Culture and Imperialism by Edward W. Said

Author:Edward W. Said [Said, Edward W.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 978-0-307-82965-8
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2012-10-23T16:00:00+00:00

The effect is that of a moment out of time in which Janine escapes the sordid narrative of her present life and enters the kingdom of the collection’s title; or as Camus put it in a note he wanted to insert in subsequent editions of the collection, “au royaume … [qui] coincide avec une certaine vie libre et nue que nous avons à retrouver pour renaître enfin”202 (“the kingdom … [which] coincides with a certain free and bare life and which it is up to us to re-find in order for us finally to be reborn”). Her past and present drop away from her, as does the actuality of other beings (le poids des êtres, symptomatically mistranslated as “the dead weight of other people” by Justin O’Brien). In this passage Janine “comes to a stop at last,” motionless, fecund, ready for communion with this piece of sky and desert, where (echoing Camus’s explanatory note, designed as a later elucidation of the six stories) the woman—pied noir and colon—discovers her roots. What her real identity is or may be is judged later in the passage when she achieves what is an unmistakably sexual climax: Camus speaks here of the “centre obscur de son être,” which suggests both her own sense of obscurity and ignorance, and Camus’s as well. Her specific history as a Frenchwoman in Algeria does not matter, for she has achieved a superveningly immediate and direct access to that particular earth and sky.

Each of the stories in L’Exil et le royaume (with one exception, a garrulous and unaffecting parable of Parisian artistic life) deals with the exile of people with a non-European history (four tales are set in Algeria, one each in Paris and in Brazil) that is deeply, even threateningly unpleasant, who are trying precariously to achieve a moment of rest, idyllic detachment, poetic self-realization. Only in “La Femme adultère” and in the story set in Brazil, where through sacrifice and commitment a European is received by natives into their circle of intimacy as a substitute for a dead native, is there any suggestion that Camus allowed himself to believe that Europeans might achieve sustained and satisfactory identification with the overseas territory. In “Le Renégat” a missionary is captured by an outcast southern Algerian tribe, has his tongue torn out (an eerie parallel with Paul Bowles’s story “A Distant Episode”), and becomes a super-zealous partisan of the tribe, joining in an ambush of French forces. This is as if to say that going native can only be the result of mutilation, which produces a diseased, ultimately unacceptable loss of identity.

A matter of months separates this relatively late (1957) book of stories (the individual publication of each preceded and followed the appearance of La Chute in 1956) from the contents of the later pieces in Camus’s Chroniques algériennes, published in 1958. Although passages in L’Exil go back to the earlier lyricism and controlled nostalgia of Noces, one of Camus’s few atmospheric works about life in Algeria, the stories are filled with anxiety about the gathering crisis.

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