The Ideal of Freedom—“The Adulterous Woman”
In 1957, in the midst of the Battle of Algiers, when both FLN terrorism and the French army’s violent repression of the civil population of Algiers, the systematic use of torture, and the execution of suspected members of the FLN were all at their peak, Albert Camus published a collection of short stories entitled Exile and the Kingdom. Four stories in the collection—“The Adulterous Woman,” “The Guest” (“L’hôte”), “The Silent Men,” and “The Renegade”—take place in Algeria and were written shortly before the outbreak of organized armed resistance. The publication of the collection precedes by less than a year the appearance of Camus’ collection of essays Algerian Reports, in which he published his last public political statements on colonialism and the Algerian War. But if his collection of political essays was largely ignored when it first appeared and has still not been given the attention it deserves, the same cannot be said of at least two of his short stories from this collection, since they have been frequently commented on, especially in the last decade, when postcolonial critics have focused on Camus’ position on the war of independence being waged in Algeria at the very moment his collection of stories appeared.
However, in his preface to the original French edition of Exile and the Kingdom, Camus does not explicitly mention either colonialism or Algeria, instead characterizing the stories as variations on the theme of exile, “which is treated in six different ways, from the interior monologue to the realist narrative” (Théâtre, récits, nouvelles, 2039).1 These narrative variations on the theme of exile are also paradoxically explorations of the idea of unlimited freedom characteristic of what Camus calls “the kingdom,” which he describes as being linked to “a certain stark, free life that we have to rediscover in order to be reborn. Exile in its own way shows us the path on the condition that we are able to refuse at the same time both servitude and possession” (2039).
The exiled “lords” of Camus’ fictitious kingdom are thus the opposite of feudal lords because they possess nothing and rule over no one. For the same reasons, they are diametrically opposed to French colons, whose privileges and power are a direct result of their possession and exploitation of the land and the forced servitude of colonized Arab and Berber Algerians. This means at the very least that if the stories in Exile and the Kingdom are to be considered illustrations of Camus’ contradictory relation to Algeria and thus as proof of his position on colonialism, the conflict between his literary variations on the themes of exile and freedom and the actual servitude imposed on Arabs and Berbers in his native Algeria needs to be analyzed with some care. Without such an analysis, it would be irresponsible to claim that Camus believed that freedom could coexist with colonialism or that his stories attempt to legitimize colonialist injustices and the oppression of Arab and Berber Algerians.
If exile could be considered the explicit, dominant theme of all the stories of the collection, the idea of freedom basic to Camus’ notion of the kingdom is far less evident. “Freedom,” in fact, is an allusive term in the stories and tends to be represented either negatively, by its loss or absence, or indirectly and metaphorically, existing not as a sociopolitical reality but as an imaginary, extrapolitical alternative to social constraints. The most striking example of the imaginary nature of the experience of total freedom is found in the first story of the collection, “The Adulterous Woman,” which ends with the description of a French-Algerian woman’s fleeting but powerfully sensual experience of absolute freedom.
To say that the main character’s experience of freedom is imaginary is not to deny the specific sociopolitical context of this or the other stories in the collection, for the story is explicitly set in colonial Algeria, and its two main characters, Janine and her husband Marcel, are presented as having the beliefs, attitudes, and above all the prejudices of modest, petty-bourgeois French colonizers. They might even be considered fictional “portraits of the colonizer” comparable to those given in Albert Memmi’s The Colonizer and the Colonized. In terms of its frank presentation of the distant, uneasy, and, at least as concerns Marcel, petty, aggressive, and racist relations with Arab Algerians, on its most explicit level the story constitutes an indictment of racism and the colonial society that has institutionalized it.
It would thus be absurd to imply or assert, as critics who have confused or conflated the voices, perspectives, experiences, views, and prejudices of the fictional characters in the story with Camus’ own voice and views have done, that the feelings of fictional characters in “The Adulterous Woman” provide evidence of Camus’ own attitudes toward Arab Algerians. For only if both the narrative perspective of the story and the specific source of the attitudes expressed in the context of the story are ignored would it be possible to attribute these attitudes to Camus and conclude, for example, that he felt that Arabs were deceptive, incompetent, or untrustworthy, as does the fictional husband Marcel in the story. Or that Camus felt uncomfortable traveling in close proximity with Arab Algerians, based on the fact that the story expresses the main character Janine’s feelings of unease and distrust in the midst of their fellow voyagers, all but one of whom are Arab and who increase her discomfort by never looking at her.2 It would be equally absurd to assume that Camus agrees that an Arab, who is described in the story as not acknowledging the presence of the two French travelers and thus not stepping aside for them or their baggage, is representative of all Arabs who “think they can get away with anything now,” as Marcel asserts in the story. Or that Camus too “loathed that Arab’s stupid arrogance” (20 [1568]), as Janine does. Or that for Camus, rather than for the characters in the story, all Arabs were indistinguishable, with the same “thin, tanned face that made them all look alike” (21 [1568]).
Articulating the fears and the petty, racist reactions and attitudes of fictional characters, rather than expressing Camus’ own feelings or convictions, such descriptions demonstrate that he understood the effects of colonialist racism on the attitudes and behavior of ordinary French Algerians. If the statements and thoughts of the characters of the story reveal anything about Camus’ attitudes toward Arabs, it is that Camus deplored racial prejudice, the ignorance, fears, and absurd sense of superiority on which it is based, and the destructive effects racism had on both colonizer and colonized alike. There is certainly ample evidence of his strong antiracist attitudes in this story and his other writings, as well as in his own life, to easily support such a claim.
Rather than demonstrate what Camus himself believed or felt about Arabs, then, the description in the story of a French Algerian woman’s misunderstandings and prejudices indicate her separation from and fear of a people who do not have the same culture, religion, or language as she, a people with whom she has lived in close proximity all her life but of whom she knows almost nothing. The brief portrait given of Janine is that of a woman colonizer who has no place in the world of the colonized, a world she perceives as being dominated by proud, even “arrogant” Arab men in which “not a single woman could be seen” (21 [1568]). It is the portrait of a French woman who has no connection to the overwhelming majority of the people of her Algerian homeland, who speak “that language she had heard all her life without ever understanding it.” She is also radically alienated from the land itself, especially the cold, hostile physical environment of the Algerian interior that does not conform to her dreams of “palm trees and soft sand” but is “merely stone, stone everywhere, in the sky full of nothing but stone-dust, rasping and cold, as on the ground, where nothing grew among the stones except dry grass” (9–10 [1562]). Her sense of exile could be said to be first and foremost that of colonizers in general, who are born and live as usurpers in a land that they claim as their homeland but that at the same time remains a foreign land.3
The fact that over the course of the voyage narrated in the story Janine becomes increasingly aware of her estrangement from Arabs and their culture, however, does not fully explain the extent of the experience of exile described in “The Adulterous Woman.” For Janine’s exile is also due to her alienation from the society and economic interests of the French colonizers of Algeria, even or especially from her own husband, whose “true passion [is] money” and whom “nothing seemed to interest… but his business” (8 [1562]). Her sense of exile is thus double and profound; it is the alienation of a French woman excluded from the worlds of French and Arab men as well as that of a French Algerian living in proximity to but at the same time radically cut off from the world and culture of Arab Algerians.
The portrait of Janine’s husband is a more extreme, aggressive version of a French Algerian petty-bourgeois colonizer. And even if Camus claims in his essays on Algeria that the overwhelming majority of the poor and modest French inhabitants of Algeria were like his own family and not racist,4 in this story he gives a powerful and uncompromising portrait of a pied-noir racist whose stupidity, pettiness, and aggressiveness are linked to his love of money and his overtly antagonistic relation to the land and its Arab inhabitants, who constantly frustrate him by resisting his efforts to dominate or exploit them. Marcel is the portrait of the colonialist not as master and ruler but as a once “courageous” pied-noir5 who, because of his own inadequacies, repeatedly expresses resentment and hostility toward the land and the peoples who inhabit it.
Marcel’s racism is evident in everyday relations with Arabs; it is the way he affirms his imaginary “natural” superiority over them. For example, when the bus in which they are riding breaks down and the Arab bus driver goes outside to repair it, Marcel asserts that “you may be sure he’s [the bus driver] never seen a motor in his life.” This is proclaimed immediately before the driver, who, unlike his two French passengers, speaks both Arabic and French, succeeds in getting the bus moving again (10 [1563]).6 And pushing this portrait of petty, stereotypical racism to its limits, Marcel explains the inferiority of Islamic culture to French culture to Janine by claiming that the Koran prohibits pork because it “didn’t know that well-done pork doesn’t cause illness. We French know how to cook.”7 He also mocks what he perceives as the slowness of the Arab waiter in their hotel by evoking a stereotype of Arab behavior: “‘Slowly in the morning, not too fast in the afternoon,’ Marcel said, laughing” (15 [1565]). It is clear from this brief but unsparing portrait of a racist colonialist that Camus understood the effects of colonial racism all too well.
Much has been written about the detailed descriptions of North African landscapes that can be found in two of Camus’ short stories from Exile and the Kingdom, and even more than in the other stories, the desert in “The Adulterous Woman” is not merely a background for the story but rather an active force, practically another character.8 The landscape is not presented “objectively” or “realistically,” however, but through the eyes of the two main characters and in terms of their hatred, fears, and, most important as concerns Janine, her desire for freedom. Marcel’s relation to the land is as antagonistic and distorted as his relation to the Arab population in general, and he repeatedly “cursed this country” (10 [1563]) just as he viciously demeaned its people for not conforming to his will. Janine’s relation is, as we shall see, completely different.
Sovereignty is a central issue in “The Adulterous Woman,” but rather than being the justification for what Edward Said has called France’s “ontologically prior” claim to Algeria,9 it is the land itself—and not the French, nor Berber, nor Arab population—that is presented as sovereign, since it exists prior to and outside any other claim to priority or sovereignty, whether historical, political, or “ontological.” It is Janine’s sudden discovery of “the limitless expanse” (22 [1569]) of the North African landscape that sets the stage for her “adulterous” betrayal of her husband and her discovery of the possibility of freedom outside both the colonialist and French patriarchal contexts—which in fact are one and the same. Overwhelmed by the harshness, majesty, and limitlessness of the desert landscape she sees from an abandoned fort, Janine is described as being “unable to tear herself away from… a void opening before her,” unable to “take her gaze from the horizon,” where she discovers “there was awaiting her something which, although it had always been lacking, she had never been aware of until now” (23 [1570]). The “something” awaiting her is not a charted territory over which she imagines herself or anyone else to have sovereignty, but rather an open, uncharted, infinite space that is presented as the opposite of the social space in which she lives: a space not of distinctions, restrictions, possessions, hierarchies, exclusions, and prohibitions, but of infinite possibilities, open boundaries, and unlimited hospitality and freedom.
Diametrically opposed to the space inhabited by both colonizers and colonized in the story is the space through which nomads wander:
Without homes, cut off from the world, they were a handful wandering over the vast territory she was discovering by sight, and which however was but a paltry part of an even greater expanse, whose dizzying course stopped only thousands of miles further south…. Since the beginning of time, on the dry earth of this limitless land scraped to the bone, a small number of men had ceaselessly trudged, possessing nothing but serving no one, destitute and free lords of a strange kingdom.
(24, trans. mod. [1570])
The freedom of the destitute lords of this “strange kingdom” is a direct consequence of the absence of almost all possessions in their life and even of a sense of possessiveness, for the land the nomads wander through does not belong to them and is not theirs to possess or rule over. They rather share and belong to it.10
Just as the desert landscape is presented as a limitless expanse that extends as far as and in fact beyond what the eye can actually see, nomadic existence and the freedom it evokes are as borderless (and imaginary) as the nomad’s wandering is endless. But the intimate relation nomads have with the land is at the same time a radical exile from the land—or rather a form of exile that represents the most profound sense of belonging, a belonging-as-exile. Their existence represents a form of freedom beyond or outside its institutionalized political states, the freedom of a people who never establish or institute themselves as a people. The sovereignty of these strange, distant lords is above all rooted in and takes the form of an absence or radical negation of sovereignty and possession in general.
The more a land is possessed and divided up, the more some are displaced from the land in order for it to be exploited and cultivated by others, the more some are made servants to the land and to those who possess it, the more external and internal borders are closed, the less freedom there is in a society. The more oppression and exclusion dominate, the further removed from the ideal of infinite freedom a people is—whether they are masters or servants, colonizers or colonized, oppressors or oppressed. This is the case no matter how their relationship with the land and with others was established and is perpetuated, whether through imperial conquest and occupation, economic exploitation, or both. What is thus evoked in the image of the nomads perceived in the distance by Janine (in fact more imagined than perceived, since they are barely visible) is what could be called a vision of impossible, total freedom, an imaginary, aesthetic ideal of freedom that could never be realized politically as such—an image or fiction of freedom that is the product of desire rather than a specific political reality or goal. It is an absolute form of freedom beyond all existing forms, one that cannot thus be ascribed directly to any particular society or form of government, whether modern or traditional—not even to actual nomadic cultures themselves.
Whatever the practical limitations of such an image of and desire for absolute freedom—assuming it makes any sense even to think about the political applicability of such a desire or ideal—it is most definitely the desire for a way of living with others and relating to the land that is in direct conflict in every imaginable way with the reality of colonialism and the parceling up, exploitation, and possession of the land colonial society guaranteed to colonizers and the servitude, oppression, and dispossession it imposed on colonized peoples. Colonialism would have to be considered the diametric opposite or absolute negation of nomadism and the ideal of total, unbounded freedom it evokes.
As an impossible horizon for Janine’s life, the idea of infinite freedom is presented as a promise, something that she will never experience as such in or as her own life: “She knew that this kingdom had been eternally promised her and yet that it would never be hers, never again, except in this fleeting moment perhaps” (24 [1570]). The kingdom she perceives/imagines/desires represents a promise of radical change and liberation, the possibility of a way of living radically different from any Janine had ever experienced or even imagined. It is a promise or call that has been made from the beginning of time without ever being explicitly announced or previously heard, a promise that thus must be repeatedly made because it will and can never be completely fulfilled.
Janine’s perspective on her own life radically changes after the exaltation of her first glimpse of the limitless expanse of the Algerian landscape and the ideal of infinite freedom it evokes in her. And at the same time, nothing changes in terms of her social condition. Her husband reconfirms the severe restrictions of her life by calling her “stupid” to be standing in the cold looking at a landscape he sees only as hostile, barren, and empty (25 [1571]), totally devoid of interest. When she finally turns away from the beauty of the desert landscape and lets herself be led by her husband back to their hotel and her life as a faithful French Algerian, that is, colonialist wife, in spite of appearances, something has changed in her: her sense of self. She is described as feeling a profound sense of loss as she returns to the hotel and as having a radically different sense of her own physical being: “She walked along without seeing anyone, bent under a tremendous and sudden fatigue, dragging her body, whose weight now seemed to her unbearable. Her exaltation had left her. Now she felt too tall, too heavy, too white as well for this world she had just entered” (25 [1571]).
The nomadic kingdom of total freedom she glimpses/imagines in the distance is a world that would in fact not be accessible to “too tall, too heavy, and too white” French men and women. It is promised to them only if they are first exiled from their size, their ethnicity, and their “Frenchness” and open to the desert’s and its inhabitants’ otherness, only if they discover in themselves a deep desire for freedom and accept the experience of the loss of self this desire implies, only if they refuse to exploit and possess the land and dominate and oppress the people who also inhabit and in fact have prior claim to it. The world glimpsed from afar is thus situated at the very antipodes of colonialism, well outside its borders, as a distant promise or unexplored possibility. It is an other world, the world of the Other, that is suddenly open to Janine, a world situated far beyond the horizon of the world in which she lives—and yet whose possibility is paradoxically within it as well.
In one of the most frequently analyzed scenes of Camus’ entire corpus, later that same evening, responding to what the narrator describes as “the call of the night,” Janine leaves the hotel bed she shares with her husband and returns to the fort that had offered her a perspective on the desert and its limitless horizon. Her return to the fort is the result of an explicit, conscious decision to revolt, for after her earlier brief experience she realized that “she wanted to be liberated even if Marcel, even if the others, never were!” (29 [1573]). But at the same time, Janine is also described as returning impulsively to the abandoned fort as if she were unable to control her actions and had no choice but to return. Or rather, as if this were her deepest, most profound choice, initially made not by her conscious mind and will, but by her body, responding to an overpowering aesthetic or erotic impulse or desire.
Janine’s uncontrollable need to return to the site from which, for the first time, she glimpsed or imagined a world of infinite freedom—and thus her choice to be “unfaithful” to her husband (and to her position as a French woman in colonial Algerian society)—are not political in nature, even if they do have obvious political implications. Described in explicitly erotic terms, Janine’s experience is of a radical loss of self and not of possessing but of being possessed by the otherness of the night:
Before her the stars were falling one by one and dying out among the stones of the desert, and each time Janine opened a little more to the night. Breathing deeply, she forgot the cold, the weight of others, her demented or rigid life, the long anguish of living and dying…. She seemed to recover her roots and the sap again rose in her body, which had ceased trembling. Her whole belly pressed against the parapet as she strained toward the moving sky; she was merely waiting for her overwhelmed heart to calm down and for silence to grow inside her…. Then, with unbearable gentleness, the water of night began to fill Janine, drowned the cold, rose gradually from the obscure center of her being and overflowed in wave after wave, rising up even to her mouth full of moans. The next moment, the whole sky stretched out over her as she lay on her back on the cold earth.
(32–33 [1574–75])
The experience is at the same time erotic and metaphysical, an uncontrollable, orgasmic overflowing of Janine’s body and being, which are both drawn to and filled with the obscurity and alterity of the desert night. For a fleeting but intense moment, Janine is possessed by Otherness; she loses all sense of herself and is Other.
But this overwhelming affect does not and cannot last. Afterward, nothing seems to have changed in her social situation, for as Janine says to her husband when she returns to the hotel in tears and rejoins him in bed: “It’s nothing, dear… nothing” (33 [1575]). No matter how intense, the overwhelming experience of otherness is no more than a momentary break in her life, a brief but powerful adulterous encounter with what is most foreign to her existence as a married French woman living in colonial Algeria. The call to leave her husband’s side and then the intensely erotic experience of infinite freedom itself come to Janine from outside her world, the world inhabited by French Algerians. It comes to her not just from the horizon of that world but from a more distant horizon beyond the horizon, from a world radically opposed to the colonial world in which she lives and to which she nevertheless returns. Her experience constitutes a call or promise of freedom rather than freedom itself, a promise, however, which as long as colonialism determines the relations between the French and Arab populations of Algeria, as well as between French men and women, can never be even partially fulfilled and thus must be constantly remade. The intense, erotic experience of impossible freedom is thus “nothing” at all in itself—nothing except the desire for a radically different life, the desire for freedom. A nothing that is everything.
Tragic Freedom and Absolute Hospitality—Host or Guest?
A hostis is not a stranger in general. Different from the peregrinus who lives outside the limits of the territory, hostis is “the stranger whose rights are recognized as being equal to those of Roman citizens.” …A relationship of equality and reciprocity is established between this stranger and the citizen of Rome, which gives a sense of the precise notion of hospitality.
—Émile Benveniste, “Hospitality”
There is pure hospitality only when I welcome, not an invited guest but an unexpected visitor, someone who invades my privacy in a certain way, who comes to my house when I am not prepared for him.
—Jacques Derrida, “Une hospitalité à l’infini”
Camus does not say who is the host and who is the guest. That is his genius.
—Jacques Derrida, “Être chez soi chez l’autre”
Undoubtedly the best-known story from Exile and the Kingdom is “L’hôte,” whose title has been translated into English as “The Guest” but that could just as accurately (or inaccurately) be translated as “The Host,” given that the word hôte in French, as in Latin, has both contradictory meanings.11 The uncertainty of the meaning of the title is reflected in the way the story presents the complexities and ambiguities of its principal subject: the precarious and contradictory status of hospitality in a sociopolitical context of inequality and oppression. Hospitality in a colonial context would have to be considered an especially contentious issue, since its very possibility assumes that the most fundamental of rights, the right to call the land in which one is born one’s homeland, to have the home in which one lives recognized as one’s own, to be allowed to be at home in one’s own home, is respected.
For how can one offer hospitality if one’s home and homeland have been taken and are occupied by others, or if one’s homeland is one’s own only because it has been taken from others? How can one open one’s home to welcome another if it has been taken away by another? And how can one accept hospitality under such conditions were it to be offered, if the host offering the hospitality has no legitimate right to be host and offer it? And by the same logic, if the guest should have been host and the one offering hospitality to the host, who then would have been guest rather than host?
To be denied hospitality by an ungracious host may well be a serious offense against the protocols of hospitality, but it could be considered a much less egregious offense or injustice than being denied the right to be host in one’s own home and thus the possibility of offering hospitality to others. Colonialism reverses the situation of host and guest, because those who should in principle be at home in their homeland and in the position of hosts offering or refusing hospitality to strangers are precisely those who are treated as strangers in a homeland that is no longer theirs. They are thus at the mercy of their foreign hosts, the occupiers and usurpers of their homeland. They are “indigenous nationals” in a homeland that is no longer their own home, foreigners in their own land who find themselves in need of the hospitality of others in order to be at home in their home.
The desolate and destitute part of Algeria that is the setting for the simple, powerful story told in “The Guest/Host” is described as the homeland of both of the principal characters in the story—the French schoolteacher and the Arab prisoner. At the end of the story, it is a homeland from which they are both are radically exiled. Whatever the political and legal claims that might be made to defend the right of either or both of them to consider this desolate land their homeland, both face either imprisonment or exclusion from both their own communities and the land itself. And both find themselves living under the threat, if not likelihood, of death. The political question of who has the right to call Algeria their homeland is of course what was at stake in the war being waged at the very moment Camus’ story was published in Exile and the Kingdom. It was a war that would resolve the question once and for all and result in Algerian independence and the mass departure of French Algerians from Algeria. But rather than focusing on the conflicting claims over the right to possess and rule the land, Camus’ story points rather to the inadequacy and tragic limitations of all political solutions to conflicts among two peoples born in, living on, and having deep affective attachments to the same land.
As was the case with The Stranger, critics have often remarked that one of the characters in the story, the Arab prisoner, remains nameless and throughout the story is referred to only as “the Arab.” The other two characters, the French schoolteacher and gendarme, have last names, Daru and Balducci, and thus have a status and a recognized personal identity that the Arab character lacks. Before deciding what the Arab character’s lack of a proper name and anonymity might signify, however, it would seem advisable first to ask, as in the case of The Stranger, if there is any internal justification in the story for maintaining the anonymity of one of the characters, “the Arab,” and thus his distance from the named French characters—even or especially from the French schoolteacher Daru, who acts as his nominal host and lodges and feeds him for one night.
In terms of the logic of the story and in order to highlight the conflicts and contradictions inherent in the colonialist sociopolitical context in which the story takes place and, more important, to make the distance between Daru and the Arab, the presumed host and guest of the story, remain as great as possible, the anonymity of the Arab is in fact an indispensable element of the story. For only if the distance and differences between Daru and the Arab prisoner are dramatically highlighted and maintained throughout the story can hospitality be offered in its most radical and contradictory form. Only with the maintenance of his anonymity and in an atmosphere of distrust, fear, and potential violence can the shelter, food, and eventually freedom the French schoolteacher/host offers his Arab prisoner/guest evoke a generalized, ideal form of hospitality, an absolute form of hospitality outside or beyond self-interest, sociopolitical differences, political disputes—and even or especially armed conflict.12
Ironically or rather, as we shall see, tragically, it is in the general context of colonial injustice and the increasingly overt hostility between the French and the Arabs of Algeria that “The Guest/Host” points to an absolute form of hospitality antithetical to colonialism. And it is thus significant that hospitality in the story consists in Daru welcoming into his home not a relative, neighbor, friend, or even an identifiable and therefore nonmenacing stranger, all examples of conventional hospitality, but rather in his offering shelter and comfort to a murderer who remains throughout the story anonymous, alien, and potentially threatening, even after he has been welcomed into and made to feel at home in the schoolteacher’s “home,” which is a room attached to the schoolhouse in which he teaches. The greater the distance and the more extreme the differences in culture, beliefs, and practices of host and guest, the more open, generous, and inclusive the hospitality offered necessarily has to be.
Freely offered, unlimited, absolute hospitality reverses the positions of host and guest, for when the host freely opens his house to his guest, the host in effect makes his guest master of his home and in doing so accepts being subservient to his guest. And the greater the distance and differences between host and guest at the start and throughout the story, the more unexpected and paradoxical (“absolute”) the resulting experience of proximity will be. And more important for the “political implications” of the story, in a colonialist context the reversibility of the relation of host and guest would imply the interconnectedness, reversibility, and the equality of colonizer and colonized, no matter their very different status in colonial society. Such hospitality would constitute nothing less than an powerful indictment of the society in which it occurs.
The story begins with the description of a scene whose importance commentators have generally ignored. After a severe snowstorm and thus isolated in the schoolhouse in which he teaches and lives, the schoolteacher Daru observes the arrival of two unexpected visitors:
The two men were now halfway up the slope. [Daru] recognized the horseman as Balducci, the old gendarme he had known for a long time. Balducci was holding on the end of a rope an Arab who was walking behind him with hands bound and head lowered. The gendarme waved a greeting to which Daru did not reply, lost as he was in contemplation of the Arab dressed in a faded blue jellaba, his feet in sandals but covered with socks of heavy raw wool.
(88–89 [1613])
Daru does not recognize the prisoner being led up the slope on a rope, but because of the way he is dressed he can identify him as an Arab. Even though he clearly recognizes and names Balducci, whom “he had known for a long time,” Daru does not, however, acknowledge his greeting. By ignoring his salutation, Daru distances himself from the French gendarme and his actions, and this distance will turn out to be much greater than that between Daru and the Arab prisoner, whose name he never learns. In the context of the story, addressing someone by his name will not necessarily be a sign of true recognition, respect, or solidarity. In fact, Daru’s distance from and even opposition to the culture in which the names Balducci and Daru are indicators of identity and privilege will only increase throughout the story.
By not returning Balducci’s greeting, Daru distances himself not necessarily from his old acquaintance Balducci himself, but rather from the French gendarme on horseback who is leading an Arab prisoner through the snow attached to a rope like an animal. The prisoner is not properly clothed for the harsh weather, and his hands are tied as he struggles to arrive at the shelter of the schoolhouse. To the French gendarme, as the agent of colonial (in)justice who is responsible for the prisoner’s condition, the schoolteacher thus initially refuses recognition. For to respond to the gendarme’s greeting in this context would be to accept and be complicit with the injustice being perpetrated on the Arab prisoner, no matter what crime he is accused of or has actually committed. To the Arab prisoner, the victim of the gendarme’s inhumane treatment, Daru will on the contrary offer hospitality without preconditions or expectations of any sort.
From the beginning of the story, Daru is thus presented as distanced from both the French gendarme and his Arab prisoner, but in different if not opposed ways. For although he refuses to his fellow French countryman the basic courtesy of replying to his salutation, he unexpectedly and spontaneously offers hospitality to the prisoner and victim of the gendarme’s mistreatment, an Arab prisoner whose name he never asks and is never told. From the very beginning of the story, then, the schoolteacher finds himself on the side neither of the victim of injustice nor of the gendarme responsible for it—neither on the side of French colonial law and practices that authorize French policemen to treat Arab prisoners in inhumane, unjust ways, nor on the side of the Arab prisoner, who Daru learns has committed murder, a violent crime he unequivocally condemns. It is also because of the murder he has committed that “the Arab” remains for him “the Arab” throughout the story, maintaining the anonymity of a criminal and potentially violent, threatening other at the very moment hospitality and freedom are generously and gratuitously offered to him and Daru’s fate and the Arab prisoner’s become intertwined. If Balducci treats his Arab prisoner as an inferior and menacing foreigner, Daru welcomes him into his home and, in spite of (or because of) his potential threat to him, treats him as a guest.13
The story from its very first scene thus already raises the question of whose side the French schoolteacher is on in the growing conflict between French and Arab, colonizers and colonized. Daru disapproves of the prisoner’s crime and is described as feeling a spontaneous reaction of “sudden anger against this man, against all men with their filthy spite, their tireless hates, their blood lust” (93 [1615]). But when the gendarme evokes the possibility of an immanent revolt and claims that “we,” that is, all the French, are in a sense already “mobilized” (92 [1614]) against “them,” the Arabs, Daru refuses his demand to take official custody of the prisoner. The gendarme reminds him of his ethnic and national origins, of the fact that he is by birth and culture “one of us,” French, and not one of the anonymous Arabs of Algeria who threaten violence and revolt. And because of what he is by birth, it is expected that he will act like “one of us,” especially in volatile situations in which “they” are directly and violently pitted against “us.” Or in the politicized language of the gendarme, which is that of the colons: “If there is an uprising, no one is safe, we are all in the same boat…. You’re from here, and you are a man” (96 [1616]). Daru is from there, and he is a man. But by refusing Balducci’s demand to treat the Arab as a prisoner, he also refuses to be forced into the same boat as the Frenchmen of Algeria in whose name Balducci speaks. He separates himself from and in fact opposes the “us” that he, like Balducci, nevertheless still uses to distinguish the French from the Arabs.
Who is Daru then? One of “us” (the French) but not in the same boat as other Frenchmen? Certainly not one of “them” (the Arabs), but he is increasingly implicated in the fate of the Arab prisoner, who is both a criminal and thus in principle deserving of punishment, but at the same time a victim of the injustices of French colonial law. After his initial refusal to recognize the gendarme, the agent of colonial injustice, Daru offers shelter and mint tea, traditional signs of hospitality in North African culture, to both Balducci, his old French acquaintance, and to the anonymous Arab prisoner—as if to show that as individuals, the one familiar, the other an unknown and potentially threatening stranger, they are equals. As if following an ancient ritual, Daru is described as kneeling down to free the hands of the unknown criminal, accepting him into his house and treating him as someone to whom he, as host, is obliged and indebted and to whom he kneels down in homage.
This symbolic reversal of the positions of host and guest, master and servant, and, in the story, colonizer and colonized is the sign of true hospitality and is of course diametrically opposed to the brutal colonial relation that determines the roles of colonizer and colonized. The striking image of injustice, the prisoner being dragged up the slope in the snow by a gendarme mounted on his horse, dramatically contrasts with the image of hospitality, Daru on his knees before the prisoner untying his hands and offering him tea and protection from the cold. The clash of images in the opening pages of the story could not be more stark.
Daru, in spite of himself and his best intentions, in spite of his repeated refusal to play the role of gendarme, which in the context of the story would be synonymous with assuming the role of being “one of us,” that is, accepting the privilege of being “French” in colonial Algeria, cannot, however, avoid being placed in a position of dominance and authority, no matter what he says and does. Because of colonialism, he is and will remain “French” in all situations, whether he identifies with and accepts what it means to be French or not.14 In resisting the authority associated with being French, although he is unable to avoid it completely, and by treating his Arab prisoner as a guest and refusing to protect himself in any way from the potential threat his presence represents, even though he is unable to identify with him and condemns his violent act, Daru’s actions affirm what colonialism violently denies: that in spite of the colonialist system, which is based on the principle of the innate rights of the French to dominate, there exists nevertheless a fundamental equality of guest and host, the Arab prisoner and the French schoolteacher, colonized and colonizer. It is an equality that underlies the oppositions and hierarchies determined by colonialism and politics in general. Granting hospitality in this way in a colonial context is thus a profoundly anticolonialist act, even if it is the colonial system that places Daru in the position of being able to assume the role of host in the first place.
The Arab and the Frenchman in the story have no common national, ethnic, cultural, or religious affiliation or identity; they share only an affective attachment to the same homeland that unites and opposes them at the same time. Or as Daru puts it: “No one in this desert, neither he nor his guest [host], was anything. And yet, outside this desert, neither of them, Daru knew, could have really lived” (98 [1617]). Living in an inhospitable homeland and at the same time linked to and separated from each other—but ultimately less separated from each other than from their own increasingly closed and violent communities—they share only their differences, their strong affective attachment to the same land, as well as their insignificance in relation to it.
Hospitality as it is presented in the story can thus be seen as an expression of equality and reciprocity that occurs within a context of inequality and extreme oppression. Absolute hospitality thus constitutes an ideal diametrically opposed to the oppressive reality of colonial lived experience and the injustices the colonial relation produces and perpetuates. The hospitality of the host/guest, no matter how violent the general context in which the act of hospitality occurs, is at the very least an indication of the possibility of an alternative to colonialism that exists as a counter-force within the colonialist system itself.
The penultimate scene in the story is similar to the scene at the end of “The Adulterous Woman,” except that the limitless space of the desert is familiar to Daru, is his homeland, rather than being totally alien, as the desert is for Janine: “Daru drank in, with deep breaths, the fresh light. He felt a kind of rapture before the vast familiar space…. Daru surveyed the two directions. There was nothing but the sky on the horizon. Not a man could be seen” (106–107, trans. mod. [1622]). Responding to the infinite space and in an ultimate act of generosity and hospitality, Daru offers the possibility of freedom to his guest [host] by releasing him and giving him the chance to choose his own fate: prison or freedom. In one direction, the horizon is limited, cut up, and occupied. It is where the town of Tinguit is located and where the French administration and police are expecting an Arab prisoner who has been charged with murder to be handed over to them by a French schoolteacher who is “one of them.” In the other direction, the horizon is unlimited, for there live nomads who “will welcome [the prisoner] and shelter [him] according to their law” (107–108 [1623]), a law that offers more than what Daru could for one night: not just shelter and hospitality, but also freedom in exile.
Just as Janine returns to her husband’s side after her aesthetic-erotic experience of total freedom, as if nothing in fact had really happened, the prisoner chooses the road to prison rather than exile and freedom. No explanation is given as to why he does this. It is an act that is not and cannot be explained. Whether this is because the freed prisoner has interiorized colonial law and himself feels he should pay for his crime—which is unlikely since he does not speak French, gives no signs of being assimilated into French culture, and feels he acted justly—or because he identifies with Daru, accepts his hospitality, and chooses prison in a reciprocal act of generosity in order to prevent his host from being accused by French authorities of freeing a dangerous criminal remains indeterminate. It is an ambiguous, contradictory, unexplained act that could be at the same time a sign of the acceptance of servitude by a colonized subject or a supreme act of generosity and therefore an affirmation of freedom on the part of an already postcolonial subject and host. In any case, Daru’s hospitality and gift of the choice of freedom paradoxically results in the unnamed Arab turning himself over to French colonial authorities, with the possibility that he will be executed for the murder he has committed, especially during a period described as a time of growing tension between French and Arab communities. Exiled from his own community but offered the gift of freedom, the Arab accepts the gift but uses his freedom to give up his freedom.
The bitterly ironic conclusion to the story, which was added in one of the revisions Camus made before publishing it, is that Daru is directly threatened with death for his generous, hospitable act. For in the eyes of the militant Arabs, “the brothers” of the Arab he in fact freed, Daru is responsible for having handed the Arab over to French authorities. His hospitality, his good intentions, and even his generous liberating act all mean nothing in the violent atmosphere of colonial Algeria; all result in imprisonment and perhaps death, not freedom. Daru does not receive his death sentence, however, in a French court of law, as Meursault did in The Stranger and as the Arab prisoner who turns himself in to the French authorities very well might. Rather the schoolteacher on his return to his school reads his sentence on the schoolroom blackboard, scribbled clumsily between the French rivers he had drawn on the board for his students’ last geography lesson: “You handed over our brother. You will pay” (109 [1623]). Daru is “objectively” an enemy of “the brothers” of the Arab to whom he offered his hospitality, no matter what he actually did, whose side he sees himself on, or what he refuses to do. He is an enemy of all Arab brothers because he is French, an enemy of the people he has taught to speak, read, and write French, people who because of him will also be able to recognize and name the four principal rivers of France and who condemn him to death in words learned from him or teachers like him.15
On neither side, at a time when political unrest and then war makes it necessary to choose one side or the other—to be either with or against “us”—at the end of the story Daru no longer fits in anywhere: “Daru looked at the sky, the plateau, and, beyond, the invisible lands stretching all the way to the sea. In this vast landscape he had loved so much, he was alone” (109 [1623]). If “the Arab” is equally alone, having chosen the path leading to prison, the “facts” in Daru’s case are as incriminating against him as those against the Arab. Just as Meursault at the end of The Stranger occupies the place of the Arab in colonial society, Daru’s fate overlaps with “the Arab’s,” the host’s fate with that of the guest’s, for each man, judged by the terms of justice of the other, is “objectively” guilty and at the end of the story finds himself alone to face punishment for his “crime.” The ideal of hospitality and the possibility of freedom evoked by the encounter of the French teacher and Arab prisoner are thus both negated by the colonial system over which neither has any control and by the violent conflicts that pit “them” against “us” and prevent the continued reversal of roles of “them” and “us,” host and guest, colonizer and colonized, which absolute hospitality in principle makes possible. To a colonial society, absolute hospitality, which consists of the mutual recognition of the freedom and equality of the other, represents in fact the greatest threat of all.
At the moment of the publication of this collection of short stories, political actions related to but more extreme than a gendarme’s inhumane treatment of an Arab prisoner were being taken by “brothers” of the gendarme in the French army. More violent acts than murdering a cousin for having stolen food and threatening a schoolteacher were being committed by “brothers” of the anonymous Arab prisoner. Such actions were destroying or had already destroyed any hope of what increasingly appeared as the impossible reconciliation between the French and Arab communities of Algeria. At the end of “The Guest/Host,” a very different form of solitude is imposed on the French schoolteacher than the kind he experienced at the beginning of the story, when a blizzard had isolated him in the schoolhouse. His exile from the French community, from his Arab and Berber students and neighbors, and also from the land itself is described as absolute and irremediable. Both the Arab Algerian and French Algerian end up perpetuating the cycle of violence they deplore, but they do it against their will and in spite of themselves and their brotherly, hospitable actions toward each other. At the end, they are not only alone but also enemy brothers in spite of themselves, condemned to solitude and death. Each is in some sense responsible for the death of the other, without meaning or wanting to be. Each is thus in part also responsible for his own death as well in a cycle of violence from which there is no escape, no neutral ground, no effective position that is also just.
The situation presented in the story is thus tragic, for there is no way for either character to escape from his fate, no place for either a French schoolteacher or an Arab prisoner except in one of the two warring camps. To be “French” or to be “Arab” is to be either executioner or victim of the other—or, in this case, both at the same time. To refuse this stark choice is not just to be alone and risk being irrelevant to the outcome of the conflict, but it is also, as the story shows, to perpetuate the very violence refused and negated in the act of absolute hospitality. “The Guest/Host” thus reveals that Camus clearly understood the impossible political position he was attempting to occupy both immediately before and during the Algerian War. The story also indicates his sense of powerlessness: neither he nor anyone else could intervene in a way that would stop or even mitigate the increasingly uncontrolled violence of the war that risked making victims of all Algerian civilians. For if even an act of absolute hospitality ends up adding to the violence of the conflict, if acts of justice end up provoking and in themselves constituting crimes, then the situation is truly tragic—not just for one side but for both.