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Exiles and Strangers EXILES AND STRANGERS EXILES AND STRANGERS A Reading of Camus's Exile and the Kingdom English Showalter, Jr. Ohio State University Press : Columbus Copyright © 1984 by the Ohio State University Press All rights reserved All quotations from Justin O'Brien's translation of Albert Camus's Exile and the Kingdom are copyright © 1957, 1958 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., of New York City, and Hamish Hamilton Ltd., London. All quotations from L'Exil et le royaume, by Albert Camus, are from his Theatre—Recits—Nouvelles ("Bibliotheque de la Pleiade," no. 161). Copyright © 1962 by Editions Gallimard, Paris. All rights reserved. Used by permission of the publisher. Quotations from Orville Prescott's review of Albert Camus's Exile and the Kingdom in "Books of the Times," published in the New York Times of March, 10, 1958, are copyright © 1958 by The New York Times Company. Reprinted by permission. Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data: Showalter, English Exiles and strangers Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. Camus, Albert, 1913-1960. Exil et le royaume. I. Title. PQ2605.A3734E938 1983 843'.914 83-12092 ISBN 0-8142-0353-1 For my father CONTENTS Acknowledgments ix One Exile and the Kingdom and the American Reader 3 Two The Adulterous Woman: New Forms of Judgment 19 Three The Renegade: A Reified Voice 35 Four The Silent Men: Muted Symbols 53 Five The Guest: The Reluctant Host, Fate's Hostage 73 Six The Artist at Work: An Ironic Self-Portrait 89 Seven The Growing Stone: Reconciliation and Conclusion 107 Eight Camus's Last Words 131 Appendix: The English Translation of L'Exil et le royaume 145 Bibliography 153 Index 161 Acknowledgments I would like to take this opportunity to express my thanks to Walter K. Gordon, dean of the Camden College of Arts and Sciences of Rutgers University, and provost of the Camden campus, for his continuous and generous encouragement and support of my work. Some of the ideas in this book arose in my classes at Rutgers, Camden, and many were developed and clarified in discussions with students, who have become too numerous to name. Most of them are far from the academic world now, but I hope some at least may discover here my expression of appreciation for their contribution. My best critic is, not surprisingly, my wife, Elaine. It is a rare advantage always to be able to discuss ideas with her and ask her advice on matters great and small. What I have learned from her over the years is incalculable, and I will not try to thank her for it here. She was, however, the first reader of the manuscript of this book, and much of what I like best in its final version she helped me put there. For that, at least, it is surely appropriate to acknowledge my gratitude in these pages. EXILES AND STRANGERS One Exile and the Kingdom and the American Reader When Albert Camus was killed in an automobile accident on 4 January 1960, at the age of forty-six, he had already earned an international reputation, crowned by a Nobel Prize in 1957. The Swedish academy's award, however, had come as a shock to most people, even to the French who knew Camus best. Camus was the youngest writer ever to win it, except for Rudyard Kipling fifty years before, and his oeuvre was of rather modest $ize. Camus himself said he would have voted for Andre Malraux. Jean-Paul Sartre, who would later decline a Nobel Prize, had quarreled publicly with Camus, and much of the French Left followed Sartre in regarding Camus with suspicion, anger, or scorn in the late 1950s. In 1957, Camus was neither so well known nor so generally respected as he has been since his death. The Nobel judges had nevertheless accurately sensed Camus's importance as an intellectual and moral leader, who, in the words of their citation, "illuminated the problems of the human conscience in our times."1 In the two decades since his death, that judgment has been amply confirmed. His works are still widely read throughout the world. In France, The Stranger has sold more than four million copies, and more than three million in the United States.2 Scholars and critics devote consistent attention to Camus; the Archives des Lettres Modernes series publishes an annual volume on him, there have been two Exiles and Strangers international Camus symposia at the University of Florida, and the organizer of the 1980 gathering spoke accurately of "the unabated flow of books, articles, and essays on Camus."3 Moreover, journalists and writers in the mass media still invoke him; on the occasion of a reissue of his Notebooks in 1978, a Time essayist wrote that "his formal works are as pertinent as the day they were written a world ago,"4 and Commentary, in November 1980, carried an article on "The Posthumous Victory of Albert Camus."5 Despite the Nobel Prize, Camus's short career had been difficult and controversial, and never more so than in the last decade of his life. During World War II, Camus became celebrated in France for his heroic Resistance journalism, his brilliant first novel, The Stranger (1942), and his philosophical essay, The Myth of Sisyphus (1942). He also won the admiration and friendship of Sartre, and after the war the two men were cited together everywhere as the moral leaders of French youth, and less accurately as co-leaders of the Existentialist movement. Camus's productivity continued high; he published his second novel, The Plague (1947), and several volumes of plays and essays, leading up to The Rebel (1951). The Rebel precipitated the break with Sartre, who allowed an unfavorable review to be published in his journal Les Temps modernes', the review was followed by an exchange of rebuttals and counter-rebuttals. Intellectually, the break was unavoidable because Sartre had decided to accept the political leadership of the Soviet Com­ munists, whose totalitarian policies were among those attacked by Camus in The Rebel, but on a personal level, Camus suffered acutely over the lost friendship. At the same time, the crisis over France's relationship with Algeria was growing more serious every day. Camus, who was born and raised in Algeria, refused to endorse any simple solution, to give unqualified support to either side, or to condone random violence in the name of justice; but his appeals for moderation went largely unheard and certainly unheeded. Ultimately, he felt constrained to adopt an attitude of silence, saying: "Between wisdom reduced to silence and madness which shouts itself hoarse, I prefer the virtues of silence."6 On the part of the former hero of the Resistance, one "Exile and the Kingdom" and the American Reader 5 of the great advocates of commitment, this statement clearly denotes a time of despair. The early 1950s had also been a period of extended literary sterility. In 1956, Camus produced The Fall, his first major work since The Rebel. As one would expect, it was greeted with mixed critical responses; but much of the hostile criticism was tainted with ideological bias. The Fall was a great success with the public not only in France but in the United States, where it stayed twelve weeks on the bestseller lists in early 1957. Even to denigrators, The Fall seemed to signal a renewal of Camus's creative energy. The stories of Exile and the Kingdom were completed and published in one volume the next year; they were to be Camus's last book. Once again, critics were divided, but the public enthusiastic. In the United States, five of the six stories had appeared first in mass-circulation magazines: The Adulterous Woman in Mademoiselle in January 1958; The Renegade in the Partisan Review, winter 1958; The Silent Men in Vogue, December 1957; The Guest in the Atlantic Monthly, December 1957; the The Growing Stone in Esquire, February 1958. The complete vol­ ume, Exile and the Kingdom, was published in early 1958. It received a page-one review in the New York Times Book Review on 9 March and climbed onto the bestseller list for eight weeks from 31 March to 18 May. The book was widely reviewed in the American press, with widely disparate reactions and consider­ able disagreement over the merits of individual stories.7 Most of the reviewers liked The Guest and The Renegade best, although Time's anonymous critic ranked The Artist at Work first, and Ramon Guthrie thought The Adulterous Woman showed the "restraint and precision that characterize Camus's best work," whereas "by contrast, The Renegade seems raucous and inept." Norman Podhoretz was virtually alone in terming The Guest "the weakest of the stories." After more leisurely reading than the first reviewers could afford, and consideration in the context of Camus's complete works, The Renegade and The Guest would probably still be ranked highest; but all six stories have elicited admiration and serious study, and most readers would agree with judgments like John Cruickshank's "[Camus] Exiles and Strangers achieved an outstanding measure of moral and artistic integrity which perhaps reached their culminating point in his third novel, La Chute (1956), and in the short stories—which are also a set of fascinating stylistic exercises—collected under the title L'Exil et le royaume (1957)."8 The public, in Camus's case, had been ahead of the critics and the literary journalists. Despite the fact that The Fall had stayed on the bestseller lists for twelve weeks in early 1957, when Camus won the Nobel Prize in October, the media obviously thought they had to explain who Camus was.
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