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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 ii Copyright by James Hebron Tarpley 2004 iii 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 iv 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. v 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 vi 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. vii 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

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