Cultures, between
30
For an alternative explanation of the significance of Pirette, see Edward J. Hughes, ‘“Tranquillement monstrueux’: Violence and Kinship in Le Premier Homme”, in Constructing Memories: Camus, Algeria and “Le Premier Homme”, Peter Dunwoodie and Edward J. Hughes (eds) (Stirling: Stirling French publications, 1998).
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Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus rich and poor, and about moveable goods – but here in the beginning of the plant world.31
Algeria represents the “naïve times” of L’Homme révolté and its men are children (E, 413) who reflect this rudimentary infant culture. The brief and violent pleasures of life, and the cult of virility, celebrated in “L’Été à Alger”, have not been abandoned here, nor revised. The life of men takes place outside the family circle, in the homosocial and natural sphere (under the sun, in the sea). Freed from the confines and obligations of domesticity, men come into their own, “uninhibited and in a mood of amused tolerance that is peculiar to men when they are together for some brief, violent pleasure” (PH, 102-03). Their hunting activities underline the harmony of the male body in action, and the primeval status of man the hunter in this relocation of the pack at the beginning of time. The narrator’s own admiration for man in nature and his “Adamic innocence” (PH, 98) is reflected by Jacques’s recognition that the companionship of men nourishes the heart (PH, 103). This aspect of the child’s education is as important as any other he is to receive. Culturally, these men are children (barbarians), but their over-riding superiority lies in the fact that they are real men, and at the dawn of a new age: Affrontés à... dans l’histoire la plus vieille du monde nous sommes les premiers hommes – non pas ceux du déclin comme on le crie dans (mot illisible) journaux mais ceux d’une aurore indécise et différente. (PH, 321) Confronting … in the oldest story in the world we are the first men – not those of the decline as they shout in the (illegible word) newspapers but those of a different and undefined dawn. (FM, 255-56)
Those of the decline are the men of the waning European civilization; such is the implication of the old farmer’s assertion that there are no men left in France (PH, 168), and the scene sketched out in the appendix when, after his arrest by the army, the hero comments that the soldier had doubtless never met “men” before (PH, 285). The violence of the hunt expresses the link between man, nature and innocence, where innocence is a total adaptation of the individual to the universe in which he lives (C1, 90). Theirs is the amoral innocence of wolves, untamed. This is the same “chaste” violence exhibited in sexual relationships with women, and as exemplified by Vincent in “L’Été à Alger”. In a different context, the reference to Cain (PH, 178) extends 31
The Decline of the West, II, 344. Camus was himself careful to distinguish elsewhere between imperialism and colonial expansion (E, 897-98).
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this innocence, where violence is naturalized, to social relations between the races. This is also seen in Veillard’s conviction that, besides themselves, the only others who can understand are the Arabs: “On est fait pour s’entendre. Aussi bêtes et brutes que nous, mais le même sang d’homme. On va encore un peu se tuer, se couper les couilles et se torturer un brin. Et puis on recommencera à vivre entre hommes. C’est le pays qui veut ça.” (PH, 168-69) “We were made to understand one another. Fools and brutes like us, but with the same blood of men. We’ll kill each other for a little longer, cut off each other’s balls and torture each other a bit. And then we’ll go back to living as men together. The country wants it that way.” (FM, 141)
Here is again the belief, expressed in 1937, and implied in “La Femme adultère”, that the land, and shared activity, creates unique collective characteristics in its people. In contrast to effeminate and decrepit European values, only in Algeria is there (in the words of Raymond) always understanding between men. The “maternal camp” of the Cormery household is far from a paradise of pure, altruistic love. If the young Jacques learns to value the company of men, a similar emotion concerning women is strikingly absent from this account of childhood. On the contrary, pleasure is to be found outside the home, while the return there is associated with restrictions, repression, and harsh punishments. Although the overtly cannibalistic aspect of matriarchy is excised here – for there is no mother cat eating her kittens (E, 28) – the cat’s inability to nourish her young is expressed in other ways, as illustrated earlier with regard to the child’s need for love, of which the mother is not a source. This description seems still to apply to the later draft of the novel, where affective deprivation is the hallmark of this family and the childhood “from which he had never healed” (PH, 44). Indeed, the traditional maternal role is notably absent. The mother is the silent witness of Jacques’ beatings, yet nothing in her behaviour supports the assertion that these blows hurt her equally (PH, 61). This faith contrasts markedly with the earlier paradoxical depiction of her as a mother who knew neither how to love or to caress her children, and hence “indifferent” (MH, 219) – for what is a good mother who does not know how to love? Both as a child and grown man the son constantly strives to explain, justify and interpret her apparent lack of maternal feeling. Ultimately, the solution is found in the harshness and poverty of her existence, which allows no time nor energy for the expression of love. She is “prevented” from intervening in their punishments by fatigue,
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inarticulacy and respect for her own mother, but nonetheless in some intangible, Christ-like way she “endured” those blows on behalf of her children (PH, 61-62). During childhood, the search for love is particularly urgent when Jacques suffers the grandmother’s whip, and the experience of emotional deprivation is at its height. Pain is once more associated with love when Jacques has an accident at the uncle’s workshop and Ernest’s reaction leads to the discovery of the uncle’s “quasi animal attachment” for his family (PH, 118). Later, M. Bernard’s administration of the cane (the stick of “barley-sugar”) is perceived as containing a curious mixture of paternal affection and sadism (PH, 142). This is an unmistakeable echo of Mersault’s ambition to “lick his life like barley-suger, to shape it, sharpen it, love it at last” (MH, 124): there, this impulse is associated with the possession of Marthe’s body, which he could “dominate and humiliate”, while the revolver with which Mersault murders Zagreus equates with the “barley-sugar stick” when Zagreus licks the barrel and sticks his tongue into it to suck out “an impossible happiness” (MH, 78). Even aside from such intertextual associations it is not difficult to detect a deformation in the emotional development of the child, where violence and love are intimately related, in the face of a total absence of any other expression of affection. Despite the narrator’s denials the social dimension rescues the family from the charge of monstrosity: they are the victims of poverty and “elemental need” and cannot be condemned for this, for they hurt one another without wanting to (PH, 118). Again, here is hardly the “lost paradise” drawn in the preface to L’Envers et l’Endroit. Poverty breeds a lack of sentimentality that might be taken for insensitivity, as in the grandmother’s harsh attitude towards death. Her attitude symbolizes that of the whole nation, determining the character of a people deprived by their collective destiny of the sort of “funeral piety” exhibited in more “civilized” lands (PH, 153). Thus, such apparent lack of empathy has a heroic dimension, further reflected in the plight of the women. They have been forced by circumstance to fight against poverty in a struggle that is so exhausting that the maternal function becomes impossible. Both the mother of Jacques (condemned to a life of celibacy) and her mother might legitimately ask Dora’s question: “Am I a woman now?” This matriarchal family is no haven of love and security but the domain of the chaotic emotions – instinct and passion, violence and ignorance.
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The Patriarchal Trace I earlier suggested a reconciliation between biology and the intellect. If Camus had previously felt alienated from these people, the embrace of blood ties does not in fact cancel out the awareness that the King’s son must “learn, understand without help, and become a man finally without the help of the only man (M. Bernard) who had rescued him; grow and bring himself up alone, at the highest cost” (PH, 163). The intellectual sphere, and the child’s intellectual mentors, could not be further divorced from notions of biological inheritance or blood lines. Amputated from their men, the women create the world implied by those such as Victoria of L’État de siège: closed in on itself (PH, 163), with no interest in the wider world, and with no belief system or ethical principles to pass on to their children. In such circumstances, the moral development of the child is entirely neglected: in the absence of guidance he only knows that some things were forbidden and punished, whereas others were not (PH, 86). Only the school offers such instruction, and this world provides a sanctuary from the home environment, where poverty and ignorance made life “harder and more bleak” (PH, 137-38). In its various incarnations the masculine world (school, male friendships, the football field, the hunt, the workshop, and later, the world of work and the briefly glimpsed ship’s cabin) offers such refuge, in the form of both physical and intellectual activity. At times even, this other world intervenes in the isolated “poor island” (PH, 255) to rescue one of its sons. When Jacques tells his schoolmaster that his grandmother is in charge (PH, 151), it is he who visits her and he who throws Jacques into the world, “taking onto himself the responsibility for uprooting him” (PH, 149). This act of midwifery is “the only paternal gesture” of his childhood, and M. Bernard had changed his destiny (PH, 129). The above comments clearly establish the significance of paternal figures on the periphery of this society. Another such figure is the father of M. Veillard at Solférino, who exemplifies the old settler spirit despised in Paris (PH, 167). He had ruthlessly succeeded in taming the soil, a labour seen as the sole product of his own indomitable spirit. When forced to evacuate his farm, this patriarch tears up his vines and empties away his wine. His life furnishes a contrast to that of the grandmother, herself a product of this same spirit – yet when left a widow she had been forced to break up her family and abandon her farm for a life of poverty in Algiers. Later, it is Victor Malan (Jean Grenier) who fulfills the paternal role:
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Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus “Lorsque j’étais très jeune, très sot et très seul (...), vous vous êtes tourné vers moi, et vous m’avez ouvert sans y paraître les portes de tout ce que j’aime en ce monde.” (PH, 36) “When I was very young, very foolish, and very much alone (…) you paid attention to me and, without seeming to, you opened for me the door to everything I love in the world.” (FM, 26)
Representatives of a repressive patriarchal power – the police who break up street brawls, and the priest who unjustly hits Jacques (PH, 158) – are rejected. This is the sense of the reflection that as children “without God or a father, the masters offered to us horrified us. We lived without legitimacy” (PH, 321). But the few positive patriarchal figures (substitute fathers indeed, if far removed from blood lines), give access not to the Law but to the world of the intellect, recognizing and encouraging the child’s innate abilities. Even the First Man needs this inheritance: “even the most gifted need someone to initiate them” (PH, 36). Thus the child inherits the best of French civilization which is combined with the best of his own rudimentary native culture. Yet, this intellectual inheritance entails uprooting, the rejection of his childhood background: the doors opening to him lead away from mother and family into a different world, and in order to achieve these goals, bringing himself up alone, he had to pay “the highest cost”.
The Unnatural Son Before her death at the hands of her son, Clytemnestra has a premonitory dream that she has given birth to a snake.32 A similar theme of the son as an unnatural monster accompanies the writing of Le Premier Homme, where a number of extratextual comments reflect on the son’s alien status and his failure to fit into this environment; just as he is ashamed of his shame (PH, 187) at their poverty or illiteracy, so his judgements of his family are turned against him as proof of his own “monstrous” condition (PH, 127), while a further footnote describes the adult Jacques as a monster (PH, 185). What marks him out as a stranger to the family and community in which he was born is precisely his status as the son of many fathers, and the non-biological legacy bequeathed to him which will tear him from this world of women (PH, 163), finally to equip him to change this world. Intellect, combined with education, alienates him from this world: 32
The Libation-Bearers, 503-29.
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On ne peut vivre avec la vérité – “en sachant” – celui qui le fait se sépare des autres hommes, il ne peut plus rien partager de leur illusion. Il est un monstre – et c’est ce que je suis. (PH, 284) One cannot live with truth – “knowingly” – and he who does sets himself apart from other men, he can no longer in any way share their illusion. He is a monster – and that is what I am. (FM, 233)
Just as the Mediterranean is later the symbolic boundary between two worlds, so during childhood a further boundary separates the domestic sphere from the world beyond. The return home is associated with the darkness of night and the anguish of death (PH, 211). This is “the same anguish” he feels when ordered by his grandmother to fetch a hen from the yard (PH, 212), for which act of bravado he is invited to assist in the cutting of its throat. Like the high priestess of an older religion, the grandmother officiates, draining the struggling creature of its blood. Later that night, this memory accompanies the child to the bed he shares with his brother, in which he tries to avoid physical contact. This scene parallels the earlier one when he first heard the story of his father’s journey to view the execution of Pirette. Lucien Cormery had vomited at the memory of this death (PH, 80), just as his son swallowed down his nausea at the horror of the hen’s execution. Jacques’s nightmares, where he imagines himself as the executed man, reveal the “sole heritage” (PH, 81) passed from father to son – the status of outsider, facing the inevitable retribution meted out to all who do not belong. This sentence is ominously confirmed by the grandmother, who is compared to Cassandra as she predicts that he will end up on the scaffold. The first oblique reference to her as a prophetess (PH, 81) becomes explicit shortly afterwards when “Cassandra” is officiating over the pots and pans in the kitchen (PH, 84). There, a comical and domestic dimension qualifies earlier connotations as her supernatural powers are limited to the inspection of the soles of the young boy’s shoes. However, this new note of humour in her depiction33 alleviates the violence and threat contained in the first allusion without altering its significance. In the Oresteia it was Cassandra who prophesied the death of Agamemnon at the hands of his wife and her lover, and the later return of Orestes, “a son resolved to kill his mother, honouring
33
See Le Dernier Camus, 57.
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his father’s blood”.34 The blood-stained farm-house, scene of Pirette’s crime, becomes like the house of Atreus “whose very stones bear guilty witness to a bloody act; that hides within these gates remnants of bodies hacked, and murdered children’s bones!”35 Thus, his sole paternal inheritance further endows on him the status of a destroyer. There can be no Clytemnestra, no adulterous and vengeful wife. At most there is the occasional suggestion, cloaked in humour, that marriage is detrimental to a man’s health. But in Le Premier Homme the grandmother herself is like one of the dark Furies of the Underworld, for this matriarch is associated with violence and blood. She it is who had “reigned” over her own family of nine children and later dominated the life of the child (PH, 81-82), which is overshadowed not only by fear of punishment, but by her more lasting judgements that he is a liar and a thief – and, finally, that he is an “enfant dénaturé” (PH, 253), an “unnatural” son. The description of childhood is framed by the lies he tells, tracing the ethical development of the son and the waning power of this matriarch as he grows into adulthood. The typical “lies” of childhood are caused by the wish to play football, which conflicts with the necessity not to wear away his shoes, or the wish to watch a football match in spite of the scarcity of money. Yet, in all cases the judgement is the same: he is a liar. Shame combines with a disgust that clings to the grandmother at the memory of one incident where he claimed to have dropped a two-franc coin in the primitive toilet. Once more, she is in the kitchen, chopping up food: Et, épouvanté, Jacques la vit retrousser la manche de son bras droit, dégager son bras blanc et noueux et sortir sur le palier. Lui se jeta dans la salle à manger, au bord de la nausée. Quand elle l’appela, il la trouva devant l’évier, son bras couvert de savon gris et se rinçant à grande eau. “Il n’y avait rien,” dit-elle. “Tu es un menteur .” (PH, 87) And Jacques, horrified, saw her roll up her right sleeve, baring her knotty white arm, and go out onto the landing. He dashed into the dining room, on the verge of throwing up. When she summoned him, he found her at the washbasin. Her arm was covered with grey soap, which she was rinsing off in a gush of water. “There was nothing there,” she said. “You’re a liar.” (FM, 70)
In life as in death, apparently, the grandmother sees the monster in her grandson, revealed (as ever) through reference to excrement and the 34
Aeschylus, Agamemnon, Philip Vellacott (tr.) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), 1279-1305. 35 Agamemnon, 1085-1107.
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bodily filth of life; as if by searching here it is his own character she examines. This incident is prefaced by the comment that no-one had ever taught the child the difference between right and wrong, but ends with the lesson learned that poverty over-rides ethical considerations – a lesson reinforced as he enters into manhood. Here, although from the same cause, it is at the grandmother’s instigation that he lies in order to obtain temporary employment for the summer. The pay-packet he takes home burns in his pocket like a brand of shame (PH, 251), but whereas the first, child’s lie had been prompted by the desire for selfgratification, the second is told for his family’s sake, and is a necessary lie. Indeed, his family’s pride when he presents his pay counterbalances this shame. “You are a man”, his uncle tells him (PH, 252). This entry into manhood also marks his revolt against the grandmother’s rule. No longer the child bound to blind obedience: (Si), un jour, lui qui avait jusque-là accepté patiemment d’être battu par sa grandmère (…) lui arracha le nerf de bœuf des mains, soudainement fou de violence et de rage et si décidé à frapper cette tête blanche (…) que la grand-mère le comprit, recula et partit s’enfermer dans sa chambre, gémissant certes sur le malheur d’avoir élevé des enfants dénaturés mais convaincue déjà qu’elle ne battrait plus Jacques. (PH, 252-53) (If), one day he who till then had patiently accepted being beaten by his grandmother (…) tore the leather whip out of her hands, suddenly crazed, in a furious rage, so determined to strike that white head (…) that the grandmother understood him – she recoiled and went to close herself in her room, sobbing certainly over the misfortune of having raised unnatural children but already knowing she would never beat Jacques again. (FM, 214)
This challenge to matriarchal power signifies the coming of a new order; it promises a reconfiguration of French values “in an Algerian consciousness, that of the first man” (PH, 314). From this chaotic world without civilization and the Law, a new, Apollonian, principle might perhaps be glimpsed: what the First Man discovers is that “every man is the first man, nobody is” (C3, 142)). The mother symbolizes a “feminine” principle passively enduring the knocks of an unchanging history (PH, 81) while remaining eternally, “geologically” untouched. In his notes for the novel, an alternative symbol is proposed when Camus considers beginning the last part of the book with the image of the blind donkey patiently turning its wheel in a circle, enduring the beatings, the heat and flies. From this endless effort springs water (PH, 316), even if through no conscious design or self-sacrifice on the part of the animal itself. The contrast
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between that Absurd hero, Sisyphus, and the domestic donkey could not be greater. Although the dead father shares the same quality of endurance, he, on the contrary, acts within History and remains untouched through an effort of the Will: Un homme dur, amer, qui avait travaillé toute sa vie, avait tué sur commande, accepté tout ce qui ne pouvait s’éviter, mais qui, quelque part en lui-même, refusait d’être entamé. (PH, 67) A hard man, bitter, who had worked all his life, had killed on command, had submitted to everything that could not be avoided, but had preserved some part of himself where he allowed no-one to trespass. (FM, 52)
He attains an archetypal status, embodying the active and founding principle at the tribe’s origins: [Jacques] voyait son père qu’il n’avait jamais vu (...), il le voyait sur ce quai de Bône parmi les émigrants (...). Il était là, décidé, sombre, les dents serrées, et après tout n’était-ce pas la même route qu’il avait prise de Bône à Solférino, près de quarante ans plus tôt, à bord de la carriole, sous le même ciel d’automne? (PH, 174) [Jacques] saw his father, whom he had never seen (…), he saw him on the dock at Bône amongst the emigrants (…). He was there, resolute, sombre, teeth clenched, and, after all, was this not the same road he had taken from Bône to Solférino, almost forty years earlier, on the wagon, under the same autumn sky? (FM, 146)
Through this unification of the Dionysian and Apollonian, every man and no man becomes the First Man. For this reason, forever unknown to his son, the man who is indistinguishable from the rest becomes the universal figure;36 the early history of colonization intervenes to create a timeless link between the origins, the father, and the contemporary Veillard, who recounts the legend of the forefathers (PH, 175-76). Peter Dunwoodie has pointed out that in this portrait of early colonization, Camus necessarily has recourse to a mythical, collective memory that supplements personal, or family memory; that Camus is faced with a stereotype of the founding fathers that was inextricably bound up with a colonial ideology associated, in particular, with Louis Bertrand and the Algerianist movement. The two major intertexts of Le Premier Homme are Maxime Rasteil’s Le Calvaire des colons de 48, published in 1930, and Louis de Baudicour’s Histoire de la colonisation de l’Algérie, first published in 1859.37 Dunwoodie points out 36 This transformation echoes the desire of the Fool of “Intuitions”, who is “universal because I don’t want to be individual” (PC, 183). 37 Paris: Challamel, 1859.
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that Rasteil’s book is a popular version of official, academic histories that express this colonial ideology. However, perhaps its attraction for Camus lay in the fact that it was based on a manuscript written by Eugène François, whose parents were on one of the convoys to Mondovi in 1848 (and whose mother, sister and brother-in-law died in the cholera epidemic of 1849). Equally, despite Dunwoodie’s surprise that Camus used Baudicour, such an old history of colonization (published seven years before Bertrand’s birth) as his second intertext, perhaps the attraction of this text lay in the fact that it was more of a contemporary account than the type of “official” history to which Dunwoodie is referring.38 Baudicour focuses on individuals and their stories – as is illustrated by the story of Dr Tonnac, the first settler in the Mitijda, mentioned in Camus’s notes (PH, 269). Tonnac spoke Arabic, was careful to abide by traditional rules of behaviour, and appears to have established amicable relationships with his neighbours – some of whom, at least, were prepared to side with him against the tribes fighting with Abdelkader.39 If, as Louis Althusser suggested, we cannot occupy a position outside of ideology, we must nevertheless confront the difficulty of reading accounts from the past through the ideological lens of the present day. Pirette is a further illustration of this problem. Baudicour’s story of Pirette, reworked in Le Premier Homme (PH, 269), concerns no slaughter of an innocent family. On the contrary, the Pirette of 1839 single-handedly defended his home against an overwhelming attack, before being forced to flee death under cover of night.40 This raises the question of why the family memory of the father’s attendance at a public execution, which Camus mentioned at several points in his writings, is conflated in the novel with a different, collective memory of heroism that reaches back to the beginnings of settlement. Certainly, Camus had read the account in Baudicour. But Le Premier Homme reinterprets Pirette the hero as a brutal murderer, as if following the course, not of historical fact, but of future interpretations of such facts – themselves inevitably influenced by changes in ideology. “Official” history has since become the property of the FLN and its complexity has, as a result, been reduced to a “narrative of heroes and villains”.41 As if in anticipation of this imminent monopolisation, 38
“Camus, Memory and the Colonial Chronotope”, 55. Histoire de la colonisation, 48. 40 Histoire de la colonisation, 50-52. 41 Algeria: Anger of the Dispossessed, 5. 39
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Pirette’s metamorphosis seems symbolic of colonial history and its changing political interpretations.42
The Blood of History Alistair Horne decribes a scene from the Philippeville massacre where an entire pied noir family had been butchered; the mother disembowelled and her five-day-old baby, hacked to death, replaced in her womb.43 This particular type of violence encapsulates that “long, ageless day” in which the renegade missionary found himself, where history and progress seem to stand still; a form of barbarism, apparently timeless, with which Camus associated the FLN (most of whose victims were other Muslims). To this judgement must be added Camus’s assessment of Islam, which, as Jean-Yves Guérin has noted, he saw as obscurantist and reactionary.44 It was with Philippeville in mind that Camus wrote “Le sang, s’il fait parfois avancer l’histoire, la fait avancer vers plus de barbarie et de misère encore” (E, 964) (“blood, if it sometimes moves history on, moves it towards even more barbarism and wretchedness”). Violence and the sexual victimization of women are revealed as a timeless feature as the recent past (the attack on the Raskil farm which had left the father and two sons with their throats cut, the mother and daughter repeatedly raped, then murdered (PH, 167) ) merges with the first trace of settlement and the pregnant woman discovered with “her belly slit and her breasts cut off” (PH, 177). Sarocchi has suggested that the mother is absent from chapter 7,45 yet her presence forcefully haunts such references, providing a yardstick against which the conflict is measured, as when Jacques reflects on what he has been told, thinking of her and the butchered, pregnant woman. This was in the nature of war, Veillard had said: “Soyons justes”, ajoutait le vieux docteur, “on les avait enfermés dans des grottes avec toute la smalah, mais oui, mais oui, et ils avaient coupé les couilles des premiers Berbères, qui eux-mêmes... et alors on remonte au premier criminel, vous
42
For an alternative account of Rasteil, Baudicour and Pirette, see also Edward J. Hughes, “Building the Colonial Archive: The Case of Camus’s Le premier homme”, Research in African Literatures, 30 (3) (Fall 1999), 176-193. 43 A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962 (New York: New York Review of Books, 2006 [1977]), 121. 44 “Des Chroniques algériennes au Premier homme. Pour une lecture politique du dernier roman de Camus”, Esprit, 211 (May 1995) (5-16), 11. 45 Le Dernier Camus, 227.
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savez, il s’appelait Caïn, et depuis c’est la guerre, les hommes sont affreux, surtout sous le soleil féroce”. (PH, 177-78) “Let’s be fair”, added the old doctor. “We shut them up in caves with their whole brood, yes indeed, yes indeed, and they cut the balls off the first Berbers, who themselves… and so on all the way back to the first criminal – you know, his name was Cain, and since then it’s been war, men are abominable, especially under a ferocious sun”. (FM, 149)
Let’s be fair. What is briefly alluded to here became a matter of public record in nineteenth-century France when, in a number of actions perpetrated by the French military, entire tribes were trapped inside caves and asphyxiated: children, women, men and their livestock. The Arabs’ early treatment of Berbers in the above quotation is illustrated on the body of the French soldier, who is in turn the victim of such barbarity (PH, 66), while that particular trail of violence ends here (and not there) in abstraction. Jacques’s thoughts are of his own mother at the beginning of this passage, with the overt comparison to the mythical foremother and the anonymous first son, there ripped untimely from his mother’s womb. More distant history telescopes into family biography as the brutally ended progress of that first bogged-down cart is retrieved and carried forwards from the first chapter of the book. The mutilated soldier, Motherhood defiled and butchered, are French Algerian: the threat of danger lingers still in the first chapter, hovering over the book’s present, with the suggestion in the appendix that the mother may be killed in an explosion (PH, 279). But this symbol of suffering motherhood is not all-encompassing: elsewhere, Assia Djebar reproduces an eye-witness account of the enfumade in the caves at Dahra: “J’ai vu un homme mort, le genou à terre, la main crispée sur la corne d’un bœuf. Devant lui était une femme tenant son enfant dans ses bras. Cet homme, il était facile de le reconnaître, avait été asphyxié, ainsi que la femme, l’enfant et le bœuf, au moment où il cherchait à préserver sa famille de la rage de cet animal”.46 “I saw a dead man, with one knee on the ground, grasping the horn of an ox in one hand. In front of him lay a woman with her child in her arms. It was easy to see that this man had been asphyxiated, together with the woman, the child and the ox, while he was struggling to protect his family from the enraged animal”.47
46
L’Amour, la fantasia, 86-87. Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade, Dorothy S. Blair (tr.) (London: Quartet, 1985), 73. 47
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In Le Premier Homme other murdered mothers are buried in the silence of the Algerian caves, briefly resurrected by Veillard to establish a fleeting balance. Rape, mutilation and murder are the prerogative of the Arab, as the one-sided wealth of detail implies. One of the few things Jacques knows about his father is his condemnation of the “dirty race” who could defile a soldier’s body and display themselves so unworthy of the label “man” (PH, 66). The races may share the same male blood, but they are not after all “bound by the same blood” (PH, 308). The same words, “dirty race”, are heard again in the mouth of a worker after the bombing of civilians in Algiers (PH, 74-75). The immediate reaction to outrage (“they must all be killed” (PH, 75) ) expresses, perhaps, the inarticulate belief that, amidst all the horrors of war, some actions still constitute crimes of war. Thus, the actions of the other side (the sexual mutilation of soldiers, the murder of civilians) are placed beyond the boundary of civilization. As to bias, one might as well complain that, despite her numerous allusions to it, Assia Djebar’s writings do not accurately portray the full brutality and scale of the North African slave trade in Europeans and Africans. Edward J. Hughes suggests a collapse of distinctions in Le Premier Homme between “innocence” and “guilt”, which skews the historical perspective. He sees in Camus’s “deliberately broad picture of man’s inhumanity” a form of moral relativism.48 Such emotionally laden distinctions between “innocence” or “guilt” are inappropriate in this context. Indeed, it was precisely against such forms of moral relativism that Camus argued in 1958 when he wrote that, whatever the cause, it was dishonoured by the murder of innocent civilians (E, 894), and that it seemed to him both indecent and harmful to cry out against torture alongside those who had directed the massacre at Melouza,49 or the mutilation of European children (E, 894). Moral relativism is precisely his target when he comments that: La vérité, hélas ! c’est qu’une partie de notre opinion pense obscurément que les Arabes ont acquis le droit, d’une certaine manière, d’égorger et de mutiler tandis que l’autre partie accepte de légitimer (…) tous les excès. (E, 894-95) The truth, alas, is that one section of public opinion thinks obscurely that the Arabs have gained the right, in a certain manner, to cut throats and to mutilate, while the other section justifies (…) every excess.
48
Le Premier Homme: La Peste, 23. In Melouza in 1957, 378 villagers, suspected of supporting a rival nationalist faction, had been massacred and mutilated in the course of a night by the FLN. 49
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Speaking of a “casuistry of blood”, he notes that each side justifies its latest outrage by pointing out the crimes of the other. In this context, Camus’s “deliberately broad picture” is a subtle reminder that History has no beginning; there is always a prior cause used to justify present violence. Above all, the justice of a cause does not automatically confer moral purity on those who support it, as the contemporary history of Algeria – and thousands of murdered or exiled Algerians – testifies. In his Carnets of 1955 Camus reflected that throughout history, once the slave overthrows his oppressor, he reigns as the master and oppresses others in his turn (C3, 175). However abstract Camus’s reference to an alternating cycle of “persecutors-persecuted” stretching back to Cain may seem, history itself has justified this particular foreboding in a manner reminiscent of Walter Benjamin’s belief that the only continuum of history is that of the oppressors, whereas “the history of the oppressed is a discontinuum”.50 As Shoshana Felman writes: Because official history is based on the perspective of the victor, the voice with which it speaks authoritatively is deafening; it makes us unaware that there remains in history a claim, a discourse that we do not hear. And in relation to this act of deafening, the rulers of the moment are the heirs to the rulers of the past.51
Le Premier Homme seems to anticipate that coming time when the voices of the Algerian poor will be drowned out by the victorious history of the independence struggle, policed by the one-party state.52 It is of those millions whose plight, he says, is never considered in Algiers or Cairo, that Camus claims to speak: C’est à eux et aux miens que je continue de penser en écrivant le mot d’Algérie et en plaidant pour la réconciliation. C’est à eux, en tout cas, qu’il faudrait enfin donner une voix et un avenir libéré de la peur et de la faim. (E, 896-97) It’s of them, and of mine, that I continue to think in writing the word Algeria and in pleading for reconciliation. It is in any case to them that a voice should at last be given, and a future freed from fear and hunger.
50
“Paralipomènes et variantes des Thèses ‘Sur le concept de l’histoire’, Écrits français”, Jean-Maurice Monnoyer (ed.): cited by Shoshana Felman, “Benjamin’s Silence”, Critical Inquiry, 25, 2 (Winter 1999) (201-34), 210. 51 Ibid, 210. 52 If the Algerian people are now insisting on knowing the truth of their recent history, it ill befits others to continue to ignore it. See, for example, Benjamin Stora, “Algérie: les retours de la mémoire de la guerre d’indépendance”, Modern and Contemporary France, 10 (4), 2002, 461-473: Martin Evans, John Phillips, Algeria: Anger of the Disposessed (London: Yale University Press, 2007).
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It remains true that in Le Premier Homme Camus conflates French settlers and Algerian peasants into a single category of “the poor”, bypassing the colonial structures that divided them. But with the passage of time, however utopian this move may seem, his pleas for reconciliation have been reassessed by those such as Assia Djebar.53 As befits Camus’s Spenglerian presentation of history, the mother represents that eternal and cultureless, generational history; she is presented as an unchanging figure of reconciliation outside of history. The friend Saddok from the hero’s youth, who is to turn towards terrorism, renders hommage to this French Algerian mother: Saddok se lève, va vers (la mère de Jacques), la main sur le cœur, pour embrasser sa mère en s’inclinant à l’arabe. Or J. ne lui a jamais vu faire ce geste, car il était francisé. “Elle est ma mère”, dit-il. “La mienne est morte. Je l’aime et la respecte comme si elle était ma mère”. (PH, 279) Saddok stands up, goes towards (Jacques’s mother), his hand on his heart, to kiss her while bowing in the Arab manner. Now Jacques had never seen him make this gesture, as he was French-educated. “She is my mother”, he said. “Mine is dead. I love and respect her as if she were my mother”. (FM, 230)
In both communities alike “Paradise is at the feet of the mother”. Yet, this deference cannot obliterate the memory of the mutilated pregnant woman, or of mother and daughter raped and murdered. Moreover, evidence of indigenous culture, singularly absent from the rest of the book, makes an entrance in connection with Saddok to underline not its civilization but its oppressive, sexual barbarity. However “assimilated”, Saddok consents to an arranged marriage, identified as a cruel tradition. The rape of settler women is revealed as the public expression of the private life of this community when Saddok admits that through marriage he will strip a stranger of her clothes, and rape her to the sound of gunshots (PH, 313). It may be argued that here Saddok becomes a counterpart to Jacques himself, for both men demonstrate commitment to their roots, despite reservations. Yet here chastity, the hallmark of the French Algerian family, contrasts with sexual depravity and excess, rendering Saddok’s commitment to his race far less honourable or understandable than that of Jacques. There is, moreover, a more profound significance attached to this contrast, for other nightmarish fantasies in the Carnets concern above all the settlers’ fear of sexual defilement to their women – as with the man who, having fought for the Arab cause, is caught up in an anti53
Le Blanc de l’Algérie (Paris: Albin Michel, 1995).
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French riot and kills his wife in order to save her from rape; or the man who had fought “for them” for 20 years “and the day of their liberation they killed my mother” (C3, 154). When the wife of a European friend is raped and killed, the “first man” and his friend pursue and kill the guilty man: “His shame, afterwards. History is blood” (C3, 177). The European who supports their cause is repaid not by gratitude but by a sexual blood lust and the destruction of the blood line, to which the only response is death rather than dishonour. History is blood in more than one sense, for it is above all the family and the integrity of that blood. I earlier suggested that the mother is the traditional symbol for the theme of blood and soil. For these same reasons this symbol incorporates conflict on this contested soil. Inherent conflicts surface through the invocation of the land itself as mother, and the suggestion that through their shared birth-place all share “the same virile blood” (PH, 168). At the same time, however, Arabs are revealed to fall far short of the ideal of manhood: “a man”, the father states, would not commit such butchery (PH, 66). Mother and son are “bound by the same blood” (PH, 308) in quite a different way, and the fears surrounding the destruction of such ties point up that difference. These men are not all from the same family, united by common linguistic and cultural roots. In reality Jacques is attached not to the romanticised Kabyle shepherd, but to the one who resembled him the most – his friend Pierre (PH, 193). Individual allegiance to the one who is the same is reflected on the collective level by the nightmare of the invasion of Europe by hordes of black, dark- and yellow-skinned races, signalling the death of himself and of “those who resembled him” (PH, 310) and their Western values. Thus, associations between mother / earth and mother / race encapsulate the divisions and conflicts to which the settlers are prey. This contrast subverts the equation between blood and soil which, under the sign of the mother, confers the same identity on all the races. Increasingly, the mother is associated with the earth and that primary, unreasoning allegiance lying in the “obscure part” of the soul: the love that was never chosen.
Mother Earth Jean Sarocchi equates the “hymn” to the instincts in the final chapter with, finally, a return to the Mother Earth; the response of the French Algerian whose homeland and mother are threatened. His argument is compelling: it is the tragedy of Oedipus brought to its ultimate conclu-
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sion, incest with the mother earth.54 But associations between “terre et mère” mark a major theme in the novel concerning the ascendancy of biology and the durability of this generational history, in turn reflected by the successive births and deaths of Civilizations on the surface of this earth. The visceral reactions when family and homeland are threatened have long been recognized as a contributory factor to Camus’s predicament over the Algerian war. Camus’s comments in Stockholm concerning his mother, that he believed in justice but would defend his mother before justice (E, 1882), seem to reflect that predicament, as do his comments in Le Premier Homme concerning the primary bond as that which is not chosen. These reactions are not unlike those of Dora, and her yearning for “love rather than justice” (TRN, 385), except that the love she claims is of a different nature. For the chorus of women from L’État de siège, “men prefer ideas. They flee their mother” (TRN, 298). Jan of Le Malentendu had returned to biology in the name of duty, and was murdered for his pains. If previously duty had conflicted with the demands of biology, in Le Premier Homme these claims are reassessed and duty is realigned. Such a reassessment is indicated in Camus’s notes of April, 1959: J’ai voulu vivre pendant des années selon la morale de tous. (...) Maintenant j’erre parmi des débris, je suis sans loi, écartelé, seul et acceptant de l’être, résigné à ma singularité et à mes infirmités. Et je dois reconstruire une vérité – après avoir vécu toute ma vie dans une sorte de mensonge. (C3, 266) For years I wanted to live according to the ethics of all. (…) Now I wander amongst the debris, I am without the law, torn apart, alone and accepting to be so, resigned to my singularity and to my infirmities. And I must reconstruct a truth – after living all my life in a sort of lie.
In June, 1959 he reiterates that he has abandoned the ethical point of view, which leads only to abstraction and injustice (C3, 268). Such an abandonment is already foreshadowed in Camus’s words to Ahmed Ibrahimi in 1956, when he tells him that the hour is coming when noone will be able to remain neutral; if the violence continues then duty will demand that he return to his own community.55 Duty becomes a question of primary allegiances; like honour, it is “a matter of the blood and not of reason”.56 Camus’s star, which led him away from 54
Le Dernier Camus, 252. De la décolonization à la révolution culturelle, (Alger: SNED, 1981), 182. 56 The Decline of the West, 343. 55
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Algeria and family, now leads him home. From Algiers in 1956, where he is to present his appeal for a civil truce, Camus rediscovers this star, lost in the cowardly intellectual climate of Paris, and which is likewise associated with the accomplishment of duty: “Yes, I rose happy, for the first time in months. I have rediscovered the star” (C3, 182). Thus Camus reaffirms his own nobility, for in the quotation cited earlier it is precisely this acceptance of the inevitable that is the source of the star: “The people fate had imposed on him (...) everything in his life he had not been able to avoid, his illness, his vocation, fame or poverty – in a word, his star” (PH, 309-10). It is, finally, at the heart of this family that the writer discovers “true nobility”, inextricably bound up with the obscure forces of the soul. He would never learn from them who his father had been, nor even whether his childhood memories were faithful to the past: Bien plus sûr au contraire qu’il devait en rester à deux ou trois images privilégiées qui le réunissaient à eux, qui le fondaient à eux, qui supprimaient ce qu’il avait essayé d’être pendant tant d’années et le réduisaient enfin à l’être anonyme et aveugle qui s’était survécu pendant tant d’années à travers sa famille et qui faisait sa vraie noblesse. (PH, 127) It was far more certain, on the contrary, that he was left with two or three favourite images that joined him to them, made him one with them, that blotted out what he had tried to be for so many years and reduced him to the blind anonymous being that for so many years had survived through his family and that made up his true nobility. (FM, 104)
I have tried to distinguish between the fictional person of the mother and the traditional metaphor of the earth as mother. The return to the earth is not a return to the mother, but to that which is associated with her, yet which “he could not obtain” from her. Rather than union with her we see a fetishistic dispersal onto all that necessarily substitutes for her – replaces her to fill the void of her dead presence and ultimately to surpass that void; a return not to her but to the obscure part of the self. Biology as mother adds a further layer to an old preoccupation: “Finally he takes Empedocles as a model” (PH, 307). Here is a new variation on the old theme of divine self-creation: Seule, la terre “grave et souffrante” est vraie. Seule, elle est la divinité. De même que cet Empédocle qui se précipitait dans l’Etna pour aller chercher la vérité où elle est, dans les entrailles de la terre, Nietzsche proposait à l’homme de s’abîmer dans le cosmos pour retrouver sa divinité éternelle et devenir lui-même Dionysos. (E, 483-84) Only the “sad and suffering” earth is true – the sole divinity. Like Empedocles who threw himself into Etna to find truth in the only place where it exists, in the
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This is a return to the “conscious deaths” of Noces and the peopling of the world with “man-gods” rooted in the earth (C1, 140: E, 88). Le Premier Homme substitutes a European figure, the Tsar, for the Oriental fils de roi. In this, Camus returns to Le Mythe de Sisyphe and to Kirilov, whose contemplated “superior suicide” is not only a revolt against death but a lesson for all men: “this earth will be peopled with Tsars and illuminated with human glory” (E, 185). Through his action, Kirilov annexes Christ to become a “man-god” (E, 184).57 The impulse here reflects that of Intuitions, and Mersault’s conscious death, while the words “I began to believe in my innocence. I was a Tsar. I reigned over everything” (PH, 283) carry overtones of Tarrou and of Clamence. Once more, a contrast is established between the “king of life” and the secret embodied in the opaque figure of woman – here “a truth he had lost and which alone justified existence” (PH, 273), preserved intact by the mother. This is the nature of the reconciliation between biology and intellect in Le Premier Homme, for the embrace of biology (the mother) does not compromise but magnifies the status of the fils de roi. Just as the private sphere is retrieved in the novel, so the claims of women (in the theatrical works) are endowed with “greatness” through their incorporation into a new, masculine ideal of duty. The parallel established with the birth of Christ at the novel’s beginning founds a different lineage around the earthly couple of mother and son. The earthly father is supplanted, and the genealogy of “J.C.” merges with that of the fils de roi as a son of many fathers who nonetheless bears the divine mark. The merging of the divine and the human condition creates a new balance between destiny and biology, which no longer undermines the role of the intellect. The Tsar (PH, 283) magnifies himself through self-abasement before the mother. In his examination of the differences between racism and nationalism Benedict Anderson claims the following distinction: (N)ationalism thinks in terms of historical destinies, while racism dreams of eternal contaminations, transmitted from the origins of time through an endless sequence of loathsome copulations: outside history. (...) The dreams of racism actually have their origin in ideologies of class, rather than in those of nation: 57 Similarly, “maman” is compared to an ignorant “Muichkine” (PH, 295), who, in Le Mythe “lives in a perpetual present nuanced by smiles and indifference, a happy state which might well be the eternal life of which the prince speaks” (E, 186-87).
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above all in claims to divinity among rulers and to (…) “breeding” among aristocracies. No surprise then that the putative sire of modern racism should be, not some petty-bourgeois nationalist, but Joseph Arthur, Comte de Gobineau.58
I have suggested, however, that women and the mother figure herself are the ones associated with eternal contamination in Camus’s earlier writings. La Chute is accompanied by the shadow of Gobineau, and the “galloping” increase of the indigenous Algerian population. To these is linked that cyclical history proposed by Oswald Spengler, for whom the decline of the West was inevitable. This is glimpsed in the appendix to Le Premier homme with its prediction of billions of other races pouring into Europe. But with the death of the West dies that ancient dream of the newly-born culture on the Algerian soil. Then: (T)out ce qu’on avait appris, à lui et à ceux qui lui ressemblaient, tout ce qu’il avait appris aussi, de ce jour les hommes de sa race, toutes les valeurs pour quoi il avait vécu, mourraient d’inutilité. Qu’est-ce qui vaudrait encore alors?... Le silence de sa mère. Il déposait ses armes devant elle. (PH, 310) (E)verything that had been taught, to him and to those like him, also everything he had learned, on that day the men of his race, all the values he lived for, would die of uselessness. Then what will still be worthwhile? His mother’s silence. He lay down his arms before her. (FM, 248-49)
We cannot know what place this passage might have had in Le Premier Homme, but in this apocalyptic dream of a “clash of civilizations”, this first biological tie becomes the repository for all that has been destroyed and all that might be reborn. Skin colour is the mark of difference, contrasted to “those who resembled him (...) the men of his race”. Biology is both a cause of division and a source of refuge, delineating “us” and “them”. It becomes the source of a collective identity, and I suggest that this is the nature of the resolution between individual identity and biological origins in Le Premier Homme. No longer victim of a potential “series of loathsome copulations”, “breeding” and “historical destiny” begin to merge. The apparently irreconcilable juxtaposition of a destructive racial chaos and the silence of the mother in the above quotation underlines her troubled and ambiguous status in the novel. Sarocchi rightly speaks of the primitive and violent conviction that the Algerian soil, in contrast to the “land of tender civilization”,59 engenders one race of 58
Imagined Communities, 136. Le Dernier Camus, 251. The word “tender” is based on Sarocchi’s reading of the manuscript: in the text it is designated as illegible (PH, 261).
59
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men, antagonistic but inseparable, and there can be no doubting this important dimension, associated with Camus’s view of organic social development. Yet the mother’s “geological” aspect (PH, 11) collides with her biological role: offered as a universal symbol of reconciliation outside of history, or racial and colonial conflict, she is simultaneously identified with the French Algerian community. Only as the celibate mother may she symbolize all the races: yet this virginity also guarantees the pure origin of the one race and the one son. These latent conflicting messages surrounding her symbolic status here underpin the presentation of race. Whereas the text presents a picture of racial symbiosis, a number of critics have noted the ambivalence of this move. Although the first chapter demonstrates the interdependence between settlers and Arabs, they are confined to marginal roles on the periphery of the society. Guérin points out that this society is shown as a cosmopolitan melting-pot of Italians, Spanish, or Jewish, in a manner that recalls L’Été.60 He notes the recurrent linking of the adjectives “français” and “arabes” throughout the text – as victims of the First World War (PH, 70) or workers (PH, 196-99). But, he says, although poverty brings together the French and the indigenous population, this does not make them the same, neither does it make them equal.61 France is consistently presented as foreign soil – not only to Jacques’s mother but to the child himself (PH, 137). Despite his attachment to his French friend, Didier, Jacques regards him as an exotic foreigner (PH, 192), in contrast to his friend Pierre (PH, 193). This is likewise expressed in the image of the Kabyle shepherd watching migrating birds return from the North. In this echo of Camus’s earlier identification with the nomads of Laghouat (C3, 52), what unites Jacques and the shepherd is not only a shared homeland but a shared poverty, unknown to those from France and over-riding colonial differences. But such insistence on lack of difference resembles the move in “Intuitions” to swallow up the surrounding environment. Poverty is equated with the tirelessly repeated trait in Jacques (and claimed by Camus himself) of generosity and lack of regard for material wealth – not locking his hotel door, offering to give all his possessions to his friend Malan. It is not only narcissism that facilitates this appropriation, but a political and personal point is also being made, 60 61
“Pour une lecture politique du dernier roman de Camus”, 8. Ibid., 13.
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and as articulated in the avant-propos to Actuelles III. The French Algerians descend from those who had chosen France over Alsace in 1871, and given their lives for France in 1914: poor themselves, they had never oppressed or exploited anyone (E, 897). Poverty thus becomes an unequivocal alibi against the charges of colonial oppression or exploitation. Moreover, Camus insists, the French Algerians are also, in the strongest sense of the term, indigenous (E, 1013). These are the political and personal messages underlying Le Premier Homme.
The Dark Forces of the Soul Beneath the impulse to define and appropriate lies an apparent need to discover, factors reminiscent of the ambivalence discerned in “La Maison mauresque”. Only in the final chapter are such desires addressed, in a deliberate move away from everyday reality “on the surface of life” to a deeper, instinctive reality beneath. Because the book was so tragically severed, it is impossible to know where these reflections might have led. What seems clear, however, is that the present text of the novel is only a small part of the work envisaged, which was to run into two volumes.62 Undoubtedly, the final chapter seems an important transitional stage which was to have announced a chapter on the adolescent (PH, 271) and, presumably, a time of sexual awakening. Whereas the preceding text presents everyday life with a high degree of realism, here the role of the instincts is privileged. At the same time markers in the text denote that the previous narrative is concluded (“la vie de cet enfant avait été ainsi” (PH, 255); (“The life of this child had been like this”), and viewed retrospectively from the vantage point of the forty-year-old man (“tel qu’il était maintenant, lui, Jacques, à quarante ans” (PH, 255-56); “as he was now – he, Jacques, at forty”), while the suggestion is that this marks a turning point (“Mais était-ce là tout” (PH, 256) ) (“But was that all there was”) inaugurating a concentration upon a “second life” always underlying the first: (C)’était ainsi, mais il y avait aussi la part obscure de l’être, ce qui en lui pendant toutes ces années avait remué sourdement comme ces eaux profondes qui sous la terre, du fond des labyrinthes rocheux, n’ont jamais vu la lumière du jour et reflètent cependant une lueur sourde (...) aspirée peut-être du centre rougeoyant de la terre (…) où toute vie semblait impossible. (PH, 256) 62
This is what Camus had said during an interview for Swedish radio, cited by Olivier Todd (Albert Camus: une vie, 703).
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Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus (T)hat’s how it was, but there was also the secret part of his being, something in him that through all those years had been blindly stirring like those measureless waters under the earth which from the depths of rocky labyrinths have never seen the light of day and yet dimly reflect a light (…) drawn perhaps from the glowing centre of the earth (…) where any life seems impossible. (FM, 216)
The following sentence continues for a further two pages, like many in this chapter, as if to underline the break with the realism of the previous narrative style and the long-held desire to write, without restriction, everything that comes into his head (C2, 299, 301). This desire is itself associated with the obscure forces of the soul that Camus had long attempted to surround by barriers (E, 12; E, 140) and which now seem to come flooding out, or to erupt like the lava from a volcano. If the mother is a problematical symbol of all the races, it is she who holds the key to that other secret kingdom of the instincts. I have suggested that the link between mother, animal and Arab in “Entre Oui et non” functioned only negatively to increase her own strangeness: likewise, the same associations in L’Étranger between mangy (syphilitic?) Arab nurse, Arab mistress, prostitute, “fourrière” (the prostitute’s cell) and Salamano’s mangy dog further complicate the nature of Meursault’s return to the mother. In La Peste Spanish ancestry is redeemed and incorporated into the maternal symbol – as in Le Premier Homme, where the author is to speak of both racial discrimination against the Spanish (PH, 269) and of his own “Spanish side” (PH, 284). In turning back to the question of origins, Le Premier Homme returns to earlier associations, later suppressed, that link mother, sexuality and race. These, as ever, are cloaked in obscurity, like the obscure conviction that prompted Camus to attempt to rewrite L’Envers et l’endroit (E, 13). If Empedocles dives into the bowels of the earth to discover the truth, then the earth into which Jacques Cormery dives is that world of poverty, dirt, ignorance – the world of the instincts and emotions, sexuality and “et la part d’ombre qu’elle jette sur toute vie” (E, 1136) (“the shadow it casts on all life”). As ever, this is a journey into the self but, however narcissistic, this last chapter provides a rich source of information concerning these obscure forces about which Camus was increasingly to speak. Apparently written in one burst, it establishes the chain of associations suggested in this book between the land, the indigenous population, and sexual desire. These are authorised not only by the chaste symbolic presence of the mother, but
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by the uncle Ernest and the valorisation of the instincts and the primitive, associated with him. Such associations begin, however, with the invocation of the hostile land, and the equation between this and Cormery’s own primitive instincts which, through the years, were attuned to: (C)et immense pays autour de lui dont, tout enfant, il avait senti la pesée avec l’immense mer devant lui, et derrière lui cet espace interminable de montagnes, de plateaux et le désert qu’on appelait l’intérieur, et entre les deux le danger permanent dont personne ne parlait parce qu’il paraissait naturel. (PH, 257) (T)his immense country around him; as a small child he had felt its weight and that of the immense sea before him, and behind him the endless expanse of mountains, plains and desert called the interior, and between the two the permanent danger no one spoke of because it seemed natural. (FM, 116-17)
This “permanent danger” remains un-named, only evoked through the description of the aunt barring the doors and windows of her isolated farm. Was it ever named? In L’Étranger, as is often noted, Arabs are presented as a threatening force of nature, barely distinguishable from the hostile land. Here, Arabs and land are interchangeable, instilling in the child a mixture of awe and heroism in the face of this country into which he had been thrown, as if he were the first inhabitant, or the “first conqueror”: (D)ébarquant là où la loi de la force régnait encore et où la justice était faite pour châtier impitoyablement ce que les mœurs n’avaient pu prévenir, avec autour de lui ce peuple attirant et inquiétant, proche et séparé. (PH, 257) (L)anding where the law of the force still prevailed, where justice was intended to punish without mercy what custom had failed to prevent – around him this people, alluring yet disturbing, near and separate. (FM, 217)
In the early days of conquest, isolated from the metropolitan centre, each military commander was king, and each man was the first conqueror, or “adventurer”. The romantic myth of the adventurer appears here as part of the folk-lore of his upbringing. I suggested the association between the conquest of land and sexual conquest, an association returning here through reference to its “alluring yet disturbing” people. This language recalls that of the first confrontation with the Arab world in “La Maison mauresque” and the conflicting imagery of power and impotence, sexual attraction and perceived impassive hostility. Despite intercommunal friendships, each evening they withdrew into their unknown houses, which the settlers never entered:
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Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus (B)arricadées aussi avec leurs femmes qu’on ne voyait jamais. (S)i on les voyait dans la rue, on ne savait pas qui elles étaient, avec leurs voile à mi-visage et leurs beaux yeux sensuels et doux au-dessus du linge blanc. (PH, 257) (B)arricaded as well with their women whom one never saw, or if you saw them on the street you did not know who they were, with faces half-veiled and their beautiful eyes sensual and soft above the white cloth. (FM, 217: translation amended)
Here lies the true enigma of this population, in the unknown women of this community. Each is barricaded against the other: yet latent fear of the primeval horde surfaces at the sight of the indigenous population in their numbers. Although a minority in the towns, they were: (S)i nombreux dans les quartiers où ils étaient concentrés, si nombreux que par leur seul nombre (...) ils faisaient planer une menace qu’on reniflait dans l’air des rues certains soirs où une bagarre éclatait entre un Français et un Arabe. (PH, 257-58) (S)o numerous in the neighbourhoods where they were concentrated, so many of them that by their sheer numbers, even though exhausted and submissive, they caused an invisible menace that you could feel in the air some evenings on the streets when a fight would break out between a Frenchman and an Arab. (FM, 217)
Echoes of L’Étranger resurface in the depiction of the brawl, which, the writer insists, has no particular significance, yet was not received in the same way by the Arabs of the neighbourhood, who would congregate as a silent, “steadily agglutinating mass” (PH, 258). Unlike “L’Été à Alger”, the arrival of the police brings no potential for fraternity here, only a conflict of interpretations and coincidence of reactions. Again, the existence of the Arabs is associated with the primary instincts: as the animal may sniff the scent of danger in the air, so the European (here the prey) recognizes the menace of the horde, that allenveloping mass. Gassin has described Patrice Mersault as a “flaireur” (“sniffer”), noting a marked tendency towards coprophilia in the Camusian hero, and Le Premier Homme provides overwhelming evidence for these observations.63 Gassin has pointed to the dead kittens of “Entre Oui et non” and to Mersault’s desired immersion in the mud of Silesia (MH, 116-17), connecting these examples with the mother and the return to the “Mother Earth”.64 In “Obscur à soi-même”, however, the first allusion to the earth and the sense of smell is connected with the indige63 64
L’Univers symbolique, 178, 159. Ibid., 159.
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nous population, and this same sense then links a chain of “obscure desires” and “powerful, indescribable sensations” (PH, 259) leading from the ambivalent emotions surrounding the indigenous population to the smell of books, stables, his mother’s hands, flowers, classrooms, to the accoutrements of femininity. These associations lead to the pleasure experienced in physical contact, first with schoolfriends’ bodies, and then the casual touch of women, in turn associated with immersion in the warmth of the earth – all that he had unconsciously hoped to receive from his mother, but did not receive: (O)u peut-être n’osait pas obtenir et qu’il retrouvait près du chien Brillant quand il s’allongeait contre lui au soleil et qu’il respirait sa forte odeur de poils, ou dans les odeurs les plus fortes et les plus animales où la chaleur terrible de la vie était malgré tout conservée pour lui qui ne pouvait s’en passer. (PH, 260) (A)nd perhaps did not dare to get it, but he found it with the dog Brillant when he stretched out alongside him and breathed his strong smell of fur, or in the strongest and most animal-like odours where the marvellous heat of life was somehow preserved for him who could not di without it. (FM, 219)
Maternal deprivation appears here a legacy passed down through the generations, for the attachment of the child to the dog mirrors that of Ernest (PH, 100), perhaps for the same reasons. The clear parallel is with Salamano and his dog, yet the couple of brother and sister (PH, 122) or of mother and son (PH, 308) provide a further, ominous analogy. In each case, the mother occupies the place of the dog, an unfortunate convergence sometimes noted by commentators.65 The fetishism of the text extends beyond this equation, for the dog symbolically replaces the mother to apply to all women as sexual partners. These links are confirmed not only by the reference to an un-named woman he had loved, but by the earlier reference to lipstick, which they sniffed, “excited and uneasy, like dogs that enter a house where there has been a female in heat, imagining that a woman was this block of perfume” (PH, 259). It has been one argument of this book that sexuality is the crucial point of intersection connecting questions of race with the treatment of women. As the draft of Le Premier Homme concerns mainly the time of childhood, any assessment of these links here is necessarily inconclusive. Yet the final chapter of the book supplies a wealth of evi65 Gassin notes in the symbol of the dog a range of disquieting characteristics in Camusian man: sado-masochism, coprophilia, sexual insecurity, even perversion. See L’Univers symbolique, 221.
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dence concerning these associations between sexuality and race, and the associations of the mother with both. During the course of this book I have noted that the purity of the mother as a symbol is dependent on the negation of her physical reality. Although in Le Premier Homme Camus seeks for the first time to unite the two, I have pointed out the extent to which this fusion subverts her role as a symbol of potential harmony to point up, instead, the deep and visceral conflicts that underlie the notion of Algeria as a homeland for all. “Yes, death is an axe, and it left the shadow of its blade, of its blow, of its curve towards the ground even in the text itself”, writes Assia Djebar of Le Premier Homme and its author.66 Ending as I do on an unfinished work and an unfinished life, or death, I offer no resolution, and no final judgement on the writer or his work. As for Camus’s political views on Algeria, in the twenty-first century History itself will be his judge. My aim has been merely to draw attention to areas of the writer’s work that have been for too long neglected, in the hope that they might also furnish new areas of debate or reassessment; in the hope that you might go beyond or overturn my arguments. In a late entry to the notebooks Camus writes that: Pour moi la vie est secrète. Elle l’est à l’égard des autres (...) mais aussi elle doit l’être à mes propres yeux, je ne dois pas la révéler dans les mots. Sourde et informulée c’est ainsi qu’elle est riche pour moi. (C3, 252-53) For me life is secret. It is with regard to others (…) but it must also be in my own eyes, I must not reveal it in words. Muffled and unformulated, this is its richness for me.
In examining the treatment of women in Camus’s work I have tried to follow the secret “second life” of which Le Premier Homme begins to speak, and to focus on those areas where, for Camus, “it is not I but my pen that thinks, remembers or discovers” (C3, 275). This is the life on which the light of lucidity never shines, yet whose repercussions spread beyond the “digues” of the consciously constructed work of art to reveal, “muffled and unformulated”, the richness of those sources the author begins to mine.
66
Le Blanc de L’Algérie, 30.
Selected Bibliography Works by Camus Théâtre, récits, nouvelles, preface by Jean Grenier, edited by Roger Quilliot (Paris: Gallimard, 1962) Essais, introduction by Roger Quilliot, edited by Roger Quilliot and Louis Faucon (Paris: Gallimard, 1965) La Mort heureuse (Cahiers Albert Camus 1), introduction and notes by Jean Sarocchi (Paris: Gallimard, 1971) Le Premier Camus: Écrits de jeunesse d’Albert Camus (Cahiers Albert Camus 2), introduction and notes by Paul Viallaneix (Paris: Gallimard, 1973) Fragments d’un combat: 1938-1940 Alger Républicain (Cahiers Albert Camus 3), 2 vols, edited with notes and commentary by Jacqueline Lévi-Valensi and André Abbou (Paris: Gallimard, 1978) Caligula (version de 1941) suivi de “La Poétique du premier Caligula” (Cahiers Albert Camus 4), edited and presented by A. James Arnold (Paris: Gallimard, 1984) Journaux de voyage, presented and edited by Roger Quilliot (Paris: Gallimard, 1978) Albert Camus éditorialiste à “L’Express” (Cahiers Albert Camus 6) (Paris: Gallimard, 1987) Le Premier homme (Cahiers Albert Camus 7) (Paris: Gallimard, 1994) Albert Camus: Carnets I (1935-1942) (Paris: Gallimard, 1962) Albert Camus: Carnets II (1942-1951) (Paris: Gallimard, 1964) Albert Camus: Carnets III (1951-1959) (Paris: Gallimard, 1989)
Translations Selected Essays and Notebooks, edited and translated by Philip Thody (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979) Youthful Writings, translated by Ellen Conroy Kennedy (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980) A Happy Death, translated by Richard Howard (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973) The Outsider, translated by Joseph Laredo (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000) The Myth of Sisyphus, translated by Justin O’Brien (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975) Caligula and Cross Purpose, translated by Stuart Gilbert (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965) The Plague, translated by Stuart Gilbert (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1948) The Rebel, translated by Anthony Bower (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962) The Fall, translated by Justin O’Brien (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963) Exile and the Kingdom, translated by Justin O’Brien (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962) The First Man, translated by David Hapgood (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1995)
Other Fictional Works Cited Aeschylus, The Oresteian Trilogy, trans. Philip Vellacott (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972)
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Conrad, Joseph, Heart of Darkness (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973) Dante, Alighieri The Divine Comedy: Volume 1: Inferno, trans., with an introduction, notes and commentary by Mark Musa (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984) Djebar, Assia, L’Amour, la fantasia (Paris: Albin Michel, 1995) ____ Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade, Dorothy S. Blair (tr.) (London: Quartet, 1985) Gide, André, L’Immoraliste (Paris: Mercure de France, 1957) Gobineau, Joseph Arthur, Les Pléïades (Monaco: Éditions du Rocher, 1946) (first published 1874) ____ Sons of Kings, Douglas Parmée (tr.) (London: Oxford University Press, 1966) Homer, The Iliad of Homer, trans. Richmond Lattimore (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969) Homer, The Odyssey of Homer, trans. Richmond Lattimore (New York: Harper Perennial, 1991) Ibsen, Henrik, Ghosts, and Two Other Plays by Henrik Ibsen trans. R. Farquharson Sharp (London: Dent, 1945) Marlowe, Christopher, Dr Faustus, edited by Roma Gill (London: A & C Black, 1990) Ovid, Metamorphoses, translated, with an introduction by Mary M. Innes (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1955) Plato, Symposium, trans. by Robin Waterfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994)
Selected Books and Articles about Camus Abbou, André, “Les paradoxes du discours dans L’Étranger: de la parole directe à l’écriture inverse”, in AC2 (1969), 35-76 ____ “Les structures superficielles du discours dans La Chute: Essai d’analyse des formes linguistiques”, Albert Camus 3 (1970), 101-25 ____ “D’un mirage l’autre, ou les pièges de la critique littéraire symptomale”, in AC 5 (1972), 179-87 ____ “Le Quotidien et le sacré: introduction à une nouvelle lecture de L’Étranger”, in Gay-Crosier, Raymond (ed.), Albert Camus: Œuvre fermée, œuvre ouverte? 231-65 ____ “Nature et place d’une théorie de la libération de l’homme dans la pensée d’Albert Camus”, in Guérin, Jean-Yves (ed.), Camus et la politique, 117-127 ____ (ed.), Albert Camus et l’Europe, (9-10 nov 1990), (O.F.I.L., 1995) (Papers from this conference are available on floppy disk, unpaginated.) Achour, Christiane, Un étranger si familier; lecture du récit d’Albert Camus (Alger: ENAP, 1984) ____ “Symbolique d’un espace”, in Revue Celfan/ Celfan Review (May 1985) 4(3), 27-29 Amash, Paul J., “The Choice of an Arab in L’Etranger”, Romance Notes, 10 (1) (Autumn 1967) 2-5 Amoia, Alba, “Sun, sea and geraniums: Camus en voyage”, in Knapp, Bettina (ed.), Critical essays on Albert Camus, 56-72 ____ “Albert Camus’s Exile and the kingdom”, Dalhousie French Studies 19 (FallWinter, 1990), 43-50 Anderson, Abraham, “L’Homme révolté and ‘Le Renégat’”, in Rizzuto, Anthony (ed.) Albert Camus’ “L’Exil et le royaume”: the third decade, 43-51
Selected Bibliography
319
Anderson, Kirsteen, “Justification and Happiness in Camus’s La Mort heureuse”, Forum for Modern Language Studies 20 (3) (July 1984), 228-46 ____ “La Première Femme: the Mother’s Resurrection in the Works of Camus and Irigaray”, French Studies LVI (1) (January 2002), 29-43 Andreu, Jean, “Un rendez-vous manqué: le voyage d’Albert Camus en Amérique du Sud (1949)”, Cahiers du monde hispanique et luso-brésilien 58 (1992), 79-97 Apter, Emily, “Out of Character: Camus’s French Algerian Subjects”, MLN, 112 (4) (Sep. 1997), 499-516 Archambault, Paul, Camus’s Hellenic Sources, Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures no119. (Chapel Hill: University of N. Carolina Press, 1972) ____ “Camus: le problème du mal et ses solutions gnostiques”, in AC9 (1979), 27-42 ____ “Albert Camus et la métaphysique chrétienne”, in Gay-Crosier, R. (ed.) Albert Camus 1980, 218-20 Argyros, Alex, Crimes of Narration: Camus’ “La Chute” (Toronto: Paratexte, 1985) Arnold, A. James, “Pour une édition critique de Caligula: travaux preliminaires”, in A C 9 (1979), 133-50 ____ “Camus lecteur de Nietzsche”, in AC9, (1979), 95-99 ____ “Pourquoi une édition critique de Caligula?”, in Gay-Crosier (ed.) Albert Camus 1980, 179-84 ____ “‘La Pierre qui pousse’: symbolic displacement in L’Exil et le royaume”, in Rizzuto (ed.), The Third Decade, 85-94 Audisio, Gabriel, “L’Algérien”, in Hommage à Albert Camus, (Paris: N.R.F., Gallimard, 1960), 432-35 Aycock, Wendell M.: Zyla, Wolodymyr (eds), Albert Camus’ Literary Milieu: Arid lands (Lubbock: Texas Tech University, 1976) Barbeito, Patricia, “Perception and ideology: Camus as colonizer in ‘The Adulterous Woman’”, Revue Celfan/Celfan review 7(3) (May, 1988), 34-38 Barchilon, José, “A Study of Camus’s Mythopoeic Tale The Fall with Some Comments about the Origin of Esthetic Feelings”, Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 19(2) (April 1971), 193-240 ____ “Profondeur et limite de la psychologie de l’inconscient chez Camus: les jeux du narcissisme”, in R. Gay-Crosier, J. Lévi-Valensi (eds), Œuvre fermée, œuvre ouverte? 17-36 Barilier, Étienne, “La Création corrigée”, in R. Gay-Crosier, J. Lévi-Valensi (eds) Œuvre fermée, œuvre ouverte? 135-50 Barrier, M. G., L’Art du récit dans “L’Étranger” d’Albert Camus (Paris: Nizet, 1962) Bartfeld, Fernande, “Deux exilés de Camus: Clamence et le Renegat”, AC6 (1973), 89-112 ____ “Aspects du destin dans L’Étranger”, Hebrew University Studies in Literature 9 (2) (Autumn, 1981), 290-315 ____ Bartfeld, Fernande, Albert Camus ou le mythe et le mime (Archives Albert Camus 5) (Paris: Lettres Modernes, 1982) ____ L’Effet tragique: essai sur le tragique dans l’œuvre d’Albert Camus (Geneva: Slatkine, 1988) ____ “Le Monologue séducteur de La Chute”, AC 13 (1989), 119-28 ____ Camus, voyageur et conférencier: le voyage en Amérique du Sud (Archives Albert Camus 7) (Paris: Lettres modernes, 1995) Barthes, Roland, “L’Étranger, roman solaire”, in Lévi-Valensi, J. (ed.), Les critiques de notre temps et Camus (Paris, Garnier, 1970), 60-64
320
Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus
____ Le degré zéro de l’écriture suivi de Nouveaux essais critiques (Paris: Seuil, 1972) Becker, Jacques, “Albert Camus et la politique à la libération”, in Camus et la politique, 107-16 Bersani, Leo, “The Stranger’s secrets”, Novel 8 (3) (Spring 1970), 212-24 Bespaloff, Rachel, “Le Monde du condamné à mort”, Esprit 163 (Jan 1950), 1-26 Birchall, Ian, “The Labourism of Sisyphus: Albert Camus and revolutionary syndicalism”, Journal of European Studies 20(2) 78 (June 1990), 135-65 ____ “Camus contre Sartre – quarante ans plus tard”, in Walker, David H. (ed.), Les Extrêmes et l’équilibre, 129-50 Bishop, Michael, “The compulsion of the minimal: the aesthetics of La Chute”, in Knapp, Bettina (ed.) Critical Essays on Albert Camus, 145-51 Blanchot, Maurice, “La Confession dédaigneuse”, NRF 4 (48) (Dec 1956), 1050-56 ____ L’Amitié (Paris, Gallimard, 1971) (“Le Détour vers la simplicité”, 214-27: “La Chute, la Fuite”, 228-35) Blondeau, Marie-Thérèse, “Notes pour une édition critique de La Peste”, Roman 2050 (2) (Dec. 1986), 69-90 Bloom, Harold (ed.), Modern Critical Views: Albert Camus (New York: Chelsea House, 1989) Blythe, Hal; Sweet, Charlie, “Speaking in Tongues: Psychoses in ‘The Renegade’”, Studies in Short Fiction 25(2) (Spring 1988), 129-34 Boll-Johansen, Hans, “L’Idéologie cachée de La Chute de Camus”, Revue Romane 14 (2) (Nov 1979), 174-84 Bonnier, Xavier, “Clamence ou le soliloque absolu”, Poétique 89-92, 299-313 Bouguerra, Tayeb, Le dit et le non-dit à propos de l’Algérie et de l’Algérien chez Camus (Algiers: DEA, Entreprise nationale du livre, 1989). Bousquet, Camus le Méditerranéen, Camus l’Ancien (Sherbrooke: Naaman, 1977) Brée Germaine (ed.), Camus: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1962) ____ Albert Camus, Columbia Essays on Modern Writers Series (Columbia University Press, 1964) ____ “Climates of the mind: Albert Camus 1936-1940”, in Knapp, Bettina (ed.), Critical essays on Albert Camus, 89-99 Briosi, Alessandro, “Sartre et le caractère ‘classique’ de L’Étranger”, in Gay-Crosier, R. (ed.), Albert Camus 1980, 235-42 Brisville, Jean-Claude, Camus (Paris: Gallimard, 1959) Brock, Robert R., “Meursault the straw man”, Studies in the novel 25(1) (Spring 1993) 92-100 Brombert, Victor, The Intellectual Hero: Studies in the French novel 1880-1955 (London: Faber & Faber, 1961) ____ “‘Le Renégat’, or the Terror of the Absolute”, in Harold Bloom (ed.) Albert Camus (New York: Chelsea House, 1989), 9-12 Brosman, Catharine Savage, “The North African Context of The Plague”, in Steven Kellman (ed.), Approaches to Teaching Camus’s “The Plague”, 110-15 ____ “Strangers and Brothers in the Works of Albert Camus and Jules Roy”, in King, Adèle (ed.), Camus’s L’Étranger: Fifty Years On, 232-43 Broyelle, Claudie; Broyelle, Jacques, Les Illusions Retrouvées: Sartre a toujours raison contre Camus (Paris: Grasset, 1982)
Selected Bibliography
321
Bryson, Dorothy, “Plot and Counter-plot in l’Étranger”, Forum for Modern Language Studies 24(3) (July 1988), 272-79 Canfield, Stephen, “Marsyas’ revenge: an analysis of Greek archetype in Camus’ l’Étranger”, Publications of the Missouri Philological Association, 13 (1988), 47-53 ____ “Plant imagery in Camus’ L’Étranger”, Publications of the Missouri Philological Association 9 (1984), 14-21 Carroll, David, “Camus’s Algeria: Birth Rights, Colonial Injustice and the fiction of a French-Algerian People”, MLN 112 (4) (September 1997), 517-549 ____ Albert Camus the Algerian: Colonialism, Terrorism, Justice (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007) Castex, Pierre-Georges, Albert Camus et L’Etranger (Paris: Corti, 1965) ____ “L’Art de l’écrivain”, in Lévi-Valensi, J.(ed.) Les Critiques de notre temps et Camus, 66-76 ____ “La Confession de Clamence dans La Chute d’Albert Camus”, Information littéraire 35(4) (Sept-Oct 1983), 151-61 Chaitin, Gilbert D., “Narrative Desire in L’Étranger”, in King, Adèle (ed.), Camus’ L’Étranger: 50 years on, 125-38 ____ “Confession and Desire in L’Etranger”, Symposium 46 (3) (1992), 163-75 ____ “The Birth of the Subject in Camus’s L’Étranger”, Romanic Review 84(2) (1993), 163-80 Champigny, Robert, Sur un héros païen (Paris: Gallimard, 1959) Charlot, Edmond, “Interview accordé à Eric Sellin”, AC3 (1970), 153-65 Charney, Hannah, “Supplementarity in Camus”, in Bettina Knapp (ed.), Critical Essays on Albert Camus, 99-107 Chavanes, François, “L’apport d’Albert Camus dans le domaine de l’éthique et la nouvelle Europe”, in Jean-Yves Guérin (ed.), Camus et l’Europe [unpaginated] Christos, Saltapidas, “Odysseas Elytis et Albert Camus”, Revue de Littérature Comparée 64 (3) (1990) 535-40 Cielens, Isabelle, “Le symbolisme des rites initiatiques dans La Mort heureuse et La Chute”, in Equinoxe (Geneva: Slatkine, 1996), 21-36 Clarke, Deborah: Makward, Christiane, “Camus, Faulkner, Dead Mothers: a Dialogue”, in Adèle King (ed.), Camus’s “L’Étranger” 50 years On, 194-208 Clayton, Alan J., “Camus, Apulée et la lune”, Romanic Review, 41 (3) (Oct 1970), 209-18 ____ Étapes d’un itinéraire spirituel; Albert Camus de 1937-1944, Archives Albert Camus 2, (Paris: Minard, 1971) ____ “Camus ou l’impossibilité d’aimer”, AC7 (1975), 9-34 Cliche, Elaine, “Langage du pouvoir, pouvoir du langage, ou la narration à la première personne dans La Chute d’Albert Camus”, Revue de l’universite d’Ottawa/ University of Ottawa Quarterly, 54 (4) (1984), 15-24 Cocking, J.M., “Camus’ ideas on art”, in C. E. Pickford (ed.), Mélanges de littérature francaise offerts à Garnet Rees, 47-58 Cohen-Solal, Annie, “Camus, Sartre et la guerre d’Algérie”, in J.-Y. Guérin (ed.), Camus et la politique, 177-84 Cohn, Lionel, “La signification d’autrui chez Camus et chez Kafka – tentative de lecture de Camus et de Kafka d’après la philosophie d’Emmanuel Lévinas”, AC9 (1979), 101-30
322
Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus
____ “Signification du sacré dans La Chute”, in R. Gay-Crosier (ed.), Albert Camus 1980, 110-17 Cohn, Robert Greer, “The True Camus”, French Review, 60(1) (Oct. 1986), 30-38 Conroy, Peter V., “La Vision schizophrène chez Meursault”, AC 8 (1976), 129-43 Corpet, Olivier, Histoires d’un livre: “l’Étranger” d’Albert Camus, (Paris: IMEC, 1990) Costes, Alain, Albert Camus et la parole manquante: étude psychanalytique (Paris: Payot, 1973) ____ “Le double meurtre de Meursault: une remarque préalable pour une lecture psychanalytique de l’Étranger”, in R. Gay-Crosier (ed.), Œuvre fermée, œuvre ouverte? 55-76 Crochet, Monique, Les Mythes dans l’œuvre de Camus (Paris: Éditions universitaires, 1978) Cruickshank, John, Albert Camus and the Literature of Revolt (Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1978) Cryle, Peter, “Diversité et symbole dans L’Exil et le royaume”, AC6 (1973), 7-19 ____ “Sur ‘Le Renégat’ et ‘El Hadj, ou le traité du faux prophète’ d’André Gide”, AC 6 (1973), 113-18 ____ Bilan critique: “l’Exil et le royaume” d’Albert Camus: essai d’analyse, (Paris: Minard, 1973) ____ “The written painting and the painted word in ‘Jonas’”, in R. Gay-Crosier (ed.), Albert Camus 1980, 123-29 ____ “Pause et rupture dans l’imagination camusienne”, in R. Gay-Crosier (ed.), Œuvre fermée, œuvre ouverte? 309-27 ____ “Bodily Positions and Moral Attitudes in L’Exil et le royaume”, in A. Rizzuto (ed.), Albert Camus, “L’Exil et le royaume”: the Third Decade, 35-41 Curtis, Jerry, “Meursault or the leap of death”, Rice University Studies, 57 (2) (Spring 1971), 41-48 ____ “Structure and Space in Camus’ ‘Jonas’”, Modern Fiction Studies, 22 (4) (Winter 1976-77), 571-76 Döring, Ulrich: Lyroudias Antiopy: Zaiser Rainer (eds), Ouverture et dialogue: Mélanges offerts à Wolfgang Leiner à l’occasion de son soixantième anniversaire, (Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 1988) Dadoun, Roger, “Albert Camus: fondations d’anarchie”, in Jean-Yves Guérin (ed.), Camus et la politique, 257-67 Daniel, Jean, “Cet étrange recours à Camus”, Nouvel observateur, 733 (Nov. 27- Dec 3, 1978), 84-86 ____ “Innocence in Camus and Dostoievsky”, in Adele King (ed.), Camus’s “L’Étranger”: Fifty Years On, 24-35 Daruwalla, K. N. “The Impact of L’Étranger: oblique reflections on an oblique novel”, in Adele King (ed.), Camus’s L’Étranger: Fifty Years On, 59-64 Daunais, Isabelle, “L’expérience de l’espace dans les nouvelles de Camus”, French Review, 67 (1) (October 1993), 47-60 Davis, Colin, “Interpreting La Peste”, Romanic Review, 85 (1) (Jan. 1994), 125-42 ____ “Altericide: Camus, Encounters, Reading”, Forum for Modern Language Studies, 33 (2) (April 1997), 129-141 ____ “Violence and Ethics in Camus”, in Edward J. Hughes (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Camus, 106-117
Selected Bibliography
323
Davison, Ray, Camus: the Challenge of Dostoevsky, (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 1997) Day, Loraine, “The Theme of Death in Camus’s ‘La Femme adultere’ and ‘Retour à Tipasa’”, Essays in French Literature, 20 (Nov. 1983), 67-94 Descaves, Pierre, “Albert Camus et le roman”, La Table Ronde, 146 (Feb. 1960), 4760 Di Pilla, Francesco, “Remarques sur L’Algerianite de Camus”, in Paul-F. Smets (ed.), Albert Camus, 19-33 ____ “Camus en Italie”, in Jean-Yves Guérin (ed.), Camus et la politique, 69-92 Dine, Philip, Images of the French Algerian war: French Fiction and Film, (Oxford University Press, 1994) Djemaï, Abdelkader, Camus à Oran (Paris: Michalon, 1995) Doubrovsky Serge, “The Ethics of Albert Camus”, in Germaine Brée (ed.), Albert Camus 1962: a collection of critical essays, 71-84 Duffy, Jean, “Narrative code versus truth: the prosecution case in L’Étranger”, Essays in poetics, 14 (2) (Sept. 1989), 28-42 Duncan, Robert L., “Judgement Without Redemption: Camus’s Version of the Fall”, Christianity and Literature, 30 (2) (Winter 1981), 43-50 Dunn, Susan, “Camus and Louis XVI: an Elegy for the Martyred King”, French Review 62 (6) (May 1989), 1032-40 Dunwoodie, Peter, “La Mort heureuse et Crime et châtiment: une étude comparée”, Revue de littérature comparée, 46 (4) (Oct-Dec. 1972), 494-504 ____ “Les Lectures d’Albert Camus avant la guerre”, AC 7 (1975), 103-07 ____ Camus: “L’Envers et l’endroit” and “L’Exil et le royaume” (London: Grant & Cutler, 1985) ____ “Albert Camus or ‘La surdité des héros’”, La Chouette 21 (March 1989), 8-23 ____ “Joseph Grand or how (not) to do things with words”, Neophilologus 76 (1) (Jan.,1992), 51-63 ____ “Albert Camus and the anarchist alternative”, Australian Journal of French Studies, 30 (1) (Jan. 1993), 84-104 ____ “Negotiation or Confrontation? Camus, Memory and the Colonial Chronotope”, in Christine Margerrison, Mark Orme et al (eds), Albert Camus in the Twentyfirst Century, 45-60 ____ “From Noces to L’Étranger”, in Edward J. Hughes (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Camus, 147-64 ____ (ed.) and Edward J. Hughes (ed.) Constructing Memories: Camus, Algeria and “Le Premier Homme” (Stirling: Stirling French Publications, 1998) ____ Writing French Algeria (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998) Dupuy, René-Jean, “Camus et les droits de l’homme”, in Jean-Yves Guérin (ed.), Camus et la politique, 247-55 Durand, Anne, Le Cas Albert Camus (L’Époque camusienne) (Paris: Librairie Fischbacher, 1961) Duvall, W., “The Nietzsche temptation in the thought of Albert Camus”, History of European Ideas 11 (1989), 955-62 Eisenzweig, Uri, Les Jeux de l’écriture dans “L’Étranger” de Camus, Archives Albert Camus 6 (Paris: Lettres modernes, 1983) Ellison, David R., “Camus and the rhetoric of dizziness: La Chute”, in Harold Bloom (ed.), Albert Camus, 115-38
324
Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus
____ “Withheld Identity in la Chute”, in Edward J. Hughes (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Camus, 178-190 Erickson, John, “Albert Camus and North Africa: a discourse of exteriority”, in Bettina Knapp (ed.), Critical Essays on Albert Camus, 73-88 Favre, Frantz, “Camus et Nietzsche – philosophie et existence”, AC9 (1979), 65-94 ____ “L’idée de l’Europe chez Nietzsche et Camus”, in Jean-Yves Guérin, (ed.), Camus et l’Europe [unpaginated] ____ “Camus et la poétique des ruines”, AC13 (1989), 105-16. ____ “L’Étranger and metaphysical anxiety”, in Adele King (ed.), Camus’ L’Étranger: 50 years On, 3-46 Fayad, Mona, “The problem of the subject in Africanist discourse: Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Camus’ ‘The Renegade’”, Comparative literature studies, 27 (4) (1990), 298-312 Felman, Shoshana (ed.): Dori Laub (ed.), Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History (London: Routledge, 1991) Festa-McCormick, Diana, “Existential exile and a glimpse of the kingdom”, in B. Knapp (ed.), Critical essays, 107-16 Feuerlicht, Ignace, “Camus’s L’Etranger reconsidered”, PMLA LXXVIII (5) (Dec 1963), 606-21 Fieschi, “L’Étranger par Albert Camus”, Nouvelle Revue Francaise, 343 (Sept, 1942), 368-70 Fife, J., “Albert Camus: ‘La Femme adultère’”, in G. Lannois, Modern French writing, 28-30 Finel-Honigman, Irene, “Oran: Protagonist, Myth, Allegory”, Modern Fiction Studies, 24 (1) (Spring 1978), 75-82 ____ “The Orpheus & Euridice Myth in Camus’s The Plague”, Classical and Modern Literature, 1(3) (Spring 1981), 207-18 Fischler, Alexander, “Camus’s ‘La Pierre qui pousse’: Saint George and the Protean dragon”, Symposium, 24 (3) (Fall 1970), 206-17 Fitch, Brian T., Le Sentiment d’Étrangete chez Malraux, Sartre, Camus et Simone de Beauvoir (Paris: Minard, 1964, 1983) ____ Narrateur et Narration dans L’Étranger d’Albert Camus: analyse d’un fait littéraire, Archives des lettres modernes no 34 (Paris: Minard, 1960, 1968) ____ “Aesthetic Distance and Inner Space in the Novels of Camus”, Modern Fiction Studies, 10 (3) (Autumn 1964), 279-92 ____ “Aspects de l’emploi du discours indirect libre dans L’Etranger”, AC1 (1968), 81-91 ____ “Une voix qui se parle, qui nous parle, que nous parlons, ou l’espace théatral de La Chute”, AC3 (1970), 59-80 ____ “Le Statut précaire du personnage et de l’univers romanesque chez Camus”, Symposium, 24 (3) (Fall, 1970), 218-28 ____ “Clamence en chute libre: la cohérence imaginaire de La Chute”, in R. GayCrosier (ed.), Albert Camus 1970, 47-76 ____ “L’Étranger” d’Albert Camus: un texte, ses lecteurs, leurs lectures (Paris: Larousse, 1972) ____ “‘Jonas’ ou la production d’une étoile”, AC6 (1973), 51-65 ____ “Camus’ Desert hieroglyphics”, Symposium 8 (1976), 117-31 ____ “La Peste comme texte qui se désigne; analyse des procédés d’autoreprésentation”, AC8 (1976), 53-71
Selected Bibliography
325
____ “Le paradigme herméneutique chez Camus”, in R. Gay-Crosier (ed.), Albert Camus 1980, 32-34 ____ “Des Écrivains et des bavards: l’intra-intertextualite camusienne”, in R. GayCrosier, R.: J. Lévi-Valensi (eds), Œuvre fermée, œuvre ouverte? 267-83. ____ “Narcisse interprète: La Chute comme modèle herméneutique”, AC10 (1982), 89-108 ____ The Narcissistic Text: a Reading of Camus’ fiction (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982) ____ “‘La Femme Adultère’: A Microcosm of Camus’ Solipsistic Universe”, in A. Rizzuto (ed.), The Third Decade, 107-26 ____ The Fall: a matter of guilt (London: Twayne, 1995) ____ (ed.) Albert Camus (vols 1-12) (Paris: Minard, 1968-1985) Fletcher, Dennis, “Camus between Yes and No: a Fresh Look at the Murder in L’Étranger”, Neophilologus, LXL (1977), 523-33 Fletcher, John, “Interpreting L’Etranger”, French Review, XLIII (1) (Winter 1970), 158-67 ____ “Meursault’s rhetoric”, Critical Quarterly, 13 (2) (Summer 1971), 125-36 ____ “L’Étranger and the new novel”, in A. King (ed.), Camus’ “L’Étranger”: 50 years on, 209-19 Ford, Marianna C., “Condemnation and Imprisonment in L’Étranger and Le Dernier jour d’un condamné”, Romance Notes, 13 (2) (Winter 1971), 211-16. Fortier, Paul, Une Lecture de Camus (Paris: Klincksieck, 1977) Freeman, E., “Camus, Suetonius and the Caligula Myth”, Symposium, 24 (3) (Fall 1970), 230-42 ____ The Theatre of Albert Camus: a critical study (London: Methuen, 1971) Frohock, W.M., “Camus: Image, Influence and Sensibility”, Yale French Studies, 1 (1948), 113-18 Frohock, W.M., Style and Temper. Studies in French Fiction, 1925-1960 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1967) Gadourek, Carina, Les Innocents et les coupables: essai d’exégèse de l’œuvre d’Albert Camus (Mouton: The Hague, 1963) Galpin, Alfred, “Italian Echoes in Albert Camus: two notes on La Chute”, Symposium, 12 (1958), 65-72 Garfitt, J.S.T., “Grenier and Camus: from Les Îles to La Chute”, Forum for Modern Language Studies, 17 (3) (July 1981), 217-29 ____ “Camus et Jean Grenier”, in D. H. Walker (ed.), Les Extrêmes et l’équilibre, 89101 ____ “Situating Camus: the Formative influences”, in Edward J. Hughes (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Camus, 26-38 Gassin, Jean, “Fils et mère chez Camus: aux origines d’un lien exceptionnel”, AC5 (1972), 271-73 ____ “Camus raciste?”, AC5 (1972), 275-78 ____ “Le sadisme dans l’œuvre de Camus”, AC 6 (1973), 121-44. ____ “De Tarrou à Camus: le symbolisme de la guillotine”, AC8 (1976), 73-102 ____ “Les facteurs homosexuels de la creation littéraire: le cas d’Albert Camus”, Australian Journal of French Studies 17 (2) (May-Aug.1980), 181-93 ____ “La Chute et le retable de ‘l’Agneau Mystique’”, in R. Gay-Crosier (ed.), Albert Camus 1980, 132-41
326
Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus
____ “À propos de la femme automate de L’Etranger”, in R. Gay-Crosier: J. LéviValensi (eds), Œuvre fermée, œuvre ouverte? (1985), 77-90 ____ “Fantaisie sur un thème de Camus: le plumier”, Equinoxe (Geneva: Slatkine, 1996), 65-69 ____ L’Univers symbolique d’Albert Camus: essai d’interprétation psychanalytique (Paris: Minard, 1981) Gay-Crosier, Raymond, Les Envers d’un échec: étude sur le théâtre d’Albert Camus (Paris: Minard, 1967) ____ Albert Camus: Paradigmes de l’ironie: révolte et négation affirmative (Toronto: Paratexte, 2000) ____ “Camus et le donjuanisme”, French Review, XLI (6) (May, 1968), 818-30 ____ “Renegades revisited: from Jonas to Clamence”, in Rizzuto, A. (ed.), The Third Decade, 19-33 ____ “Une affinité plus qu’élective: les fondements du ludisme existentiel d’Albert Camus et de Georges Bataille”, in Smets, P. (ed.), Albert Camus (1985), 71-84 ____ “Camus et Sade: une relation ambigue”, Zeitschrift für französische Sprache und Literatur, 98 (2) (1988), 166-73 ____ “Albert Camus: algérianité et marginalité”, Australian Journal of French Studies 27(3) (Sept-Dec. 1990), 283-89 ____ (ed) Camus 1970 (Quebec: Celef, 1970) ____ (ed.) Albert Camus 1980 (Gainesville: University Presses of Florida. 1980) ____ (ed.) Albert Camus (vols 13-21) (Paris: Minard, 1985-2007) ____ (ed.): Jacqueline Levi-Valensi (ed.), Albert Camus: Œuvre fermée, œuvre ouverte?: Actes du colloque du centre culturel international de Cérisy-la-salle, juin, 1982 (Cahiers Albert Camus 5) (Paris: Gallimard, 1985) Geha, Richard Jr, “Albert Camus: another will for death”, Psychoanalytic review, 54 (4) (Winter 1967), 106-22 Gifford, P., “Socrates in Amsterdam: the uses of Irony in La Chute”, Modern Language Review, 73 (3) (July 1978), 499-512 Giles, James (ed.), French Existentialism: Consciousness, Ethics and Relations with Others (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999) Girard, René, “Camus’s Stranger Retried”, PMLA, 79 (1964), 519-33 Goodhand, Robert H., “The Omphalos and the Phoenix: symbolism of the center in Camus’ ‘La Pierre qui pousse’”, Studies in Short Fiction, 21 (2) (Spring 1984), 117-26. Grenier, Jean, Albert Camus: Souvenirs (Paris: Gallimard, 1968) ____ Correspondance Albert Camus-Jean Grenier (1932-1960) (Paris: Gallimard, 1981) ____ Carnets 1944-71, edited by Claire Paulhan (Paris: Seghers, 1991) Grenier, Roger, Albert Camus, soleil et ombre: une biographie intellectuelle (Paris: Gallimard, 1987) Grimaud, Michel, “Humanism and the White Man’s Burden: Camus, Daru, Meursault and the Arabs”, in Adele King (ed.), Camus’s ‘L’Étranger: Fifty Years On, 17082 Guérin, Jean-Yves, “Noces de sang; Albert Camus: les intellectuels face au terrorisme”, Esprit, 94-95 (1984), 147-56 ____ “Camus devant le socialisme”, in R. Gay-Crosier (ed.), Œuvre fermée, œuvre ouverte? 345-60
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327
____ “L’Europe dans la pensée et l’œuvre de Camus”, in P.-F. Smets (ed.), Albert Camus, 57-70 ____ “Jalons pour une lecture politique de La Peste”, Roman 20-50, 2 (Dec. 1986) 726. ____ Camus: portrait de l’artiste en citoyen (Paris: François Bourin, 1994) ____ “Des Chroniques algériennes au Premier Homme; pour une lecture politique du dernier roman de Camus”, Esprit, 211 (May 1995), 5-16 ____ “Le Combat pour les Droits de l’homme: L’Europe, la démocratie et le totalitarisme hier et aujourd’hui”, in André Abbou (ed.), Camus et l’Europe [unpaginated] ____ (ed.), Camus et la politique; actes du colloque de Nanterre, 5-7 juin 1985 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1986) Haddour, Azzedine, “Algeria and its History: Colonial Myths and the Forging and Deconstructing of Identity in Pied Noir Literature”, in Alec Hargreaves: Michael J. Hefferman (eds), French and Algerian Identities: from Colonial Times to the Present ____ Colonial myths: history and narrative (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000) Haggis, Donald R. Albert Camus: La Peste (London: Edward Arnold, 1962) Haig, Stirling, “The Epilogue of crime and punishment and Camus’ ‘La Femme adultère’”, Comparative Literature Studies, 13 (4) (1966), 445-49 Hamouda, Ouahiba, Albert Camus à l’épreuve d’Alger Républicain (Alger: Office des Publications Universitaires, 1991) Hanna, Thomas, “Albert Camus and the Christian Faith”, in G. Brée (ed.), Camus: a Collection of Critical Essays, 48-58 Hargreaves, Alec, “Personnes grammaticales et relations affectives chez Camus”, in Revue Celfan, 4 (3) (May, 1985), 10-17 ____ “Caught in the Middle: the Liberal Dilemma in the Algerian War”, Nottingham French Studies, 25 (2) (Oct. 1986), 73-82 ____ “Camus and the Colonial Question in Algeria”, Muslim World (1987), 164-74 ____ “History & Ethnicity in the Reception of L’Étranger”, in A. King (ed.), Fifty Years On, 101-12 ____ Michael J. Hefferman (eds), French & Algerian identities from Colonial Times to the Present: a Century of Interaction (Lewiston: Queenston: Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press 1993) Harlow, Barbara, “Camus and Algeria 1985: ‘ne touche pas à mon pote’”, Revue Celfan, 4 (3) (May 1985), 31-35 Hélein-Kos, Suzanne, “Une Relecture chiffrée du ‘Renégat’ d’Albert Camus”, AC 12 (1985), 97-106 Hernández, Lillian, “Vers une poétique de Noces”, in R. Gay-Crosier (ed.), Albert Camus 1980, 142-48 Heuvel, Pierre van den, “Parole, mot et silence: les avatars de l’énonciation dans l’Étranger d’Albert Camus”, AC 10 (1982), 53-87 Hewitt, Nicholas, “La Chute et Les Temps modernes”, Essays in French Literature, 10 (Nov. 1973), 64-81 Hollahan, Eugene, “The Orpheus allusion in ‘Evelina’ and La Peste”, Comparative Literature Studies, 16 (2) (1979), 110-20 Horowitz, Louise K., “Of Women and Arabs: sexual and racial polarisation in Camus”, Modern Language Studies, 17 (3) (Summer 1987), 54-61
328
Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus
Hughes, Edward J., “‘La vérité est carrée’ – some reflections on Camus’s ‘Le Renégat ou un esprit confus’”, La Chouette, 10 (September 1983), 76-85 ____ “‘Tranquillement monstrueux’ Violence and Kinship in Le Premier homme”, in E. J. Hughes and P. Dunwoodie (eds), Constructing Memories: Camus, Algeria and “Le Premier Homme” ____ “Building the Colonial Archive: The Case of Camus’s Le premier homme”, Research in African Literatures, 30 (3) (Fall 1999), 176-193 ____ (ed.): Peter Dunwoodie (eds) Constructing Memories: Camus, Algeria and “Le Premier Homme” (Stirling: Stirling French Publications, 1998) ____ (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Camus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007) ____ Camus: Le Premier homme: La Peste, Glasgow Introductory Guides to French Literature 33 (Glasgow: University of Glasgow, 1995) ____ Writing Marginality in Modern French Literature: from Loti to Genet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) Hunwick, Andrew, “Albert Camus, Meursault et le lecteur ‘dupé’”, AC 15, 153-80 Hurley, D. F., “Looking for the Arab: Reading the Readings of Camus’s ‘The Guest’”, Studies in Short Fiction, 30 (1) (Winter 1993), 79-93 Hutcheon, Linda, “‘Le Renégat ou un esprit confus’ comme nouveau récit”, AC6 (1973), 67-87 Ibrahimi, Ahmed Taleb, De la décolonisation à la révolution culturelle (1962-1972) (Algiers: S.N.E.D., 1981) Imbert, Patrick, “Par une belle matinée: déjà lu, toujours écrit”, Revue des sciences humaines, 72 (201) (Jan-March 1986), 147-53 Jakobiak, Bernard, “Camus ou le colonisateur sublimé”, Souffles, 3 (12) (4e trimestre, 1968), 22-28 Jeanson, Francis, “Albert Camus ou l’âme révoltée”, Les Temps Modernes, 7 (79) (May 1952), 2070-90 ____ “Pour tout vous dire”, Les Temps Modernes, 8 (82) (August 1952), 354-83 John, S. Beynon, “Image and symbol in the work of Albert Camus”, in G. Brée (ed.), A Collection of Critical Essays, 132-44. Joiner, Lawrence, “‘Le Renégat’: identity denied”, Studies in Short Fiction, 13(1) (1976), 37-41 ____ “Camus’s ‘The Renegade’: a quest for sexual identity”, Research Studies, 45 (3) (Sept. 1977), 171-76 Jones, Rosemarie, “Modes of discourse in La Chute”, Nottingham French Studies, 15 (2) (November 1976), 27-35 ____ Camus: “L’Étranger” and “La Chute” (London: Grant & Cutler, 1980) ____ “Camus and the Aphorism: L’Exil et le royaume”, Modern Language review, 78 (2) (April 1983), 308-18 ____ “Telling stories: narrative reflections in L’Étranger”, in A. King (ed.), Fifty Years On, 114-24 Judt, Tony, “The lost world of Albert Camus: Le Premier Homme”, New York Review of Books, XLI (16) (October 1994) Kamber, Gerald, “Diction et contradiction dans un texte de L’Étranger”, Neophilologus, 55 (4) (1971), 387-99 Kashuba, Irma M., “A Method of presenting Camus’s The Plague”, in S. Kellman (ed.), Approaches to Teaching Camus’s ‘The Plague”, 47-53
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329
Kateb, George, “Camus’s La Peste: a dissenting view”, Symposium 17 (4) (Winter 1963), 292-303 Keefe, Terry, “Camus’s La Chute: some outstanding problems of interpretation concerning Clamence’s past”, Modern Language Review, 69 (3) (July 1974), 54155 ____ “More on Clamence’s Interlocutor in Albert Camus’s La Chute”, Romance Notes, 16 (3) (Spring 1975), 552-58 ____ “Marriage in the later fiction of Camus and Simone de Beauvoir”, Orbis Litterarum, 33 (1) (1978), 69-86 ____ “Clamence and Women in Albert Camus’s La Chute”, Modern Fiction Studies, 25 (4) (1979-80), 646-51 ____ “‘Heroes of our time’ in Three Stories of Camus and Simone de Beauvoir”, Forum for Modern Language Studies, 17 (1) (Jan 1981), 39-54 ____ (ed.): Smyth, Edmund (ed.), Autobiography and the Existential Self (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1995) ____ French Existentialist Fiction: Changing Moral Perspectives (London: Croom Helm, 1986) Kellman, Steven G., Approaches to teaching Camus’ “The Plague” (New York: MLA, 1985) ____ The Plague: Fiction and Resistance (New York: Twayne, 1993) King, Adèle, “Structure and Meaning in La Chute”, PMLA 77 (5) (Dec 1960), 660-67 ____ Camus (Edinburgh & London: Oliver & Boyd, 1964) ____ “Jonas, ou l’artiste au travail”, French Studies 20 (3) (1966), 267-80 ____ Notes on Albert Camus’ “L’Étranger”, York Notes (London: Longman, 1980) ____ (ed.) Camus’s L’Etranger: Fifty Years On (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1992) ____ “Le Premier homme: Camus’s unfinished novel”, World Literature Today, 69 (1) 1995, 83-85 King, Jonathan H., “Sartre-Camus: the quarrel as biography”, French Cutural Studies, 5 (1994), 39-56 Knapp, Bettina (ed.), Critical Essays on Albert Camus (Boston: G. K. Hall & Co, 1988) Kohlhauer, Michael, “L’Exil a-t-il un nom? Albert Camus, ‘La Maison mauresque’”, AC17, 89-106 Kréa, Henri, “Le malentendu algerien”, France-Observateur, 12 (557) (5 January 1961), 16 Ladimer, Bethany, “Pour une sémiotique de l’œuvre de Camus”, AC10 (1982), 7-27 ____ “Camus’ Chenoua Landscape”, YFS, 57 (1979), 109-23 Lakich, John, “Tragedy and Satanism in Camus’s La Chute”, Symposium, 24 (3) (Fall 1970), 262-76 Lamont, Rosette C., “Two faces of terrorism: Caligula and the just assassins”, in B. Knapp (ed.), Critical Essays on Albert Camus, 128-40 Lannois, Georges, Modern French writing (London: Heinemann, 1969) Lavallée-Williams, Marthe, “Arabs in ‘La Femme adultère’: from faceless other to agent”, Revue Celfan, 4 (3) (May 1985), 6-10 Lazère, Donald, The Unique Creation of Albert Camus (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973) Lebesque, Morvan, Camus (Paris: Seuil, 1976) Leger, Susan, “Camus’s ‘L’Hôte’: the lesson of an ending”, French Literature Series, 17 (1990), 87-97
330
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Le Hir, Jeanne, “De Mersault à Meursault: une lecture intertextuelle de L’Étranger”, AC10 (1982), 29-52 Le Sueur, James D., Uncivil War: Intellectuals and Identity Politics during the Decolonization of Algeria (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001) Lekehal, Ali, “Aspects of the Algerian Landscape: the Fantastic in The Renegade’”, in J. Suther (ed.), Essays on Camus’s Exile and the Kingdom, 153-70 Lenzini, José, L’Algérie de Camus (Aix-en-Provence: Édisud, 1987) Leov, Nola M., “L’Étranger: the Case for the Defence”, Essays in French Literature, 15 (Nov 1978), 82-116 ____ “‘Il faut comprendre’: communication and non-communication in L’Étranger”, New Zealand Journal of French Studies, 12 (1) (May 1991), 15-29 ____ “Savoir se répéter: another look at L’Etranger”, New Zealand Journal Of French Studies, 12 (2) (1991), 24-34 ____ “Patterns in La Peste: the example of Joseph Grand”, New Zealand Journal of French Studies, 14 (1) (May 1993), 30-42 ____ “Thalassa, Thalassa: Camus’s use of imagery in La Chute”, New Zealand Journal of French Studies, 14 (2) (Nov.1993), 5-29 Lévi-Valensi, Jacqueline, “La Chute ou la parole en procès”, AC3 (1970), 33-58 ____ “L’Engagement culturel”, AC5 (1972), 83-106 ____ “Genèse de l’œuvre romanesque d’Albert Camus”, doctoral thesis (Paris: Sorbonne, 1980) ____ “Le Temps et l’espace dans l’œuvre romanesque de Camus: une mythologie du réel”, in R. Gay-Crosier (ed.), Albert Camus 1980, 57-68 ____ “La relation au réel dans le roman camusien”, in Lévi-Valensi (ed.), R. GayCrosier (ed.), Œuvre fermée, œuvre ouverte, 153-85 ____ “La Fascination du vide dans La Chute”, in M. Crouzet (ed.), Espaces Romanesques (Paris: PUF, 1982) ____ “Unité et diversité du roman camusien”, in P.-F. Smets (ed.), Albert Camus, 101-14 ____ “L’entrée de Camus en politique”, in J.-Y. Guérin (ed.), Camus et la politique, 137-51 ____ “L’Europe dans les œuvres de fiction d’Albert Camus: une mythologie ambiguë”, in A. Abbou (ed.), Camus et l’Europe [unpaginated] ____ La Peste d’Albert Camus (Paris: Gallimard, 1991) ____ (ed.), Les Critiques de notre temps et Camus (Paris: Garnier, 1970) ____ (ed.), R. Gay-Crosier (ed.), Œuvre fermée, œuvre ouverte? (Cahiers Albert Camus 5) (Paris: Gallimard, 1985) ____ (ed.), Albert Camus et le théâtre: actes du colloque tenu à Amiens 31 mai-2 juin, 1988 (Paris: I.M.E.C., 1992) ____ “La Chute” d’Albert Camus (Paris: Gallimard, 1996) ____ Albert Camus ou la naissance d’un romancier (1930-1942) (Paris: Gallimard, 2006) Longstaffe, Moya, “A Happy Life and A Happy Death: The Quest of Camus’s L’Etranger”, French Review, 64 (1) (October 1990), 54-68 ____ “Camus et la sagesse humaine: an analysis of a key passage from the conclusion of L’Etranger”, Modern Languages, 69 (4) (Dec 1988), 91-96 Lottman, Herbert R. Albert Camus: a Biography (London: Axis, 1997) Lynch, Martha, “Le ‘Je’ utopique dans ‘Le Renégat’”, AC13 (1989), 129-39 ____ “L’image du colon dans ‘La Femme adultère’”, AC14 (1991), 139-52
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331
Madden, David, “Ambiguity in Albert Camus’ The Fall”, Modern Fiction Studies, 12 (Winter 1967), 461-72 Mailhot, Laurent, Albert Camus ou l’imagination du desert (Montreal: Presses de l’université de Montréal, 1973) ____ “Aspects théâtraux des récits et essais de Camus”, in R. Gay-Crosier (ed.), Albert Camus 1980, 153-60 ____ “Le Métatexte camusien: titres, dédicaces, épigraphes, préfaces”, in R. GayCrosier (ed.), Œuvre fermée, œuvre ouverte? 285-308 ____ “L’intellectuel et l’artiste: sur deux ou trois tableaux d’Albert Camus”, in P.-F. Smets (ed.), Albert Camus, 129-44 Maillard, Claudine: Maillard, Michel, Le langage en procès; structures et symboles dans “La Chute” de Camus (Grenoble: Presses universitaires de Grenoble, 1977) Makari, George, “The last four shots: problems of intention and Camus’ The Stranger”, American Imago 45(4) (Winter1988), 359-74 Man, Paul de, “The Mask of Albert Camus: Notebooks 1942-1951”, in Harold Bloom (ed.), Albert Camus (New York: Chelsea House, 1989), 19-27 Manly, William M., “Journey to consciousness: symbolic pattern of Camus’s L’Étranger”, PMLA, LXXIX (3) (June 1964), 321-28 Margerrison, Christine, “Albert Camus and ‘Ces femmes qu’on raie de l’humanité’: Sexual Politics in the Colonial Arena”, French Cultural Studies, 10 (2) (29) (June 1999), 217-30 ____ “Struggling with the Other: Gender and Race in the Youthful Writings of Camus”, in J. Giles (ed.), French Existentialism: Consciousness, Ethics and Relations with Others, 191-211 ____ “The Dark Continent of Camus’s L’Étranger”, French Studies, 55 (1) (2001), 59-73 ____ “Camus and the Theatre”, in E. Hughes (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Camus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 67-78 ____ “Sous le regard des hommes: ‘La Femme adultère’”, in C. Margerrison, Mark Orme, et al.(eds), Albert Camus in the Twenty-first Century, 85-102 ____ (ed.), Mark Orme et al. (eds), Albert Camus in the Twenty-first Century (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008) Marx-Scouras, Danielle, “Portraits of Women, Visions of Algeria”, in Edward J. Hughes (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Camus, 131-44 Matala, Marie, “Camus et la Grèce”, in André Abbou (ed.), Camus et l’Europe [unpaginated] Matoré, Georges, “Remarques sur l’espace romantique dans La Chute de Camus”, in C. Pickford (ed.), Mélanges de littérature offerts Garnet Rees (1980), 233-40 Matthews, J. H., “In which Albert Camus makes his leap: Le Mythe de Sisyphe”, Symposium, 24 (3) (Fall 1970), 277-88. McCann, J., “The Verdict on Meursault”, Nottingham French Studies, 29 (1) (1990), 51-63 McCarthy, Patrick, Camus: a Critical Study of his Life and Work (London: Hamilton, 1982) ____ “The first Arab in L’Étranger”, Revue Celfan, 4 (3) (May 1985), 23-6 ____ Albert Camus: The Stranger (Cambride: Cambridge University Press, 2004 [1988])
332
Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus
____ “Camus, Orwell and Greene: the impossible fascination of the colonised”, in A. King (ed.), Camus’s L’Étranger: Fifty years On, 221-31 McConnell, Winder, “Sado-masochism and punishment instincts in two works by Camus”, Journal of Evolutionary Psychology, 9 (1-2) (Mar 1988), 100-06 McGregor, Rob Roy, “Camus’s ‘Le Renégat’: an Allegory of the Existentialist Pilgrimage”, French Review, 66 (5) (April 1993), 742-51 Mellon, Linda Forge, “An Archetypal Analysis of Albert Camus’s ‘La Pierre qui pousse’: the Quest as Process of Individuation”, French Review, 64 (6) (May 1991), 934-44 Memmi, Albert, “Camus ou le colonisateur de bonne volonté”, La Nef, 12 (December 1957), 95-96 Merad, Ghani, “Emmanuel Roblès et Albert Camus: deux grands écrivains et deux écrivains algériens”, Revue Celfan, 4 (3) (May 1985), 29-31 Mertens, Pierre, “La Chute de l’Ange”, in P.-F. Smets (ed.), Albert Camus, 115-128 Meyers, Jeffrey, “Camus’ The Fall and Van Eyck’s The Adoration of the Lamb”, Mosaic, 7 (3) (Spring 1974), 43-51 Micha, René, “L’Agneau dans le placard”, in Hommage à Albert Camus, NRF, 8 (87) (March 1960), 501-05 Miller, Owen J., “L’image du miroir dans l’œuvre romanesque de Camus”, AC3 (1970), 129-50 Mingel-Grun, Albert, “Poles thématiques et déroulements narratif dans ‘La Femme adultère’”, in P.-F. Smets (ed.), Albert Camus, 145-52 Mino, Hiroshi, Le Silence dans l’œuvre d’Albert Camus (Paris: Corti, 1987) ____ “Le (re)commencement chez Camus”, Equinoxe (Geneva: Slatkine, 1996), 7082 ____ “Trois discours sur le meurtre: Meursault, Rieux, Clamence”, AC 17, 69-86 Mistacco, Vicky, “Nomadic Meanings: The Woman Effect in ‘La Femme adultère’”, in A. Rizzuto (ed.), Albert Camus’ L’Exil et le royaume: the Third Decade, 7184 ____ “Mama’s Boy: Reading Woman in L’Étranger”, in A. King (ed.), Camus’ “L’Étranger”: Fifty Years On, 152-69 Montgomery, Geraldine F., Noces pour femme seule: Le féminin et le sacré dans l’œuvre d’Albert Camus (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004) Morot-Sir, Edouard, “L’Esthétique d’Albert Camus: logique de la limite, mesure de la mystique”, in R. Gay-Crosier (ed.), Œuvre fermée, œuvre ouverte, 93-112. ____ “Camus, reader of Melville: recognition of a fraternal model”, French-American Review, 6 (2) (Fall 1982), 328-41 ____ “Logique de la limite, esthétique de la pauvreté: théorie et pratique de l’essai”, in R. Gay-Crosier (ed.) Albert Camus 1980, 189-207 ____ “Humour and exile”, in A. Rizzuto (ed.), The Third Decade, 53-70 ____ “La double transcendance du feminin et du masculin dans ‘La Femme adultère’ d’Albert Camus”, Dalhousie French Studies, 19 (Fall-Winter1990), 51-60 ____ “1942-1943: l’homme à la recherche de l’impossible: les trois essais d’Albert Camus, de Jean-Paul Sartre, et de Georges Bataille”, L’Esprit Créateur, 33 (1) (Spring 1993), 5-15 ____ “Actualité de L’Étranger”, AC17, 7-26 Moses, Edwin, “Functional Complexity: the narrative techniques of The Plague”, MFS, 20 (1974), 419-29
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333
Murray, Jack, “Three Murders in the Contemporary French Novel”, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 6 (3) (Autumn 1964), 361-75 ____ “Colonial bodies: Gide’s L’Immoraliste as an intertext of Camus’s, ‘La Femme adultère’”, Modern Language Quarterly, 52 (1) (March 1991), 71-85 ____ “Closure and anti-closure in Camus’s L’Etranger: some ideological considerations”, Symposium, 46 (3) (Fall 1992), 225-40 Nadeau Maurice, Grâces leur soient rendus: mémoires littéraires (Paris: Albin Michel, 1990) Neilson, Frank P., “The Plague: Camus’s Pro-fascist Allegory”, Literature & Ideology, 15 (1973), 17-26 Nicholls, J. A., “Towards a Camusian reading of le devoir de violence”, Australian Journal of French Studies, 28 (2) (May-Aug 1991), 211-19 Niel, Andre, “Albert Camus et le drame du moi”, Revue de la Méditerranée, 17 (82) (Nov-Dec 1957), 603-22 Nojgaard, Morten, “Temps et espace dans La Chute de Camus”, Orbis Litterarum, 26 (4) (1971), 291-320 Nora, Pierre, “Pour une autre explication de l’Etranger”, France-observateur, 12 (557) (5 Jan. 1961), 16-17 Noyer-Weidner Alfred, “Structure et sens de l’Etranger”, in R. Gay-Crosier (ed.), Albert Camus 1980, 72-85 ____ “Albert Camus in his short story phase”, in Judith Suther (ed.), Essays on Camus’s Exile & the kingdom, 45-87 Nuttall, A.D., “Did Meursault mean to kill the Arab? The intentional fallacy fallacy”, Critical Quarterly, 10 (1) (1968), 95-106 Nykrog, Per, “Sartre penned by Camus, 1953-55”, L’Esprit créateur, 29 (4) (Winter 1989), 65-74 O’Brien, Conor Cruise, Albert Camus (London: Fontana, 1970) O’Connell, David, “Jules Roy, Albert Camus et les chevaux du soleil”, Revue Celfan 6 (2-3) (Feb-May1987), 15-19 O’Hanlon, Redmond, “The Rite of friendship: an analysis of the bathing scene in La Peste”, Modern Languages, 61 (3) (September 1980), 120-25 ____ “The Life-death Nexus in L’Etranger”, Nottingham French Studies 19 (2) (Oct 1980), 31-48 Ohayon, Stephen, “Camus’ The Stranger: the Sun Metaphor & Patricidal Conflict”, American Imago, 40 (2) (Summer1983), 189-205 Okeh, Peter Igbonekwu, “La Peste en Afrique; une rencontre avec Albert Camus et Alioum Fantoure”, Présence africaine, 129 (1er trim 1984), 53-78 Onimus Jean, Camus (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1965) ____ “Un Grand amour manqué”, in J. Levi-Valensi (ed.) Les Critiques de notre temps et Camus, 111-15 ____ “The Adulterous Woman and the Starry Sky”, in J. Suther (ed.), Essays on Camus’ “Exile and the Kingdom”, 121-31 Orme, Mark, The Development of Albert Camus’s Concern for Social and Political Justice: “Justice pour un juste” (Madison/Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2007) Otten, Terry, “‘Maman’ in Camus’s The Stranger”, College Literature, 2 (2) (Spring 1975), 105-12 Papamalamis, Dimitris, Albert Camus et la pensée grecque, (Nancy: Idoux, 1965)
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Parisier-Plottel, Jeanine, “Intertextuality in Albert Camus”, in B. Knapp (ed.), Critical Essays on Albert Camus, 116-27 Parker, Samuel Emmett, Albert Camus: The Artist in the Arena (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1965) Parsell, David B., “Aspects of comedy in Camus’s Le Malentendu”, Symposium 37(4) (Winter 1983), 302-17 Pasco, Alan H., “And Seated Ye Shall Fall. Some Lexical Markers in Camus’s ‘Jonas’”, Modern Fiction Studies 28 (2) (Summer 1982), 240-42. Pelz, Manfred, “Camus’s Two Styles in ‘The Adulterous Woman’”, in J. Suther (ed.), Essays on Camus’s Exile and the Kingdom, 133-42 ____ ‘“The Function of Interior Monologue in ‘The Renegade’”, in J. Suther (ed.), Essays on Camus’s Exile and the kingdom, 189-202 Perrot, Jean, “Le Descartes dostoievskien de la Chute d’Albert Camus”, AC5 (1972), 129-53 Perry, Sheila, “‘La vie d’artiste’ by Albert Camus: the artist – innocent or guilty?”, Nottingham French Studies 21(1) (May 1982), 37-47 Peschel, Enid Rhodes, and Edmund Pellegrino (eds), Medicine and Literature (New York: Watson Academic Publishers, 1980) Peters, Renate, “L’art, la révolte, l’histoire: ‘Le Renégat’ et L’Homme révolté”, French Review, 54 (4) (March 1981), 517-23 Petit, Pierre, “Tuberculose et sensibilité chez Gide et Camus”, Bulletin des amis d’André Gide, 9 (51) (July 1981), 279-92 Petrey, Sandy, “The Function of Christian Imagery in La Chute”, Texas Studies in Language and Literature 11(1970), 1445-54 ____ “Speech, society and nature in Camus’s ‘Les Muets’”, Romance notes, 22 (2) (Winter 1981), 161-66 Peyre, Henri, “Presence of Camus”, in Bettina Knapp (ed.), Critical essays, 13-35 ____ “Camus the pagan”, in Brée (ed.), Camus: a Collection of Critical Essays, 65-70 Phan Thi Ngoc-Mai: Pierre Nguyen Van-Huy, La Chute de Camus, le dernier testament (Neuchâtel: à la baconnière, 1974) Pichon-Rivière, Arminda A., de: Baranger, Willy, “Répression du deuil et intensification des mécanismes et des angoisses schizo-paranoïdes. (Notes sur l’Étranger de Camus)”, Revue francaise de psychanalyse, 23 (3) (1959), 409-20 Pickford, Cedric (ed), Mélanges de littérature française offerts à Garnet Rees (Paris: Minard, 1980) Picon, Gaëtan, L”Usage de la lecture (Paris: Mercure de France, 1961) ____ “Remarques sur La Peste”, in Jacqueline Lévi-Valensi (ed.), Les Critiques de notre temps et Camus, 77-84 Pilla, Francesco di, “Camus en Italie”, in Guérin (ed.), Camus et la politique, 69-93 ____ “Remarques sur l’algérianité de Camus”, in P.-F. Smets (ed.), Albert Camus, 19-34 Pingaud, Bernard, “L’Etranger” de Camus (Paris: Hachette, 1971) ____ “L’Étranger” d’Albert Camus (Paris, Gallimard, 1992) Planche, Jean-Louis, “Le 8 mai 1945: éléments pour une analyse des positions de Camus face au nationalisme algérien”, in Jean-Yves Guérin (ed.), Camus et la politique, 153-71 Porter, Laurence M., “From chronicle to novel: artistic elaboration in Camus’s La Peste”, Modern Fiction Studies, 28 (4) (Winter 1982-3), 589-96
Selected Bibliography
335
Pratt, Bruce, “Epicureanism in L’Étranger”, Essays in French Literature 11 (Nov 1974), 74-82 Pratt, Mary Louise, “Mapping Ideology: Gide, Camus, and Algeria”, College Literature, 8 (1981), 158-74 Prince, Gerald, “Introduction à l’étude du narrataire”, Poétique 14 (1973), 178-96 ____ “Le Discours attributif dans La Peste”, in R. Gay-Crosier (ed.), Albert Camus 1980, 101-07 Quilliot, Roger, “Albert Camus’s Algeria”, in G. Brée (ed.), Camus: a collection of critical essays, 38-47 ____ “Albert Camus ou les difficultés du langage”, AC2 (1969), 77-102 ____ “Clamence et son masque”, AC3 (1970), 81-100 ____ La Mer et les prisons: essai sur Albert Camus, (Paris: Gallimard, 1970) ____ “Un Monde ambigue”, in Lévi-Valensi (ed.), Les Critiques de notre temps et Camus, 98-103 ____ “L’anarchisme mesuré de Camus”, Symposium, 24 (3) (Fall 1970), 243-53 ____ “Camus’s Libertarian socialism”, in Bettina Knapp (ed.), Critical essays, 36-42 ____ “Camus et le socialisme”, in J.-Y. Guérin (ed.), Camus et la politique, 31-39 Quinn, Renée, “Albert Camus devant le problème algérien”, Revue des sciences humaines, 32 (128) (1967), 613-31 ____ “Le thème racial dans L’Etranger”, La Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France, 69(6) (Nov-Dec 1969), 1009-13 Rabaté, Dominique, Vers une littérature de l’épuisement (Paris: Corti, 1991) ____ “L’économie de la mort dans L’Étranger”, AC 16 (1995), 93-107 Reuter, Ives, Texte/idéologie dans “la Chute” de Camus (Paris: Minard, 1980) ____ “La Chute ou les problèmes de lecture d’un manuel”, AC10 (1982), 109-23 Rey, Pierre-Louis, Camus: “L’Étranger” (Paris: Hâtier, 1970) Rhein, Philip, Albert Camus (Nashville: Twayne Publishers, 1969) Rigaud, Jan, “Albert Camus, écrivain algérien?”, Revue Celfan, 4 (3) (May 1985), 1822 ____ “Interview accordée à Jan F. Rigaud par Margeurite Dobrenn et Christiane Faure”, Revue Celfan (Nov. 1986), 16-22 ____ “The Depiction of Arabs in L’Étranger”, in A. King (ed.), Fifty Years On, 18392 Riggs, Larry W.: Willoquet-Maricondi, Paula, “Colonialism, enlightenment, castration: writing, narration and legibility in L’Etranger”, Studies in Twentieth Century Literature, 16 (2) (Summer 1992), 265-88 Rizzuto, Anthony, Camus’ Imperial Vision (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press: 1981) ____ “Camus and a Society without Women”, Modern Language Studies, 13 (1) (Winter 1983), 3-14 ____ “La scène d’amour chez Camus”, in D. H. Walker (ed.), Les Extrêmes et l’équilibre, 211-25 ____ (ed.) Albert Camus’ “L’Exil et le royaume: The third decade (Toronto: Paratexte, 1989) ____ Camus: Love and Sexuality (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998) Robin, Maurice, “Albert Camus et la crise de l’homme dans le tiers monde” in A. Abbou (ed.), Camus et l’Europe [unpaginated] ____ “Remarques sur l’attitude de Camus face à la guerre d’Algérie”, in J.-Y. Guérin (ed.), Camus et la politique, 185-91
336
Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus
Roblès, Emmanuel, “Jeunesse d’Albert Camus”, in Hommage à Albert Camus, NRF (March 1960), 410-21 ____ “Interview accordée à La Revue Celfan par Emmanuel Roblès”, Celfan Review, 1 (3) (1982), 20-22 ____ Albert Camus et la trêve civile (Philadelphia: Celfan Monologs, 1988) ____ Camus: frère de soleil (Paris: Seuil, 1995) Roelens, Maurice, “Un texte, son histoire et l’histoire: ‘L’Hôte’ d’Albert Camus”, Revue des sciences humaines, 42 (165) (Jan-March 1977), 5-22 Ronen, Ruth, “Space in Fiction”, Poetics Today, 7 (3) (1986), 421-38 Rubinlicht-Proux, Anne, “L’Étranger et le positivisme juridique”, AC17 (1996), 2768 Sahel, Andre-Patrick, “Phénix et Charybde: mort vitale et vie mortifère chez Gide et Camus”, Bulletin des amis d’Andre Gide, 14 (19) (71) (July 1986), 75-83 Sarocchi, Jean, Camus (Paris: P.U.F., 1968) ____ Le Dernier Camus ou Le Premier homme (Paris: Nizet, 1995) ____ “Le Thème de la recherche du père dans l’œuvre d’Albert Camus”, doctoral thesis (Paris IV, 1975) ____ “Albert Camus: père manqué, œuvre ouverte”, in R. Gay-Crosier (ed.), Œuvre fermée, œuvre ouverte? 37-53 ____ “D’une peste l’autre: pour un parallèle entre les deux versions de La Peste”, Roman 20-50, 2 (December 1986), 57-68 ____ “L’Autre et les autres”, in A. Rizzuto (ed.), The Third decade, 95-104 ____ “Le Malentendu par Andre Gide”, Litteratures, 22 (Spring 1990), 191-206 ____ “Les fureurs adolescentes”, in D. H. Walker (ed.), Les Extrêmes et l’équilibre, 3-15 ____ “Camus et Bonnefoy”, AC 15 (1993), 97-122 ____ “L’Europe, Exil ou Royaume”, in Abbou (ed.), Camus et l’Europe [unpaginated] ____ “La Méditerranée est un songe, Monsieur”, Perspectives, 5 (1998), 109-129 ____ “Clamence séducteur?”, Europe, 846 (October 1999), 119-131 Sartre, Jean-Paul, “Explication de l’Étranger”, Situations 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1947), 99-121 ____ “Réponse à Albert Camus”, Les Temps modernes 8 (82) (Aug. 1952), 334-53 Schenirer, Gisèle, “Camus: paysage interieur”, New Zealand Journal of French Studies, 2 (2) (Nov. 1981), 55-65 Schlette, Heinz Robert, “La critique de la technique chez Camus”, in A. Abbou (ed.), Camus et l’Europe [unpaginated] Segal, Naomi, Narcissus and Echo: Women in the French ‘récit’, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988) Segovia, Jaime Castro, “Reflections of the Afro-Brazilian World in “The Growing Stone”“, in J. Suther (ed.), Essays on Camus’s Exile & the Kingdom, 172-88 Showalter, English, Jr, “Two Murderers: Meursault and the renegade”, in A. Rizzuto (ed.), The Third Decade, 9-17 ____ “Camus and Dadelsen’s Jonas” Modern Language Studies, 12 (2) (Spring 1982), 41-47 ____ Exiles and Strangers: a reading of Camus’s “Exile and the Kingdom” (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1984) ____ The Stranger: Humanity and the Absurd (New York: Twayne, 1989)
Selected Bibliography
337
Siblot, Paul: Planche, Jean-Louis, “Le 8 mai 1945: éléments pour une analyse des positions de Camus face au nationalisme algérien”, in Camus et la politique, 153-71 Sjursen, Nina, “Meursault un rescapé de la normalisation ou L’Étranger lu par Foucault”, AC 13 (1989), 95-104 ____ “La chute du langage: l’ironie d’après Camus, Baudelaire et Paul de Man”, AC14 (1991), 97-113 ____ “Le piège et la démesure”, in Abbou (ed.), Camus et l’Europe [unpaginated] ____ (ed.), Karin Holter (ed.), “Encore Camus? Camus encore! Journée camusienne à l’Université d’Oslo”, Narcisse 16 (Oslo, 1996) Smets, Paul-F., Albert Camus: textes réunis par P-F Smets à l’occasion du 25e anniversaire de la mort de l’écrivain (Brussels: éditions de l’université de Bruxelles, 1985) ____ Albert Camus: dans le premier silence et au-dela: suivi de Albert Camus, chroniqueur judiciaire à ‘Alger Républicain’ en 1939 (Brussels: Goemaere, 1985) ____ La Chute: Un testament ambigu (Brussels: Blondiau Print, 1988) ____ “Le juge-pénitent du Mexico-City”, Revue Générale, 125 (1989), 71-79 ____ Albert Camus, ce “premier homme” (Brussels: Ceuterick, 1995) Sperber, Michael A., “Camus’ The Fall: the Icarus complex”, American Imago, 26 (3) (Fall 1969), 269-80 Stamm, Julian, “Camus’ Stranger; his act of violence”, American Imago, 26 (Fall 1969), 281-90 Stephanson, R., “The plague narratives of Defoe and Camus: illness as metaphor”, Modern Language Quarterly, 48 (3) (Sept. 1987), 224-41 Sterling, Elwyn F., “Albert Camus’s la Peste: Cottard’s act of madness”, College literature, 13 (2) (Spring 1986), 177-85 ____ “Albert Camus’s ‘Adulterous Woman’: A Consent to Dissolution”, Kentucky Romance Quarterly, 34 (2) (May 1987), 155-63 ____ “Albert Camus: the psychology of the body and the stranger”, University of South Florida Language Quarterly, 25 (3-4) (Spring-Summer, 1987), 11-20 Stoltzfus, Ben, “Camus and the meaning of revolt”, Modern Fiction Studies, 10 (3) (Autumn 1964), 293-302 ____ “Camus’s L’Étranger: a Lacanian reading”, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 31 (4) (Winter1989), 514-35 Strauss, George, “A Reading of Albert Camus’s La Mort heureuse”, Neophilologus, 59 (2) (April 1975), 199-212 Sturrock, John, “Something Royal. Le Premier homme by Albert Camus”, London Review of books, 16 (17) (8 Sept. 1994), 6-8 Sugden, L., “Meursault, an Oriental Sage”, French Review, 47 (6) (Spring, 1974), 197-207 Suther, Judith (ed.) Essays on Camus’s “Exile and the Kingdom”, Romance Monographs (Mississipi: University of Mississipi, 1980) Tarrow, Susan, Exile from the Kingdom: a political re-reading of Albert Camus (University of Alabama Press, 1985) Tavor, Eve, “Fictional Facts and Science in Defoe and Camus’ Plague Year”, Orbis Litterarum, 40 (2) (1985), 150-70 Theis, Raimund, “Albert Camus’s Return to Sisyphus”, in J. Suther (ed.), Essays on Camus’s “Exile and the Kingdom”, 21-43
338
Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus
Thody Philip, “Meursault et la critique (anglo-saxonne)”, Albert Camus: Configuration critique 5 (Paris: Lettres modernes, 1961), 11-23 ____ Albert Camus: A study of his Work (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1957) ____ Albert Camus, 1913-60 (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1961) ____ “Camus’s L’Étranger revisited”, Critical Quarterly, 21 (2) (Summer 1979), 6169 ____ Albert Camus (London: MacMillan;1989) ____ (ed.) Albert Camus. Selected Essays and Notebooks (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970) Tisson-Braun, Micheline, “Silence and the desert: the flickering vision”, in B. Knapp (ed.), Critical essays, 42-55 Todd, Olivier, Albert Camus: une vie (Paris: Gallimard, 1996) Ton That, Dong-Nai, “L’Héroisme Moderne de Camus: une étude de trois femmes”, Chimères, 14 (1) (Winter 1980-81), 73-82 Toura, Hiroki, “Quatre formes de présence au monde - Mersault, Caligula, Sisyphe et Meursault”, Equinoxe (Geneva: Slatkine, 1996), 9-20 Treil, Claude, L’indifférence dans l’œuvre d’Albert Camus (Quebec: Cosmos, 1971) Tremblay, V-L., “La structure mytho-rituelle de l’imaginaire camusien”, French review, 62 (5) (April 1989), 783-92 Tucker, Warren, “La Chute, voie du salut terrestre”, French Review, 43 (5) (April 1970), 737-44 Ullman, Stephen, The Image in the Modern French Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960) Van den Heuvel, Pierre, “Parole, mot et silence; les avatars de l’énonciation dans L’Étranger d’Albert Camus”, AC10 (1982), 53-88 Van Huy, Pierre Nguyen, La Métaphysique du bonheur chez Albert Camus (Neuchatel: à la baconnière, 1962) Vasil, Dean, The Ethical Pragmatism of Albert Camus: Two Studies in the History of Ideas (New York: Peter Lang, 1985) Viallaneix, Paul, “Jeux et enjeux de l’ironie dans la Chute”, in Gay-Crosier (ed.) Œuvre fermée, œuvre ouverte?, 187-200 ____ “Le Testament du Premier homme”, Equinoxe (Geneva: Slatkine, 1996), 95-100 Vigée, Claude, “L’Errance entre L’Exil et le Royaume”, Table ronde, 146 (Feb 1960), 120-26 Viggiani, Carl A., “Camus’s L’Étranger”, PMLA, 71 (5) (Dec 1956), 865-87 ____ “Notes pour le futur biographe d’Albert Camus”, AC1 (1968), 200-18 ____ “Fall and Exile: Camus 1956-58”, in R. Gay-Crosier (ed.), Albert Camus 1980, 269-76 ____ “The Genesis and Elaboration of L’Exil et le royaume in the Carnets”, in A. Rizzuto (ed.), The Third Decade, 105-116 Vincent, Grégoire, “Monde sourd, monde absurde, ou pour une impossibilité de s’entendre dans L’Étranger”, Romanic Review, 85 (3) (May 1993), 403-19 ____ “Les Femmes et Meursault dans L’Étranger”, Romanic Review, 90 (1) (January 2000), 45-71 Waelti-Walters, Jennifer, “Images of the fall in Camus: La Chute and Caligula”, in U. Döring: Zaiser, Rainer (eds), Ouverture et dialogue: mélanges offerts à Wolfgang Leiner à l’occasion de son soixantième anniversaire (Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 1988), 783-91
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339
____ “The Centripetal Structure of Camus’s La Peste”, in Kellman (ed.), Approaches to Teaching Camus’ “The Plague”, 37-46 Wagner, C. Roland, “The silence of the Stranger”, Modern Fiction Studies, 16 (1) (Spring 1970), 27-40 Walker, David H., “Image, symbole et signification dans ‘La Pierre qui pousse’”, AC11 (1982), 77-104 ____ “Albert Camus and the fait divers”, French Cultural Studies, 3 (Feb. 1992), 115 ____ “Le Criminel chez Camus”, in Walker, D.H. (ed.), Les Extrêmes et l’équilibre, 17-32 ____ “Albert Camus devant les méfaits de l’Europe”, in A. Abbou (ed.), Camus et l’Europe [unpaginated] ____ “De L’Exil et le royaume au Premier Homme”, Equinoxe (Geneva: Slatkine, 1996), 83-94 ____ (ed.) Albert Camus: les extrêmes et l’équilibre: actes du colloque de Keele 2527 mars 1993 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994) ____ Outrage and Insight: Modern French Writers and the ‘fait divers’ (Oxford, Washington D.C.: Berg, 1995) Walker, I. H., “The Composition of Caligula”, Symposium, 20 (3) (Fall 1966), 263-77 ____ “Camus, Plotinus and ‘Patrie’: the remaking of a myth”, Modern Language Review, 77 (4) (Oct 1982), 829-39 Ward, Bruce K., “The Recovery of Helen: Albert Camus’s Attempt to Restore the Greek idea of Nature”, Dionysius, 14 (Dec. 1990), 169-94 ____ “Prometheus or Cain: Albert Camus’s Account of the Western Quest for Justice”, Faith and Philosophy 8 (2) (April, 1991), 193-213 Wardman, Harold W. “Parody in Camus”, Essays in French Literature, 2 (Nov 1965), 15-29 Waters, Valerie, “Camus’s La Femme adultère: Janine’s dream”, Romance Studies, 18 (Summer,1991), 65-73 Weis, Marcia, The Lyrical Essays of Albert Camus: “une longue fidélité” (Sherbrooke: Naaman, 1976) Welch, David, “Paradox and the poetry of paradox in Albert Camus’s L’Étranger”, in C. Pickford (ed.), Mélanges de littérature offerts à Garnet Rees, 275-87 West, John K., “Political or Personal: The Role of the Chenoua Landscape in Camus’s La Mort heureuse”, The French Review, 73 (5) (April 2000), 834-844 Weyembergh, Maurice, “Albert Camus et Karl Popper: la critique de l’historisme et de l’historicisme”, AC9 (1979), 43-63 ____ “Camus et Nietzsche: évolution d’une affinité”, in R. Gay-Crosier (ed.) Albert Camus 1980, 221-30 ____ “L’obsession du clos et le thème des camps”, in R. Gay-Crosier (ed.): J. LéviValensi (ed.), Œuvre fermée, œuvre ouverte? 361-75 ____ “Révolte et Ressentiment”, AC12 (1985), 65-82 ____ “Une lecture nietzschéenne de La Mort heureuse”, in P.-F. Smets (ed.), Albert Camus, 35-49 ____ “La mémoire du juge-pénitent”, AC 15 (1993), 63-77 ____ “La mémoire du retour et le retour de la mémoire”, in Abbou (ed.), Camus et l’Europe [unpaginated] ____ “‘La Femme adultère’ et ‘The Woman who Rode Away’: Albert Camus et D.H. Lawrence”, Equinoxe (Geneva:Slatkine, 1996), 50-64
340
Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus
____ “Camus philosophe?”, in Narcisse 16, (1996), 17-32 ____ Albert Camus ou la mémoire des origines (Brussels: De Boeck University, 1998 Whartenby, H. Allen, “The Interlocutor in La Chute: a key to its meaning”, PMLA, 83 (5) (Oct 1968), 1326-33 Wheeler, Burton M., “Beyond despair: Camus’ The Fall and Van Eyck’s Adoration of the lamb”, Contemporary Literature, 23 (3) (Summer 1982), 343-64 Williams, Thomas A., “Albert Camus and the Houses of Descartes”, Romance Notes, 5 (2) (Spring 1964), 115-17 Zahareas, Anthony, ‘“La Femme Adultère’. Camus’s Ironic Vision of the Absurd”, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 5 (3) (Fall 1963), 319-28 Zepp Evelyn, “Self and other: identity as dialogical confrontation in La Chute”, Perspectives on Contemporary Literature, 12(1986), 51-56 ____ “Dialogizing the Monologue: the creation of the ‘double-voiced’ word in Camus’s La Chute”, Symposium, 35 (4) (Winter 1981-2), 357-71 ____ “The popular-ritual structural pattern of Albert Camus’s La Chute”, Modern language Studies, 13 (1) (Winter 1983), 15-21 ____ “Exile in the Kingdom: Where is the King?”, in A. Rizzuto (ed.), The Third Decade, 107-41 Zima, Pierre, “Indifférence et structures naratives dans L’Étranger”, in P.-F. Smets (ed.) Albert Camus, 85-99 ____ “Pour une sémiotique sociocritique”, Revue des sciences humaines, LXXII (201) (Jan- March 1986), 21-34 Zimmerman, Eugenia N., “The Plague and its contracts”, in S. Kellman (ed.), Approaches to Teaching Camus’s “The Plague”, 54-62
Social and Historical Background Adler, Laure, La Vie quotidienne dans les maisons closes: 1830-1930 (Paris: Hachette, 1990) Ageron, Charles-Robert, Les Algériens musulmans et la France (1871-1919) (Paris: P.U.F., 1968) ____ Politiques coloniales au Maghreb (Paris: P.U.F., 1972) ____ Histoire de l’Algérie contemporaine, vol. 2 (Paris: P.U.F., 1979) ____ Histoire de l’Algérie contemporaine (1830-1994) 10th edn, (que sais-je?) (Paris, PUF, 1994) Ahmed, Leila, “Feminism and feminist movements in the Middle East, a preliminary exploration”, Women’s Studies International Forum, 5 (2) (1982), 153-68. ____ Women and Gender in Islam (Newhaven: London: Yale University Press, 1992) Alloula, Malek, Le Harem colonial: images d’un sous-érotisme (Paris: Slatkine, 1981) Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983) Andrew, C. M.: Kanya-Forstner, A.S., “Centre & Periphery in the Making of the Second French Colonial Empire, 1815-1920”, Journal Of Imperial & Commonwealth History, XVI (3) (May 1988), 9-34 Audisio, Gabriel, Ulysse ou l’intelligence (Paris: Gallimard, 1946) Baudicour, Louis de, Histoire de la colonisation de l’Algérie (Paris: Challamel, 1860) Berlière, Jean-Marc, La Police des mœurs sous la IIIe République (Paris: Seuil, 1992) Berman, Paul, Terror and Liberalism (London: Norton, 2004) Berque, Jacques, Le Maghreb entre deux guerres, 10th edition (Paris: Seuil, 1962) Bertrand, Louis, Le Sang des races (Paris: Georges Crès et Cie, 1921)
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341
Blanchard, Ian, Mining, Metallurgy and Minting in the Middle Ages, vol.1 (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2001) Bourdieu, Pierre, Sociologie de l’Algérie (que sais-je?) (Paris: P.U.F., 1970) Corbin, Alain, Les Filles de Noce; misère sexuelle et prostitution (19e & 20e siècles) (Paris: Aubier Montaigne, 1978) Cohen, Nick, What’s Left? How Liberals Lost Their Way (London: Harper Collins, 2007) Colley, Linda, Captives: Britain, Empire and the World 1600-1850 (London: Random House, 2003) Davis, Robert C., Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, The Barbary Coast, and Italy, 1500-1800 (London: Macmillan, 2004) Djebar, Assia, Le Blanc de l’Algérie (Paris: Albin Michel, 1995) Dorph, Kenneth Jan, “Islamic law in contemporary North Africa: a study of the laws of divorce in the Maghreb”, Women’s Studies International Forum, 5 (2) (1982), 169-82 Evans, Martin; John Phillips, Algeria: Anger of the Dispossessed (London: Yale University Press, 2007) Fanon, Frantz, Sociologie d’une révolution (l’an V de la révolution algérienne) (Paris: Maspero, 1975) Fromentin, Eugène, “Un été dans le Sahara”, in Œuvres complètes, Guy Sagnes (ed.) (Paris: Gallimard, 1984) Fouchet, Max-Pol, Un Jour, je m’en souviens: mémoire parlée (Paris: Mercure de France, 1968) Girardet, Raoul, L’Idée coloniale en France 1871-1962 (Paris: La Table ronde, 1972) Gobineau, Joseph Arthur, Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines, 2 vols (Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1940 [1853]) ____ Les Pléïades, introduction and notes by Jean Mistler (Monaco: Éditions du Rocher, 1946 [1876]) Gordon, David, Women of Algeria: an Essay on Change, Harvard Middle Eastern Monograph Series (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968) Heggoy, Andrew Alf, “Cultural disrespect: European and Algerian Views on Women in Colonial and Independent Algeria”, Muslim World, 62 (October 1972), 32135 ____ “Algerian Women and the Right to Vote: Some Colonial Anomalies”, Muslim World 64 (1974), 228-35 ____ “On the Evolution of Algerian Women”, African Studies Review, 17 (2) (Sep., 1974), 449-56 Henry, Jean-Robert (ed.), Le Maghreb dans l’imaginaire français: la colonie, le désert, l’exil (Aix-en-Provence: Édisud, 1985) Henriques, Fernando, Prostitution and Society: a survey (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1962) Horne, Alistair, A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962 (New York: New York Review of Books, 2006 [1977]) Hytier, Jean, L’Iran de Gobineau (Alger: Cafre, 1939) Kessous, Mohammed-el-Aziz, La Vérité sur le malaise Algérien ([Bone: 1935]) Le Sueur, James D., Uncivil War: Intellectuals and Identity Politics during the Decolonization of Algeria (London: University of Nebraska Press, 2005) Leconte, Daniel, Les Pieds-Noirs: histoire et portrait d’une communauté (Paris: Seuil, 1980)
342
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Lewis, Bernard, Race and Slavery in the Middle East (Oxford University Press, 1994) ____ “The Crows of the Arabs”, Critical Inquiry 12 (1) (Autumn 1985), 88-97 Löwenheim, Oded, “‘Do Ourselves Credit and Render a Lasting Service to Mankind’: British Moral Prestige, Humanitarian Intervention, and the Barbary Pirates”, International Studies Quarterly, 47 (1) (2003), 23–48 Magubane, Zine, “Which Bodies Matter? Feminism, Poststructuralism, Race, and the Curious Theoretical Odyssey of the ‘Hottentot Venus’”, Gender and Society, 15 (6) (Dec., 2001), 816-34 McClintock, Anne, “The Angel of Progress: Pitfalls of the Term ‘Post-Colonialism’”, Social Text, 31/32, “Third World and Post-Colonial Issues” (1992), 84-98 ____ Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (London: Routledge, 1995) Memmi, Albert, “Portrait du colonisé”: précédé de “portrait du colonisateur” (Paris: Gallimard,1985) Mernissi, Fatima, “Virginity and Patriarchy”, Women’s Studies International Forum, 5 (2) (1982), 183-92 Minces, Juliette, The House of Obedience: Women in Arab Society, trans. Michael Pallis (London: Zed Press, 1982) Moghadam, Valentine M. (ed.), Gender and National Identity: Women and Politics in Muslim Societies (London: Zed Press, 1994) M’Rabet, Fadela, La Femme algérienne (Paris: Maspero, 1965) Nora, Pierre, Les Français d’Algérie (Paris: Julliard, 1961) Roche, Anne, “La Posture ethnographique dans quelques textes à compte d’auteur de Français sur l’Algérie”, in J.-R. Henry (ed.), Le Maghreb dans l’imaginaire français, 165-75 Roy, Jules, La Guerre d’Algérie (Paris: Julliard, 1960) Saadawi, Nawal el, “Woman and Islam”, Women’s Studies International Forum, 5 (2) (1982), 193-206 Siblot, Paul, “Retours à ‘L’Algérie heureuse’ ou les mille et un détours de la nostalgie”, in J.-R. Henry (ed.), Le Maghreb dans l’imaginaire français, 151-64 Spengler, Oswald, The Decline of the West, trans. Charles Atkinson (London: Allen and Unwin, 1971) Stora, Benjamin, “Conflits et champs politiques en Algérie”, Politique étrangère (2) (Summer 1995) (60e année), 329- 42 ____ “Algérie: les retours de la mémoire de la guerre d’indépendance”, Modern and Contemporary France, 10 (4), 2002, 461-473 Tillion, Germaine, Le Harem et les cousins (Paris: Seuil, 1966) Vatin, Jean-Claude, “Désert construit et inventé, Sahara perdu ou retrouvé: le jeu des imaginaires”, in J.-R. Henry (ed.), Le Maghreb dans l’imaginaire français, 10731 Vidal-Naquet, Pierre: Thibaud, Paul, “Le Combat pour l’indépendance algérienne: une fausse coïncidence?”, Esprit, 208 (Jan. 1995), 142-151 Viollette, Maurice, L’Algérie vivra-t-elle? Notes d’un ancien gouverneur-général (Paris: Alcan, 1931)
Literary, Feminist and Postcolonial theory Aresu, Bernard (ed.), Substance: a review of theory and literary criticism, 69 21 (3) (1992) (Special Issue, Translations of the Orient: Writing the Maghreb)
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343
Ashcroft, Bill: Griffiths, Gareth: Tiffin, Helen, The Post-colonial Studies Reader (London: Routledge, 1995) Barthes, Roland, Mythologies (Paris: Seuil, 1957) (New York: Vintage, 1993) Barker, Francis et al (eds), Europe and its Others, 2 vols, Proceedings of the Essex Conference on the Sociology of Literature (Colchester: University of Essex, 1985) ____ (eds) The Politics of Theory (Colchester: University of Essex, 1982) Barker, Francis: Hulme, Peter: Iversen, Margaret (eds), Colonial Discourse/ Postcolonial Theory (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994) Bergner, Gwen, “Who is that Masked Woman? Or, the Role of Gender in Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks”, PMLA, 110 (1) (January 1995) (Special issue on Colonialism and the Post-colonial Condition), 75-87 Bhabha, Homi, “The Other Question… Homi Bhabha Reconsiders the Stereotype and Colonial Discourse”, Screen, 24 (6) (1983), 18-36 Bhabha, Homi, “Of Mimicry and Man: the Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse”, in Philip Rice, Patricia Waugh (eds) Modern Literary Theory, 234-41 ____ “Signs taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and Authority under a Tree Outside Delhi, May 1817”, Critical Inquiry, 12 (Autumn 1985), 144-65 Boone, Joseph A., “Vacation Cruises; Or, The Homoerotics of Orientalism”, PMLA, 110 (1) (Jan. 1995), 89-107 Busia, Abena P. A., “Miscegenation as Metonymy: Sexuality and Power in the Colonial Novel”, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 9 (3) (July 1986), 360-72. Célestin, Roger, From Cannibals to Radicals: Figures and Limits Of Exoticism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996) Chrisman, Laura, “The Imperial Unconscious? Representations of Imperial Discourse”, in P. Williams, L. Chrisman (eds), Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory, 498-516 Déjeux, Jean, La littérature algérienne contemporaine (Paris: P.U.F., 1975) ____ “De l’éternel Méditerranéen à l’éternel Jugurtha”, Revue algérienne des sciences juridiques économiques et politiques, 14 (4) 1977, 658-728 ____ “Romans algériens et guerre de libération”, L’Esprit créateur 26 (1) (Spring 1986), 70-85 Doane, Mary Ann, Femmes Fatales; Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1991) ____ “Dark Continents: Epistemologies of Racial and Sexual Difference in Psychoanalysis and the Cinema”, in Femmes Fatales, 209-48 Donald, James: Rattansi, Ali (eds) “Race”, Culture and Difference (London: Sage, 1992) Frazer, J.G., The Golden Bough: a Study in Magic and Religion, abridged (London: Papermac, 1987) Freud, Sigmund, Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious trans. James Strachey, Angela Richards (ed.) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991) ____ “The Question of Lay Analysis: Conversations with an impartial person”, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 20 (London: Hogarth Press, 1953) ____ “Medusa’s Head”, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol.18, trans. James Strachey (ed.) (London: Hogarth Press, 1955) ____ The Origins of Religion (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990)
344
Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus
____ The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991) ____ Civilization, Society and Religion (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991) Gaines, Jane, “White Privilege and Looking Relations: Race and Gender in Feminist Film Theory”, in Erens, Patricia (ed.), Issues in Feminist Film Criticism, 197214 Gilman, Sander L., “Black Bodies, White bodies. Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late 19th Century Art, Medicine & Literature”, Critical Inquiry 12 (Autumn 1985), 204-42. Gourdon, Robert: Henry, Jean-Robert; Lorcerie, Henri (eds), “Roman colonial et idéologie en Algérie”, Revue algérienne des sciences juridiques, économiques et politiques, 11(1) (March 1974), 12-252 Graves, Robert, Greek Myths, 2 vols (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1955) Hargreaves, Alec: Michael J. Hefferman (eds), French and Algerian identities from Colonial Times to the Present: a Century of Interaction (Lewiston: Queenston: Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, 1993) Henry, Jean-Robert (ed.), Le Maghreb dans l’imaginaire français: la colonie, le désert, l’exil (Aix-en-Provence: Édisud, 1985) Hollingdale, R. J. A Nietzsche Reader (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977) Hyam, Ronald, Empire and Sexuality; the British experience (Manchester: Manchester University Press; 1990) Irigaray, Luce, Le Corps-à corps avec la mère (Montreal: Éditions de la pleine lune, 1981) ____ Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche, Gillian C. Gill (trans.) (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991) Kristeva, Julia, Powers of Horror: an Essay on Abjection, Leon Roudiez (trans.) (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982) Le Goff, Jacques, Time, Work and Culture in the Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980) Miller, Christopher, Blank Darkness: Africanist Discourse in French (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985) ____ “Hallucinations of France and Africa in the Colonial Exhibition of 1931 and Ousmane Socé’s Mirages de Paris”, Paragraph, 18 (1) (March 1995), 39-63 Miller, Jane, Seductions: Studies in Reading and Culture (London: Virago, 1990) Modleski, Tania, Feminism without Women: Culture and Criticism in a “Postfeminist” Age (New York and London: Routledge, 1991) Moore-Gilbert, Bart, Postcolonial Theory: Contexts, Practices, Politics (London: Verso, 1997) Mortimer, Mildred, “The Desert in Algerian Fiction”, L’Esprit créateur 26 (1), 61-69 Nietzsche, Friedrich, The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music, trans. Shaun Whiteside, ed. Michael Tanner (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993) ____ Thus Spoke Zarathustra trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969) ____ Twilight of the Idols / The Anti-Christ, R. J. Hollingdale (tr.) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990) Nunes, Zita, “Anthropology and Race in Brazilian Modernism”, in F. Barker et al (eds), Colonial Discourse, postcolonial theory, 115-25 Pajaczkowska, C.: Young, L., “Racism, Representation, Psychoanalysis”, in Donald, James: Rattansi, Ali (eds), “Race”, Culture and Difference, 198-219
Selected Bibliography
345
Porter, Dennis, “The Perverse Traveller: Flaubert’s Voyage en Orient”, in Esprit créateur, 29 (1) (Spring 1989), 25-36 Rice, Philip: Waugh, Patricia (eds), Modern Literary Theory: A Reader (London: Edward Arnold, 1989) Richon, Olivier, “Representation, the Despot and the Harem: Some Questions around an Academic Orientalist painting by Lecomte-du-Nouÿ (1885)”, in Barker et al (eds), Europe and its Others, vol. 1, 1-13 Rosello, Mireille (ed.), Paragraph: A Journal of Modern Critical Theory 18 (1) (March 1995) “Practices of Hybridity” Said, Edward, Orientalism (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985) ____ “Orientalism reconsidered”, in Francis Barker et al (eds), Europe and its Others, 14-27 ____ Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage, 1994) Sedgewick, Eve Kosofsky, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985) Sellers, Susan (ed.), Feminist criticism: Theory and Practice (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991) Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, “The Politics of Interpretations”, in In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics, 118-33 ____ In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (London: Methuen, 1987) ____ “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Williams, P. and Chrisman, L. (eds) Colonial Discourse, Post-colonial Theory, 66-111 ____ The Post-colonial Critic, Sarah Harasym (ed.) (London: Routledge, 1990) ____ A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999) ____ Death of a discipline (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003) Stéphane, Roger, Portrait de l’aventurier: T. E. Lawrence, Malraux, von Saloman (Paris: Grasset, 1965) Stam, Robert: Spence, Louise, “Colonialism, Racism and Representation”, Screen, 24 (2) (1983), 2-20 Suleri, Sara, “Woman Skin Deep: Feminism and the Postcolonial Condition”, Critical Inquiry, 18 (Summer, 1992) 756-69 Tanner, Michael, Nietzsche (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994) Williams, Patrick: Chrisman, Laura (eds), Colonial Discourse and Post-colonial Theory (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993) Williams, Charles, The Figure of Beatrice. A Study in Dante (London: Faber, 1943) Woodhull, Winifred, Transfigurations of the Maghreb: Feminism, Decolonisation and Literatures (London, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993) ____ “Exile”, YFS (Post/colonial Conditions), 82 (1993), 7-24 Young, Julian, Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992) Young, Robert J. C., White Mythologies: Writing, History and the West (London: Routledge, 1990) ____ Colonial Desire; Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London: Routledge, 1995)
Index Abbou, André, 109 Abel, 208 abjection, 77, 83 abstract level, the, 61, 137, 138, 139 Absurd, the, 43, 110, 133, 134, 152; Absurd man, 72, 86, 87, 95, 98, 99; and Eurydice, 54; and the domestic donkey, 298; cycle, 141; first awareness of, 49; prefiguration of, 54; premonitions of, 54; the woman’s corpse, 86; women, death and an Absurd sensibility, 77 actor, the, 25, 86; as a liar, 82; as a sculptor, 93; woman as the original model, 41; woman, the first actor, 81 Ageron, Charles-Robert, 65, 67, 68, 137 Algerian war of independence, 195 Algerianism, 129 Alloula, Malek, 104 Althusser, Louis, 299 Anderson, Benedict, 183, 280, 282, 308 Andrade, Oswald de, 183, 194, 247 Apollo: the judgement of, 94, 284 Apollonian principle, the, 85, 92, 94, 95 Arab Empire, the, 215 aristocracy, 174, 175, 176, 261, 271, 272; natural, 181; the creators, 175 Arnold, A. James, 51, 55, 102, 134, 252, 258 Art: the Artist who gives birth to himself, 93; the Artist-god, 75, 85, 92; the birth of the author, 52 assimilation, 52, 64, 66, 67, 69, 102, 105, 183, 195; as absorption, being swallowed up, 257; biological, 67, 183, 248; cannibalism as a method of
assimilation, 194; naturalised Europeans, 68; racial, 180, 256; via shared activities, 236 Audisio, Gabriel, 63, 65, 69, 102, 129, 184, 186, 209, 212, 266 authenticity, 29, 64, 102, 116, 120, 123, 124, 150, 225 Balain, Blanche, 30 balance: between Greek and Christian values, 212, 285 Baranger, Willy, 80 Barchilon, José, 201 Barker, Francis, 32, 183 Bartfeld, Fernande, 70, 175, 248, 270 Barthes, Roland, 139 battle of the sexes, the, 163, 164, 171 Beatrice, the Lady of Grace, 209 beauty, 139, 169, 189, 219; without mind, 85 Benjamin, Walter, 303 Berlière, Jean-Marc, 121 Berman, Paul, 242 Berque, Jacques, 64, 103, 107, 108, 219 Bertrand, Louis, 60, 65, 66, 69, 129, 270, 273, 298 Bhabha, Homi, 33, 34, 62, 102, 239, 240, 254, 258 Bible, the, 131, 171, 211, 212, 213 biology: biological role of women, 93; decay, 124; female, 65, 67, 76, 102, 124, 236, 268, 271, 273, 274, 310; and the mother-right, 95; generational continuity, 284; inheritance, 103, 177, 178; origin, 62; ties of kinship, 283 birds, 182, 211, 251, 255, 310; and the black Diana, 183; as souls of the dead, 213; doves, 182, 212, 214; seagulls, 211; symbol of lust, 213; symbol of the Holy Spirit, 208; the Pleiades, 214
348
Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus
black Diana, the, 183, 255, 259, 260 Blake, Patricia, 176 Blanchot, Maurice, 152, 153, 155, 190 Blondeau, Marie-Louise, 137 blood: and soil, 284, 305; bloodlines, 196; chastity of the blood tie, 283; duty, 306; impoverished, 180; maternal blood line, 22, 287; purity, 181; the blood feud, 103 Brazil, 171, 181, 182, 183, 184, 188, 196, 207, 245, 256 Breton, André, 36 Brisville, Jean-Claude, 70, 274 Brombert, Victor, 242, 243, 244 Brosses, Charles de, 241 Budapest, 166, 171, 250 Cæsarism, 60, 187 Cain, 208, 209, 301, 303 calender, fils de roi. See King’s Son, 176 Calypso, 136, 187, 192, 198, 206 Camus, Albert: Amour de vivre, 70, 93, 226; Caligula, 51, 55, 57, 75, 95, 134, 135, 175; Carnets I, 61, 70, 71, 72, 77, 89, 112, 135, 143, 151, 190, 195, 218, 290, 308; Carnets II, 129, 131, 134, 135, 136, 145, 149, 157, 158, 163, 166, 172, 175, 181, 185, 189, 192, 197, 271, 283, 312; Carnets III, 21, 34, 102, 175, 181, 185, 188, 190, 212, 218, 233, 253, 259, 260, 266, 268, 272, 273, 276, 279, 281, 284, 288, 297, 306, 310, 316; Chroniques algériennes, 169; Devant la Morte, 41, 59, 75, 77; Entre Oui et Non, 42–47, 50, 56, 159; Intuitions, 24–26, 28, 30, 40, 60, 87, 89, 93, 308, 310; Jonas, ou l’artiste au travail, 264, 266–74; Journaux de Voyage, 145, 181–84, 188–89, 193, 196, 207, 245, 254– 55, 269; L’Étranger, 35, 40, 51, 78, 91, 95, 96–98, 102–3, 108–28, 133, 135, 188, 202, 220, 240, 248, 280, 312, 313, 314; L’Exil d’Hélène, 136, 139, 142, 158, 188; L’Homme révolté, 27, 159, 169,
172, 174, 175, 181, 185, 186, 192, 201, 212, 214, 242, 290; L’Hôpital du quartier pauvre, 26–28, 36, 48, 56, 136, 158; La Chute, 21, 37, 39, 169–71, 177, 180–214, 215, 223, 226, 246, 252, 255, 257, 266, 268, 269, 270, 273, 280, 284, 309; La Culture indigène, la nouvelle culture méditerranéenne, 61, 63, 64, 130, 189; La Maison mauresque, 28–35, 36, 37, 44, 48, 103, 108, 114, 124, 131, 233, 234, 236, 282, 311, 313; La Mer au plus près, 185, 192; La Mort dans l’âme, 28, 83, 87, 90; La Mort heureuse, 27, 40, 72, 76, 85, 88– 95, 98, 101, 107, 108, 112, 113, 119, 135, 153, 158, 160, 227, 265; La Peste, 27, 62, 133, 136–63, 166, 169, 171, 175, 187, 192, 195, 206, 218, 233, 250, 264, 273, 274, 280, 312; La Pierre qui pousse, 183, 215, 251–60, 268, 269; La Voix qui était soulevée par de la musique, 53; Le Livre de Mélusine, 36–41, 44, 50, 52, 53, 54, 56, 92, 153, 226, 234; Le Malentendu, 130–33, 261, 306; Le Minotaure, 70, 218; Le Mythe de Sisyphe, 43, 48, 49, 54, 56, 57, 72, 75, 77, 82, 85, 86, 87, 88, 93, 95, 98, 109, 136, 152, 156, 204, 210, 215, 217, 308; Le Premier Homme, 21, 22, 27, 30, 35, 44, 45, 62, 69, 70, 79, 80, 81, 130, 133, 186, 215, 220, 246, 263, 264, 266, 267, 274–316; Le Renégat, ou un esprit confus, 215, 241, 242–51, 253, 255, 257, 268, 300; Le Vent à Djémila, 89, 91; Les Justes, 62, 166, 175; Les Muets, 264, 266, 267; Les Voix du quartier pauvre, 41, 42, 49, 59, 112, 274; Noces, 36, 53, 63, 65, 66, 86, 102, 112, 162, 216, 226, 233, 308; Noces à Tipasa, 71, 131, 144, 210; Perte de l’être aimé, 55, 56, 59; Remarque sur la révolte, 140; Retour à Tipasa, 185, 216, 223, 226, 233;
Index Rivages, 63, 64; Voilà! elle est morte. See Devant la morte, 55 Camus, Francine, 201, 273 Camus, Simone, 36 cancer, 123 cannibalism, 47, 94, 183, 245; and assimilation, 184; and matriarchy, 246, 248, 250; the mother cat, 83, 281 Cassandra, 285, 295 Centenary of the French conquest, the, 29 Cerberus, 226 Chamberlain, Houston, 178 chaos, 175, 189, 199, 202, 253, 259, 280, 286, 289, 297; racial, 180 chastity, 72, 92, 135, 160, 188, 197, 198, 206, 209, 286, 304 Christian imagery, 171, 187, 196, 206, 211, 212, 213, 284 Christianity: eschatology, 189; the slave religion, 187, 206, 285 Circe, 192, 206 civil régime, the, 68 civilizing mission, the, 67, 69, 180, 184, 246, 258, 260 Claro, Léon, 29 Clayton, Alan J., 35, 72 Clytemnestra, 280, 285, 294, 296 Cohen, Nick, 242 Cold War, the, 242, 245 Colley, Linda, 244 Colonial Exhibition, the, 29 commerce: commodity transactions, 102; the sex trade, 108 Conqueror, the, 30, 86, 136, 175, 234 Conrad, Joseph, 228 conscious death, 88, 89, 91, 308 Costes, Alain, 49, 80, 81, 108, 109, 114, 159, 247, 279 criminality, 200, 211; murder, 87, 90, 109, 112, 114, 117, 120, 131, 171, 208, 210, 280, 302; the innocent murderer, 117 Crochet, Monique, 70, 147, 149 Cruickshank, John, 136, 137 Cryle, Peter, 216, 217 cultural priority, 34, 52, 63, 67, 102, 170, 189, 246
349
culture, 58, 288; birth of, 51, 52; cultureless history of the generation sequence, 62, 284, 297 Dadoun, Roger, 92 Daniel, Jean, 101 Dante, Alighieri, 196, 202, 206, 209, 251, 255 dark continent, 122, 188, 249; of female sexuality, 183 Davis, Robert C., 243 death: bodies without a soul, 77, 78, 83, 87; conscious, 88, 89, 91, 308; involuntary death, 87; of woman, 51, 55; the pedagogical death, 75 debauchery, 128, 189, 197, 198, 211, 213, 226 degeneration, 256 Déjeux, Jean, 64, 65, 184 depersonalization, 98 dératisation, 141 despot, the, 31 Dionysian principle, the, 93 Dionysus, 70, 93, 94, 95, 285; not of woman born, 94; the twice born, 94 Djebar, Assia, 106, 107, 238, 301, 302, 304 Doane, Mary Ann, 122 domestic sphere, 274, 295 Don Juan, 57, 71, 72, 82, 86, 92, 96, 141, 203, 204, 205, 279 Dorph, Kenneth Jan, 105 Dream world, the, 24 Dunwoodie, Peter, 280, 289, 298 duty, 38, 200, 259, 273, 274, 306, 308 earth, the, 72, 165, 187, 308, 312; and abjection, 143; as pollution, 142 Ecclesiastes: the living dog, 86 École d’Alger, 59, 129, 176, 184 Eden, 189, 200 Electra, 132 Empedocles, 83, 307, 312 envy, 24, 25, 77, 132, 171, 172, 174, 285 Erickson, John, 232, 237 Eumenides, the, 94 Euripides, 132, 164 Eurydice, 54, 135, 136, 142, 143, 147, 151, 152, 153, 155, 156
350
Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus
evasion, 28, 32, 34, 37, 87, 152, 184, 224, 234; the wish for, 24 Eve, 198, 208 Exmouth, Lord: naval bombardment of Algiers, 244 exoticism, 30, 104, 236, 255 Fanon, Franz, 106 fascism, 69, 129, 130 father, the, 132, 286, 295, 298, 299, 302; absence of, 279; as the son, 289; civilization and the Law, 288; frailty of the father’s role, 287; murder of, 280; Orestes, 296; patriarchy, 286, 288, 294; rejection of, 177; search for, 22, 181; status of, 177; substitutes, 294; superfluity of, 286, 308; the legacy of, 131 Faust: Faustian man, 190 Felman, Shoshana, 303 feminine, the, 62, 84, 139; as the cultureless history of the generation sequence, 85 Fernande Bartfeld, 70, 175 fetishism, 239, 240, 241, 242, 246, 247, 248, 249, 250, 251, 315 Fieschi, 116 fils de roi, le, 170, 176, 177, 178, 186, 197, 272, 308 Fitch, Brian, 40, 120, 201, 222, 224, 232, 234, 270, 272 FLN, the, 170, 215, 299 fraternity, 136, 158, 167, 169, 170, 314; embracing all men, 257 Freeman, E., 134 Fréminville, Claude de, 42, 55, 59, 63, 176 French conquest, Centenary of, 29 Freud, Sigmund, 109, 119, 122, 125, 155, 183, 188, 240, 241, 246, 247, 249, 250, 253, 280, 282, 287; the dark continent, 122 Fromentin, Eugène, 238, 239 Gadourek, Carina, 273 Gard, Roger Martin du, 189 Garfitt, J.S.T., 84 Gassin, Jean, 25, 27, 33, 35, 80, 109, 119, 141, 159, 160, 172, 207, 247, 248, 253, 314, 315
Gay-Crosier, Raymond, 35, 72, 96, 173 gender, 128, 163, 216, 219, 227, 230, 282; and race, 241, 248; as a borderline between life and death, 77, 78, 81, 83, 86, 235; gender relations, 105; gendering of race, 179; reversals, 131; role in the theatrical works, 134; the colonial subject as a gendered subject, 240 Gide, André, 131, 176, 228 Gilman, Sander L., 122, 123, 124, 125, 254 Girard, René, 117 Girardet, Raoul, 58 Gobineau, Joseph Arthur, 63, 170, 176–80, 181, 182, 183, 184, 189, 253, 309 God: African gods, 252; the Artistgod, 75, 85, 92; the man-god, 73, 75, 308 grandmother, the: actress, 276 Graves, Robert, 94, 214 Greece, 129, 136, 169, 187, 188, 194, 195, 196, 206, 212, 284, 286 Greek tragedy: balance, 164 Grenier, Jean, 21, 59, 61, 63, 64, 84, 101, 133, 164, 166, 170, 171, 188, 216, 227, 250, 257, 281, 285, 293 Guérin, Jean-Yves, 92, 159, 300 Haddour, Azzedine, 51, 138 harem, the, 31, 32, 33, 34, 104, 249 Hargreaves, Alec, 109 Heggoy, Alf, 65, 105, 107, 230 Hell, 192, 196, 197, 200, 202, 206, 209, 210, 213 historical origination, 34, 51, 103, 170, 239, 283, 310 history: and gender, 163 homecoming, the, 185, 192, 209, 216 homeland, the, 21, 61, 129, 130, 133, 136, 139, 169, 174, 185, 192, 209, 215, 216, 254, 261, 263, 274, 281, 282, 305, 310, 316; Latinity, 69; of the soul, 102, 131 homoeroticism, 180; and race, 179 homosocial, the, 70, 88, 160, 206, 290 honour, 107, 115, 170, 306
Index Horne, Alistair, 300 Horowitz, Louise K., 111 Hughes, Edward J., 138, 300, 311 Hulme, Peter, 183 human nature, 138, 140 huntress, woman as, 255, 257 hybridity, 36, 39, 171, 194, 212, 255, 259, 269 Hytier, Jean, 63, 176 Ibrahimi, Ahmed Taleb, 306 Ibsen, Henrik, 34, 35, 39, 124, 131, 261 ideology, 61, 71, 129, 308; German ideology, 136, 162; ideology at work, 111, 115, 162; totalitarianism, 242 idolatry, 241, 246, 247, 259 Iliad, the, 136, 157, 158, 169, 178 illness, 78, 79, 82, 282; as an apprenticeship for death, 87; as parasitism on society, 88 imagery: Christian, 187, 196, 211, 213, 284 immortality, 71, 92, 136, 187, 198, 199 incest, 280, 286, 306 indifference, 97, 126, 161, 224, 250 Indonesia, 182, 191, 194, 195 Inferno, 197, 207, 209, 210, 213 innocent murderer, 117 inter-racial relationships, 65 Irigaray, Luce, 280, 285 Islamic empire, 170, 215, 245 Ithaca, 129, 178, 184, 185, 187, 192, 193, 195, 207, 214, 284 Java, 191, 194, 196, 199, 200, 207; home of the cannibal, 192 jokes: the dirty joke, 118, 119, 125 judgement, 192; and justice, 208; of woman, 194 Judgement: the last, 213 Julien, Charles-André, 68 Just Judges, the, 207 justice, 166, 167, 198, 200, 207, 212, 219, 243, 275, 306, 313; female figures of, 139 Kabyle insurrection, the, 68 King’s son, the: fils de roi, 177 Kirilov, 75, 93, 308
351
Knapp, Bettina, 177 Kristeva, Julia, 78, 82; abjection, 77 Laghouat, 217, 218, 232, 238 language: and gender, 150; antithesis between heterosexual love and speech, 150; degeneration of, 180; discourse of masculinity, 103, 118, 120; disintegration of, 189; linguistic unity, 64, 189; myth as a depoliticized form of speech, 139; of action, 164; of commerce, 131; of reason, 146; of the heart, 194; Orientalist discourse, 34, 106, 227; shared, 134 LaVallee-Williams, Marthe, 237 Lazère, Donald, 258 Leconte, Daniel, 66, 107 Leiris, Michel, 29 Lenzini, José, 29, 30 Lévi-Valensi, Jacqueline, 35, 41, 48, 56 Lewis, Bernard, 244 Lottman, Herbert, 36, 43, 45, 107, 130, 218 love: and speech, 82; and violence, 281, 292; emotional deprivation, 21, 45, 82, 276, 291, 307; heterosexual; and egotism, 148; conceptions of, 151; homosexual, 157; instinctive, 282; mother love, 163, 194; the language; of the heart, 276; verbal expression of, 276, 279 Löwenheim, Oded, 244 lucidity, 22, 50, 70, 84, 85, 87, 90, 216, 232, 253, 316; and biology, 77; as an attribute of gender, 85; as the pathway to the divine, 94 Lynch, Martha, 236 macumba ceremony, the, 182, 183, 188, 193, 207, 249, 254, 255, 257, 258, 259, 260, 285 Mailhot, Laurent, 72, 213 Maillard, Claudine and Michel, 209, 213 Maisonseul, Jean de, 30 Makari, George, 116
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Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus
Man: Faustian, 190; the Fall of, 181, 189, 190, 214; the First Man, 170, 177, 181, 288, 294, 297, 298 man-god, the, 274 Marlowe, Christopher, 197, 318 marriage, 96, 97, 126, 150, 194, 222, 223, 225, 266; and biological kin, 286; and colonialism, 236; and debauchery, 226; and fornication, 272; and freedom, 221; and more archaic bonds, 286; and servitude, 265; and the true family, 133; arranged, 304; as a temporary institution, 288; as an institution, 273; as debauchery, 198; class variations, 264; cross-cultural variations, 267; detrimental to health, 296; in a social context, 267; intermarriage, 64, 66, 104, 237; of Muslim women, 105 Martin du Gard, Roger, 189 Martinière, the, 219 Mary, the spotless mirror of God, 208 maternal principle, 163 maternal stereotype, 124 maternal symbol, 35, 312 matriarchy, 183, 196, 280, 284, 286, 291; and cannibalism; theory of assimilation, 183 matricide, 280, 295 McCarthy, Patrick, 96, 114 McClintock, Anne, 239, 241 Mediterranean spirit, 61, 162 Medusa, 155 Melville, Herman, 206 Mephistopheles, 214 Mersault, Patrice, 91 Meyers, Jeffrey, 207 Miller, Christopher, 29, 179, 241 Miller, Henry, 272 Monique Crochet, 70 Moore-Gilbert, Bart, 240 Morot-Sir, Édouard, 35, 227 mother, the, 122, 275, 276, 279, 292, 312; and confession, 41, 279; and homeland, 133; and son, 42, 49, 127, 277, 283, 315; and the true parent of the child, 94, 284; and the woman who thinks, 226; as an
instrument, 48, 70, 116; as biological origin, 22, 282; as dead consciousness, 47, 79; as dead object, 277, 280; as fictional creation, 307; as origin, 34; as symbol, 22, 115, 169, 274, 281, 297; as template, 41; as the source of mortality, 155; associations with abjection, 83; birthright, 103; blood and soil, 284, 305; communication, 49; cultureless history of the generation sequence, 62, 304; dual function, 35; embrace of biological ties, 308; endowed with greater reality, 275; exclusion of, 111; first appearance, 124; ideal of purity, 124; idealisation, 127; in La Peste, 161; incapacity for thought, 278; maternal biology, 288; maternal bond, 289; matriarchy, 286; mother earth, 305; of Dionysus, 94; paradox of maternal stupidity, 284; parallels with Arabs in general, 123; rejection, 98; return of, 274; return to, 278; return to the earth, 314; symbolic function, 281; the mother-right, 95, 280; transformation into art, 53; unity, 93 mother-child relationship, 286 mourning, the process of, 55, 80, 82, 118, 156, 281 murder: Cain and Abel, 208, 209, 290, 301; the first, 208, 209, 245, 278, 280 Murray, Jack, 229, 231, 232, 237 Mythe de Némésis, le, 188, 284 mythology, 169 myths, 70; Christian; Adam, 178, 208; Babel, 189, 191; Beatrice, 209, 210; Eve, 198, 208; Mary, the New Eve, 209; Salome, 211, 212; the Virgin Mary, 208, 285; Egyptian; Anubis, 226; Greek, 169; Achilles, 157; Apollo, 94, 280, 286; Athena, 94; Calypso, 136, 187, 192, 198, 206; Cassandra, 285, 295; Cerberus,
Index 226; Circe, 192, 206; Clytemnestra, 280, 285, 294, 296; Dionysus, 70, 93, 94, 95, 285; Electra, 132; Eurydice, 54, 135, 136, 142, 143, 147, 151, 152, 153, 155, 156; Helen, 129, 139, 169, 192, 207, 209, 212; Iphigeneia, 285; Ithaca, 129, 178, 184, 185, 187, 192, 193, 195, 207, 214, 284; Leto, 285; Medusa, 155; Nemesis, 139, 171, 188, 210, 212, 213, 284; Odyssey, the, 136, 178, 185, 193, 194, 206; Oedipus, 280; Orestes, 132, 274, 280, 284, 295; Orpheus, 94, 135, 136, 142, 143, 151, 152, 153, 155, 156, 209; Patroclus, 157; the Erinnyes, 139, 188, 280; the Oresteian Trilogy, 280, 284, 295; the Pleiades, daughters of Atlas, 178, 181, 214; the Sirens, 193, 206, 212; the Trojan war, 136, 280; the Underworld, 226, 228; Ulysses, 129, 136, 178, 184, 185, 186, 187, 192, 193, 196, 209, 216, 251; Zagreus. See Dionysus; Zeus, 94; of origin, 69, 129, 169 Nasser, Gamal Abdel, 215 Nature, 71, 81, 139 navigator, the, 182, 191, 192, 193, 209, 214, 251 Nemesis, 139, 171, 188, 210, 212, 213; The Myth of, 188 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 55, 72, 75, 85, 88, 89, 92, 93, 94, 134, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 187, 283, 285; theory of ressentiment, 172 nightmares, 186, 195, 246, 247, 258, 268, 288 nomadism, 264, 271 Nora, Pierre, 104, 106, 179, 220, 230, 237 Noyer-Weidner, Alfred, 220 Nunes, Zita, 183 O’Brien, Conor Cruise, 64, 109, 110, 138 O’Hanlon, Redmond, 160 Occupation, the, 137, 141 Odyssey, the, 136, 178, 185, 193, 194, 206
353
opium of sexuality, the, 191, 193 oppression: racial, 121; sexual, 121 Oresteia, the, 280, 284, 295 Orestes, 132, 274, 280, 284, 295 orgy, the: and the end of history, 181, 246 Orientalism, 30, 34, 106, 227 origination, historical, 34, 51, 170 origins, 21, 63, 170, 274, 287, 298, 308, 309, 312 Orpheus, 94, 135, 136, 142, 143, 151, 152, 153, 155, 156, 209 Other, the, 280; total Otherness of the colonized, 254 Others, 24, 40, 41, 56, 62, 70, 75, 120, 170, 193, 199, 201, 203, 206, 234, 244, 249, 265, 293; accomodation with, 27; in the external world, 24; in the real world, 26; independent existence, 46; the depiction of, 42 Ovid, 157 paganism, 171, 184, 186, 187, 188, 193, 206, 212, 213, 226, 252, 255, 260, 284, 285, 295 Parisier Plottel, Jeanine, 177 passion, 151, 167, 204, 222, 258, 259, 264, 280, 292; and the truth, 110; collective, 166; language of, 146; mastery of, 145, 156, 247, 248, 249, 258, 268; slavery of, 153; transience of, 153 path, the true: la vraie voie, 135, 145, 197 patriarchy, 280, 289; conflicts, 103, 104, 105, 113, 163, 188, 280, 287, 288, 293, 294; representatives of, 105, 113, 294 Patroclus, 157 Philippeville massacre, the, 263, 300 Pichon-Rivière, Arminda A. de, 80 Pietz, William, 241 Pirette, 288, 289, 295, 296, 299, 300 Pléïades, les, 176, 180, 181 Pleiades, the, 178, 214; and the fils de roi, 181; birds, 214; rising and setting, 214 Plottel, Jeanine Parisier, 177 Prague, 28, 85, 90
354
Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus
Pratt, Mary Louise, 228, 229, 230, 232, 247 priority, cultural, 35, 52, 67, 102, 189, 246 prostitution, 108; brothels, 108, 131; Camus’s attraction to brothels, 101; the colonial brothel, 196 psychology, 89, 98, 122, 164; of women, 165, 174 purity: racial, 34, 52, 63, 102, 170, 181, 189, 237, 246; the white woman, 35 Quilliot, Roger, 41, 133, 139, 164, 186, 202, 223, 227 race, 109, 112, 114, 121, 239, 241, 271, 312, 315; a bastard race, 67; and colonial literature, 69; and gender, 241, 248; and homoeroticism, 179; and sexuality, 34, 128; as a foil, 127; assimilation, 67; gendering of, 179; inter-racial relationships, 179; miscegenation, 67, 182, 184, 237; mixed race, 67; racial chaos, 309; racial purity, 34, 51, 63, 170, 181; racial theory, 240; racism, 65; Spanish blood, 66; the black woman, 103, 122, 124, 125, 252, 253, 254, 260; the female races, 179; the new race, 35, 59, 60, 64, 65, 66, 67; the race-class spectrum, 228; the white woman, 122, 124, 125, 218, 254, 260; the woman of race, 103; white race, 179; women as sisters beneath the skin, 103 racial purity, 35, 102, 189, 237, 246 racism, 65, 69, 109, 114, 219, 220, 266, 308 rebirth, 52, 53, 77, 84, 181, 229, 282, 307 Redemption, 207, 208 resentment, 95, 132, 172, 173; as a female quality, 174; the theory of, 173 responsibility and guilt, 202, 271 revolt, 27, 87, 134, 135, 140, 210, 297, 308; against death, 77; as the business of men, 174; cycle of, 133; Dora, 167; essay on revolt,
163; in a feminine tradition, 165; negative revolt, 173; of the slave, 173; the mainspring of, 174 Rhodes, Cecil, 190 Richon, Olivier, 32 Rigaud, Jan, 114 Rivages, 64 Rizzuto, Anthony, 13, 24, 35, 127, 147, 150, 222, 246, 252, 273 Roblès, Emmanuel, 63 Rosfelder, André, 21 salvation, 208, 209, 271 Salzburg, 90 Sarocchi, Jean, 45, 51, 63, 102, 129, 131, 172, 192, 194, 246, 260, 277, 305 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 101, 109, 132 Scheler, Max, 173, 174 Sedgewick, Eve Kosofsky, 160 Segovia, Jaime Castro, 252 Self, the, 24, 25, 33, 40, 72, 77, 93, 199, 217, 228, 234, 251, 274; and Others, 23, 24; birth of, 53, 132; excision of an autobiographical Self, 98; mother as an extension of, 47; proliferation of, 28; threat to, 248; unity, 46 settlers, the, 67, 68, 69, 170, 215, 287 sexuality: and infidelity, 76, 90, 103, 128, 213; and prostitution, 101, 103, 115, 132, 180, 181, 189, 193, 198, 200, 207, 211, 255; and race, 124; and sexual excess, 124, 253; and syphilis, 128, 312; and the sex trade, 108; as an opiate, 135, 191, 193, 197; chastity, 91, 102, 227, 286, 290; debauchery, 128, 189, 197, 198, 211, 213, 226; degeneration, 124; female, 53, 101, 103, 115, 122, 128, 132, 133, 170, 180, 181, 189, 193, 198, 200, 207, 211, 215, 226, 227, 249, 254, 255, 264, 274, 285, 315; as a source of corruption, 123; harassment, 107, 223; pollution, 102; sadism, 114, 119, 244, 248; sexual jealousy, 36, 73, 76, 90, 92, 97, 108, 113, 119, 201; sexual purity, 35, 63, 72, 102, 112, 123,
Index 124, 128, 131, 133, 169, 171, 188, 200, 207, 260, 316; the end of history in the orgy, 181; the harem, 32, 34, 108; the orgy, 246 Showalter, English, Jr, 227 Sicily, 187, 195, 199, 200; associations with slavery, 194 silence, 187; and authenticity, 150; animal, 281; animal silence of the mother, 47; as an authentic truth, 161; as the foundation for heterosexual love, 156; conspiracy of, 150; maternal, 275, 309; Mme Rieux, 153; of the mother, 49; of the son, 56, 159; the incapacity for thought, 278 Sirens, the, 193, 206, 212 slavery, 177; associations with Sicily, 194; the Atlantic slave trade, 243; the Muslim slave trade, 243; the slave mentality, 173, 174; and revolt, 173; the slave religion, 187; the white slave trade, 244 solidarity, 23, 26, 83, 89, 136, 159; and the perception of sameness, 27 son, the, 294, 308; as a liar, 81, 82, 258, 296; as a monster, 81, 296; the son of woman, 197 soul: Faustian soul, 190; Greek, 190; loss of boundaries, 256; obscure forces of, 22, 99, 199, 259, 283, 307, 312; the body without a soul, 77, 78, 83, 87; without limits, 83 South America, 171, 175, 181, 182, 185, 186, 188, 192, 193, 248, 285 Spengler, Oswald, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 70, 85, 139, 163, 172, 175, 176, 190, 245, 246, 288, 290, 304, 306, 309 spheres: domestic sphere, 268; public and private, 55, 105, 163, 165, 263, 267, 271, 304 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 106, 111, 115, 162, 227 star, the, 186; Camus, 306; Clamence, 192; fils de roi, 272; invisible star, 185; Jonas, 272; mark of the
355
aristocrat, 185; the First Man, 282, 283; Ulysses, 185 stars, 185; the Pleiades, 178, 181, 214 stereotypes: a priori knowledge, 163; maternal stereotype, 162; of the primitive, 183; power of, 111; racial, 108, 111, 123, 128; sexual, 111, 163; social, 114; the colonial stereotype, 34, 239, 240, 258; the maternal stereotype, 103, 117, 161; the mythical woman, 162; women, 96 Suther, Judith, 220 syphilis, 35, 107, 123, 124, 131 Taghâsa, 242, 244, 247, 249, 260 The Adoration of the Lamb, 207, 208, 209 theory of racial inequality, 181 Thody, Philip, 110, 113 Tillion, Germaine, 103 Tipasa, 71, 185, 216, 217, 223 Todd, Olivier, 21, 257, 274, 311 tourist, the, 30, 33, 198, 222, 227, 229, 230, 233, 235, 236, 238, 257 tragedy: Greek, 94, 132; as a balance between opposing forces, 134 transcendence, 54, 95, 241; as communion, 54; passive form of, 227 Trojan war, the, 136, 280 Tsar, the. See man-god, 308 typhus, 137 Ulysses, 129, 136, 178, 184, 185, 186, 187, 192, 193, 196, 209, 216, 251; the navigator, 185 Underworld, the, 145, 147, 157, 181, 255, 296 Van Eyck, 207, 213 Van Huy, Nguyen, 162, 163 Viggiani, Carl A., 185, 287 violence, 180, 256; against women, 78 Viollette, Maurice, 67, 137 Virgil, 206 voyeurism, 33, 34, 44, 45, 230, 257, 277 vraie voie, la: the true path, 135, 191, 193, 197 Wagner, Roland, 116
356
Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus
Walker, David H., 252 Weyembergh, Maurice, 89, 172, 173, 174, 175, 181, 186 Wheeler, Burton M., 207 whiteness, 179, 182, 254, 259 Will, the, 73, 75, 86, 87, 92, 153, 260, 298; as the expression of a gendered hierarchy, 200 woman: as a black Diana, 183, 255, 259, 260; as a housewife, 219, 225, 232, 233; as an actress, 41, 79, 80, 276; as huntress, 255, 257; as judge, 194, 204, 205, 225, 279; as myth, 169; as temptress, 199, 207; as the first actor, 81; as the ideologically excluded Other, 106; the fat white woman, 218, 233; the maudlin woman, 114, 126, 220; the menopausal woman, 220, 225, 233 women: and abjection, 47, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 82, 86, 135, 141, 142, 143; and the animal world, 37, 47, 84, 85, 86, 117, 121, 125, 126, 128, 141, 279, 291, 312, 315; and the preparation of food, 83; as biological beings, 133; as
honorary brothers, 227; as sexual partners, 133, 141, 201, 274, 315; association with Nature, 71; associations with death, 41, 47, 51, 52, 56, 57, 58, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 81, 83, 86, 87, 128, 133, 135, 142, 276; cats, 47; colonized, 123, 124, 128, 133; flower-like, 71, 90, 96, 141, 218; outside of history, 163; psychology of, 174; rape, 244, 249, 304, 305; sadistic, 244; stereotypes, 142; the control of, 120; the death of, 51, 55; the equivalence of, 40, 71, 89, 91, 97, 126, 249; the footnoted female, 239; the homogeneous woman, 111, 115, 239; the occluded woman of race, 35; the suppression of, 135; violence against, 78, 113, 115, 118, 119, 300; white, 128 Young, Julian, 283 Young, Robert, 179, 183 Zagreus, 84, 88, 89, 91, 94, 158, 292; the dismembered Dionysus, 93 Zagreus-Dionysus, 94, 95 Zeus, 94, 193, 280, 285
