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FAUX TITRE
311
Christine Margerrison
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For Peter, Nick and Lucy
Contents
Abbreviations 11
Introduction 13
Chapter 1: Early Confrontations with Others:
the Écrits de Jeunesse 21
Peopling the Universe 24
The Exotic 28
Woman as a Sexual Partner 35
Women in the Real World 41
Women, Death and an Absurd Sensibility 48
In view of the many books and articles on Camus, it has become cus-
tomary 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 peren-
nial 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 sub-
ject 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 investi-
gation.
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 one-
dimensional, lacking reality and human complexity, and this is par-
ticularly the case in Camus’s theatrical works, which were not in-
tended 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 trou-
ve devant elle en état de rupture sans, pour autant, avoir trouvé une nouvelle for-
me 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 (Am-
sterdam: 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, con-
sciously 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 sat-
isfy 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 Ca-
mus, 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 indif-
ferent 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 conven-
iently justifies the move away from attempted depictions of the inte-
rior 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 him-
self 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 exis-
taient” (E, 10) (“I am interested more in their destiny than in their re-
actions, 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 writ-
ings, 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 Com-
panion to Camus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 67-78.
Introduction 15
dimension in his work, there is also the obvious fact that, with the ap-
parent 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 ques-
tion: “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 Ca-
mus 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 be-
come the standard approach for all who prefer to dispense with the
trouble of independent thought. A more insidious effect of such accep-
tance of the ready-made idea is the creation of an intellectual strait-
jacket that discourages a spirit of inquiry.
For me, a further starting point lies in the conviction that the treat-
ment of women is no parochial concern, but sheds light on the writ-
ings 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 jus-
tice. 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
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 Con-
temporary 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
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 impor-
tance 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 a-
social area of his work, the one that relates most closely to the per-
sonal 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 chal-
lenge 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 en-
visage the impending loss of his homeland.1 In 1956, as he was finish-
ing 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 unfin-
ished work, Le Premier Homme. In this return to his roots Camus in-
vestigates 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 acknowledge-
ment 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 em-
braces 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
promise the god-like status of the fledgling superman – the son who
would assert his own superiority and difference, giving birth to him-
self.
Camus’s earliest writings furnish an important source of informa-
tion 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 nine-
teen 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 par-
ticularly 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 resem-
bled 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 con-
sciousness 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 de-
velop; factors which are to define what it is “to be a man”.
Women, on the other hand, are depicted as having an opaque con-
sciousness which the writer consistently fails to penetrate; woman
embodies a secret unknown to the writer, and her interior life is be-
yond 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 im-
penetrable 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
4
L’Univers symbolique d’Albert Camus: essai d’interprétation psychanalytique
(Paris: Minard, 1981), 46-47.
26 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 him-
self. Only when this perceived world disintegrates can the speaker
begin to unify his own fragmented Self, but in a form of Self-
universalization that incorporates this outside world as an extension of
the Self.
Art becomes here the medium through which the real can be ap-
proached 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 ap-
parently 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 con-
sciousness to the attempted depiction of others in a real world. Both
direct and indirect speech are incorporated, giving these voices an ap-
parent independence from their creator, and the effect is one of har-
mony 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, chil-
dren or earning a living. Indeed, for one of these men his failure to
fulfill precisely these responsibilities had driven him to attempt sui-
cide:
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 27
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, weak-
ened, 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 him-
self 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 com-
me 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)
5
L’Univers symbolique, 178. It was commonly believed at the time that tuberculosis
led to a heightened libido.
28 Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus
6
“Hallucinations of France and Africa in the Colonial Exhibition of 1931 and Ous-
mane 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.
30 Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus
points out that there was very little actual contact between the Euro-
pean population and the colonized one in Algiers. Few Arabs lived in
Belcourt, and even fewer Arab children went to school. Lenzini re-
ports 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 par-
ticularly from the women at its heart, how can the conquerors of the
Centenary assert legitimate ownership when they are themselves re-
fused 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 un-
known 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 Alge-
ria is revealed, the masters of all they survey and of nothing they can-
not 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 Other-
ness. 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.
Early Confrontations with Others 31
the despot in his harem, is profiled in the speaker’s words about the
house, which owes its very existence to him; like Scheherazade her-
self, 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 mai-
son), 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 for-
get 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)
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 embod-
ied 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, enfan-
tins, les magiques tissus d’argent et de soie, qui rient sans raison, affinés de lumiè-
re. 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)
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, Fran-
cis Barker, Peter Hulme and Margaret Iverson (eds) (Colchester: University of Essex,
1985), 1-13 (9).
Early Confrontations with Others 33
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, avail-
able 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, in-
harmonious and discordant colours represent women with “incoher-
ent” 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 me-
tonymy 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 eve-
ryday that so offends the young writer, in this setting the sordid ac-
quires an exotic and seductive dimension in a context where the theme
of sight is explicitly raised for the first time, with overtones of voyeur-
ism. 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, of-
fending 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 character-
istic of the Camusian hero,11 and “La Maison mauresque” presents
10
“The Other Question”, Screen 24 (6) 1983, 18-36 (29).
11
L’Univers symbolique, 179.
34 Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus
12
“The Other Question”, 26.
Early Confrontations with Others 35
13
See, for example, Raymond Gay-Crosier, “Camus et le donjuanisme”, French Re-
view, XLI (6) (May, 1968), 818-30; Jean Gassin, “Le sadisme dans l’œuvre de Ca-
mus”, 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 Gay-
Crosier and Jacqueline Lévi-Valensi (eds) (Paris: Gallimard, 1985) 93-113; Anthony
Rizzuto, Camus: Love and Sexuality.
36 Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus
14
Herbert Lottman, Albert Camus: a biography (London: Axis, 1997), 63.
Early Confrontations with Others 37
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 “com-
munion” in which she does not participate because, despite the appar-
ent 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 uni-
verse. 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 com-
plicit “we” which creates a division between “us” and others who be-
long 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 lis-
tener, 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, al-
though 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 in-
dividuality 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 un-
dertaken 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 des-
tiny. 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 bais-
ser sa lance, comme il l’aurait fait dans la petite allée pour éviter les
basses branches” (PC, 263) (“he can continue his route without lower-
ing 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 narra-
tor 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 loin-
tains feuillages reculent d’autant. Et sans qu’il le sache jamais, éternellement no-
tre 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 know-
ing 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)
Early Confrontations with Others 39
Necessarily, then, the narrator and the fairy do not have the same de-
sires, because his pleasure lies in the power he holds over his crea-
tions; 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 de-
stabilizing – 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 pos-
sible that the reverse might be the case; a feared impossibility of sex-
ual consummation may have resulted in this compensatory world of
childhood, and the accompanying transference of pleasure into puni-
tive 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 al-
though 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 con-
tains the threat that she simply would not be interested, a suspicion
underlined by the eventual choice of her name and its phallic over-
tones. 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 ap-
parent 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-
40 Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus
15
Le Sentiment d’étrangeté chez Malraux, Sartre, Camus et Simone de Beauvoir (Pa-
ris: Minard, 1964), 212, 217.
Early Confrontations with Others 41
treatment of women is quite distinct from this, for they cannot be as-
similated 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 earli-
est 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 her-
self. 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 be-
yond 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 sur-
prised 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 slight-
est 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 figura-
tively, as in the series of portraits Camus attempts in “Les Voix du
quartier pauvre”, dated 1934. Basing himself on plans for these writ-
ings, Roger Quilliot remarks that Camus probably intended in 1935 to
organise his essay around the theme of the mother (E, 1176), an ob-
servation confirmed by Jacqueline Lévi-Valensi, who notes the theme
42 Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus
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 Pre-
mier 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.
Early Confrontations with Others 43
Sometimes, she would be asked a question: “What are you thinking about?”
“Nothing,” she would answer. And it was very true. (YW, 193)
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.
44 Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus
(E)lle semblait ne plus penser à lui ni d’ailleurs à rien, et le regardait même par-
fois 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)
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). Al-
though there is no hint of that in this fictionalized version, an Arab is here linked
symbolically with the mother.
46 Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus
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 aut-
our de lui, devenue corporelle et jouant avec application, sans souci de
l’imposture, le rôle d’une vieille femme pauvre à l’émouvante desti-
née” (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 reso-
nances 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 cul-
ture, 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
Early Confrontations with Others 47
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 com-
mon 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.
48 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 ins-
trument, il se servait d’elle contre lui-même et ce qui l’entourait. (…) Déjà il sa-
vait 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 care-
fully 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…
22
I have borrowed this term from Camus’s “Misère de la Kabylie” (E, 938).
Early Confrontations with Others 49
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 uncon-
scious 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 produc-
tion. Her actual speech subverts narratorial claims to knowledge,
while the inability to imagine her thoughts, which reveals a non-
omniscient narrator, is replaced by the insistent, if unconvincing cer-
tainty 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 asso-
ciations are most clearly applicable to the mother-son relationship, as
when Camus writes in Le Mythe that “l’absurde naît de cette confron-
tation 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.
24
Albert Camus et la parole manquante, (Paris: Payot, 1973), 106, 108, 135.
25
Ibid., 127, 132.
50 Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus
1
See, for example, Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage, 1994);
Azzedine Haddour, Colonial Myths: History and Narrative (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 2000).
52 Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus
bowing to adore the earth. The world still springs forth. An unreal genesis of
which Melusina is the verb. (YW, 187-88)
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 contem-
plates “les ombres vertes, lincueil d’Ophélie” (PC, 269) (“green shad-
ows, Ophelia’s shroud”). The constant theme of eternal regeneration
recalls an earlier essay, “L’Art dans la Communion”, where art is de-
fined 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 dis-
cerned in Noces, where female sexuality is dispersed onto the land-
scape.
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
54 Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus
Woman (PC, 281); a process that strips her of her individuality and
consciousness. The meaninglessness of her speech, emptied of its con-
tent, 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 win-
dow 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 Ab-
surd 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 se-
cret 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 gla-
ce 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 bod-
ies, 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)
to divert attention away from the role of female characters in the con-
struction 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 conscien-
ce 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 conscious-
ness; a conflict concerning what lies beyond – of pride or of resignation (Claudel).
So each event is susceptible to two interpretations.
2
Albert Camus: une vie, 73.
3
In the new Pléiade edition of Camus’s collected works, this is entitled “Voilà! elle
est morte”.
56 Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus
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 trans-
ferred to the speaker and his feelings. This loss, moreover, is now
aligned with “incertitude sur ce que nous sommes” (PC, 231) (“uncer-
tainty 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.
The Death of Woman and the Birth of Culture 57
(“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 universali-
zation 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 con-
trol 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 inte-
grate 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 dem-
onstrate a move away from highly introspective concerns towards a
growing recognition of the outside world, and the desire to bear wit-
ness to the world of “le quartier pauvre”. At this point I want to sug-
gest 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 question-
ing in Europe of the shared values of Western society. A number of
works written at this time were not only questioning Western civiliza-
tion 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 influen-
tial work.
5
See Raoul Girardet, L’Idée coloniale en France 1871-1962 (Paris: La Table Ronde,
1972), 155.
The Death of Woman and the Birth of Culture 59
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 cul-
ture 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
6
Albert Camus: une vie, 97.
7
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
60 Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus
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 form-
less, 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 ir-
revocably 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 con-
tinent lies. In this respect Spengler’s ideas only reinforced those al-
ready established in Algeria itself that France, worn out by centuries
of civilization, might be rejuvenated by contact with a vigorous “bar-
barism”.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.
10
See Louis Bertrand’s preface to the new edition of Le Sang des races (Paris: Geor-
ges 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).
The Death of Woman and the Birth of Culture 61
modelling the face of a culture where man’s greatness will finally discover its true
visage. (SEN, 88)
11
Albert Camus: Souvenirs (Paris: Gallimard, 1968), 125.
62 Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus
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
The Decline of the West, II, 327.
13
Ibid., 327-28.
The Death of Woman and the Birth of Culture 63
which raised the difficult and nebulous question of “racial purity, cul-
tural priority”. As far as Camus’s address to the “Maison de la cul-
ture” 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 writ-
ers, 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 ber-
bère. 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 al-
gériens” (“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 in-
volved in the setting up of the review Rivages, and this collection of essays was pub-
lished by Camus and his friend Claude de Fréminville.
64 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 me-
tropolis, 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.
19
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.
The Death of Woman and the Birth of Culture 65
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 sig-
nificance. Audisio saw this new race as still in its early stages, but ar-
gued 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 writ-
ers 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 re-
jected the overt racism of those such as Louis Bertrand. Nevertheless,
the young man’s use of such words, as in Noces, has an emotive di-
mension in view of the French Algerian context and the political cli-
mate 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 Dis-
23
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.
66 Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus
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.
The Death of Woman and the Birth of Culture 67
The French of Algeria are a bastard race, made up of unforeseen mixtures. Span-
iards and Alsatians, Italians, Maltese, Jews and Greeks have come together there.
As in America this brutal interbreeding has had happy results. (SEN, 133)
31
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.
68 Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus
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 “gallop-
ing 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 peo-
ples and with the assimilationist aims of the French government. Their
wish was to be freed from the restrictions of military law, yet to re-
main 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 Al-
geria was to experience alternating periods of military and civil rule.
Although military government was a source of contention for the set-
tlers, who pressed for full assimilation, the colonized population
feared the prospect of a civil régime which represented the confisca-
tion of their lands, the loss of their traditional laws, and juries of set-
tlers 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 pen-
ury. 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.
35
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.
The Death of Woman and the Birth of Culture 69
It is above all in the light of this myth of Latinity that the Mediterra-
nean counter-myth associated with Camus and Gabriel Audisio must
be viewed. While rejecting the racism and developing fascism sur-
rounding 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, Ca-
mus 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 con-
cerning 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.
70 Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus
42
Albert Camus: une vie, 741.
43
Monique Crochet, Les Mythes dans l’œuvre de Camus (Paris, Éditions universitai-
res, 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).
The Death of Woman and the Birth of Culture 71
As part of its perishable wealth, women are banished from this soci-
ety, while constituting that part of the natural world which gives
meaning to the lives of men. As commentators have often noted, na-
ture 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.
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 after-
math: “ces visages chaleureux ou émerveillés, il les parcourt, les en-
grange 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 ab-
sence 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 individ-
ual 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 ap-
proach 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 en-
tente amoureuse de la terre et de l’homme délivré de l’humain” (C1,
75) (“this amorous understanding between the earth and man deliv-
ered 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.
The Death of Woman and the Birth of Culture 73
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)
1
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.
76 Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus
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).
The Man-God and Death as an Act of the Will 77
gives birth to himself. This chapter examines this theme, and the asso-
ciated 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 ar-
gue 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 valor-
ized 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 strik-
ing 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 him-
self. 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 om-
niscient position, revealing underlying vulnerabilities and a recogni-
tion of difference that threatens the integrity of the Self.
Indecipherable, woman is presented as a body without a soul, becom-
ing 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”):
78 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 abjec-
tion. It is death infesting life. (I)t beckons to us and ends up engulfing us.3
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.
The Man-God and Death as an Act of the Will 79
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 mo-
ment of liberation marking off the past from the future, and establish-
ing 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 be-
tween this woman and a corpse is that she is still capable of move-
ment. 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 de-
picted 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, espe-
cially 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.
80 Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus
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 be-
lief that this is only one more example of acting. Here, the viewpoints
of the narrator and the child converge, resulting in a confusion of per-
spective when he declares that those who “play at” being ill some-
times 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 cor-
ruption:
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”, ex-
acerbated 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, matter-
of-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 grand-
mother’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 convic-
tion 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.
The Man-God and Death as an Act of the Will 81
dead; her farting days are over and her infectious corruption will
henceforth be confined to her own body, beneath the soil. The mem-
ory 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 un-
certainty 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 Pre-
mier 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 be-
tween life and death but also the extent to which this cadaver contin-
ues 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 perform-
ances 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 tal-
ent for acting (lying) – as is revealed by the scene where he is asked
whom he prefers, his mother or his grandmother (E, 20). This ques-
tion, 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
La Parole manquante, 41.
9
The verb in both cases is “se délivrer”.
82 Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus
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 dis-
gust (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 con-
trol, and the mark of his superiority. The ritualized funeral “game”
repeated again and again in Camus’s early writings denotes no unfin-
ished 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 al-
ready on a borderline between human and animal, life and death. In-
gesting 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 in-
timacy the woman accepted and the fact that she could receive part of a stranger’s
body inside her own. (HD, 25)
10
Powers of Horror, 102.
The Man-God and Death as an Act of the Will 83
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 under-
stand and savour this delicate taste which reveals the secret of the world, it is my-
self 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 privi-
leged 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. Gar-
fitt, who notes of one of Jean Grenier’s essays entitled “Le Chat”, that
for Grenier the cat represents “a metaphysical completeness, a coinci-
dence with self and the world, which serves to emphasize his own in-
completeness 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 fisher-
11
“Grenier and Camus: from Les Îles to La Chute”, in Forum for Modern Language
Studies (17) (1981), 221.
The Man-God and Death as an Act of the Will 85
Perhaps these lines were suppressed from Le Mythe because they sug-
gest 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)
Elle y prépare. Elle crée un apprentissage dont le premier stade est l’attend-
rissement 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)
12
Twilight of the Idols / The Anti-Christ, R.J. Hollingdale (tr.) (Harmondsworth: Pen-
guin, 1990), “Expeditions of an Untimely Man” (36), 99.
The Man-God and Death as an Act of the Will 89
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 sé-
pare 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 my-
self to the fate of living men instead of contemplating the unchanging sky. Creat-
ing 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)
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, 35-
49.
90 Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus
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 dépayse-
ment, 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 be-
yond 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 inces-
santly 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 emo-
tional ties binding him to women. In order to realize his own divinity
he must suppress those ties binding him to woman: lucidity must con-
quer 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 “crum-
ble” 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.
The Man-God and Death as an Act of the Will 91
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.
The Man-God and Death as an Act of the Will 93
the condition of individuation as the source and origin of all suffering, and hence
as something reprehensible.17
17
The Birth of Tragedy (10), 52.
18
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.
The Man-God and Death as an Act of the Will 95
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 Diony-
sus 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 transcen-
dence 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 commenta-
tors 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 novel-
ists 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 dispas-
sionate presentation of the Absurd hero in Le Mythe de Sisyphe; al-
though 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.
23
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.
96 Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus
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.
The Man-God and Death as an Act of the Will 97
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 indiffer-
ence 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 indif-
férent. 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 slight-
est interest in this invitation to ask about her life, her reproachful look
quickly changes to laughter (TRN, 1155-157) and possible disagree-
ment 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 like-
wise 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 ar-
gue the unimportance of such questions as his predecessor had done,
98 Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus
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 phan-
toms and people it with truths of flesh and blood whose presence I cannot deny”).
The Man-God and Death as an Act of the Will 99
Absurd hero. In this essay, Camus uses the metaphor of water to de-
scribe 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)
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 say-
ing. (MS, 17)
1
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.
102 Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus
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 associ-
ated with Algeria. In commercial Europe (C3, 329), by contrast, sex-
ual 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 Europe-
South 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 Euro-
pean 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 sib-
ling 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 be-
comes sensitive to the kinship of the blood”) in a suggestive misread-
ing4 – for Algeria constitutes here a spiritual landscape based on the
bonds of blood.
The form of chaste sexuality spoken of earlier is, I suggest, inti-
mately 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 con-
trast 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 colo-
nizing 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 op-
erates through the distinctions between French Algerian women
(Marie and Meursault’s dead mother) and the sexualized woman of
4
Camus (Paris: PUF, 1968), 48.
5
“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).
The Dark Continent of L’Étranger 103
6
Le Maghreb entre deux guerres, 338-39.
7
Le Harem et les cousins (Paris: Seuil, 1966), 117-19
104 Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus
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 re-
venge.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 da-
vantage. 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 nour-
rit 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 repu-
tation for sexual submissiveness is more especially frustrating, as every idea of
military conquest and feudal relations is accompanied by the traditional expecta-
tion 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, Al-
loula’s reaction seems provoked more by the perceived dishonour to
Algerian men than concern for the women themselves, whose recircu-
lated 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 separa-
tion 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 in-
digenous 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).
9
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).
The Dark Continent of L’Étranger 105
12
Alf Heggoy, “Cultural Disrespect: European and Algerian Views on Women in
Colonial and Independent Algeria”, Muslim World, 62 (October 1972), 321-35 (329-
30).
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).
106 Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus
15
Le Maghreb entre deux guerres, 400.
16
“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 al-
gérienne) (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).
The Dark Continent of L’Étranger 107
19
“L’Algérie se dévoile”, 24, 26.
20
“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.
108 Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus
Calls for independence, first voiced in Algiers around 1930, are inte-
grally 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, di-
verted 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 exhaus-
tively analysed, often without saying anything new – which is perhaps
25
Le Maghreb entre deux guerres, 304-05, 340.
26
Alain Costes, “Le double meurtre de Meursault”, in Albert Camus: Œuvre fermée,
œuvre ouverte? 55-76 (66).
The Dark Continent of L’Étranger 109
27
“History and Ethnicity in the reception of L’Étranger”, in Adèle King (ed.), Ca-
mus’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.
110 Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus
is viewed as the commentary on the novel, one being seen as the ex-
perience of the Absurd and the other as its philosophical justifica-
tion.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 fa-
mous 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 sug-
gested 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 mar-
shall 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 identifica-
tion with Meursault (with whom “we” sympathise) and Camus’s own
political credentials (he was the first French writer “seriously to con-
cern 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 won-
ders why critics should have taken so long to point them out. (...) For what actu-
ally happens in L’Étranger, when seen from the standpoint of the Arabs, is a
peculiarly unpleasant example of both racialist and sexual exploitation.32
29
“Explication de l’Étranger”, Situations I (Paris: NRF Gallimard, 1947), 100.
30
“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.
The Dark Continent of L’Étranger 111
34
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.
112 Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus
rity upon Marie and the dead mother, but her presence also reveals an
underlying connection between all women that undermines their rep-
resentation 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 like-
lihood 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 Al-
ger”, and between August and December, 1938, three scenes entitled
“Belcourt”, the third of which concerns the “histoire de R.” (C1, 122-
23). 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 Ray-
mond 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).
The Dark Continent of L’Étranger 113
37
“Meursault et la critique”, 15.
38
Introduction to the first English edition of The Outsider (London: Hamish Hamil-
ton, 1946), 10 (my emphasis).
114 Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus
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.
The Dark Continent of L’Étranger 115
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 power-
ful 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 pre-
viously happy about his sister’s behaviour, he objects only to the vio-
lence 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 es-
sentially 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).
116 Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus
Here, the mother, Arab, and the Arab nurse are conflated in a manner
that robs each of a separate identity or function, making them inter-
changeable. 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 writ-
ings (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 no-
tion 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 interpreta-
tions 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 exam-
ple, Fieschi, “L’Étranger par Albert Camus”, N.R.F. 30 (343) (September 1942), 364-
70. In “The last four shots: problems of intention and Camus’s The Stranger”, Ameri-
can 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).
The Dark Continent of L’Étranger 117
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 pro-
vide 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 au-
thenticates 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 Al-
gerian woman. The introduction of Raymond is directly framed by a
51
“Camus’s Stranger Retried”, 523.
118 Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus
conversation with Salamano about his dog, and the moaning of the
dog (TRN, 1143, 1147). Meursault participates in Raymond’s pro-
jected 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 mir-
rors Salamano’s relationship with his dog: “je la tapais, mais tendre-
ment, 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 Meur-
sault’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 pri-
marily one against his dead mother rather than as an identification
with Raymond and his wish to punish the Algerian woman. The the-
ory 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
The Dark Continent of L’Étranger 119
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 senti-
ment 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 re-
cipients 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 des-
picable, so that Raymond achieves “in a roundabout way the enjoy-
ment 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 trans-
52
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 behav-
iour. On Meursault’s part, however, he regards this as directed at the mother.
55
Jokes, 147.
120 Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus
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).
The Dark Continent of L’Étranger 121
59
“Aspects de l’emploi du discours indirect libre dans L’Étranger”, 87.
60
This parallel is later reinforced by a perhaps coincidental similarity. When Sala-
mano 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 prostitu-
tion. 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.
122 Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus
61
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 Psychoanaly-
sis 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.
The Dark Continent of L’Étranger 123
ments that “black females do not merely represent the sexualized fe-
male, 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 war-
riors”.66 These observations return me to a consideration of the first
Arab in L’Étranger whose nose has been eaten away by cancer. I ear-
lier referred to the parallel drawn by McCarthy between the mother
figure, the Arab nurse, and Arabs in general. But McCarthy’s deter-
mination to equate the mother and Arab in a positive form of authen-
ticity blinds him to the ambiguities of their depiction. This is
combined with the unwillingness to allow sufficient weight to the sex-
ual oppression on which I earlier commented. He remarks that “rather
than making her an object of political oppression like Raymond’s mis-
tress, 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. Dur-
ing the first part of the twentieth century the widespread fear of syphi-
lis 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 Al-
though the condition was in decline in the 1940s, this particular racial
stereotype would have been recognised by a French Algerian reader-
ship 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 Theoreti-
cal Odyssey of the ‘Hottentot Venus’”, Gender and Society, 15 (6) (Dec., 2001), 816-
34
66
Ibid., 235.
67
“The First Arab in L’Étranger”, 24.
68
Le Maghreb entre deux guerres, 88-89.
124 Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus
shared many physical and mental traits common to the European pros-
titute.
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
69
“Black Bodies, White Bodies”, 218.
The Dark Continent of L’Étranger 125
The first lines of this quotation underline the function of constant ref-
erences 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 sex-
ual charge in this scene depends on the interplay of contrast and simi-
larity 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 Sala-
mano and Raymond.
Parallels between Meursault and Marie, and Raymond and his mis-
tress 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
126 Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus
70
McCarthy, The Stranger, 18.
The Dark Continent of L’Étranger 127
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 Al-
gerian 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 “sur-
rounded” by Algerian women (TRN, 1176). She is likewise set be-
tween 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 encourage-
ment 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 non-
existence, 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.
72
Cf. Anthony Rizzuto, “La scène d’amour chez Camus”, in Albert Camus: les ex-
trêmes et l’équilibre, 211-26.
128 Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus
syphilitic mark of her race and gender upon her face, a link further
reinforced by the parallels between Arab mistress, mother and Sala-
mano’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 fur-
ther 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 in-
trigue 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 ex-
pense of the traditional emphasis on the mother figure because it
seems to me that she functions as a touchstone by which all other fe-
male 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 considera-
tion 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)
1
Camus, 16.
130 Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus
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 geogra-
phy accounts for the differences between German and Italian fascism,
for the Italians are closer to the sea.3 Character is determined by geog-
raphy 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 fam-
ily 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 the-
ory 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 loca-
tion 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 re-
veals that one cannot be happy in exile or oblivion, living forever as a
stranger (TRN, 127). Despite his reasons for not immediately identify-
ing himself to his mother and sister, the need for instinctive recogni-
tion 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, accord-
ing 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 (Lon-
don: Verso, 1983), 131.
Mythical Women in La Peste 131
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.
132 Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus
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 in-
significant, 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)
7
Ibid., 201.
Mythical Women in La Peste 133
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 (“en-
core 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 un-
conscious 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 biologi-
cal beings. The mother above all embodies these contradictions, for
she is at once the site of idealization and the biological source. Evi-
dently, 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 im-
possible not to regard this image as a symbol of the Absurd, while the
development of Camus’s writings into the phase of revolt is accompa-
nied 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.
134 Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus
9
The Theatre of Albert Camus: a Critical Study (London: Methuen, 1971), 68.
10
The Theatre of Albert Camus, 68, 69.
Mythical Women in La Peste 135
Towards December 1942, the first reference to the Orpheus and Eury-
dice 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 incorpo-
rates 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
136 Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus
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 be-
yond the particular to the universal. He conveys a general picture of man’s posi-
tion 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 Cruick-
shank 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 ex-
governor 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 mi-
sère 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.
138 Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus
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.
Mythical Women in La Peste 139
19
Mythologies (London: Vintage, 1993), 143.
20
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).
140 Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus
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).
Mythical Women in La Peste 141
22
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.
142 Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus
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)
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 observa-
tion 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 sepa-
rates 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, mas-
culine activity through which men give meaning to life, whereas its
closure brings him face to face with the indifference and impenetrabil-
ity 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.
Mythical Women in La Peste 145
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)
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.
148 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)
ginning, and thus theirs is the viewpoint that prevails rather than a se-
ries 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)
29
This theme is constantly reiterated: Rieux tells Tarrou that he had had to see some-
one 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 be-
cause 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.
150 Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus
30
Camus: Love and Sexuality, 92.
Mythical Women in La Peste 151
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)
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 disappoint-
ment of reunion with the loved one because, like Rieux, he knows al-
31
“Orpheus’s Gaze”, in The Space of Literature, Ann Smock (tr.) (London: Univer-
sity of Nebraska Press, 1989), 171, 172.
Mythical Women in La Peste 153
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 eve-
ryday 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 impor-
tance 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 sex-
ual passion; and, like him, he seeks to lead his life through an asser-
tion 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 un-
faltering:
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 plague-
stricken. 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)
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 increas-
ing empire over him is evidenced by the fact that he is already begin-
ning 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 to-
wards 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” real-
ity, and in pursuit of this goal he uses documents, first-hand testi-
mony, 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 actu-
ally did happen, that it closely affected the life of a whole populace, and that there
Mythical Women in La Peste 155
are thousands of eye-witnesses who can appraise in their hearts the truth of what
he writes. (P, 7)
32
See Freud’s essay “Medusa’s Head”, Standard Edition of the Complete Psychologi-
cal Works of Sigmund Freud, vol.18, trans. by James Strachey (ed.) (London: Hogarth
Press, 1955), 273-74.
156 Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus
Achilles was the first literary figure to endure such torment. In March,
1942, Camus refers to the Iliad, the death of Patroclus, Achilles’ re-
turn 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 long-
ing 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.
158 Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus
he had suffered; the wars of men; hard crossing of the big waters. Remembering
all these things he let fall the swelling tears.36
Such is his unending grief that Achilles continues still to punish Hec-
tor, “killing” his lifeless corpse again and again and dragging it around
the tomb of Patroclus. Camus’s reading of the Iliad seems to have in-
spired 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 admira-
ble image of man had been preserved instead (C2, 16).
“L’Exil d’Hélène” contains a reference to this bond of male friend-
ship. In speaking of contemporary times Camus writes:
Nous lutterons pour celle de ses vertus qui vient de loin. Quelle vertu? Les che-
vaux 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? Patro-
clus’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 sug-
gests they should consecrate an hour to friendship, it is mutually un-
derstood 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 back-
ground 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 di-
versity. 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 under-
36
Iliad, XXIV, 4-9.
Mythical Women in La Peste 159
39
Ibid., 79.
40
L’Univers symbolique, 244-49.
41
“Les facteurs homosexuels de la création littéraire: le cas d’Albert Camus”, Austra-
lian 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).
Mythical Women in La Peste 161
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 stereo-
type 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 stereo-
type for reality.
With respect to the undoubted association between mother and na-
ture, he first draws a descriptive parallel between the two and, on this
basis, makes them an identical force. Thus the term “maternal” be-
comes 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 vic-
tory 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 vic-
tory 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 re-
turn 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
La Métaphysique du bonheur chez Albert Camus, 94, 89.
45
Ibid., 106-7, 117.
Mythical Women in La Peste 163
46
The Decline of the West, II, 329.
47
Ibid., II, 327.
164 Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus
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 dis-
like of a psychological dimension in the theatre was often mentioned;
in Sur l’avenir de la tragédie he claimed that Euripides upset the clas-
sical 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 “virtu-
ally puppets, only too obviously exemplifying Camus’s evolving phi-
losophy 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 rationnel-
le, 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 the-
atrical 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 thea-
tre 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 rep-
48
The Theatre of Albert Camus, 95.
49
Souvenirs, 118.
Mythical Women in La Peste 165
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 de-
fence against the definitive silence of totalitarianism. Without the ca-
pacity for “greatness” in men the instinctive concerns of women
would be impossible. For all her force, Victoria is incapable of follow-
ing 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 inter-
dependence; 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). (In-
deed, 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.
Mythical Women in La Peste 167
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 Co-
lumbus and Lyautey. The time of colonialism is finished, one need only know this
and draw the consequences.
are expressed during his stay in South America, and the possible con-
sequences 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 con-
sidered in conjunction with the Christian imagery often noted by
commentators, Camus’s third, unrealized cycle, Nemesis, seems pro-
filed 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 contem-
porary 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 anec-
dote about the girl in Budapest who, when asked which party she
would subscribe to later, replied “the most cruel one”, because, what-
ever 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, be-
cause 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 Ca-
mus, and in their “silent, bitter” war against men their overriding im-
pulse is of envy for that other world they will never comprehend and
of which they can never truly be a part.
1
Souvenirs, 50.
172 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
2
The Decline of the West, II, 328.
3
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 Al-
Women, Race and the Fall of Man 173
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 su-
perabundant 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)
8
“Révolte et ressentiment”, 76.
Women, Race and the Fall of Man 175
9
Ercilla, 23.8.49 (cited by Fernande Bartfeld in Camus voyageur et conférencier, 31).
10
Ibid., 71.
176 Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus
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.
Women, Race and the Fall of Man 177
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 re-
vealed 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 intertex-
tual comparison with one passage from La Chute, overlooking the
wider importance of Gobineau’s argument, which is founded ulti-
mately on biological inheritance.
17
Les Pléïades, 19.
18
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.) (Har-
mondsworth: 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.
178 Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus
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 gé-
nérations suivantes avec d’indignes alliances avaient, pour un temps, déguisés,
voilés, affaiblis, atténués, dissimulés, fait disparaître, mais qui, jamais morts, re-
paraissent 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
21
Les Pléïades, 20.
22
Sons of Kings, 15.
23
Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1940 (1853). Further references to this book will be incorpo-
rated 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.
Women, Race and the Fall of Man 179
24
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.
180 Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus
our men of progress speak of is the orgy” (C3, 153). This is the Un-
derworld of La Chute, where woman, the instrument of such assimila-
tion, 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 fa-
ther (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 for-
mat, but it is not this Camus discusses when he refers in L’Homme
révolté to the novel (E, 667). Again, one might agree with Weyem-
bergh 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 remark-
ing 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 cul-
tural 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.
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 en-
tails 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 sexu-
ality 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 descen-
dent sur les corps nus” (TRN, 1481) (“You enter, they draw the cur-
tains 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 en-
tire 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.
27
Colonial Desire, 115.
28
See Zita Nunes, “Anthropology and race in Brazilian modernism”, in Colonial Dis-
course / Postcolonial Theory, edited by Francis Barker, Peter Hulme and Margaret
Iversen (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), 115-25.
29
Ibid., 119-20.
184 Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus
30
Imagined Communities, 21.
31
“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).
Women, Race and the Fall of Man 185
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”). Nauti-
cal 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 es-
cape 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”, con-
ceived 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 concentra-
tion 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, set-
ting him literally above the increasingly overpopulated Europe where
he lives.
It is not my aim here to supply a potentially endless list of quota-
tions 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).
186 Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus
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).
Women, Race and the Fall of Man 187
39
Albert Camus éditorialiste à “l’Express”, 121.
188 Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus
40
Souvenirs, 134.
Women, Race and the Fall of Man 189
nor an elsewhere, but the here and now as Mexico and Indonesia in-
vade 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 Ci-
pango, 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 Lohen-
grins 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 Co-
lumbus, who first brought America to Europe) breaks down temporal
distinctions between a colonizing past and a decolonizing present. (Al-
though not in the orthodox Camusian repertoire, we need not be sur-
prised 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), what-
ever 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
192 Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus
“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 fol-
low. 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 bé-
nitier immense” (TRN, 1531) (“we will never get out of this immense
basin of holy water”). It is commonly said (following Clamence him-
self) that through his monologue Clamence aims to confront his lis-
tener 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 be-
comes 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.
Women, Race and the Fall of Man 193
Clamence has lost la vraie voie and prostitutes himself to ensnare oth-
ers. But this particular opium of sexuality is not entirely of Greek ori-
gin; here, the prostitutes of South America (JV, 117) are transposed to
the port of Amsterdam, upon which is further superimposed the quasi-
Catholic 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 com-
mence. Les dieux descendent sur les corps nus et les îles dérivent, démentes, coif-
fées 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 naviga-
tion 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.
194 Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus
adrift, mad, crowned with the tousled hair of palm trees in the wind. Try it.
(F, 13-14)
44
“La recherche du père”, 152. Indeed, this seems to be the critical consensus.
45
The Odyssey, Glossary, 373,
Women, Race and the Fall of Man 195
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 inde-
pendence 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 segrega-
tion was enforced between the Dutch, the Chinese (imported as a la-
bour force because the natives were seen as naturally lazy) and the
196 Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus
Such clarity would suggest that Clamence’s client was not in Hell be-
fore his arrival in Amsterdam (and leaves unanswered the question of
why he sits in the Mexico-City at all). Furthermore, it suggests an ele-
ment 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 pro-
gresses; 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 de-
bauchery. Man cannot, like an Olympian god, give birth to himself.
Consequently, he can never claim to be a fils de roi, because he is al-
ways, 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 sanc-
tion. 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 Alge-
ria.
198 Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus
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 ar-
rêté. 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
Women, Race and the Fall of Man 199
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 slav-
ery.
200 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, pro-
vided 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 rela-
tionships 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 de-
scription of his previously successful life – which is to say that from
the very beginning he destroys the idea of Eden as a space of inno-
cence 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 or-
phan) in order to confirm his own superiority, while his “good mur-
derers” 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 every-
thing is a landmark”). In everyday relations (pitying the widow, ac-
cepting 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
Women, Race and the Fall of Man 201
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 ciga-
rette, la cigarette de la satisfaction, quand, au même moment, un rire éclata derriè-
re 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)
48
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 Psycho-
analytic Association 19(2) (April 1971), 193-240.
49
The Fall: A Matter of Guilt (London: Twayne, 1995), 23.
202 Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus
In this way he constantly relives these pleasures. What else can he do?
As the storyteller, it is he who controls such disclosures and deter-
mines 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 per-
spective, 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, 1501-
504). 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)
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 diman-
che, 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 amuse-
ment. 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)
is not part of Don Juan’s bargain with women, who must exist in iso-
lation 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 sat-
isfaction, is female laughter deriding him on the level where he feels
most alive, most innocent – in the theatre of love. This parallel is un-
derlined by the repetition of the same phrase in dismissal of each inci-
dent: 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 dis-
misses it. It returns to him (TRN, 1501).
Although the young woman’s suicide takes place some years ear-
lier, the laughter is the precursor to the woman’s cry. Such parallels
are deliberate and designed to focus the listener’s attention on this in-
cident 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 com-
pounded by the fact that he could have done nothing to save her. Al-
though 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 mo-
ment de se méfier, on va maquiller le cadavre. (TRN, 1538)
206 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)
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 Al-
bert Camus 1980, 133-41.
208 Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus
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.
Women, Race and the Fall of Man 209
54
Inferno II, 76.
55
Le Langage en procès: Structures et symboles dans “La Chute” de Camus (Greno-
ble: Presses Universitaires de Grenoble, 1977), 97.
56
Ulysse ou l’intelligence, 85, 23, 80.
210 Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus
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 preserv-
ing 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 dis-
embodied “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 can-
not 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 Wil-
liams points out that Beatrice represents this moment of choice, “a choice between
action and no action” (123).
Women, Race and the Fall of Man 211
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, par-
tout 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 goé-
landes 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, every-
where, 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 con-
cerns precisely such questions of payment, contradicting the sugges-
tion 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 con-
tracted towards one – a comment made immediately before he re-
counts the incident on the Pont Royal (TRN, 1510), and although he
derides suicide as an illusory way of “making people pay”, neverthe-
less 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 Ori-
entalist myth. When Clamence imagines his arrest for the theft of “the
Just Judges”, he again compares himself to John the Baptist:
212 Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus
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 refer-
ence 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 pro-
file can be discerned behind the birds who call to Clamence, remind-
ing 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.
Women, Race and the Fall of Man 213
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)
59
Le Langage en procès, 146-47.
60
Inferno, V, 82-4. In L’Imagination du désert Laurent Mailhot also notes the subli-
mated sexual role played by the dove in Christian symbolism (300).
214 Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus
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 mythol-
ogy 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 Cla-
mence’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 Mephi-
stopheles, 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 everlast-
ing bliss!”63
61
Robert Graves, The Greek Myths, vol. 1 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), 152.
62
The Greek Myths, 154, 165.
63
Dr Faustus, Scene 3 (78-81).
Chapter 7
Sexual topographies
1
See also Albert Camus: une vie, 714.
216 Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus
2
Correspondance Jean Grenier-Albert Camus (Paris: Gallimard, 1981), 199.
3
Bilan Critique: L’Exil et le Royaume d’Albert Camus: essai d’analyse (Paris:
Minard, 1973), 51.
Sexual Topographies 217
4
Bilan Critique, 28.
218 Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus
5
Cited by Lottman, Albert Camus, 549.
Sexual Topographies 219
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 ex-
pression 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 out-
siders to the town (TRN, 1983-84). Not only their class, but their gen-
der 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 un-
dertakes 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 petty-
bourgeois – 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, in-
significance, and Emma Bovary without questioning the “mystical”
nature of Janine’s experience at the fort. However, much of the hu-
mour 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.
220 Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus
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 as-
sumed 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 di-
rectly, even if she works, is generally more racist than the man and strongly con-
tributes 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 sup-
ported by Camus. In Le Premier Homme emigrant women are pre-
sented 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 like-
wise parasitical on the existence of an already pacified indigenous
population, and this form of passive consumption is more readily as-
sociated 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 dem-
onstrates 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 combi-
nation of this title, her name, and her physical appearance work to de-
fine 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 Ca-
mus’ “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.
Sexual Topographies 221
“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. Ulti-
mately, of course, her only adultery will be with herself and an onanis-
tic 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 dé-
sirable – 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 tiè-
de 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 in-
viting. (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.
222 Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus
11
‘“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.
Sexual Topographies 223
12
“Camus’s Solipsistic Universe”, 119.
Sexual Topographies 225
tion that it would never again be hers except in that fleeting moment
of spectatorship. The “authenticity” of which I spoke in chapter 4 re-
turns 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 “meno-
pausal”, 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 Euro-
pean housewife with her swollen ankles, her sexual frustrations and
her clichéd desires.
The relationship of Janine and Marcel lacks any real communica-
tion 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), some-
thing 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 judge-
ment. 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 de-
serving 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 de-
flected onto a kind of man for whom Camus had always expressed
contempt; there is no possibility there of confusing character with au-
thor. Furthermore, the woman who finally thinks could not possibly be
226 Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus
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 in-
carnation 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 heterosexual-
ity is also for the first time addressed from the point of view of a fe-
male 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 see-
ing one another (TRN, 1572). Pleasure plays no part in this exchange,
which reflects rather their mutual vulnerability, clinging to one an-
other in the face of a threatening post-war world, and in fear of mor-
tality. 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 “har-
bour” (TRN, 1526). La Chute (chronologically later than this story)
develops this aspect of bourgeois marriage as a form of modern de-
bauchery 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,
Sexual Topographies 227
and she returns with the same precaution as when she had left (TRN,
1575).
Roger Quilliot notes that over four successive versions Camus em-
phasizes the sexual nature of this final experience (TRN, 2040). Al-
though English Showalter is surely correct when he says that little
attention has been paid to the sexual nature of this experience,13 a fo-
cus 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 metaphysi-
cal allusion, but rather a specific reference to her genitals, which be-
come “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 high-
lighted, 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 permuta-
tions 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 re-
moved from Camus, Spivak speaks of the unpredictable consequences
if, rather than being included as honorary brothers, women as women
13
Exiles and Strangers, 25.
14
“La double transcendance du féminin et du masculin dans ‘La femme adultère’
d’Albert Camus”, Dalhousie French Studies 19 (1990) (51-60), 55.
228 Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus
15
Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 32, 38.
16
Writing French Algeria, 41.
17
Death of a Discipline, 130.
18
“Mapping Ideology: Gide, Camus and Algeria”, College Literature, 8 (2) (1981),
158-74.
Sexual Topographies 229
19
Ibid., 159, 166.
20
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.
230 Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus
24
“Mapping Ideology”, 158.
25
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.
Sexual Topographies 231
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 / sen-
sual South division, and where the response to the North African set-
ting privileges the body over the mind,27 for he overlooks the
emphasis there on the mind and lucidity. Furthermore, as I have re-
marked, the indigenous population there is entirely abstracted in fa-
vour 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 commun-
ion. Janine’s vague romantic yearnings centre around the nonetheless
concrete figure of the nomad, and it is precisely his absence that ren-
ders 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 es-
says, where sexual union is of a mystical nature and with an unpeo-
pled 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 ear-
lier, in Laghouat, but also when he records his feelings about Boghari-
Djelfa, the route to Laghouat, with its extreme and “royal” poverty:
27
“Colonial Bodies”, 84.
28
“Colonial Bodies”, 83.
Sexual Topographies 233
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, wo-
manless space.
Although “La Femme adultère” is the first text to confront the fact
of the colonized population, this “other” South continues to be pro-
tected 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 unsympa-
thetic businessman, imported from the Carnets or the shadowy mar-
gins 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 Ca-
mus’s youth. It returns to a different source, and over a similar tempo-
ral 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.
234 Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus
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 as-
sociated 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 writ-
ing 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 mechani-
cal 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 Sym-
posium, 8 (1976), 117-31.
Sexual Topographies 235
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)
34
“L’Image du colon dans ‘La Femme adultère’”, A C 14 (1991), 151, 139.
35
Although few in number, many more European women entered into mixed mar-
riages than men (see chapter 2). Statistics certainly do not support the view that Euro-
pean 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.
238 Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus
40
He refers to Fromentin’s impressions of the region in 1953 (C3, 93).
41
“Un été dans le Sahara”, in Oeuvres complètes, Guy Sagnes (ed.) (Paris: Gallimard,
1984), 77, 78.
42
Ibid., 134-35.
43
Ibid., 181.
Sexual Topographies 239
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, col-
our 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 nu-
merous commentators have pointed out (Bhabha the first amongst
them) his exclusive focus is on the relations between men; as he ac-
knowledges 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 dis-
44
L’Amour, la fantasia (Paris: Albin Michel, 1987), 255. A qalam is a writing instru-
ment.
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.
240 Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus
48
See Bart Moore-Gilbert, Post-Colonial Theory: Contexts, Practices, Politics (Lon-
don: Verso, 1997), 140-151.
49
“The Other Question”, 27.
Sexual Topographies 241
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 Sexual-
ity in the Colonial Contest (Routledge: London, 1995), chapter 4.
242 Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus
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 es-
prit 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 con-
dition. The story concerns a French Catholic missionary who journeys
to the desert city of Taghâsa, renowned for its barbaric cruelty, in or-
der 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 Ca-
mus’s attack on the worship of ideologies and totalitarianism: as Vic-
tor 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 perma-
nent 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 ap-
plied to the rise of Islamism, and a new totalitarian ideology, by po-
litical commentators such as Paul Berman.55 Following Berman, the
journalist Nick Cohen has argued that the traditional Left has aban-
doned 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: Pen-
guin, 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).
Sexual Topographies 243
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 en-
tirely 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 Mediter-
ranean, The Barbary Coast, and Italy, 1500-1800 (London: Macmillan, 2004), xxiv.
244 Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus
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 1-
1½ million Europeans were abducted into slavery between the six-
teenth 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 fur-
ther 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 “sa-
distic 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 con-
crete details through which it is constructed. Certainly, as a mono-
logue 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, appar-
ently, from the real to the fantastic; from the familiar and concrete
geographical locations of the seminary at Grenoble and the city of Al-
giers to a city built of salt that seems entirely the product of night-
mare. 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 (Lon-
don: 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 Pi-
rates’, International Studies Quarterly 47 (1) (2003), 23–48.
62
“The Terror of the Absolute”, 12, 9, 11.
Sexual Topographies 245
63
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.
246 Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus
66
Blank Darkness, 179, 43, 133.
67
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.
248 Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus
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 can-
nibalistic desires”. See Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality and Other Works,
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962), 72.
Sexual Topographies 249
that tore me to shreds, the offence and the suffering were sweet to me!
(EK, 31-32)
was”, with the result that, unlike the virile rebel, he has no Self to af-
firm. “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 inex-
tricable 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 be-
comes formless, where the blood is mixed to such a point that the soul has lost its
boundaries.
72
A. James Arnold makes this point in ‘“La Pierre qui pousse’: Symbolic Displace-
ment in L’Exil et le Royaume”, in Rizzuto (ed.), Albert Camus’ “L’Exil et le Royau-
me”: 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 be-
comes 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.
Sexual Topographies 253
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 mas-
ter 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 bar-
rier against floods, the “tamer” of rivers, moreover, d’Arrast repre-
sents 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 quar-
ter, when, like his priestly predecessor, he is offered a libation by the
young black woman whom he impulsively wants to prevent from leav-
ing (TRN, 1666). His attitude towards her is characterized by non-
rational 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, 1666-
67). Again, before leaving for the ceremony, d’Arrast hesitates, as if
waiting for her (TRN, 1673). Sexual attraction, never explicitly ex-
pressed, 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 sex-
ual 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
254 Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus
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 identifi-
cation and alienation, scenes of fear and desire, in colonial texts.76
75
L’Univers symbolique, 163-64, 192-93.
76
“The Other Question”, 25.
77
“Black Bodies, White Bodies”, 218.
Sexual Topographies 255
tral to the ritual, where on the one hand she is a “black Diana”, a hunt-
ress, 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 re-
flects an “innocent melancholy”, and thus she becomes like a sacrifi-
cial 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 beau-
tiful 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 More-
over, 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 atmos-
phere of the exotic and primeval. Furthermore, this strange and de-
monic 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 red-
painted 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).
256 Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus
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).
Sexual Topographies 257
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 non-
rational.
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 Roy-
aume. 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 in-
stinctive 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 exter-
nal 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.
81
Albert Camus: une vie (see chapter 44, “Le Cri du prisonnier”), 638.
82
Souvenirs, 98.
258 Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus
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, polymor-
phous 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
83
“The Other Question”, 34.
84
See Arnold’s “Symbolic Displacement” for a consideration of this theme.
Sexual Topographies 259
colonial situation; its tone on the contrary, is patronizing toward the noble sav-
ages.85
85
The Unique Creation of Albert Camus, 208.
86
Cf. The Unique Creation of Albert Camus, 209.
87
Albert Camus: une vie, 661.
260 Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus
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 Western-
ized 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 Afri-
can, it is the South-American Catholic – the Other who is “else-
where”.88 But this conclusion holds only so long as such co-existence
has clear boundaries, for, as Sarocchi has likewise noted, all of Ca-
mus’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 an-
ger” 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.
Sexual Topographies 261
tile historical forces.1 The modern world brings new forms of no-
madism 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 il-
lustrated 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 mar-
riage across class and geographical boundaries. Although not always
central, these portraits are nonetheless integral to a process of recon-
struction 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 ambi-
tion 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 comple-
mentary 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 varia-
tions. Fernande is a traditional wife who supports her husband in his
dealings in the public sphere. She ministers to his needs, and the ex-
pertly ironed shirt with which she provides him is a source of con-
tentment (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 land-
less whites, but excludes “those half-breeds with pointed yellow shoes and scarves
who had only adopted the worst of the West” (PH, 320).
The First Man 265
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.
The First Man 267
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 so-
cial 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 Pa-
ris:
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 con-
damner; 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)
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 ter-
mite 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 him-
self. 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 in-
dustrieuse. 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 conse-
quences 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 bene-
fit, for she complements his own predilection for inactivity. In differ-
ent 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 respon-
sibility 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 pre-
figures the comment that there are no men left in France (PH, 168),
270 Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus
4
Preface to the new edition of Le Sang des races (Paris: G. Crès et Cie, 1921), XI.
5
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 Beau-
voir”, 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 commenta-
tors in what he calls the “mercantile age” (C3, 96).
The First Man 271
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 swal-
lowed up by the demands of domestic life, so that wife and family
likewise take on a cannibalistic aspect. Given the lack of clarity be-
tween 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 “hel-
ped” 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 lit-
tle, 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)
7
Albert Camus ou le mythe et le mime, 58.
272 Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus
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 de-
rive 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 hap-
piness was authorized by some higher decree. (F, 23)
Jonas evinces a similar attitude, but likewise fails to recognize his ob-
ligations towards this star, so that gradually Louise’s activity sup-
plants 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 word-
play 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 be-
tween the King’s son and the “new princes” of commerce who repre-
sent all those forces besetting Jonas. Not only is he led astray by the
false stars of success, marriage, and fornication, but this fate is re-
vealed 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 Ber-
8
‘“Jonas’ ou la production d’une étoile”, 51-52.
9
This confusion may be compared to that of Clamence, seeing invisible doves in the
sky, or mistaking snowflakes for doves.
The First Man 273
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 Cor-
mery 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, doom-
ing all those unable to escape its reach. This is the loathsome Europe
that spawned the renegade priest and from which d’Arrast has es-
caped.
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 re-
flects a shifting of focus from mythical to “real” women, and the bur-
den 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 Ca-
mus’s own protestations that Clamence was not modelled on himself
(and his contempt for this character), it is not at all clear that with re-
spect to women Camus underwent a process of self-examination dur-
ing 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 subject-
ing 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.
11
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.
274 Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus
13
Albert Camus: une vie, 741.
The First Man 275
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:
The First Man 277
(E)lle semblait ne plus penser à lui ni d’ailleurs à rien, et le regardait même par-
fois 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 negativ-
ity associated with her remains. She no longer has a strange or super-
natural 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 inde-
pendent awareness admits the possibility of the wrong response. What
14
Le Dernier Camus, 54.
278 Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus
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 ad-
dress 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 at-
tempts 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, indi-
rectly, 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 Ca-
mus’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.
The First Man 279
does nothing but reflect back to the only subject the childhood of pov-
erty from which he has never done anything else but flee (E, 1213)?
Like Echo, the mirror reflects only the subject standing before it; al-
though 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 can-
not 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 si-
lenced 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 re-
jection and his feelings of being superfluous – his own inability to ex-
press 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 ex-
plains 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 judge-
ment.
I argued in chapter 1 that the young writer’s attempts to recreate
this maternal figure were repeatedly defeated by his inability to imag-
ine her inner life; this failure to give her a human dimension is only
resolved by her transformation into a symbol, a final solution that de-
termines 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.
280 Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus
of the mother, the death of the woman in her, and the death of all im-
penetrable 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, treat-
ing 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 Er-
innyes, upholders of the mother-right. This trilogy traces the over-
throw 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 signi-
fied 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 Ca-
mus”, 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.
The First Man 281
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.
282 Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus
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 be-
yond the family circle to form the basis for the idea of the nation it-
self.
Commenting on the self-sacrifing love inspired by the idea of the
homeland, Benedict Anderson highlights those ties which are not cho-
sen, 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 assimi-
lated to skin-colour, gender, parentage, and birth-era – all those things one can not
help.22
22
Imagined Communities, 131.
The First Man 283
23
Julian Young, Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Art (Cambridge: CUP, 1992), 151.
284 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 conti-
nuity of the generations, that “cultureless history of the generation
sequence”. This symbolic dimension serves a dual purpose, as her out-
look 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 judge-
ment 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 in-
strumental 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 Alge-
ria, 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.
The First Man 285
28
The scene before the restaurant of the man shot in a brawl is returned here to Al-
giers to demonstrate forcefully the vulnerability of the two women and children (PH,
128).
The First Man 287
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 begin-
ning 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.
288 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 reli-
gion 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 geo-
graphical 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, mater-
nal 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 exsan-
guineous 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-
The First Man 289
ning that all the windows and doors are bolted against this blood-
thirsty intruder (PH, 257) who would destroy the family – a threat im-
plicitly 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 illus-
trated 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 “barbari-
ans” 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 de-
scent for any son of Algeria, where all that is represented by patriar-
chy – 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 graft-
ing of the new culture on the Algerian soil was a primeval and neces-
sary 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 de-
fends to the utmost, with the desperate force of its whole being, against alien
seeds, against overshadowing neighbour plants, against all nature. (...) The bitter-
est 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 Dun-
woodie and Edward J. Hughes (eds) (Stirling: Stirling French publications, 1998).
290 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 homo-
social 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 relo-
cation of the pack at the beginning of time. The narrator’s own admi-
ration 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 differ-
ent 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 ap-
pendix 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 rela-
tionships with women, and as exemplified by Vincent in “L’Été à Al-
ger”. 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 else-
where between imperialism and colonial expansion (E, 897-98).
The First Man 291
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 para-
dise 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 mark-
edly with the earlier paradoxical depiction of her as a mother who
knew neither how to love or to caress her children, and hence “indif-
ferent” (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,
292 Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus
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 emo-
tional 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 administra-
tion 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 re-
lated, in the face of a total absence of any other expression of affec-
tion. 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, de-
termining 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 exhaust-
ing that the maternal function becomes impossible. Both the mother of
Jacques (condemned to a life of celibacy) and her mother might le-
gitimately ask Dora’s question: “Am I a woman now?” This matriar-
chal family is no haven of love and security but the domain of the
chaotic emotions – instinct and passion, violence and ignorance.
The First Man 293
“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 atten-
tion to me and, without seeming to, you opened for me the door to everything I
love in the world.” (FM, 26)
32
The Libation-Bearers, 503-29.
The First Man 295
On ne peut vivre avec la vérité – “en sachant” – celui qui le fait se sépare des au-
tres 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)
33
See Le Dernier Camus, 57.
296 Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus
34
Aeschylus, Agamemnon, Philip Vellacott (tr.) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972),
1279-1305.
35
Agamemnon, 1085-1107.
The First Man 297
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 un-
touched through an effort of the Will:
Un homme dur, amer, qui avait travaillé toute sa vie, avait tué sur commande, ac-
cepté 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 sub-
mitted to everything that could not be avoided, but had preserved some part of
himself where he allowed no-one to trespass. (FM, 52)
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.
The First Man 299
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.
The First Man 301
savez, il s’appelait Caïn, et depuis c’est la guerre, les hommes sont affreux, sur-
tout 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 un-
der a ferocious sun”. (FM, 149)
46
L’Amour, la fantasia, 86-87.
47
Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade, Dorothy S. Blair (tr.) (London: Quartet, 1985),
73.
302 Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus
48
Le Premier Homme: La Peste, 23.
49
In Melouza in 1957, 378 villagers, suspected of supporting a rival nationalist fac-
tion, had been massacred and mutilated in the course of a night by the FLN.
The First Man 303
50
“Paralipomènes et variantes des Thèses ‘Sur le concept de l’histoire’, Écrits fran-
çais”, Jean-Maurice Monnoyer (ed.): cited by Shoshana Felman, “Benjamin’s Silen-
ce”, 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).
304 Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus
53
Le Blanc de l’Algérie (Paris: Albin Michel, 1995).
The First Man 305
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 lib-
eration they killed my mother” (C3, 154). When the wife of a Euro-
pean 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 grati-
tude 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 in-
tegrity 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 incorpo-
rates 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 Pi-
erre (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 set-
tlers 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-
306 Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus
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 pre-
dicament 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), ex-
cept 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.
54
Le Dernier Camus, 252.
55
De la décolonization à la révolution culturelle, (Alger: SNED, 1981), 182.
56
The Decline of the West, 343.
The First Man 307
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 (...) every-
thing 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”, inex-
tricably bound up with the obscure forces of the soul. He would never
learn from them who his father had been, nor even whether his child-
hood 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 es-
sayé d’être pendant tant d’années et le réduisaient enfin à l’être anonyme et aveu-
gle 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 favour-
ite 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 be-
ing that for so many years had survived through his family and that made up his
true nobility. (FM, 104)
bowels of the earth, Nietzsche proposed that man should allow himself to be en-
gulfed in the cosmos to rediscover his eternal divinity and to become Dionysus
himself. (R, 65-66)
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).
The First Man 309
above all in claims to divinity among rulers and to (…) “breeding” among aristoc-
racies. 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 silen-
ce 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 Pre-
mier Homme, but in this apocalyptic dream of a “clash of civiliza-
tions”, 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, de-
lineating “us” and “them”. It becomes the source of a collective iden-
tity, 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”, “breed-
ing” 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.
59
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).
310 Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus
60
“Pour une lecture politique du dernier roman de Camus”, 8.
61
Ibid., 13.
The First Man 311
62
This is what Camus had said during an interview for Swedish radio, cited by Olivier
Todd (Albert Camus: une vie, 703).
312 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 previ-
ous narrative style and the long-held desire to write, without restric-
tion, 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 strange-
ness: 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 ances-
try is redeemed and incorporated into the maternal symbol – as in Le
Premier Homme, where the author is to speak of both racial discrimi-
nation against the Spanish (PH, 269) and of his own “Spanish side”
(PH, 284).
In turning back to the question of origins, Le Premier Homme re-
turns to earlier associations, later suppressed, that link mother, sexual-
ity 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
The First Man 313
by the uncle Ernest and the valorisation of the instincts and the primi-
tive, associated with him.
Such associations begin, however, with the invocation of the hos-
tile 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 perma-
nent 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 moun-
tains, plains and desert called the interior, and between the two the permanent
danger no one spoke of because it seemed natural. (FM, 116-17)
(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 popula-
tion 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)
63
L’Univers symbolique, 178, 159.
64
Ibid., 159.
The First Man 315
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, class-
rooms, 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 mal-
gré 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 strong-
est and most animal-like odours where the marvellous heat of life was somehow
preserved for him who could not di without it. (FM, 219)
65
Gassin notes in the symbol of the dog a range of disquieting characteristics in Ca-
musian man: sado-masochism, coprophilia, sexual insecurity, even perversion. See
L’Univers symbolique, 221.
316 Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus
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: Galli-
mard, 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 (Harmonds-
worth: 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)
____ Le degré zéro de l’écriture suivi de Nouveaux essais critiques (Paris: Seuil,
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____ “Camus contre Sartre – quarante ans plus tard”, in Walker, David H. (ed.), Les
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____ L’Amitié (Paris, Gallimard, 1971) (“Le Détour vers la simplicité”, 214-27: “La
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____ “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
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____ “Plant imagery in Camus’ L’Étranger”, Publications of the Missouri Philologi-
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____ “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)
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____ Étapes d’un itinéraire spirituel; Albert Camus de 1937-1944, Archives Albert
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____ “Camus ou l’impossibilité d’aimer”, AC7 (1975), 9-34
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Tipasa’”, Essays in French Literature, 20 (Nov. 1983), 67-94
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____ “Camus en Italie”, in Jean-Yves Guérin (ed.), Camus et la politique, 69-92
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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 &
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____ “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
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____ “Negotiation or Confrontation? Camus, Memory and the Colonial Chronotope”,
in Christine Margerrison, Mark Orme et al (eds), Albert Camus in the Twenty-
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____ “From Noces to L’Étranger”, in Edward J. Hughes (ed.), The Cambridge Com-
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____ (ed.) and Edward J. Hughes (ed.) Constructing Memories: Camus, Algeria and
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____ Writing French Algeria (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998)
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____ “Caught in the Middle: the Liberal Dilemma in the Algerian War”, Nottingham
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Index
black Diana, the, 183, 255, 259, 260 172, 174, 175, 181, 185, 186, 192,
Blake, Patricia, 176 201, 212, 214, 242, 290; L’Hôpital
Blanchot, Maurice, 152, 153, 155, du quartier pauvre, 26–28, 36, 48,
190 56, 136, 158; La Chute, 21, 37, 39,
Blondeau, Marie-Louise, 137 169–71, 177, 180–214, 215, 223,
blood: and soil, 284, 305; bloodlines, 226, 246, 252, 255, 257, 266, 268,
196; chastity of the blood tie, 283; 269, 270, 273, 280, 284, 309; La
duty, 306; impoverished, 180; Culture indigène, la nouvelle
maternal blood line, 22, 287; culture méditerranéenne, 61, 63,
purity, 181; the blood feud, 103 64, 130, 189; La Maison
Brazil, 171, 181, 182, 183, 184, 188, mauresque, 28–35, 36, 37, 44, 48,
196, 207, 245, 256 103, 108, 114, 124, 131, 233, 234,
Breton, André, 36 236, 282, 311, 313; La Mer au
Brisville, Jean-Claude, 70, 274 plus près, 185, 192; La Mort dans
Brombert, Victor, 242, 243, 244 l’âme, 28, 83, 87, 90; La Mort
Brosses, Charles de, 241 heureuse, 27, 40, 72, 76, 85, 88–
Budapest, 166, 171, 250 95, 98, 101, 107, 108, 112, 113,
Cæsarism, 60, 187 119, 135, 153, 158, 160, 227, 265;
Cain, 208, 209, 301, 303 La Peste, 27, 62, 133, 136–63,
calender, fils de roi. See King’s Son, 166, 169, 171, 175, 187, 192, 195,
176 206, 218, 233, 250, 264, 273, 274,
Calypso, 136, 187, 192, 198, 206 280, 312; La Pierre qui pousse,
Camus, Albert: Amour de vivre, 70, 183, 215, 251–60, 268, 269; La
93, 226; Caligula, 51, 55, 57, 75, Voix qui était soulevée par de la
95, 134, 135, 175; Carnets I, 61, musique, 53; Le Livre de
70, 71, 72, 77, 89, 112, 135, 143, Mélusine, 36–41, 44, 50, 52, 53,
151, 190, 195, 218, 290, 308; 54, 56, 92, 153, 226, 234; Le
Carnets II, 129, 131, 134, 135, Malentendu, 130–33, 261, 306; Le
136, 145, 149, 157, 158, 163, 166, Minotaure, 70, 218; Le Mythe de
172, 175, 181, 185, 189, 192, 197, Sisyphe, 43, 48, 49, 54, 56, 57, 72,
271, 283, 312; Carnets III, 21, 34, 75, 77, 82, 85, 86, 87, 88, 93, 95,
102, 175, 181, 185, 188, 190, 212, 98, 109, 136, 152, 156, 204, 210,
218, 233, 253, 259, 260, 266, 268, 215, 217, 308; Le Premier
272, 273, 276, 279, 281, 284, 288, Homme, 21, 22, 27, 30, 35, 44, 45,
297, 306, 310, 316; Chroniques 62, 69, 70, 79, 80, 81, 130, 133,
algériennes, 169; Devant la 186, 215, 220, 246, 263, 264, 266,
Morte, 41, 59, 75, 77; Entre Oui et 267, 274–316; Le Renégat, ou un
Non, 42–47, 50, 56, 159; esprit confus, 215, 241, 242–51,
Intuitions, 24–26, 28, 30, 40, 60, 253, 255, 257, 268, 300; Le Vent à
87, 89, 93, 308, 310; Jonas, ou Djémila, 89, 91; Les Justes, 62,
l’artiste au travail, 264, 266–74; 166, 175; Les Muets, 264, 266,
Journaux de Voyage, 145, 181–84, 267; Les Voix du quartier pauvre,
188–89, 193, 196, 207, 245, 254– 41, 42, 49, 59, 112, 274; Noces,
55, 269; L’Étranger, 35, 40, 51, 36, 53, 63, 65, 66, 86, 102, 112,
78, 91, 95, 96–98, 102–3, 108–28, 162, 216, 226, 233, 308; Noces à
133, 135, 188, 202, 220, 240, 248, Tipasa, 71, 131, 144, 210; Perte de
280, 312, 313, 314; L’Exil l’être aimé, 55, 56, 59; Remarque
d’Hélène, 136, 139, 142, 158, 188; sur la révolte, 140; Retour à
L’Homme révolté, 27, 159, 169, Tipasa, 185, 216, 223, 226, 233;
Index 349
Rivages, 63, 64; Voilà! elle est culture, 58, 288; birth of, 51, 52;
morte. See Devant la morte, 55 cultureless history of the
Camus, Francine, 201, 273 generation sequence, 62, 284, 297
Camus, Simone, 36 Dadoun, Roger, 92
cancer, 123 Daniel, Jean, 101
cannibalism, 47, 94, 183, 245; and Dante, Alighieri, 196, 202, 206, 209,
assimilation, 184; and matriarchy, 251, 255
246, 248, 250; the mother cat, 83, dark continent, 122, 188, 249; of
281 female sexuality, 183
Cassandra, 285, 295 Davis, Robert C., 243
Centenary of the French conquest, death: bodies without a soul, 77, 78,
the, 29 83, 87; conscious, 88, 89, 91, 308;
Cerberus, 226 involuntary death, 87; of woman,
Chamberlain, Houston, 178 51, 55; the pedagogical death, 75
chaos, 175, 189, 199, 202, 253, 259, debauchery, 128, 189, 197, 198, 211,
280, 286, 289, 297; racial, 180 213, 226
chastity, 72, 92, 135, 160, 188, 197, degeneration, 256
198, 206, 209, 286, 304 Déjeux, Jean, 64, 65, 184
Christian imagery, 171, 187, 196, depersonalization, 98
206, 211, 212, 213, 284 dératisation, 141
Christianity: eschatology, 189; the despot, the, 31
slave religion, 187, 206, 285 Dionysian principle, the, 93
Circe, 192, 206 Dionysus, 70, 93, 94, 95, 285; not of
civil régime, the, 68 woman born, 94; the twice born,
civilizing mission, the, 67, 69, 180, 94
184, 246, 258, 260 Djebar, Assia, 106, 107, 238, 301,
Claro, Léon, 29 302, 304
Clayton, Alan J., 35, 72 Doane, Mary Ann, 122
Clytemnestra, 280, 285, 294, 296 domestic sphere, 274, 295
Cohen, Nick, 242 Don Juan, 57, 71, 72, 82, 86, 92, 96,
Cold War, the, 242, 245 141, 203, 204, 205, 279
Colley, Linda, 244 Dorph, Kenneth Jan, 105
Colonial Exhibition, the, 29 Dream world, the, 24
commerce: commodity transactions, Dunwoodie, Peter, 280, 289, 298
102; the sex trade, 108 duty, 38, 200, 259, 273, 274, 306, 308
Conqueror, the, 30, 86, 136, 175, 234 earth, the, 72, 165, 187, 308, 312; and
Conrad, Joseph, 228 abjection, 143; as pollution, 142
conscious death, 88, 89, 91, 308 Ecclesiastes: the living dog, 86
Costes, Alain, 49, 80, 81, 108, 109, École d’Alger, 59, 129, 176, 184
114, 159, 247, 279 Eden, 189, 200
criminality, 200, 211; murder, 87, 90, Electra, 132
109, 112, 114, 117, 120, 131, 171, Empedocles, 83, 307, 312
208, 210, 280, 302; the innocent envy, 24, 25, 77, 132, 171, 172, 174,
murderer, 117 285
Crochet, Monique, 70, 147, 149 Erickson, John, 232, 237
Cruickshank, John, 136, 137 Eumenides, the, 94
Cryle, Peter, 216, 217 Euripides, 132, 164
cultural priority, 34, 52, 63, 67, 102, Eurydice, 54, 135, 136, 142, 143,
170, 189, 246 147, 151, 152, 153, 155, 156
350 Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus
evasion, 28, 32, 34, 37, 87, 152, 184, Gay-Crosier, Raymond, 35, 72, 96,
224, 234; the wish for, 24 173
Eve, 198, 208 gender, 128, 163, 216, 219, 227, 230,
Exmouth, Lord: naval bombardment 282; and race, 241, 248; as a
of Algiers, 244 borderline between life and death,
exoticism, 30, 104, 236, 255 77, 78, 81, 83, 86, 235; gender
Fanon, Franz, 106 relations, 105; gendering of race,
fascism, 69, 129, 130 179; reversals, 131; role in the
father, the, 132, 286, 295, 298, 299, theatrical works, 134; the colonial
302; absence of, 279; as the son, subject as a gendered subject, 240
289; civilization and the Law, Gide, André, 131, 176, 228
288; frailty of the father’s role, Gilman, Sander L., 122, 123, 124,
287; murder of, 280; Orestes, 296; 125, 254
patriarchy, 286, 288, 294; Girard, René, 117
rejection of, 177; search for, 22, Girardet, Raoul, 58
181; status of, 177; substitutes, Gobineau, Joseph Arthur, 63, 170,
294; superfluity of, 286, 308; the 176–80, 181, 182, 183, 184, 189,
legacy of, 131 253, 309
Faust: Faustian man, 190 God: African gods, 252; the Artist-
Felman, Shoshana, 303 god, 75, 85, 92; the man-god, 73,
feminine, the, 62, 84, 139; as the 75, 308
cultureless history of the grandmother, the: actress, 276
generation sequence, 85 Graves, Robert, 94, 214
Fernande Bartfeld, 70, 175 Greece, 129, 136, 169, 187, 188, 194,
fetishism, 239, 240, 241, 242, 246, 195, 196, 206, 212, 284, 286
247, 248, 249, 250, 251, 315 Greek tragedy: balance, 164
Fieschi, 116 Grenier, Jean, 21, 59, 61, 63, 64, 84,
fils de roi, le, 170, 176, 177, 178, 186, 101, 133, 164, 166, 170, 171, 188,
197, 272, 308 216, 227, 250, 257, 281, 285, 293
Fitch, Brian, 40, 120, 201, 222, 224, Guérin, Jean-Yves, 92, 159, 300
232, 234, 270, 272 Haddour, Azzedine, 51, 138
FLN, the, 170, 215, 299 harem, the, 31, 32, 33, 34, 104, 249
fraternity, 136, 158, 167, 169, 170, Hargreaves, Alec, 109
314; embracing all men, 257 Heggoy, Alf, 65, 105, 107, 230
Freeman, E., 134 Hell, 192, 196, 197, 200, 202, 206,
Fréminville, Claude de, 42, 55, 59, 209, 210, 213
63, 176 historical origination, 34, 51, 103,
French conquest, Centenary of, 29 170, 239, 283, 310
Freud, Sigmund, 109, 119, 122, 125, history: and gender, 163
155, 183, 188, 240, 241, 246, 247, homecoming, the, 185, 192, 209, 216
249, 250, 253, 280, 282, 287; the homeland, the, 21, 61, 129, 130, 133,
dark continent, 122 136, 139, 169, 174, 185, 192, 209,
Fromentin, Eugène, 238, 239 215, 216, 254, 261, 263, 274, 281,
Gadourek, Carina, 273 282, 305, 310, 316; Latinity, 69;
Gard, Roger Martin du, 189 of the soul, 102, 131
Garfitt, J.S.T., 84 homoeroticism, 180; and race, 179
Gassin, Jean, 25, 27, 33, 35, 80, 109, homosocial, the, 70, 88, 160, 206,
119, 141, 159, 160, 172, 207, 247, 290
248, 253, 314, 315 honour, 107, 115, 170, 306
Index 351
Man: Faustian, 190; the Fall of, 181, instrument, 48, 70, 116; as
189, 190, 214; the First Man, 170, biological origin, 22, 282; as dead
177, 181, 288, 294, 297, 298 consciousness, 47, 79; as dead
man-god, the, 274 object, 277, 280; as fictional
Marlowe, Christopher, 197, 318 creation, 307; as origin, 34; as
marriage, 96, 97, 126, 150, 194, 222, symbol, 22, 115, 169, 274, 281,
223, 225, 266; and biological kin, 297; as template, 41; as the source
286; and colonialism, 236; and of mortality, 155; associations
debauchery, 226; and fornication, with abjection, 83; birthright, 103;
272; and freedom, 221; and more blood and soil, 284, 305;
archaic bonds, 286; and servitude, communication, 49; cultureless
265; and the true family, 133; history of the generation sequence,
arranged, 304; as a temporary 62, 304; dual function, 35;
institution, 288; as an institution, embrace of biological ties, 308;
273; as debauchery, 198; class endowed with greater reality, 275;
variations, 264; cross-cultural exclusion of, 111; first
variations, 267; detrimental to appearance, 124; ideal of purity,
health, 296; in a social context, 124; idealisation, 127; in La Peste,
267; intermarriage, 64, 66, 104, 161; incapacity for thought, 278;
237; of Muslim women, 105 maternal biology, 288; maternal
Martin du Gard, Roger, 189 bond, 289; matriarchy, 286;
Martinière, the, 219 mother earth, 305; of Dionysus,
Mary, the spotless mirror of God, 208 94; paradox of maternal stupidity,
maternal principle, 163 284; parallels with Arabs in
maternal stereotype, 124 general, 123; rejection, 98; return
maternal symbol, 35, 312 of, 274; return to, 278; return to
matriarchy, 183, 196, 280, 284, 286, the earth, 314; symbolic function,
291; and cannibalism; theory of 281; the mother-right, 95, 280;
assimilation, 183 transformation into art, 53; unity,
matricide, 280, 295 93
McCarthy, Patrick, 96, 114 mother-child relationship, 286
McClintock, Anne, 239, 241 mourning, the process of, 55, 80, 82,
Mediterranean spirit, 61, 162 118, 156, 281
Medusa, 155 murder: Cain and Abel, 208, 209,
Melville, Herman, 206 290, 301; the first, 208, 209, 245,
Mephistopheles, 214 278, 280
Mersault, Patrice, 91 Murray, Jack, 229, 231, 232, 237
Meyers, Jeffrey, 207 Mythe de Némésis, le, 188, 284
Miller, Christopher, 29, 179, 241 mythology, 169
Miller, Henry, 272 myths, 70; Christian; Adam, 178,
Monique Crochet, 70 208; Babel, 189, 191; Beatrice,
Moore-Gilbert, Bart, 240 209, 210; Eve, 198, 208; Mary,
Morot-Sir, Édouard, 35, 227 the New Eve, 209; Salome, 211,
mother, the, 122, 275, 276, 279, 292, 212; the Virgin Mary, 208, 285;
312; and confession, 41, 279; and Egyptian; Anubis, 226; Greek,
homeland, 133; and son, 42, 49, 169; Achilles, 157; Apollo, 94,
127, 277, 283, 315; and the true 280, 286; Athena, 94; Calypso,
parent of the child, 94, 284; and 136, 187, 192, 198, 206;
the woman who thinks, 226; as an Cassandra, 285, 295; Cerberus,
Index 353
Pratt, Mary Louise, 228, 229, 230, 163; in a feminine tradition, 165;
232, 247 negative revolt, 173; of the slave,
priority, cultural, 35, 52, 67, 102, 189, 173; the mainspring of, 174
246 Rhodes, Cecil, 190
prostitution, 108; brothels, 108, 131; Richon, Olivier, 32
Camus’s attraction to brothels, Rigaud, Jan, 114
101; the colonial brothel, 196 Rivages, 64
psychology, 89, 98, 122, 164; of Rizzuto, Anthony, 13, 24, 35, 127,
women, 165, 174 147, 150, 222, 246, 252, 273
purity: racial, 34, 52, 63, 102, 170, Roblès, Emmanuel, 63
181, 189, 237, 246; the white Rosfelder, André, 21
woman, 35 salvation, 208, 209, 271
Quilliot, Roger, 41, 133, 139, 164, Salzburg, 90
186, 202, 223, 227 Sarocchi, Jean, 45, 51, 63, 102, 129,
race, 109, 112, 114, 121, 239, 241, 131, 172, 192, 194, 246, 260, 277,
271, 312, 315; a bastard race, 67; 305
and colonial literature, 69; and Sartre, Jean-Paul, 101, 109, 132
gender, 241, 248; and homo- Scheler, Max, 173, 174
eroticism, 179; and sexuality, 34, Sedgewick, Eve Kosofsky, 160
128; as a foil, 127; assimilation, Segovia, Jaime Castro, 252
67; gendering of, 179; inter-racial Self, the, 24, 25, 33, 40, 72, 77, 93,
relationships, 179; miscegenation, 199, 217, 228, 234, 251, 274; and
67, 182, 184, 237; mixed race, 67; Others, 23, 24; birth of, 53, 132;
racial chaos, 309; racial purity, 34, excision of an autobiographical
51, 63, 170, 181; racial theory, Self, 98; mother as an extension
240; racism, 65; Spanish blood, of, 47; proliferation of, 28; threat
66; the black woman, 103, 122, to, 248; unity, 46
124, 125, 252, 253, 254, 260; the settlers, the, 67, 68, 69, 170, 215, 287
female races, 179; the new race, sexuality: and infidelity, 76, 90, 103,
35, 59, 60, 64, 65, 66, 67; the 128, 213; and prostitution, 101,
race-class spectrum, 228; the 103, 115, 132, 180, 181, 189, 193,
white woman, 122, 124, 125, 218, 198, 200, 207, 211, 255; and race,
254, 260; the woman of race, 103; 124; and sexual excess, 124, 253;
white race, 179; women as sisters and syphilis, 128, 312; and the sex
beneath the skin, 103 trade, 108; as an opiate, 135, 191,
racial purity, 35, 102, 189, 237, 246 193, 197; chastity, 91, 102, 227,
racism, 65, 69, 109, 114, 219, 220, 286, 290; debauchery, 128, 189,
266, 308 197, 198, 211, 213, 226;
rebirth, 52, 53, 77, 84, 181, 229, 282, degeneration, 124; female, 53,
307 101, 103, 115, 122, 128, 132, 133,
Redemption, 207, 208 170, 180, 181, 189, 193, 198, 200,
resentment, 95, 132, 172, 173; as a 207, 211, 215, 226, 227, 249, 254,
female quality, 174; the theory of, 255, 264, 274, 285, 315; as a
173 source of corruption, 123;
responsibility and guilt, 202, 271 harassment, 107, 223; pollution,
revolt, 27, 87, 134, 135, 140, 210, 102; sadism, 114, 119, 244, 248;
297, 308; against death, 77; as the sexual jealousy, 36, 73, 76, 90, 92,
business of men, 174; cycle of, 97, 108, 113, 119, 201; sexual
133; Dora, 167; essay on revolt, purity, 35, 63, 72, 102, 112, 123,
Index 355
124, 128, 131, 133, 169, 171, 188, aristocrat, 185; the First Man, 282,
200, 207, 260, 316; the end of 283; Ulysses, 185
history in the orgy, 181; the stars, 185; the Pleiades, 178, 181, 214
harem, 32, 34, 108; the orgy, 246 stereotypes: a priori knowledge, 163;
Showalter, English, Jr, 227 maternal stereotype, 162; of the
Sicily, 187, 195, 199, 200; primitive, 183; power of, 111;
associations with slavery, 194 racial, 108, 111, 123, 128; sexual,
silence, 187; and authenticity, 150; 111, 163; social, 114; the colonial
animal, 281; animal silence of the stereotype, 34, 239, 240, 258; the
mother, 47; as an authentic truth, maternal stereotype, 103, 117,
161; as the foundation for 161; the mythical woman, 162;
heterosexual love, 156; conspiracy women, 96
of, 150; maternal, 275, 309; Mme Suther, Judith, 220
Rieux, 153; of the mother, 49; of syphilis, 35, 107, 123, 124, 131
the son, 56, 159; the incapacity for Taghâsa, 242, 244, 247, 249, 260
thought, 278 The Adoration of the Lamb, 207, 208,
Sirens, the, 193, 206, 212 209
slavery, 177; associations with Sicily, theory of racial inequality, 181
194; the Atlantic slave trade, 243; Thody, Philip, 110, 113
the Muslim slave trade, 243; the Tillion, Germaine, 103
slave mentality, 173, 174; and Tipasa, 71, 185, 216, 217, 223
revolt, 173; the slave religion, Todd, Olivier, 21, 257, 274, 311
187; the white slave trade, 244 tourist, the, 30, 33, 198, 222, 227,
solidarity, 23, 26, 83, 89, 136, 159; 229, 230, 233, 235, 236, 238, 257
and the perception of sameness, tragedy: Greek, 94, 132; as a balance
27 between opposing forces, 134
son, the, 294, 308; as a liar, 81, 82, transcendence, 54, 95, 241; as
258, 296; as a monster, 81, 296; communion, 54; passive form of,
the son of woman, 197 227
soul: Faustian soul, 190; Greek, 190; Trojan war, the, 136, 280
loss of boundaries, 256; obscure Tsar, the. See man-god, 308
forces of, 22, 99, 199, 259, 283, typhus, 137
307, 312; the body without a soul, Ulysses, 129, 136, 178, 184, 185,
77, 78, 83, 87; without limits, 83 186, 187, 192, 193, 196, 209, 216,
South America, 171, 175, 181, 182, 251; the navigator, 185
185, 186, 188, 192, 193, 248, 285 Underworld, the, 145, 147, 157, 181,
Spengler, Oswald, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 255, 296
70, 85, 139, 163, 172, 175, 176, Van Eyck, 207, 213
190, 245, 246, 288, 290, 304, 306, Van Huy, Nguyen, 162, 163
309 Viggiani, Carl A., 185, 287
spheres: domestic sphere, 268; public violence, 180, 256; against women,
and private, 55, 105, 163, 165, 78
263, 267, 271, 304 Viollette, Maurice, 67, 137
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 106, Virgil, 206
111, 115, 162, 227 voyeurism, 33, 34, 44, 45, 230, 257,
star, the, 186; Camus, 306; Clamence, 277
192; fils de roi, 272; invisible star, vraie voie, la: the true path, 135, 191,
185; Jonas, 272; mark of the 193, 197
Wagner, Roland, 116
356 Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus