Abstract
Like contrary forces in a historical field, the metaphors and themes of stranger and brother, alienation and fraternity, mark and act as organising principles in the works of both Albert Camus and his Algerian compatriot and friend, Jules Roy, whom Philippe Bernet called his ‘héritier spirituel’.1 The parallelism, suggested by the titles L’Etranger and Roy’s Etranger pour mes frères (1982), goes well beyond the use of the term. To the lyrical passages in Noces and L’Eté concerning the fraternity between the speaker and the natural world correspond similar passages by Roy, notably in Les Chevaux du soleil (1968–75), a series of novels concerning Algeria. Camus’s farsighted criticisms in Misère de la Kabylie (1939) of the unconscionable inequities in the Algerian economic system and social fabric are echoed in Roy’s La Guerre d’Algérie (1960) and Autour du drame (1961). Finally, the sense of exile and alienation visible in Camus’s 1942 masterpiece and elsewhere is paralleled, in its own register, in a number of Roy’s books. However, between the positions of the two writers, who were close friends from 1945 until Camus’s death in 1960 and who held many views in common, there was also, at the time of the Algerian war, a distance that did not mar their friendship but sheds a critical light on the texts of the Nobel Prize winner, including L’Etranger.
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Notes
Manfred Sprissler (ed) Albert Camus: Konkordanz zu den Romanen und Erzählungen, vol. 1 (Hildesheim and New York: Georg Olms, 1988) p. 699.
Madeleine Tison-Braun, ‘Silence and the Desert: The Rickering Vision’, in Bettina L. Knapp (ed.) Critical Essays on Albert Camus (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1988), p. 49.
‘Once the subject seeks to assert himself, the Other, who limits and denies him, is nonetheless a necessity to him; he attains himself only through that reality which he is not...’ Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex H.M. Parshley (trans) (New York: Bantam, 1961), p. 129.
Edward Said, ‘Representing the Colonized: Anthropology’s Interlocutors’, Critical Inquiry’ vol. 15 (Winter, 1989), pp. 205–25.
For glimpses of this machisme, see Simone de Beauvoir, La Force des choses (Paris: Gallimard, 1963), p. 208
Jules Roy, ‘La Tragédie Algérienne,’ in Camus, R.-M. Albérès (ed.) (Paris: Hachette, 1964), p. 212.
See my Art as Testimony: The Work of Jules Roy (Gainesville: University of Horida Press, 1989), p. 15. Roy wrote concerning colonialism then: ‘Quel pied-noir le connaissait? Aucun. Camus a été le premier à se rendre compte — le premier et le seul, pendant longtemps. Sans lui, il n’y aurait eu personne d’autre.’ See Jacques Roque, ‘Jules Roy ou la Rigueur’, in Jules Roy, Une Femme au nom d’étoile (Paris: Talandier/Cercle du Nouveau Livre, 1971), p. 18.
See Maurice Robin, ‘Remarques sur l’attitude de Camus face à l’Algérie’, in Jeanyves Guérin (ed.) Camus et la politique (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1986), pp. 185–90
See Jules Roy, Etranger pour mes frères (Paris: Stock, 1982), p. 109.
Francis C. Bueb, Jules Roy: Un Moraliste de notre histoire’, Magazine Littéraire, vol. 31 (August 1969), p. 41.
Jules Roy, Les Ames interdites (Paris: Grasset, 1971), p. 500.
Preface to Gabriel Audisio, L’Opéra fabuleux (Paris: Julliard, 1970), p. 12.
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Brosman, C.S. (1992). Strangers and Brothers in the Works of Albert Camus and Jules Roy. In: King, A. (eds) Camus’s L’Etranger: Fifty Years on. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22003-8_21
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