The Algerian Island in the Novels of Albert Camus: The End of the

242 Pages·2004·1.25 MB·English

THE ALGERIAN ISLAND IN THE NOVELS OF ALBERT CAMUS:
THE END OF THE PIED-NOIR ADVENTURE TALE

by

James Hebron Tarpley

BA, Vanderbilt University, 1992

MA, University of Pittsburgh, 1996

Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of

Arts & Sciences in partial fulfillment

of the requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

University of Pittsburgh

2004
UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH

FACULTY OF ARTS AND SCIENCES

This dissertation was presented

by

James Hebron Tarpley

It was defended on

December 11, 2003

and approved by

Dr. Yves Citton

Dr. Giuseppina Mecchia

Dr. Philip Smith

Dr. Philip Watts
Dissertation Director

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Copyright by James Hebron Tarpley
2004
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THE ALGERIAN ISLAND IN THE NOVELS OF ALBERT CAMUS:
THE END OF THE PIED-NOIR ADVENTURE TALE

James Hebron Tarpley, PhD

University of Pittsburgh, 2004

ABSTRACT

Albert Camus’s novels provide insight into the worldview of the pieds-noirs, Algerian-born
descendants of European settlers facing ever-increasing pressure to abandon what they saw as
their homeland as decolonization accelerated after the Second World War, when Camus was
writing. This study examines Camus’s four main novels, L’étranger, La peste, La chute, and Le
premier homme in their colonial context. Through a careful analysis of Camus’s use of the
tropes and imagery associated with the robinsonnade, or island adventure tale, and its inherent
connection to colonialist discourse, this study nuances our understanding of Camus’s position on
the subject of Algeria. We will argue that Camus’s fiction suggests mixed feelings about the
colonial project in Algeria and furthermore that he clearly anticipated the impending end of the
French-Algerian experiment.

In L’étranger we see how the Algerian landscape is defined by impenetrable borders, forcing
mutually antagonistic groups into violent encounters within narrow spaces. In La peste we
examine the islanding of the city of Oran due to the plague outbreak, and we note how the
functioning of the city is laid bare due to the pressure of quarantine. La chute shows us that
Camus was fixated on an insular Algeria even when writing of northern Europe. Le premier
homme provides final proof that the island Algeria portrayed in Camus’s novels is associated
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with the colonial adventure of the pieds-noirs, and that this adventure will end, as in all
robinsonnades, with a return to the mother country.

The novels of Albert Camus were read as expressions of universal existentialist truth until Conor
Cruise O’Brien pointed out the importance of considering them in the colonial Algerian context.
Subsequent criticism of Camus has been largely shaped by O’Brien’s approach and by that of the
late Edward Said, who followed up O’Brien’s critiques with an even stronger indictment in
Culture and Imperialism of Camus as being in “outright opposition to Algerian independence”
and in assuming that the French colonial project in Algeria is immutable. We will more clearly
analyze Camus’s perspective on the French colonial endeavor in Algeria as it is expressed in his
novels.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

PREFACE.....................................................................................................................................vii
1. INTRODUCTION..................................................................................................................1
1.1. The Pied-noir..................................................................................................................3
1.2. Brief Review of Camus Scholarship...............................................................................9
1.3. The Robinsonnade........................................................................................................42
2. L’étranger: Violence in the Space Between........................................................................53
2.1. Introduction...................................................................................................................53
2.2. Meursault’s Black Feet.................................................................................................57
2.3. On the Beach.................................................................................................................69
2.4. Between Four Walls......................................................................................................79
2.5. Losing his Head............................................................................................................98
3. Castaways on a Plague Island: Robinsons Oranais in La peste.........................................107
3.1. Introduction(s).............................................................................................................107
3.2. A Plague of Rats.........................................................................................................117
3.3. A Hazardous Voyage..................................................................................................120
3.4. Quarantine...................................................................................................................131
3.5. Islands Within Islands.................................................................................................138
3.6. Conclusion..................................................................................................................148
4. Falling for Colonial Nostalgia: Islands in La chute...........................................................151
5. Last Words of Le premier homme......................................................................................168
5.1. The Explicit Island Algeria.........................................................................................168
5.2. An Insular Vineyard....................................................................................................171
5.3. Stranger in a Strange Land..........................................................................................175
5.4. A Visit with the Master of The Islands.......................................................................183
5.5. Childhood Robinsonnade............................................................................................185
5.6. The Adventure Turns Sour..........................................................................................193
5.7. Race to the Finish........................................................................................................196
5.8. Literary and Cultural Heritage....................................................................................203
5.9. Calling a Cat a Cat......................................................................................................208
5.10. An Imaginary Epic..................................................................................................214
5.11. The Impossibility of Memory.................................................................................218
5.12. Conclusion..............................................................................................................224
BIBLIOGRAPHY.......................................................................................................................229

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PREFACE

I would like to express my heartfelt appreciation for each member of my dissertation committee.
Their encouragement, excellent suggestions, and unflagging support of my project resulted in
this document ultimately seeing the light of day. Special thanks go to my dissertation director,
Phil Watts, for ten years of inspiration, guidance, and patience.

My family constantly inspires me to strive for the best. My parents and grandparents have
supported and encouraged me throughout all of my studies, and my brothers’ disparate interests
have helped to keep me focused on my own. Finally, without my wife Noémie Parrat’s
motivational and editorial input, I believe that I would never have finished this dissertation at all,
so I dedicate it to her.

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1. INTRODUCTION

In the following study, we will attempt to deepen and nuance our understanding of the
relationship between the pied-noir and the Algerian space as this relationship plays out in the
fiction of Albert Camus. In order to accomplish this goal, it will be necessary to define precisely
what, or who, is a pied-noir, and it will also be useful to examine the current critical atmosphere
in which Camus and Algeria are studied. We will also examine the legacy of the nineteenth-
century island adventure text, or robinsonnade, for it seems that Camus knew this tradition and
used its tropes, its stock of metaphors and its freight of imperial connotations when describing
the Algerian space as it affects the French Algerian, or pied-noir, characters who are the focus of
the bulk of Camus’s fiction. Even with the intense critical interest in reading Camus’s novels
from a post-colonial perspective, no one has yet explored the centrality of the robinsonnade
intertext in his work.
The critical response to Albert Camus has fluctuated in several waves over the forty-odd
years since his death. At first Camus was taken as a sort of unreligious saint, or “just man,” in
the Sixties, at least partially because of the tragedy and sense of unfulfilled destiny caused by his
untimely death in a car accident in 1960. A decade later, Conor Cruise O’Brien wrote what is
probably the most significant intervention on Camus, particularly in light of politics, specifically
those pertaining to colonialism. In his Albert Camus: of Europe and Africa O’Brien
systematically studies Camus’s writing over his literary career as it was available in 1970,
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showing that the Algerian context of much of Camus’s fiction was integral to an understanding
thereof. His ultimate conclusion that Camus was incapable of distancing himself from the
political positions of the pied-noir culture in which he was steeped, while simultaneously
emerging as a wholly French cultural figure, has held sway since it was published. The second
most influential set of remarks on Camus are those of Edward Said, who devotes a short chapter
to Camus in Culture and Imperialism. Said, who it must be said spends several orders of
magnitude less time and energy studying Camus before making his conclusions than did
O’Brien, basically echoes O’Brien’s criticisms of Camus’s political positions as seen in his
literature while suggesting that O’Brien was too easy on Camus. O’Brien suggests that Camus
was incriminatingly silent on colonialism and the moral problems associated with it, for example
in his much-cited analysis of the Arab quarters of Oran in La peste, in which said quarter is
“curiously deserted”1 to the point of having been the sight of a literary final solution. Said goes
so far as to state that Camusian fictional works are “interventions in the history of French efforts
in Algeria, making and keeping it French.”2 Where O’Brien can envisage the possibility that
Camus struggled with new ways of imagining the relationship between the French, the pieds-
noirs, and the Arab- and Kabyle-Algerians, Said sums up Camus’s work as steeped in “belated,
in some ways incapacitated colonial sensibility.”3 In many ways, the critical efforts which
examine Camus and Algeria after Said’s comments are largely attempts to answer his analysis
with a more subtle, nuanced reading of Camus that is closer to that author’s texts and less reliant

1 Conor Cruise O’Brien, Albert Camus: of Europe and Africa (New York: The Viking
Press, 1970) 53.

2 Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (1993; New York: Vintage Books, 1994)
175.

3 Said 176.

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on prevailing impressions of what Camus was about. Indeed, Christine Margerrison suggests
that there is currently such a rush to resituate Camus and his works in their Algerian context that
this has led to some misappropriation of scholarly research concerning Camus and his
contemporary Muslim-Algerian literary colleagues.4 We will study a representative sample5 of
such criticism in order to set the stage for our own intervention, which we hope will combine the
better insights therein with an insistence on studying Camus’s fictional texts for the best chance
to understand the pied-noir point of view as it is expressed through characters and scenes which,
while undoubtedly not crafted for just such an effect, nevertheless provide the clearest possible
glimpses of a group that was greatly affected by a growing globalization which ultimately left
them behind.
1.1. The Pied-noir
Who or what precisely is a “pied-noir”? This Frenchman born in Algeria seems to be a
collection of contradictions, embodying a rather diverse group of people that nevertheless are all
lumped together in discussions of Algeria before and after its independence from France. The
pied-noir, or ‘Blackfoot,’ is in many ways the bête noire of the Algerian scene of the 19th and
20th centuries, associated as he is with the violent terror campaigns of the OAS, racism, and
economic hardships in France and Algeria. He can be seen as the foot soldier of the French
imperial endeavor in North Africa, laboring to bring Algeria firmly into the French empire and
nation and subsequently to keep it there. The very etymology of this term has given rise to a
great deal of speculation, and the manifold folk etymologies add to the richness of the

4 Christine Margerrison, “Two Recent Studies of Camus,” French Studies Bulletin: A
Quarterly Supplement 83 (2002): 17.

5 Many of these were assembled in a special edition of Johns Hopkins University’s MLN
in a special issue in 1997, edited by Marc Blanchard, entitled “Camus 2000.”

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