CHAPTER TWO

National Identities—When Numbers Don’t Add Up

“Algérie, France: une ou deux nations?”(“Algeria, France: One or Two Nations?”)—this is the title of an essay by Etienne Balibar that asks what would appear on the surface to be a ridiculously simple historical-political question.² For if until 1962 France claimed and the international community generally recognized that Algeria was an integral part of the French Republic, the only possible answer to the question since independence would have to be that Algeria and France constitute two nations, for not even the most reactionary ex-colon or nostalgic pied-noir could deny that Algeria and France today constitute two separate, independent states.

For Balibar, such an answer, no matter how obvious, is inadequate and even misleading. This is because in a postcolonial context simple addition of national identities increasingly does not work, since what is being added are not only recognized national entities with determined geographical-political borders, but also shared sociopolitical spaces that cannot be adequately delineated by exterior borders. Balibar thus questions whether simple math (1 nation + 1 nation = 2 nations) can accurately account for the complexity of either social space or its historicity, and he provocatively asks whether “the spatio-temporal or socio-temporal idea of an irreversible duality [might be] the sign, not of decolonization, but rather of the persistent colonization of history?” (73). The “persistent colonization of history” would ironically result from the desire to break definitively with the colonial past and recognize the autonomy and integrity of a previously colonized people. Since Balibar’s purpose is obviously not to attempt to legitimate after the fact either colonialism in general or the French colonization of Algeria in particular, his essay’s title is intended rather to call attention to how, as an effect of their common colonialist history, Algeria and France both continue in the postcolonial era to be not just externally influenced but also internally constituted by each other.

1 + 1 does not equal 2, then, if long after Algerian independence each of the two nations continues to contribute internally to the constitution and identity of the other, if each constitutes a “foreign body” within the other that is at the same time an undeniable and integral part of the national body itself. Using what he calls a “numerical allegory,” Balibar argues that Algeria and France added together “do not equal two but something like one and a half, as if each in being added to the other always-already contributed a part to the other” (76). Another form of allegorical math could very easily produce the result of two and a half or even three (or more), depending on how the “foreign body” within each nation is counted: either as something that makes each nation in itself more than itself (already at least one and a half in itself) or less than what it thinks itself to be—that is, either as a supplement or a deficiency (or perhaps both at the same time).

Recent conflicts in both nations over language, religion, and cultural practices have revealed how not just extremist political groups but also religious and political authorities on the different sides of the borders separating and linking the two countries continue to consider the different manifestations of this mutual constitution/contamination of national-cultural space as threats to national sovereignty and cultural identity. For both Algeria and France have in different ways repeatedly attempted without success to control, repress, or exclude the foreign bodies within them through a patrolling of both their external and internal borders and a more rigorous and at times violent imposition and enforcement of exclusionary nationalist-religious cultural norms. Balibar’s “allegorical math” would suggest that such attempts, whether they take the form of repressive interventions of the army or police, terrorist acts of religious fundamentalists, or laws passed by duly elected officials, have failed in the past and will continue to fail in the future. It is too late, always-already too late, to impose a mythical ethnic, cultural, or religious homogeneity on either or both sides of national-cultural borders.

The willed forgetting or repeated denial of the historical and political consequences of colonialism on both sides of the different borders separating and linking France and Algeria, the general unwillingness to recognize and appreciate fully what Balibar calls each nation’s “interior alterity [altérité intérieure]” (74), could be considered one of the most contentious issues facing not just France and Algeria but all modern nations in the post-colonial era.³ The fundamental, constitutive role played by interior alterity within nations means that it is no longer sufficient to conceive of decolonization as the negation of what Balibar calls “the false simplicity of the number one,” if it is only to affirm the equally “false simplicity of the number two” (78). The situation becomes even more complicated if the border separating nations such as France and Algeria from each other is what Balibar calls a fractal or “incomplete border [une frontière non-entière]” (76), a border that is neither completely open nor closed, one that both separates and distinguishes, on the one hand, and links and mixes together, on the other. The consequence of such open boundaries—open not by the decision of national authorities or the actions of armies but by the long-term aftereffects of colonialism itself—is that each nation’s cultural identity is constituted in part by what Balibar calls “an interior difference” or “an essential non-contemporaneousness to self” (82). 1 + 1 does not equal 2 because each nation, each people, each culture, as a result of its internal entanglement with the other, is in itself other than itself—more and/or less than itself. Postcolonialism in this sense signals the end of simple math as concerns closed national borders, homogeneous cultural identities, and continuous historical series.

In numerous essays and books he wrote before his death, Edward Said also questions the closed nature of the borders allegedly separating ex-colonizing and ex-colonized nations and the limitations of the oppositions assumed to define cultural identity. In his preface to Culture and Imperialism, for example, Said argues that critical analyses of relations between East and West should no longer focus exclusively on the history of Western imperialism, domination, and colonial expansion and the myths of Western superiority that support them. What also needs to be understood in the postcolonial era is that the history of imperialism produced varied and heterogeneous interconnections among different cultures. This means that what previously had been considered strictly external relations between distinct cultures in fact constitute internal relations within different but overlapping and mutually intertwined cultures: “For the first time, the history of imperialism and its culture can now be studied as neither monolithic nor reductively compartmentalized, separate, distinct.”⁴ The outside, the foreign, and the alien, which in principle are in opposition to the sameness or homogeneous identity of the inside, are in fact located within it, functioning as constitutive elements of the inside rather than intrusions from the outside. Cultural identity can thus not be taken as a given; it can no longer be assumed to be homogeneous or one.

Said thus argues that one of the results of independence is interdependence: “Partly because of empire, all cultures are involved in one another, none is single and pure, all are hybrid, heterogeneous, extraordinarily differentiated, and unmonolithic” (xxv). Following Said, it would be possible to claim that the continually increasing hybridity of cultures constitutes a or even the defining characteristics of the postcolonial era itself. Such mutual cultural entanglement does not eliminate borders (or differences) within, between, or among nations and cultures, however, but rather transforms the issue of borders and differences from being predominantly a question of the separation of the foreign from the indigenous or the outside from the inside into one of understanding the function and effects of hybridity or difference internal to (postcolonial) culture in general. The continuing tension between the desire for homogeneous identity and the effects of heterogeneity also highlights the persistence of internal exclusions within allegedly postcolonial nations and cities and helps explain why postcolonialism remains still today more of an unrealized project than a reality.

A Colonialist Allegory

If one accepts the arguments of Balibar and Said concerning cultural borders, the question of how or where to situate Albert Camus’ work in relation to colonialism in general and to the border(s) between (and within) Algeria and France in particular may not be as easy to answer as critics of his work have argued. In an essay on Camus included in Culture and Imperialism, which is remarkably different in both tone and argument from his preface to the same work, Edward Said places Camus squarely on the French or colonialist side of the border, and he even criticizes what he calls Conor Cruise O’Brien’s otherwise “agile demystification” of Camus for having misrepresented both Camus’ relation to the non-European world and, even more importantly, the issue of “the frontier of Europe” in general:

There is a subtle act of transcendence in O’Brien’s notion of Camus as someone who belonged “to the frontier of Europe,” when anyone who knows anything about France, Algeria, and Camus… would not characterize the colonial ties as one between Europe and its frontier…. Western colonialism… is first a penetration beyond the European frontier and into the heart of another geographical entity, and second it is specific not to an ahistorical “Western consciousness… in relation to the non-Western world”… but to a laboriously constructed relationship in which France and Britain call themselves “the West” vis-à-vis subservient, lesser peoples in a largely undeveloped and inert “non-Western world.”

(173–174)

Said’s comments emphasize both the historical refusal of “the West” to respect geographic and political boundaries separating Europe from the lands lying outside its frontier and the constructed, artificial nature of the relationship it imposed on the “non-Western” areas and peoples it conquered and colonized. From the beginning of the imperial era at least, but undoubtedly even before, it is no longer a question only of exterior borders or frontiers, therefore, since by penetrating beyond its borders Europe also incorporated its frontiers within itself. The outside is now inside as the inside is extended outside.

European conquest and occupation of lands beyond its geographic borders and its domination of “non-Western” peoples and cultures cannot of course be disputed. At the same time, Europe’s disrespect for borders or frontiers did not mean that borders were simply eliminated each time a European nation penetrated “beyond the European frontier into another geographic entity.” Borders rather continued to be areas of dispute and violent conflict and were constantly relocated and redefined, both outside and within colonized lands and colonizing nations. This also suggests that what it meant to be either “Western” or “non-Western” was constantly changing as well. Cultures came in contact with each other and influenced or, according to ultranationalists, contaminated each other, although certainly not in the same way or on an equal, reciprocal basis, both because of and in spite of the colonial relation of dominance of European peoples and cultures over other peoples and cultures. If, as Said suggests, cultural hybridity, the sharing and mixing of different cultures across the borders that also separate them, should be considered the principal characteristic of the postcolonial world, in his own terms the process in fact began with the “first imperialist penetration” beyond the borders of Europe. Cultural hybridity could thus not be said to have appeared for the first time in the postcolonial world but was rather present (as both a possibility and reality) from the very beginning of the imperialist era—and, in fact, long before, from the beginning.

This would suggest that it would not necessarily be “an act of transcendence” to situate a writer such as Albert Camus on or in relation to “the frontier(s) of Europe,” as long as it is acknowledged both how difficult it is to locate such a border before, during, and after colonialism and the way in which borders have both an external and internal cultural function. For no matter how oppressive French colonialism was, it could not and did not effectively efface “the frontier” between Europe and North Africa, but rather transformed and displaced it both outside and in. Given the complexity of the problem of national-cultural borders in such a context, it would perhaps make more sense to situate Camus’ work not in relation to a single frontier between non-Western and Western, North African and European, or even French and Algerian national and cultural borders, but rather in terms of the different external and internal borders both separating Algeria from and linking Algeria to France, not just after independence but already during the colonial period itself. Camus could thus rightly claim to be Algerian or to have a profound and undeniable Algerian side, but “the Algerian in him” should not be conceived in terms of a hypothetical and fictive homogeneous geographical or national-cultural identity, no matter how either might be defined, but rather in terms of the conflicted history and hybridity of the term itself—again not just during Camus’ life and before independence but after it as well.

In both his literary texts and essays, Camus’ comments on the relations between “East” and “West” in Algeria and in the Mediterranean area in general are not of one piece: at times they are naïvely Eurocentric; at others, more critical and complex. Camus depicts the problem of the complex hybridity of both geographical and cultural identity in a colonialist context perhaps most explicitly in his descriptions of different Algerian cities, not just in various lyrical essays but in his fictional works as well, since Algiers is the setting of both The Stranger and a significant part of his posthumously published The First Man, and Oran, his least favorite Algerian city, is the setting of The Plague.⁵ His descriptions of Oran in particular could, in fact, be the most telling indicator of Camus’ contradictory relation to the internal national-cultural borders determined by colonialism in Algeria, in part because of his conflicted relations with the city itself and his different attempts to describe its hybrid cultural characteristics, but also because postcolonial critics have used his representation of the city in his allegorical novel of the French Resistance as particularly strong evidence of his alleged colonialist sympathies and prejudices.

In order to better situate Camus’ representation of the city of Oran, however, it would be helpful to be able to compare it to the description of Oran in an overtly apologetic form of colonialist discourse. An excellent example of such an apology is the study of the geography and urban history of Oran written in 1938 by René Lespès, which considers Oran a model city and praises its rapid economic and demographic growth and overall success after a century of colonialism.⁶ For Lespès, what distinguishes Oran from Algerian cities such as Algiers and Constantine and what he claims is the undeniable proof that Oran is the crowning achievement of French colonialism is that, unlike Algiers, for example, Oran was not an important city before the arrival of the French. Both during and after the Spanish and Ottoman conquests and occupations, Oran was a small fortress city with relatively few inhabitants, and it began to grow and prosper only after the arrival of the French. Lespès argues, therefore, that it is only because of French rule that Oran became a thriving modern metropolis in the 1930s, so successful that it represents for him the colonial city par excellence.

The ultimate sign of the great success of colonialism in Oran, however, is not simply the wealth of Oran’s European inhabitants. It is rather the growth of the city’s “indigenous population,”⁷ which Lespès claims had been practically nonexistent before the arrival of the French: “The Oran of the French contains more Muslims that had ever been grouped there before our arrival” (109).⁸ Oran is thus represented not as having been conquered, taken away from an indigenous Arab population, and then occupied by foreign French inhabitants. In Lespès’ presentation, Oran is rather a city that was generously rescued by the French from more brutal and destructive foreign conquerors and then allowed to grow and prosper for the first time. For Lespès, the prosperity of Oran under French colonialism is the irrefutable proof of colonialism’s success for both Europeans and “natives” throughout Algeria and the best justification for its continuation.

Lespès’ defense of Oran and French colonialism is, however, more complicated than it might at first appear. For after praising the increase in its indigenous population and attributing this growth to French colonial rule, Lespès acknowledges that Oran still remains the most European of all Algerian cities. Oran is so European, in fact, that he admits that a visitor could walk through its streets and have the impression that no “Muslim natives [Indigènes musulmans]” inhabited it (133). Oran is thus a colonial city in which the colonized, although continually increasing in number, remain practically invisible, absent from the social and cultural life of the city, living within and yet apart from the city at the same time. Muslim natives of Oran in this analysis are thus simultaneously included within and excluded from the city, inside and yet still outside the interior boundaries that define the city in French colonialist terms. As their increasing numbers and prosperity are used to prove colonialism’s success, their visible absence within this increasingly “European city” testifies at the same time to the effects of the exclusion produced within the city by its internal colonial borders.

But if Oran is the most explicitly European and thus least North African or Arab of Algerian cities, it is also paradoxically, Lespès acknowledges, “a Franco-Spanish city from the ethnic point of view” and “the least French of the three departmental capitals of the colony” (133). Oran, the crown jewel of French colonialism in Algeria, has clearly for Lespès succeeded in its “civilizing mission,” but in doing so, in assimilating non-French subjects into a French urban space and/or simultaneously excluding/repressing from its European inner core and identity almost all signs of indigenous cultures, Oran has remained the least French of its cities, the city in which being French for the majority of its French inhabitants actually means being more Spanish than French. French cultural identity in Oran could thus be said to be based on the interior inclusion of its Spanish population and the internal exclusion of its Arab population.⁹ The city’s external and internal borders produce assimilation, exclusion, separation, and hybridity all at the same time.

With only one-fifth of its total population being of French ancestry, Oran is thus the Algerian city in which the most colonialist work had to be done on Europeans and non-Europeans alike to integrate diverse populations into French culture and in this way realize the contradictory ideal (myth) of assimilation that is at the very basis of French colonialist ideology. Lespès considers all colonial cities, given that they are always “populated with fairly heterogeneous ethnic elements,” to be the best sites in which to pursue the colonialist ideal of “fusion and rapprochement” (469). But it is Oran that had most dramatically realized this ideal. And if assimilation had already been achieved for so many in this, the least French of all French Algerian cities, then he is also convinced that such success could eventually be achieved in all of Algeria, even for the “indigenous Muslims” of Oran, who in his version of history enter the city in significant numbers and prosper only after the French conquest and largely because of French rule. Even if, as he admits, they are still not yet integrated into or very visible in the city as such.

It is as if the Arab population of Oran is less indigenous to this city than anywhere else in Algeria and thus “more foreign” to Oran than “the French” are, even if the French themselves have predominantly Spanish origins and for this reason Spanish Algerians are presented as being the best representatives of what it is to be French. At this point in Lespès’ descriptions and analyses, it is no longer clear which group is being assimilated into which or what the term “French” could actually mean in such a situation, since it is predominantly embodied by Spanish immigrants, most fully manifested in an Algerian city in terms of Spanish rather than French culture, and achieved by the exterior inclusion of Spaniards and interior exclusion of “Muslim natives.”

But it is precisely because of its diverse populations and the relatively small percentage of French inhabiting the city that Oran is presented as the Algerian city where colonialist idealism met its most difficult test—and where for Lespès the triumph of colonialism was thus the most spectacular: “Oran testifies brilliantly of the success of urban colonization in Algeria. How could one not be led to recognize it as the chosen space in which the strongest and best distributed of French and neo-French populations are found?” (474–475). As Oran goes, then, so goes colonialism in Algeria, and for Professor Lespès, both Oran and colonialism were, by the mid-1930s, overwhelming successes.

In this analysis of a colonialist success story, Oran, the chosen urban space of French colonialism, is defined by borders that determine both a complex geographic and cultural identity that allow it to be distinguished from its rural surroundings and the other urban spaces to which it is compared. But at the same time, the city of Oran is a space in which French cultural identity is constantly at risk, constantly transforming others but in the process being transformed at the same time. Oran is thus complicated by the very colonial structure that allows the French both to dominate and oppress the colonized and assimilate others into French culture and society—not just its Spanish population but eventually, at least in principle, its Muslim population as well. The “success” of Oran and colonialism in general is thus revealed to be based on the contradictory postulate of the nonindigenous status of the indigenous population, just as the invisibility of “the natives” is necessary to highlight the indigenous nature of the Spanish cultural presence in the city and thus paradoxically the presence and dominance of the French and the success of French colonialism.

But as long as the Muslim population of Oran remains largely invisible, the process of assimilation would have to be considered incomplete and the success of colonialism in Oran, even in colonialist terms, far from total. But, as Albert Memmi and others have argued, successful assimilation is in fact a structural impossibility, for it would bring about the end of the colonial relation and thus the demise of colonialism itself. Colonialism was thus destined to fail, regardless of whether in its own terms it was considered to have succeeded or failed.¹⁰ Oran in this sense is the site of this contradictory impossibility, the city in which success is failure and what it means in colonialist terms to be French is revealed to be a paradoxical hybridity of national cultural traits and an identity that does not add up.

Camus’ Oran

If a colonialist apologist such as Lespès can obviously be criticized for his mystified view of colonialism, his study reveals and could even be said to revel in the contradictions of the general colonialist assimilationist project. What could be called Camus’ “Oran problem” is of an entirely different nature. For Oran is also not just any city in Camus’ essays and fictional texts, but the one whose descriptions have received the most attention and provoked some of the harshest criticism of his work. This is most definitely not because he presents in The Plague (or anywhere else) an enthusiastically positive view of Oran or treats it as the crowning achievement of French colonialism. It is rather because he allegedly does the opposite: he portrays Oran as an entirely French city and thus covers over its colonial nature and ignores or represses the existence of its indigenous Muslim population. If Lespès says too much in praise of colonial Oran, Camus allegedly says and shows too little, at least too little of its colonial nature, in his fictional depiction of the “same” city.

It is once again Conor Cruise O’Brien who, in his chapter on The Plague, presents the harshest criticisms of the novel and accuses Camus of justifying colonial injustices and colonialism in the novel simply by the way he describes Oran.¹¹ The main problem for O’Brien is that the Oran of The Plague is an exclusively European city, a city without Arabs or whose Arab population is for the most part invisible. Oran is described in the novel as a French city inhabited almost exclusively by French citizens, an Algerian city without the visible presence of indigenous Algerians, a colonial city apparently with no colonized people. O’Brien considers this to be not only a serious political distortion of the real, historical Oran, which of course it is, but also a symptom of what he alleges is Camus’ general defense of French colonialism, which is reflected in the novel by his indifference to the plight of the Arab and Berber populations of his homeland and specifically the Arab population of one of Algeria’s three principal cities. What is assumed by O’Brien is that such an omission, if it is an omission, is symptomatic and reveals what he claims are Camus’ deepest colonialist political convictions.

The allegorical form of the novel does present certain problems for his argument, however, and O’Brien initially acknowledges that, since The Plague is what he calls a fable of the German occupation and the French Resistance, there is no compelling reason why it also should deal explicitly with colonialist oppression and injustice. He also recognizes that a fable follows a different logic, has a different purpose, and can have different historical and political implications than a historical or realist novel. O’Brien even admits that the novel’s allegorical “strategy demands the disappearance of the Arabs, [since] it was metropolitan France, not Algeria, which was occupied by the Germans…. Myths and fables require a certain simplification, and it is therefore not surprising that Arabs should be kept out of the picture” (53–54). Whether the fact that Oran is not depicted in the novel as a colonial city is actually a “simplification” remains to be seen. But after having recognized what could be called the right of fable or allegory to simplification—what I would call the right to depart from, transform, and fictionalize historical reality—in a contradictory move, O’Brien then denies the novel the very right he had just granted it, because of what he claims are the nefarious political implications of this same omission or absence.

Because the novel briefly evokes the Arab quarter of Oran and its deserted streets in one of its descriptions of the devastation caused by the plague, O’Brien claims that it cannot then completely ignore the Arab population of the city and totally suppress the political issue of colonialism. And this is especially the case since the novel is an allegory of resistance to the oppression and deaths produced by political plagues. For O’Brien, it all comes down to whether colonialism can be considered a possible referent for the plague and, even more important for his indictment of Camus, whether Camus intended his allegory to apply exclusively to the Nazi occupation of France or imagined that it could also evoke other forms of deadly oppression as well, particularly colonialism. O’Brien himself is convinced that the allegory should definitely apply to colonial Algeria as well but that Camus, however, believed that it should not.

O’Brien boldly asserts, but provides no evidence to back up his claim, that at the time the novel was published (1947), certain “Arab Algerians,” but not “Camus and his friends,” believed that there was a connection between Nazism and colonialism and thus between the French resistance to the German occupation of France and Arab resistance to the French occupation of Algeria:

There were Arabs for whom “French Algeria” was a fiction quite as repugnant as the fiction of Hitler’s new European order was for Camus and his friends. For such Arabs, the French were in Algeria by virtue of the same right by which the Germans were in France: the right of conquest…. From this point of view, Rieux, Tarrou, and Grand [the “resistance heroes” of the novel] were not devoted fighters of the plague: they were the plague itself.

(55)

Camus’ characters (and by extension Camus himself) are thus for O’Brien not true résistants to oppression, injustice, and mass extermination, but actually carriers of death and agents of the plague in the form of colonialist oppression and devastation. In his argument, they are secret agents of injustice posing as agents of justice, perhaps the most hypocritical and dangerous kind of oppressors, which might help explain the harsh polemical tone of much of O’Brien’s book. For the freedom they demand for themselves and for which they risk their lives in their struggle against the plague (in the form of Nazism), they allegedly deny to others’ resistance to another form of the plague (colonialism). In this way, they condemn the indigenous colonized inhabitants of the city allegorically to oblivion and death. What “Camus and his friends” actually thought, wrote, and did to combat the plague of colonial oppression in Algeria is ultimately irrelevant for O’Brien, since for him there can be no question that the novel ends up spreading “the plague itself.”

In the most inflammatory remarks of his entire book—and of any of the attacks on Camus’ writing of which I am aware—O’Brien links the novel even more closely to the Nazi oppression in general and the mass extermination of Jews allegorized in the novel in particular by calling the novel’s silence concerning the Arab population of Oran “an artistic final solution of the problem of the Arabs of Oran” (56). Everything for O’Brien is thus reversed in the novel because of the absence of Arab characters, with the narrative of courageous, practical resistance to the plague actually a nefarious disguised form of the plague itself. Thus a novel, whatever its literary and political interest and limitations might be, which has been read by the overwhelming majority of its readers as a depiction of resistance to oppression, is in the final analysis for O’Brien the artistic expression of mass extermination. The novel describes the way a small number of individuals risk their lives in collective action in an attempt to save the entire population of the city from extermination. But in doing so, O’Brien claims the novel “exterminates” the entire Arab population of Oran.

Whatever the polemical force of O’Brien’s attack on Camus and, more importantly, the critical and polemical force of the analogy he draws between colonialism and Nazism in general and its applicability to the novel, it is true that Aimé Césaire and other militant anticolonialist writers and critics also made use of a similar analogy well before O’Brien did.¹² It would probably surprise many of his critics to discover that Camus himself also used the same analogy, although not in as sweeping a fashion as O’Brien or Césaire. In an article he wrote for Combat in May 1947, Camus condemns the massacre of thousands of Algerian demonstrators and bystanders in the region of Sétif in 1945 (as well as protesters in Madagascar in 1947) and denounces the French use of collective punishment to combat mass demonstrations and civil disorder in its colonies. He was, in fact, one of very few voices at the time speaking out against such crimes and injustices.¹³

In his 1947 article, Camus denounces “the methods of collective repression” used in Algeria and characterizes the racist actions taken by the French as “a policy of terror” similar to that of Nazi Germany:

Yet the facts are there, the clear and hideous truth: we are doing what we reproached the Germans for doing…. If the Hitlerians applied their shameful laws to Europe, the reason was that they believed their race to be superior, hence the law for Germans could not be the same as the law for enslaved peoples. If we French revolted against their terror, it was because we believed that all Europeans were equal in rights and dignity. But if Frenchmen can now hear of the methods used in some instances by other Frenchmen against Algerians and Malagasies and not react, it is because they are unconsciously certain that we are in some way superior to those people and that it makes little difference what means we choose to demonstrate that superiority.

(“Contagion,” Combat, May 10, 1947; in Camus at Combat, 291 [671–672])

Camus’ condemnation of racism in this particular editorial and in fact throughout his writings leaves no doubt as to which side he holds responsible for the “policy of terror” used in Algeria and other colonies. The charge that “Camus and his friends” did not find colonial racism and oppression repugnant and that he did not denounce them and see a link between colonial and Nazi racism and violence simply does not hold up to scrutiny. It should also be noted that The Plague was published in June 1947, a month after Camus wrote this article.¹⁴

The question remains as to whether it is legitimate to criticize an allegorical novel for being “historically inaccurate,” or, in the case of The Plague, for not giving a sufficiently detailed and accurate description of the city of Oran and its different populations. The city depicted in The Plague is obviously not the colonial city of Oran and shares little with it except its name, geographic location, and general physical characteristics. The novel also does not provide any indication of other aspects of Oran’s long and complex history or its different foreign occupiers. There are few traces not just of its Arab population but also of the other ethnic groups that constitute this, the “least French” of all Algerian cities. Neither does this allegory of resistance to oppression and extermination evoke any of the events of World War II that most directly affected the city itself.¹⁵

But given the allegorical nature of the novel, it is still not clear that all the historical and political events not mentioned in the novel, all the subjects not treated, make it either procolonialist or, as has also been claimed, an ahistorical or antihistorical novel. O’Brien in fact does not criticize the novel for not describing any of the events of the war itself. It is only in terms of French colonialism in Algeria that he attacks the novel’s lack of historical and political accuracy and what he feels are its dangerous ideological implications. In O’Brien’s reading, the allegorical border that separates the fiction narrated in the novel and historical-political reality would appear to be legitimate, except when it comes to colonialism. In this one area he judges the novel to be ideologically suspect.

Other critics, however, including, surprisingly, the young Roland Barthes, well before O’Brien’s book appeared, criticized the allegorical form of the novel and argued that even as concerns its principal historical referent, the Nazi occupation of France, the novel has antihistorical implications.¹⁶ Camus, of course, never had the chance to respond to the kind of criticism made by O’Brien, but in his response to Barthes’ criticism that the plague can at best have only an abstract relation to history because in the novel it does not have “a human face,” Camus insists that the novel on the contrary, as a fiction or allegory, has an evident historical content and a direct relation to at least one clearly defined moment of history: that of “the European resistance against Nazism. The proof is that even though this enemy is never named, everyone recognized it” (Théâtre, récits, nouvelles, 1973). The fact that Nazism, unnamed and unrepresented as such in the novel, was easily recognized by readers as the principal historical referent for the allegory of the plague proves, Camus argues, that the allegory in fact has “a human face,” as well as an obvious historical-political referent.

No more explicit reference to the events of the war was needed to evoke the oppressive historical reality and deadly effects of the occupation and the necessity for collective resistance. By not naming Nazism, by its absence as an explicit referent, the novel allows readers on their own to provide the missing name and construct the relations of the novel to that name and the historical events to which it refers. Camus insists that the absence of a named historical referent in an allegorical context does not thus constitute a denial of historical-political reality or a flight from history, but rather a nonrepresentational way of referring to, analyzing, and also questioning, if not resisting, historical-political reality itself.

Besides what he describes as his profound distrust or “disbelief” in historical realism, Camus also claims that the allegory of the plague relates to different historical-political contexts and referents rather than one alone, and this multireferentiality for him has a decided advantage over historical realism: that of at the same time applying to various forms of political oppression rather than only one.¹⁷ When Camus wrote his response to Barthes in 1953, and already in 1947 when The Plague was published, he clearly considered Stalinism another extreme form of political oppression that should be associated with the deadly characteristics of the plague. The question is whether other systematic forms of oppression such as colonialism should be associated with it as well.

Influenced by the fact that Camus a decade later would oppose the tactics of the FLN’s armed struggle for Algerian independence, O’Brien claims that it is already evident in The Plague that Camus “intended” to exclude colonialism from the list of possible referents for his allegory of oppression. Given Camus’ prewar journalism and especially the postwar editorials he published in Combat, in which he criticized French colonial oppression and injustice and repeatedly named the colonial system as the source of Arab and Berber oppression, humiliation, and destitution, it would seem difficult if not impossible to give much credence to O’Brien’s assertion.¹⁸ According to the logic of the allegory of the plague itself, colonialism would on the contrary have to be considered another of its possible historical referents, whether the novel does more than mention in passing the Arab inhabitants of Oran or not. To associate colonialism with the plague is consistent with the novel’s multireferential allegorical form and with what Camus’ essays on Algeria from the 1930s and 1940s repeatedly state. It is much more consistent in any case than the claim that the résistants in the novel to one form of the plague (National Socialism) are in fact secret agents of another form of the plague (colonialism)—or to claim that the novel itself encourages the first association but explicitly excludes the second. It is true, however, that unlike the obvious reference to “the European resistance to Nazism,” which was immediately recognized by readers of The Plague, the references to both Stalinism and colonialism have not been sufficiently acknowledged by critics and too often, especially as concerns colonialism and following O’Brien’s lead, vigorously denied.

By insisting so much on the importance of the location and inhabitants of the city in which The Plague takes place, critics have tended to overlook what I would argue is the novel’s most important relation to Camus’ perspective on colonial Algeria and his later position on the Algerian War. Based on Camus’ experience in the French Resistance, The Plague presents an allegory of the struggle against oppression that is diametrically opposed to the form that the armed struggle for Algerian independence would actually take under the leadership of the FLN less than a decade after the novel was published. Camus’ allegory of resistance in a novel that was largely written during World War II explicitly dramatizes the limits that he was convinced needed to be accepted by all resistance movements, no matter how oppressive and deadly the political plague being combated. It was when no limits were placed on the means being used that the form of resistance to one form of the plague became in fact the carrier for the next form, with the means of resistance themselves rapidly spreading the disease they were meant to combat.¹⁹

The chief organizer of the collective resistance to the plague, Dr. Rieux, who is revealed near the end of the novel to be the author of the “chronicle” narrated by the novel, gives a simple, commonsense, practical justification for resistance rather than a religious or political one: “The essential thing was to do your job well” (41, trans. mod. [1250]). It is also Rieux who, given the increasing number of deaths caused by the microbe, even before the true nature or even name of the disease is known, asserts that the situation already “permits no hesitations” and that debates over whether to call the epidemic the plague or not are “of small importance…. The important thing is to prevent its killing off half of the population of this city,” to “take the responsibility of acting as though the epidemic were a plague” (49, 51, trans. mod [1257, 1259]). Rieux’s position, which is in fact also Camus’, is that in the face of oppression, no matter how overwhelming it appears to be, the deepest and most legitimate basis for resistance, the one that brings together groups of people with radically different religious and political beliefs, is the refusal to accept that a significant part of the population will be sacrificed to the plague. What is common to all the groups is the desire to save as many lives as possible.

The goal can never be “the salvation of man,” an expression that Rieux explicitly rejects because it is “too big” and because he “would not go that far,” but rather only “man’s health,” since “his health comes first” (219, trans. mod. [1397]). To work for the “health” of a community is an endless task, however, with no definitive victories and no guarantees or even a vague promise of a total cure (salvation) in the future. If the notion of resistance the novel presents has been mockingly characterized as a “Red Cross” morality, a more generous reading could find in its simplicity and practicality a recognition of the limits of all individual and collective action that is rooted in the awareness of the danger of promises of revolution or total salvation—whether in an afterlife, as Father Paneloux in the novel preaches in his first sermon, or through political action, as is the case with the different forms of what Camus in The Rebel calls redemptive politics.

What The Plague reveals about Camus’ perspective on Algeria, therefore, is not a colonialist indifference toward the Arab population of Oran or any other Algerian city. His is rather a critical perspective that stresses at the same time the necessity for and limitations of all acts of political resistance to oppression, the obligation to put people’s health first, before religion and before politics. In terms of the Algerian War, which would begin seven years after The Plague was published, it would not be a question for Camus of whether the resistance to colonial oppression was legitimate and necessary—there is ample evidence in his political writings that he felt it was both. The question for him would be what form that resistance should and could legitimately take, and whether it should be primarily oriented toward saving lives and concerned with the social and political health of the Algerian people as a whole. Or whether, on the contrary, through the use of unlimited violence and terrorism (which he considered political maladies, other extreme forms of the plague), it should promise not just an end to the injustices of colonialism but a total victory over oppression and thus a form of national-religious salvation—revolutionary redemption by whatever means deemed necessary and at whatever the costs in human lives and suffering.

Given these considerations, it would be difficult to characterize the modest “heroes” of the resistance to the plague in the novel as agents of colonial oppression. Except, as the novel asserts, if they are carriers of the plague they combat, so are we all. It is also Rieux’s sense of the precariousness of “health” that explains why, at the moment of “victory” in the war against the plague and in the midst of the collective celebration and joy of the population of Oran after the deadly enemy has apparently been defeated once and for all and the barriers around the city finally removed, in the last lines of the novel he states that there is no “final victory” and that the “fight against terror and its relentless onslaughts” on the contrary is “never ending” (308 [1474]). For he knows that the terror of the plague can and will return once again: “He knew what those jubilant crowds did not know but could have learned from books: that the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good” (308 [1474]).

There is one thing, therefore, that can be stated with certainty, one thing that Albert Camus (and “his friends”) definitely did know, and knew long before he published The Plague: they knew that oppression and injustice also have a colonialist form, and that in Algeria, despite the victory over Nazi Germany, the plague in the form of colonialist injustice had not been defeated, the “health” of the Algerian people was deplorable, and Arab and Berber Algerians continued to suffer from economic and political oppression and die. The massacres at Sétif and Guelema in May 1945 were certainly overwhelming additional evidence—as if any more evidence was needed—of the increasingly deadly effects of the terror of the colonialist plague.²⁰ It would seem impossible to read The Plague and not come to the conclusion that the allegorical novel constitutes an unequivocal condemnation of such terror and gives basic, commonsense reasons for resisting terror in whatever form it appears—even or especially in its colonialist form.

Absence

Even if the absence of Arab characters in the presentation of the city of Oran in The Plague is in principle an issue worthy of discussion, a serious analysis of the significance and effects of their absence should also take into consideration the absence in the novel of other ethnic and religious groups as well. The Franco-Spanish population of the fictional, allegorical city, for example, is also not given the prominence it actually had in the historical city of Oran, but is represented predominantly by a small group of marginal criminals who try to arrange the illegal departure of people from the city after the official quarantine is imposed. Oranian Jews, who also constitute an important component of the city’s diverse indigenous population, are also not mentioned in the novel. Regardless of the specific consequences within the novel of the absence of particular groups, it is important also to acknowledge that absence in its many different forms is in fact one of the principal themes of the novel and constantly evoked in the descriptions of the city and its inhabitants, whoever they are and whomever they represent. A serious analysis of the absence of any particular group would thus need to take into account the centrality of the problem of absence in general.

One of the most significant of the absences that define the city of Oran in the novel is the absence of beauty and nature. Oran is “ugly… without pigeons, without trees, and without gardens” (3 [1219]). In much the same vein, in “The Minotaur, or Stopping at Oran” (originally written in 1939 and republished in Summer [L’été ] in 1954), Camus ironically describes how the citizens of Oran had succeeded in creating a barrier between themselves and the magnificent natural beauty of their surroundings, with the constructed, manmade ugliness inside the city successfully serving to obscure and even block out the natural beauty immediately outside the city’s borders: “Compelled to live facing a glorious landscape, the people of Oran have overcome this formidable handicap by surrounding themselves with extremely ugly buildings. You expect a city opening on the sea, washed and refreshed by evening breezes. But except for the Spanish district, you find a city with its back to the sea, built turning in on itself, like a snail.”²¹ Before the plague in the novel results in physical barriers being constructed and policed to protect the outside world from being infected, Oran has in effect already turned itself totally back in on itself and closed itself off from the world of natural beauty lying just outside its borders.

The Oran of The Plague and Camus’ essays is thus a city best defined not by what it is, but by what it is not, by what is kept outside its borders and indicated only by its marked absence inside. For Oran is not just a city “without picturesque sites, without vegetation”; it is also and more tellingly a city “without a soul” (The Plague, 6, trans. mod. [1221]). The absence of both created and natural beauty within the city is thus related to the most devastating of the lacks of the city: its inhabitants appear to lack the sensitivity, complexity, interiority, and consciousness that define what it means to be human. Oran is a zero-degree city for zero-degree, robotic, soulless inhabitants who are already culturally and aesthetically dead long before great numbers of them begin to be afflicted by and die horrible deaths from the plague. For the plague in the form of boredom and routine, death, in or as life, is already present in the city before the actual plague is recognized, named, and officially declared, long before the plague as such begins to threaten with its allegorical “final solution” not just one of the ethnic or religious groups of the city, but all of them.²²

The soulless population of Oran thinks almost exclusively of making money and has time for little else, not even for lovemaking, which like other pleasures is described as “very sensibly… reserved for Saturday afternoons and Sundays,” with all passions “violent and short-lived” (4 [1220]). Oran is also a city cut off from both national and world history, a city in which nothing really ever happens, a city that lives by routine and repetition. Oran is “a colorless place [un lieu neutre]” (3, trans. mod. [1219]) inhabited by a colorless, mediocre, “neutered” people lacking imagination and “without an inkling of anything different [sans soupçon d’autre chose]” (5, trans. mod. [1220]). The Oran of The Plague is thus an exemplary city in its mediocrity and in terms of what it lacks or excludes. It is presented as being representative not of the colonial city as such but rather of the emptiness characteristic of modernity in general, “a completely modern city” (5 [1220]). It would seem that even before the outbreak of the plague it would have been much better for all of the inhabitants of Oran never to have lived there at all.

And yet it is in this “lieu neutre,” this empty, soulless, totally commercial, ugly, and thus for Camus most fully modern of all modern cities that an effective, practical resistance to the plague is organized, that a people comes alive in the midst of oppression and the threat of total extinction and struggles against a force so powerful that it initially seems fruitless to try to resist or attempt to defeat it. Given the general suffering, deprivation, and increasing number of deaths, a city and its people begin to organize to resist the horrible fate imposed on them by a superior force they do not understand. As we have already indicated, following Rieux, the inhabitants of Oran act not out of abstract ideological principles—whether religious or political—but out of practical necessity and a growing sense of solidarity with one another, for the plague infects all levels of society and all groups. It could even be argued that the emptiness of the city and its people, the absence of values, constitutes the grounds for the kind of practical resistance that is eventually organized by Rieux and the other characters in the novel. Theirs is resistance in its purest form, or more accurately, in its zero-degree form: a resistance to oppression and death with no other purpose or motivation than to save as many people’s lives as possible and overcome the horrible isolation imposed by the “new order” in which they are forced to live under the occupation of the plague. Resistance would be meaningless if it were not first and foremost a resistance to all “final solutions,” not just as concerns one group, but as concerns all the different populations of the polis. This is the strong antitotalitarian but also anticolonialist statement the novel makes; it is what Camus (and his friends) actually thought and knew about colonialism.