History and Ethnicity in the Reception of L’Etranger

Abstract

In the last interview that he gave before his death, Camus was asked what aspects of his works had been unduly neglected by French literary critics. He replied: ‘La part obscure, ce qu’il y a d’aveugle et d’instinctif en moi. La critique française s’intéresse d’abord aux idées. Mais, toutes proportions gardées, pourrait-on étudier Faulkner sans faire la part du Sud dans son oeuvre?’ ‘The obscure part, what I feel blindly and instinctively. French criticism is always first interested in ideas. But, relatively speaking, could you study Faulkner without reference to the South in his work?¹ Through this reference to the role of the American South in the writings of William Faulkner, Camus was clearly alluding to the importance of his native Algeria within his own works. While Camus mainly had in mind his emotional attachment to the topographic features of Algeria, other parallels with the American South also suggest themselves. Colonial Algeria, like the southern part of the United States, was characterised not simply by its geographical position in relation to an associated northern territory (which in Camus’s case lay in France) but also by an ethnically diverse population and a history of political inequality. As Camus rightly observed, the particularities of Algeria had initially attracted very little attention in critical studies of his works.