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An Artist in the Age of Terrorism: Camus and the Algerian Confl Ict（ 1 ）

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An Artist in the Age of Terrorism: Camus and the Algerian Confl Ict（ 1 ） 四天王寺大学紀要 第 49 号（2010年 3 月） An Artist in the Age of Terrorism: Camus and the Algerian Confl ict（ 1 ） Keiji OKAZAKI Whatever our［writers’］personal frailties may be, the nobility of our calling will always be rooted in two commitments difficult to observe: refusal to lie about what we know and resistance to oppression.（Camus’s Nobel Prize address of December 10, 1957）（2 ） Keywords: Camus, Algiers, Terrorism, Revolt, The Just 1. Introduction If Camus had survived the automobile accident to witness Algeria’s independence and its aftermath, the collapse of the Soviet Union, or the proliferation of terrorism, culminating in the 9.11 attack in New York, would he have remained silent as he did in the late fi fties concerning the Algerian confl ict? This, we are confi rmed, is a question requiring an urgent answer which would present a possible key to our dealing with the twin contemporary problems – justice and terrorism. David Schalk refers to Camus as ‘the wrong model for American antiwar activists during the Vietnam era...（’ 3 ） Emily Apter argues that “The failure of Camus’s cosmopolitical hybrid – a vision of French Algeria...offers a kind of object lesson for the future of globalization theory or transnational identity-formation.”（ 4 ） Accordingly, we are convinced that it would not be futile, rather very rewarding and signifi cant, to re-read and re-interpret his artistic achievements to have an overview of the present world crisis and gain a deeper insight into the reality of the contemporary political situation. We are living in the age of terrorism as was Camus half a century ago. Albert Camus（1913-1960） was an Algerian born French, a pied-noir（, 5 ） and his concern for his homeland never left him throughout his life. At the outbreak of the Algerian conflict, he was torn between faith and motherhood, justice and freedom. He abhorred violence and denounced the brutal handling of the strife. Camus was on neither sides, the oppressed Arabs or the suppressing French colonists. No other Parisian knew the plight of the Arabs better than Camus.（ 6 ） He once made a minute report on their miserable and humiliating condition in the local newspaper, which is still regarded as the most － 413 － Keiji OKAZAKI realistic as well as compassionate article dealt with the colonized Arabs.（ 7 ） With the explosion of the Algerian war of independence in 1956, he soon made himself actively and directly involved in the struggle as an intellectual with fi rst-hand experience of the poverty stricken Algerians. He attempted at making a compromise between the French colonists and the Algerian activists. He hoped to realize a mixed country where the French and the Arabs could cooperate with each other to enhance the social and economical development – a Camus’s euphoria of cohabitation, a cosmopolitan hybrid,（ 8 ） never to be attained. As the confl ict was aggravated when both the French administration and the Arabian protesters resorted to severe violence - torture, terror, assassination - , Camus withdrew from the stage of the political battlefi eld except making sporadic comments and providing fi nancial aids to refugees.（ 9 ） The silence he kept on the Algerian struggle was fi ercely attacked by both the leftist and the rightist in Paris. J-P. Sartre denounced his ambiguous stance and condemned him as an accomplice to the bourgeoisie. Camus later declared his attitude in the famous interview given on the occasion of being awarded the Nobel Prize saying that mother counted more than justice.（10） This paper analyzes the relationship between Camus’s political absence from the Algerian confl ict and his literary achievements –L’Homme révolté（The Rebel） and Les Justes（The Just）. The twin books share the same themes related with violence: justice and freedom. His philosophical works with the dual themes are where his love of theatre and his faith merge. The essay（The Rebel） echoes the drama（The Just）, visualizing his concept of the revolt on the stage, just as his philosophical note（The Myth of Sisyphus） will help to clarify what he depicts in his novel（The Staranger）. 2. Camus and Algiers In 1830, Algeria was conquered by France which proclaimed the land her territory in 1848, twenty years before the Meiji Restoration of Japan. The French occupying Algiers thought of themselves as saviors liberating the country from innocence and poverty. They assumed that there had been no civilization in Algiers, before they settled. After the conquest, therefore, the colonists’ policy of assimilation into French culture and dependence on French economy was accelerated; the Arabs were deprived of their language and forced to work under the French masters as low-waged factory workers or peasants on plantations. The rigid assimilating policy provoked riots against the colonizing government. But every Algerians’ uprising was ruthlessly suppressed, leading into the escalation of colonizing policy. Thus Algeria faced the increasing tension between the colonizers and the colonized. The Arabs were constantly under threat of starvation and unemployment. Under these tense circumstances between the Arabs and the French, Camus was born to a colonist in Mondovi, a village in the Algerian interior surrounded by vineyards. His father, Lucien Auguste Camus, was a French descendant of those who had settled in Algeria after the 1830 conquest, and his mother, Catherine Hélène Sintés, of a family coming from the Spanish island of Minorca. The Nobel laureate led a lonely and miserable life in a tiny apartment house in the working–class area in Belcourt, located near the Arab quarter of Algiers. His family were stricken by poverty; his father was － 414 － An Artist in the Age of Terrorism killed in the war in France less than a year after his birth, and his mother was absent from home working assiduously all day long. His somewhat eccentric grandmother dominated the house taking charge of her grandsons’ rearing. She persecuted Camus and his younger brother with violence. The widow watched her mother’s harsh treatment sadly and silently without protesting. Thus Camus did not have a happy domestic life, living in poverty, with his illiterate mother and strict and selfish grandmother. Instead, he was blessed with physical and cerebral power. He was good at swimming and playing soccer, and did well at school. Camus was so excellent a student that he could fi nish the Algerian university with distinction. He was provided with the assistance of compassionate relatives and teachers who found hidden intellectual brilliance in him, and dedicated their lives to the promising young man: Gustave Acault（his maternal uncle）, Louis Germain, Jean Grenier, to name but a few. Acault was a butcher and self-taught man, discussing every subject with his customers, diffusing the young nephew a sense of joking. Germain, an elementary school teacher, found in Camus a lot of good quality. Being a hard-worker in study and physical exercise was one of them. The student expressed a deep sense of gratitude for his meticulous assistance in the Nobel Prize address. Grenier, a teacher, philosopher, and writer, exerted the strongest infl uence upon Camus in that his talk infused the youth’s mind with moral values. Camus called him ‘my master’ and dedicated his fi rst book L’Envers et l’endroit to the teacher. Outside home, Camus was surrounded with a quasi-paternal atmosphere where his inherent ability came to bud.（11） Camus gradually awakened to the reality of the colonized Algeria when he was in the lycée, having a political debate on the Algerian problems with his bright colleagues. He joined the Communist Party in 1935, but his alignment with communism did not last long. Aronson assesses his understanding of and interest in Marxism as superfi cial.（12） Soon after receiving master degree in philosophy from the University of Algiers in 1936, he began to work for the Algerian Republican, a left-wing newspaper, and was in charge of literary criticism: he reviewed Sartre’s Nausea in it. Camus’s famous report on the misery of the Kabylians（Misère de la Kabylie） was published on this paper.（13） The inhabitants of the high country south of Algeria were attacked by a severe famine which was caused, as Camus reported, by the injustice as well as misconduct of the French authorities. He vividly disclosed the vestiges of the devastation brought about by colonialism. His article, serving to make his name known, aroused the governmental support for the victims. But the political stance of the paper invited a constant surveillance from the French administration, and the paper was banned in 1938. Camus, therefore, was forced to leave Algeria and settled in Paris where he spent the wartime. He worked as a journalist at Paris Soir, Combat, and a reader and editor at Gallimard publisher.（14） Camus had continued his career as a journalist until he got fame with the publication of the twin works of absurdity – The Stranger and The Myth of Sisyphus, in 1943. In Paris, he concerned himself with the reality and the future of Algeria. After the end of World WarⅡ, a new phase of a confl ict began － 415 － Keiji OKAZAKI to emerge in Algeria; the Arabs protested against the French, calling for independence. The upheaval demanded the Algerian born Camus to decide which side he would stand by, the Arabs or the French. He dreamt of the cohabitation among Algerian natives and French settlers, a French Algerian hybrid.（15） The naïve view was heavily criticized from both parties. One of the ctitics was Sartre, an existentialist and close friend with Camus, accusing his ambiguous attitude on the Algerian confl ict and urging him to make a clear declaration of his faith.
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