The French Connection

...Le probl?me est ailleurs, he would say, brow furrowed and eyes turning somber, you don’t get it...

...Controversies spilled over into reviews, whose circulation was tiny, and thence into the Paris press and beyond...

...The fi rst thing you notice about The Stranger is its title...

...But to turn him into some kind of plague-on-both-houses neo-Tolstoyan by projecting him into contemporary affairs, as Carroll does, is to miss the point as well...

...He was sensible and reasonable...

...But I have the impression that, as a matter of fact, the president did read Camus somewhere along the way...

...He is about to be given a very high honor by the French Republic for his labors in making people like Sartre and Camus known to Americans...

...Would Camus have opposed the war on terrorism and the methods that have been used to wage it...

...But their years of teaching have made them more patient, and Joe offers an answer: It matters to anyone who still reads, he says...

...But l’Alg?rie, as Minister of Justice Fran?ois Mitterrand insisted, c’est la France...

...it is true, though, that the French army took a few years to fi nd winning tactics...

...He had, to be sure, a complicated personal life, some of which took place in the streets around here...

...Would he have blamed us for unleashing the dogs of civil war in a onceunited Iraq by leaving a power vacuum after removing the tyrant who held it together by terror...

...but that is a different matter entirely...

...Most of the settlers, like Camus’s family, were very poor...

...The present situation in Iraq, Carroll writes, bears some resemblance to the situation Camus commented on with futile good sense and goodwill...

...Or, for that matter, the Maltese, the Spaniards—the French...

...Yet it’s not as if we were dealing with obscure and diffi cult texts: Camus wrote plainly, and his work lives in neat, elegant editions put out faithfully by the house where he worked, Gallimard...

...Would he think the U.S...

...Camus, always a man of the left and not especially friendly toward the American position in the Cold War, or the strategy of containment with its essential military component, saw Stalinism for what it was...

...I learn in Albert Camus the Algerian that there is a “post-colonial” school of literary criticism which posits that The Stranger is racist because the Arab victim of the anti-hero Meursault has no name...

...That is what the history of ideas is about...

...In its name, Front de Lib?ration Nationale, the feminine of national is required because it is the liberation which is national, not the front...

...but today, does it matter...

...But can the Algerian controversies serve as lessons for today’s war in Iraq...

...Why not the Jews...

...The FLN, like its predecessor organization led by Messali Hadj, posited a national entity to be liberated, and it claimed this was an Algerian homeland (patrie) within the Arab umma...

...It gets worse: The Algerian in Camus is also an important component of his agnosticism, of his determined resistance to political and religious doctrines, systems, and ideas, the side of him that maintains a distance from—and a complicated, oppositional relationship with—national, religious, cultural, ethnic, and political identities, the side that resists oneness, sameness, uniformity, and all expressions of absolute truth...

...but Camus, who kept a hand in journalism all his life, was always far more persuasive...

...According to Carroll, who teaches French and Italian literature at UC Irvine, this view is not unanimous: Michael Walzer of Princeton, for example, maintains that Camus was “a good man in a bad time” and defends his writings...

...It was 1954 and, having been driven from Indochina, the Roger Kaplan is the author of Conservative Socialism: The Decline of Radicalism and the Triumph of the Left in France...

...He is trying to do the right thing...

...I assume this is where Carroll thinks his book can be read with profi t by someone with no particular interest in French literature or Algerian history...

...At the outset of the armed revolt in 1954, for example, he asked why there should be an “Arab nation” in that land, as the National Liberation Front demanded...

...In these circumstances, the heartsandminds strategies that the army tried, with occasional success, were like spitting in the wind...

...I turn to Joe and Guigitte Frank, who thought they were going to spend a quiet afternoon at my father’s and not get drawn into old polemics...

...Carroll is quite right to say that this is to miss the point about Camus’s moral stance, and for that matter his political stance...

...Or that the plague in The Plague is a metaphor for the de facto apartheid in Algeria because there are no Arabs in the fi ctional Oran (Algeria’s western capital) where the story is set...

...The caf...

...Which the settlers could not conceive of doing...

...He died in 1960, and at the time everyone who knew him viewed him, for a reason, as a partisan of the effort to defeat the Algerian nationalists, whose terrorism he deplored and denounced...

...Carroll argues, on the contrary, that Meursault is “the other” and is executed as “an Arab and a Jew...

...I always imagined, however, that these took place in the circles of those French intellectuals that my mother and father frequented in what I think of as the Cold War years (ending with the outbreak of hot war in Korea...

...Camus’s journalism during the Algerian war, mainly in the form of editorial commentary collected in 1958 in the slim volume Chroniques alg?riennes, sought to separate the combatants...

...While there may be some usefulness in laboriously examining the way a modern master uses the weapons of the spirit to write on such weighty matters as justice, this book demonstrates the risks inherent in assigning a writer political positions that, at best, are hypothetical...

...BY ROGER KAPLAN David Carroll’s dual purpose here is to rescue the reputation of Albert Camus from academicians who have consigned him to the ash heap of dead white males, while enlisting him in the opposition to the Iraq war...

...In doing this, Carroll misinterprets almost as grossly as they falsify...

...but in the academy it seems to have become an issue...

...but that was a myth...

...On the strategy of choosing Iraq as a battlefi eld in a larger war, there is no point in speculating: He was not keen on military solutions...

...But Camus asked: Why the Arabs...

...Carroll is a good man...

...Forty-seven years after his death, no one can say...

...So I offer him a sample of David Carroll’s prose: The “Algerian in Camus,” in the sense I am using the term, does not, however, constitute an “Algerian identity” that would defi ne Camus...

...Camus was considered naive at best, a traitor at worst, by piednoir public opinion, and would probably be called a wimp today by Muslim nationalists...

...His novel The Stranger is the emblematic work of that movement, the way The Sun Also Rises represents the Lost Generation and The Great Gatsby represents the Jazz Age...

...More specifi cally, Carroll, in one overwrought sentence, asks why George W. Bush did not read Camus before starting all the trouble: It would have sharpened his sense of justice...

...Justice can wait, if it’s my mother’s life that pays for it...

...Some of the others saw it for what they wanted it to be...

...But what motivated his attitude toward Algeria was that his people lived there...

...But he never said the French army was wrong to defend the civilian population in Algeria...

...I don’t know if this is germane to the geography of Mesopotamia...

...Most of the French political class, led by the Socialists who happened to be in power at the time, supported the suppression of the armed revolt against French rule in Algeria...

...Many Muslims are opposed to this internationale, which wants our ruin and their destruction...

...Perhaps...

...But we have to be clear: Camus, a realistic man who had seen life up close in the slums of Belcourt and in the cruelties of the Nazi occupation, meant what he said...

...As to The Plague, Camus—who knew there was a vicious strain of anti-Semitism among the often pro-Vichy piedsnoirs, notably in Oran—made it very clear that he was writing a parable of the Nazi occupation of Europe and the duty to resist evil...

...The doctor in The Plague views his duty as a call to act in a seemingly hopeless situation...

...I happen to be gazing at the old coffee shop at the angle of the Boulevard SaintGermain and the Rue Bonaparte as I write this...

...And of course, that is so...

...How can anyone know...

...Algeria was sun-drenched, beautiful, sensual, and hard at the same time, and most of its inhabitants were poor...

...Why not the Kabyles, or the Berbers, more generally...

...Carroll takes us through several of Camus’s key books, including The Stranger and The Plague, to mutilate those who would make Camus an apologist for the colonial regime...

...He thought that those who, from the safety of the caf?s, used grand words like colonialism and freedom, and constructed their perfect worlds with other people’s lives, didn’t get it...

...He fell out of touch with the university world when he went overseas for long decades of service to our country...

...it is rather the locus of a problem, of a split or confl ict of national cultural and political identities that is expressed in his writings in various ways...

...Albert Camus was the French novelist and essayist who, along with JeanPaul Sartre and a few others, represented the postwar Existentialist movement...

...He would have opposed the ill-treatment of prisoners, while seeking to know whether such ill-treatment was systemic or an aberration...

...But why not just say that Camus was confused...

...It is not news that Camus was in the thick of controversies...

...The French army and government always had a problem in that the settler “tribe” was adamant about not wanting to share power while the FLN was adamant that its core leadership would monopolize power, Leninist-style...

...But as Camus had been saying since the late 1930s, when he wrote a famous reportage for the Communist Alger-R?publicain newspaper on the oppression and misery of the Muslim population, this was wrong...

...For this, armchair experts accuse him of ambivalence, at best, or at worst, “objective” support for the colonialist side...

...Which would be factually mistaken, but it would at least be clear...

...That is why he said, angrily at a press conference when he received the Nobel Prize, that between justice (equality for all in Algeria) and his mother, he would choose his mother...

...Fully integrated into the canon of 20th-century letters, Camus became a problem for the academic thought police because of positions he took during the Algerian war of independence (195462...

...But it was during the Algerian war that matters went from very bad to really awful, because Sartre and his friends, who knew very little about Algeria, decided that Camus and his friends, wife, mother, uncles, etc.—who, of course, really were Algerians— did not know anything and were playing into the hands of reactionary racist colonialist . . . dogs, as Sartre called them...

...Hence the malentendu—not getting it—that Camus struggled to overcome during these years when he had to worry every day about whether his mother was boarding a bus that was about to explode...

...Army should stay out of the sectarian and tribal confl icts tearing Iraq apart...

...Carroll twists it, out of his sincere love of Camus, to mean that killing his mother would have been an injustice, so therefore, and so on...

...Sartre’s offi ce was around the corner, which is why the joint became a hangout and, eventually, a landmark...

...He was Algerian—of course he was Algerian, fran?ais d’Alg?rie—and that was never an issue...

...You had a de facto colonial situation, and you had to fi x it by giving full political equality to the Muslims...

...He shakes his head in despair at my habit of asking stupid questions...

...It was not fair...

...I do not ask whether any of that mattered, digging my hole deeper...

...However, it took only a few people who were not sensible or reasonable, but who had access to bombs, to render his position irrelevant...

...Meursault’s problem is existential...

...There were some big landowners, of course, and there were farmers who had worked very hard to drain the swamps of the Mitidja valley and turn it into a citrus paradise...

...Camus, my father used to say (and Joe concurring), was less friendly than some of these other literary derelicts, like Sartre, because he always felt he was being misunderstood...

...crowd gave him hell for that one...

...If I read Carroll correctly, erudite professors are assigning to Camus ideas and attitudes that are not his...

...It is not unusual for academics living in Princeton or UC Irvine to care about arguments that took place in Paris a half-century or more ago...

...Joe winces...

...His position was that the cycles of terror and repression played into the hands of the extremists on both sides, which seems obvious enough in retrospect...

...The conventional wisdom among Paris intellectuals was that they were parasitical plantation owners—gros colons...

...We are presently engaged in operations in Iraq, allied with some Iraqis against others who are themselves supported by a Muslim internationale...

...Sartre tended toward insult, invective...

...It’s not a bad place—nice booths, but steep prices—and I am up on the fourth fl oor in a little place across the street asking my old dad, who lives here, whether any of this matters...

...In the end, though, the only question in confl icts like this is who shall have power locally...

...Camus probably did not take the full measure of Algerian national sentiment, which united Arabs and Berbers, liberal nationalists like Ferhat Abbas (whom Camus respected), Leninists and proto-Islamists, against the French...

...And not getting it in a war can be a serious matter—justice in contradiction with itself...

...But isn’t this precisely the problem...

...He also deplored and denounced antiterrorism methods used by the French army, and he was an anticolonialist...

...Camus was not confused and he had no identity problems, if that’s what Carroll is trying to say...

...Simply projecting from what Camus said about terror and torture, he would surely have condemned people who set off bombs in marketplaces and mosques...

...In a (successful) strategy of cutting off and starving the insurgents while they hunted them down, the French took the battle to Egypt during the Suez expedition, and sealed off the borders with Tunisia and Morocco...

...He made reasonable arguments...

...There are still plenty of people around— like my old dad and his pal, Joseph Frank, whom Carroll and his friends could easily consult since he shuttles between Princeton and Stanford—who were there (not that this is always a recommendation for accuracy) and could tell them what-for...

...To my own considerable astonishment, I learn that such authorities as Conor Cruise O’Brien and Edward Said view Camus as an apologist for colonialism, perhaps even a racist...

...My father’s brows turn up in genuine surprise...

...It was awful...

...What I fi nd odd is that the contemporary argument should be so skewed...

...What would he have thought of our attempt to encourage such sentiment in the geographical expression called Iraq...

...French knew that decolonization was in the air...

...The Plague, he says, by omitting the Arabs, is really an attack on colonial segregation...

...Sartre wrote very well, too...

...More exactly, those circles frequented—hung out, we might say today—around my parents because their apartment was heated and they had access to cigarettes and whiskey...

...Administratively and politically, he was right: Algeria comprised three departements of France...

...Personally, I always thought Camus was diffi - cult to misunderstand: He sought clarity and pursued a kind of “measure,” evenhandedness, which he took from the Greeks whom he studied for his nevercompleted doctorate...

...Camus’s position was that there were several populations in Algeria, and simple justice required they be taken into account when accounts were settled...

...Maybe he would have felt the same way about the American, British, and Iraqi forces battling marketplace killers—maybe not...