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INTRODUCTION TO EXILE AND THE KINGDOM
This volume of Camus's short stories, most of them written between 1949 and 1955, has been for half a century a literary treasure hidden in plain sight. Although the first English translation of Exile and the Kingdom has never gone out of print, this collection languished until recently in the shadow of Camus's more famous and canonical works, The Stranger, The Fall, The Plague, The Myth of Sisyphus.
Fifty years can erase, enhance or complicate a writer's reputation and the way his works are read. Albert Camus (1911-1960) received the Nobel Prize in 1957, the year Exile and the Kingdom was published. By then he was considered a major French writer and intellectual spokesman whose short novels, stories, plays, and essays were - and still are -- among the most acute representations of a world without God, of the nature of the human condition without transcendental meaning, and of the Existentialist answer to that condition. He also thought of himself -- and has often been regarded-- as a moralist, setting many of his works in a vague, hallucinatory and often symbolic place (the Amsterdam of The Fall, for instance, or the unnamed town of The Plague) that allows the characters' thoughts and ethical dilemmas to occupy the foreground of the reader's attention.
There was a long period during the last fifty years when it was forgotten, especially by Camus's English readers, that in 1957 France, along with its intellectuals, was deeply engaged in the Algerian struggle for independence (1955-62). If Camus continued to be read and admired during this period of forgetting, it was rarely mentioned that as a French Algerian he was anguished, increasingly isolated, and finally silenced in his attempt to advocate a solution -- a federation something like England's with its former colonies -- that would salvage France's relation with Algeria and still guarantee equal rights for all its citizens.
Camus had condemned colonial injustice as early as the mid-forties. After a visit to Algeria in 1952, which prompted him to write most of the stories in Exile and the Kingdom, he declared in a public letter that the French in North Africa had "the Declaration of the Rights of Man in one hand and a stick for repression in the other." But after all, he was a pied noir-the rather derogatory name, meaning "dirty feet," given to the French settlers born in Algeria. His father's family had been there for three generations (his illiterate mother was Italian). They were poor, working class people, and although they were French nationals, France was at best an abstraction for which his father nevertheless gave his life in the First World War. Among the stories in this volume,"The Mute" reflects Camus's intimate understanding of the working poor of French Algeria, and its main character, Yvars, is a barrel maker like Camus's uncle, for whom he worked as an adolescent on his days off from school.
As a young man Camus trained as a teacher, worked as a journalist and theater director, and published poetry and short stories. He contracted tuberculosis, which undermined his health for the rest of his life, but this did not stop him from living and working with a fierce intensity. He went to France in 1940 with the manuscript of The Stranger half finished, and it was published to much acclaim in 1942, under the German occupation. He was thirty-one years old.
Camus's early Communist sympathies and his journalism, first in Algeria, then in France writing for the Resistance publication Combat, made him a comrade of people like Jean-Paul Sartre and other leftist writers and intellectuals, and an instant enemy of the political right. By the early Fifties, however, he had alienated the left too, beginning with his denunciation of Stalinism and followed by his position on Algerian independence, which pleased no one. He was anguished by the terrorism on both sides of the struggle: the torture and massacre of the Arab population by the French, and the deliberate killing of French civilians by the freedom fighters. He traveled to Algeria in 1956 to try, without success, to broker a civilian truce. Before withdrawing from public debate, in one of his last statements on the subject (after receiving the Nobel Prize) he said: "I believe in justice, but I will defend my mother before justice." Camus was a man of principle, but unlike a good many other French intellectuals, he was not prepared to violate his sense of fundamental human loyalties in the name of an abstract concept.
Above all he was grief-stricken at the prospect of the expulsion of Algeria's French settlers when France would finally admit defeat and withdraw from its last colonial outpost. He died prematurely in 1960 in an automobile accident, but he felt that the "return" of the pieds noirs to metropolitan France - in principle a return to their putative homeland - would mean an exile from the land of their birth, where they were both rooted and rootless, not just another minority but intimate strangers.
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Fifty years on, the Algerian war has again become a vital topic in France and in other Western countries as terrorism and its permutations, whether sponsored by nation states, sectarian groups, or independence movements, is once more an urgent concern. Today, long after the demise of France's colonial empire, and especially since the publication in 1994 of Camus's unfinished autobiographical novel The First Man, we are in a position to take a fresh look at the stories in Exile and the Kingdom (as critics like Connor Cruise O'Brien and David Carroll have begun to do). We can now see more clearly, perhaps, how Algeria and its people -- European protagonists, Arab or indigenous Others -- are represented in Camus's work; and how this imagined relationship frames the struggles of many of his characters.
The previously unpublished stories that make up Exile and the Kingdom - especially but not only those set in North Africa -- explore, in a more consciously nuanced way than the novels and plays, the dilemma of the outsider or stranger, and the vexed poles of solitude and community, exile and belonging, speech and silence.
These themes as they play out in "The Guest," for example, come perhaps closest to Camus's own situation during the Algerian struggle for independence. The French title of this story is L'Hote, which means, tellingly, both "host" and "guest." Watching the approach of his two visitors from top of the plateau where his schoolhouse is situated, the teacher Daru thinks of the destitute families of his Arab students, to whom he distributes extra rations of grain, and of the land they share:
The country was like that, a cruel place to live, even without the men, who didn't help matters. But Daru had been born here. Anywhere else, he felt exiled
He becomes host to an Arab prisoner, his "guest" for the night, but there is a sense in which Daru and his people the are the true guests in this land, this kingdom of stones and opaque native inhabitants. The ancient rules of hospitality, his sympathies and principles, prevent him from turning in his prisoner-guest, and - like Camus --from taking sides during this period of unrest. Ultimately he finds himself isolated by both the French colonial community and the rebellious Arabs. His deliberate stance of neutrality is an assertion of the individual against the claims of conflicting communities, each of which sees him as a traitor. But exile and silence are thrust upon him even in the land of his birth.
In this story and the others set in North Africa (and one in South America), an often cruel but beautiful landscape and its indigenous inhabitants play a central role. The sun and sea of Algeria ("The Mute"), its cold and hostile desert plateaus, its barren stony plains and glittering nights ("The Adulterous Wife," "The Renegade," "The Guest,"), the dark tropical jungle, the river and red dust of Brazil (in "The Growing Stone") -- are evoked with such power and lyricism that these non-European lands themselves seem to possess the characters like an insistent lover.
"The adulterous wife" Janine, for instance, in the story of that title, suddenly finds herself surrounded by proud, dignified Arabs as icy and severe as the remote desert plateau in winter where she accompanies her husband on a business trip. Her first reaction as a French colonial is outrage at the arrogance of these people, having always regarded them, with their alien language and culture, as simply a backdrop to her unfulfilled life. Seeing a nomad encampment, not even the men themselves, she is finally able to imagine them as agents, if in a rather romanticized way:
... since the beginning, on the dry earth of this measureless land scraped to the bone, a few men ceaselessly made their way, possessing nothing but serving no one, the destitute and free lords of a strange kingdom.
In the end, at least for a moment, she opens herself up to this land, which slowly seduces and possesses her. She has a brief glimpse of what it might mean to become truly herself in this place, although she has no words to say it, and to do so she must betray her husband, and through him her people. In her unresolvable inner conflict she embodies the dilemma of mutually exclusive loyalties that asserts itself throughout this collection.
The protagonists of all the stories in Exile and the Kingdom are in a way doubly exiled, like Daru and Janine, caught in a conflict between a personal truth - usually bound to their connection with a particular land -- and betrayals of various sorts. In "The Mute," for example, the lame barrel maker Yvars and his comrades are silenced by their multiple allegiances in the wake of a failed strike. Yvars's passivity and resignation, however, are not so different from Janine's: "he had nothing to do but wait, quietly, without really knowing why." Again, Camus uses the language of love and seduction to indicate Yvar's relation to the landscape: mornings when he was heading back to work... he no longer liked looking at the sea, ever faithful to their rendez-vous...
But what are he and the others waiting for? Perhaps to rise above resignation, to claim their rights as workers and respect for the hard won competence required by their trade; certainly they are waiting to claim this land ("his country") that should belong to them as much as to the French owning class or to their Arab neighbors. But they are "the mute." Only Marcou, the union representative, has words to express the traditional hostility between union and management, but these words do not begin to express the complexities of their situation.
Their exile in the land of their birth is related to a conflict of loyalties that, on a deeper level, reflects a conflict of civilizations: Are they French or Algerian? Can Europeans with roots in the Christian West ever be at home in a land inhabited by North African Arabs and other native peoples with their own indigenous faiths? A man driven mad and literally silenced by the internalized conflict of civilizations and allegiances -his tongue has been cut out - is the narrator and protagonist of "The Renegade, or A Confused Mind." Camus experiments in this story with a monologue voiced, unusually, by a native missionary crazed by the "savage sun" and the "cruelty of the savage inhabitants" he has tried to convert from Fetishism to Christianity in their strange city of salt, but especially by his own multiple betrayals: of his land, his people, his indigenous faith, his adopted faith, and above all himself.
In this and other stories, the exotic, non-European is both demonized and romanticized, and an unbridled and savage sensuality is set in contrast to the inhibited, reason-worshipping culture of the Judeo-Christian West.
In "The Growing Stone," the last story in the collection, the French engineer D'Arrast is a voluntary exile who has chosen to leave Europe behind and come to Brazil, to a remote town along the Amazon, in order to build a dam. Camus conceived this story in 1949 during a visit to Brazil - a setting even more exotic than Algeria -- and although it is much more realistic, it shares with "The Renegade" a fable- like quality. Like Daru in "The Guest," D'Arrast must choose between the colonists and Europeanized notables, and the destitute, barely Christianized descendants of African slaves. He is beguiled by the land and the seductive vitality of these people - embodied by a beautiful young black girl. And it is only by honoring a poor native who has undertaken a Sisyphian task that D'Arrast is able to honor himself. Like Janine, he experiences a moment of joyous belonging; in this joy, he too betrays his own people.
Only "Jonas, or The Artist at Work," written in 1946, is set in France, but it turns on some of the same themes. Told in the third person by an omniscient and distinctly sardonic narrator, this story skewers the hypocrisy and self-serving vanity of the art world (read: literary world). And of course Camus himself, like the painter Gilbert Jonas, experienced in his personal life the conflict between the commitments to family and others and the commitment to art, which takes time and above all solitude. Like the protagonists in the Algerian stories, Jonas finds himself exiled in his own house, which is filled with unwanted visitors, and he is finally reduced to silence by his inability to be faithful, at all costs, "to his star."
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As an artist like Jonas and a French Algerian like Daru, Camus was indeed doubly exiled. He was a writer living in a country whose language was his native tongue, but his homeland, at least as he felt it, was elsewhere. In Exile and the Kingdom we can see that he envisioned Algeria as a kind of mythic place, with its harsh beauty and sensual power, in which Europeans, Arabs and others might possess - and be possessed by --the land together. Yet in these stories, reconciliation between the individual and the community, longing and belonging, speech and silence can only be imperfectly, ruefully imagined but not realized.
Carol Cosman.
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