CAMUS'S L'ETRANGER: FIFTY YEARS ON

Also by Adele King

CAMUS FRENCH WOMEN NOVELISTS: Defining a

Female Style PAUL NIZAN: ECRIV AIN

PROUST THE WRITINGS OF CAMARA LA YE

Call1US'S L'Etranger: Fifty Years on

Edited by

Adele King Associate Professor of French

Ball State University, Muncie, Indiana

Palgrave Macmillan

(eBook)

Editorial matter and selection © Adele King 1992 Text © Macmillan Academic and Professional Ltd 1992

Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1992 All rights reserved. For information, write:

Scholarly and Reference Division, St. Martin's Press, Inc., 175 Fifth Avenue,

New York, N.Y. 10010

First published in the United States of America in 1992

ISBN 978-0-312-06858-5

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Camus's l' etranger : fifty years on / edited by Adele King. p. em. Includes index.

ISBN 978-0-312-06858-5

1. Camus, Albert, 1913--1960. Etranger. I. King, Adele. PQ2605.A3734E836 1992 843'.914-dc20 91-24360

CIP

ISBN 978-1-349-22005-2 ISBN 978-1-349-22003-8 (eBook)DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-22003-8

To the memory of Matthew Ward

Contents

Preface viii

Notes on Contributors ix

Introduction: After Fifty Years, Still a Stranger 1 Adele King

Part One Contexts and Influences on L'Etranger 17

1 Camus, our youthful years 18 Emmanuel Robles

2 Innocence in Camus and Dostoievsky 24 Jean Daniel

3 L'Etranger and 'Metaphysical Anxiety' 36 Frantz Favre

Part Two The Reception of L'Etranger and its influence 47 on other writers

4 Discovering The Outsider 48 Albert Wendt

5 A Brother to the Stranger 51 Vilas Sarang

6 The Impact of L'Etranger: oblique reflections on an 59 oblique novel K.N. Daruwalla

7 L'Etranger and L'Objecteur 65 David Bradby

8 The Reception of L'Etranger in the Soviet Union 76 He1ene Poplyansky

9 Camus and Algerian Writers 89 Christiane Achour

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10 History and Ethnicity in the Reception of L'Etranger 101 Alec C. Hargreaves

Part Three Textual Studies 113

11 Telling stories: narrative reflections in L'Etranger 114 Rosemarie Jones

12 Narrative Desire in L'Etranger 125 Cilbert D. Chaitin

13 The Rhetoric of the Text: Causality, Metaphor, and Irony 139 Peter Schofer

14 Mama's Boy: Reading Woman in L'Etranger 152 Vicki Mistacco

15 Humanism and the 'White Man's Burden': Camus, 170 Dam, Meursault, and the Arabs Michel Crimaud

16 Depiction of Arabs in L'Etranger 183 Jan Rigaud

Part Four Comparative Studies 193

17 Camus, Faulkner, Dead Mothers: A Dialogue 194 Deborah Clarke and Christiane P. Makward

18 L'Etranger and the new novel 209 John Fletcher

19 Camus, Orwell and Greene: the impossible 221 fascination of the colonised Patrick McCarthy

20 Strangers and Brothers in the Works of 232 Albert Camus and Jules Roy Catharine Savage Brosman

21 Camus and Sartre 244 Olivier Todd

Index 252

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Preface

Preface

..These essays are dedicated to the memory of Matthew Ward, whose translation of The Stranger won the PEN translation prize in 1989. Mr Ward's death in 1990 prevented him from completing an essay on his translation, originally to have been part of this collection. Most quotations from The Stranger come from this translation. Some citations from Camus's work are from published translations; some translations are mine. The varying, sometimes contradictory interpretations of L'Etranger are, of course, those of the individual essayists.

My debts to scholars in many countries are numerous. I would like to thank John Cruickshank, Brian T. Fitch, Patrick Henry, Elaine Marks, Eric Sellin, Susan Suleiman, and Olivier Todd. Liliane Phan and Monique Guibert, of Gallimard, provided access to their files of reviews and information on sales and translations of L'Etranger. Catherine Camus spoke to me about her father's work and its reception. Ball State University supported my work with a summer research grant. Lynne Marozin and Lisa Mercer, my student assistants, deserve special thanks for their help.

ADELE KING

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Notes on Contributors

Christiane Achour, born in Algeria in 1946, is presently a Professor in the French Department of the University of Algiers. She specialises in colonial Algerian and Caribbean works. She is the author of Abecedaires en devenir, Langue fram;aise et colonialisme en Algerie (Alger, ENAP, 1985). Un Etranger si familier - Lecture du recit d'Albert Camus (Alger, ENAP, 1985), and Anthologie de La Litterature algerienne de langue fran~aise (Alger-Paris, ENAP /Bordas, 1990).

David Bradby is Professor of Drama and Theatre Studies in the University of London (Royal Holloway and Bedford New College). He has taught in the Universities of Glasgow, Ibadan, Kent, and Caen. He is the author of Modern French Drama, Cambridge University Press, 1984; Directors' Theatre (with David Williams), Macmillan, 1988, and has edited New French Plays, Methuen, 1989.

Catharine Savage Brosman is the author of Art as Testimony: The Work of Jules Roy (1989) and of other studies on Roy. Her most recent collection of poems, Journeying from Canyon de Chelly, appeared in 1990, and her Simone de Beauvoir Revisited in 1991. She has edited three volumes on twentieth-century French novelists in the Dictionary of Literary Biography series and is currently preparing volumes on nineteenth-century French fiction writers.

Gilbert D. Chaitin is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Indiana University, Bloomington. He is the author of The Unhappy Few, a study of Stendhal's novels, and of numerous articles on the French novel and the psychoanalytic theory of narrative.

Deborah Clarke, Assistant Professor of English and Women's Studies at Pennsylvania State University, specialises in twentieth­century American fiction, women writers and feminist criticism. She has published articles on Faulkner and Toni Morrison, and is finishing a book: Robbing the Mother: Women in Faulkner.

Jean Daniel, born in Algeria, has been a writer and journalist in France since the 1940s, where he began Caliban, a magazine for

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which Camus wrote. He was editor of L'Express from 1955 to 1963. Among his books are Le Temps qui reste (1973), Le Refuge et la source (1977), and DeGaulle et I'Algerie (1986). He has been editor of Le Nouvel Observateur since 1964.

K. N. Daruwalla is a well-known Indian poet and short story writer. His sixth and most recent volume of poems was Landscapes (Oxford University Press, 1987). An earlier volume, The Keeper of the Dead, won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1984. He edited Two Decades of Indian Poetry (1980). A collection of short stories, Sword and Abyss, was published in 1979.

Frantz Favre, professeur agrege of classical literature, teaches at the Lycee Corneille in Rouen. He is on the executive committee of the Societe des Etudes Camusiennes and has published articles on Camus in the Camus Series of Revue des Lettres Modernes.

John Fletcher is Professor of French at the University of East Anglia in Norwich. He has published widely on contemporary French Literature and is perhaps best known for his books on Samuel Beckett, Claude Simon and Alain Robbe-Grillet. His most recent work was a highly acclaimed translation (with Beryl S. Fletcher) of Claude Simon's novel The Georgics.

Michel Grimaud teaches in the Department of French at Wellesley College in Massachusetts (USA). His main research interests are interdisciplinary issues in the human sciences (he is co-publisher of a journal entitled Empirical Studies of the Arts), forms of reference and address in French and English, and social and linguistic aspects of street naming. He is editor of a journal on Victor Hugo (Paris, Minard). He has most recently published articles on naming and onomastics in Le Franr;ais moderne, Names, Poetics, Poitique, Pszichologia.

Alec G. Hargreaves is Senior Lecturer in French at Loughborough University, England. He is the author of The Colonial Experience in French Fiction (London: Macmillan/New York: Humanities Press, 1981), Immigration in Post-War France (London: Methuen, 1987), and Immigration and Identity in Beur Fiction (London /New York: Berg, 1991) and has published articles in the Journal of European Studies, French Review, Modern and Contemporary France, Contemporary French Civilization, and Modern Fiction Studies among others.

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Rosemarie Jones is Lecturer in French in the School of European Studies of the University of Sussex. She has published on the romans antiques and on Camus, and she is currently working on pied-noir and Algerian Francophone novels.

Adele King, Professor of French at Ball State University, published Camus in the Writers and Critics Series in 1964. She has also published books on Proust, Nizan, and Camara Laye, and French Women Novelists: defining a female style (Macmillan, 1989). She is co­editor of two series for Macmillan: Modem Dramatists and Women Writers.

Christiane P. Makward, Associate Professor of French and Women's Studies at Pennsylvania State University, specialises in contempor­ary French literature, Francophone women's studies and trans­lation. She has published numerous articles; her books include S. Corinna Bille par eIle-mooe and Ten Women's Voices in Theatre from the French.

Patrick McCarthy is Professor of European Studies at the Johns Hopkins University Bologna Centre. His publications include Camus, a critical biography and Camus' "The Stranger".

Vicki Mistacco is Professor of French at Wellesley College. She has written articles and papers on twentieth-century French novelists including Gide, Mauriac, Robbe-Grillet, and Duras and is the author of another feminist reading of Camus: 'Nomadic Meanings: The Woman Effect in liLa Femme adultere".' Her current research is on the avant-garde, women's writing, and the eighteenth-century novel.

Helene Poplyansky, born in the Soviet Union, is now a doctoral student at the University of Toronto, where she is writing a thesis on the reception of L'Etranger in various countries.

Jan Rigaud was born in Paris and educated in North Africa and the US. He now teaches at Villanova University. He has published interviews on Camus and is now completing a book on Camus.

Emmanuel Robles, born in Oran, studied in Algiers where he was part of a group of young writers, including Camus. Among his novels are Cela s'appeIle l'aurore, Un printemps d'Italie, Venise en hiver,

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and Le Vesuve. Les Hauteurs de la ville won the Prix Femina in 1948. As a reporter and lecturer, he has traveled widely. He also writes for television and the cinema, for which he has collaborated with Luis Bunuel and Luchino Visconti. In 1973 he was elected to the Academie Goncourt.

Vilas Sarang is Professor of English at the University of Bombay. His most recent publication is a collection of short stories, Fair Tree of the Void (Penguin, 1990), translated by the author from the Marathi. He has also published books of criticism, poetry, and a novel in Marathi. Many of his stories have been published in such journals as Encounter and London Magazine.

Peter Schofer, Halverson-Bascom Professor of French, has taught at the University of Wisconsin-Madison since 1968. His areas of interest include nineteenth-century French poetry, rhetoric, and film. His publications include Poemes, pieces, prose (1973), Rhetorical Poetics (1983), and Autour de la litterature (1986). He is now com­pleting research for a book on Baudelaire's prose poetry.

Olivier Todd was educated at the Sorbonne and at Cambridge. He has published in such magazines as The New Statesman and Hudson Review and has collaborated on British and French television pro­grammes. He has also worked as a journalist for France-Observateur and Ie Nouvel Observateur. His last journalistic job was editor-in­chief of l'Express. Now a full-time writer, he has published fourteen books (including seven novels). In Un fils rebel (1981) he writes of his relationship to Sartre.

Albert Wendt is of the Aiga Sa-Tuapepe and Sa-Tuala and Sa-Patu of Samoa. His novels, short stories, and poems have been published in many countries. Among his works are Sons for the Return Home, Pouliuli, Leaves of the Banyan Tree, and Flying-Fox in a Freedom Tree. His latest novel is Ola (Penguin Books, 1991). He teaches New Zealand, Pacific, and Commonwealth Literature at the University of Auckland, New Zealand.

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