‘Ces forces obscures de l’âme’: Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus (review)

This is a well-researched and argued study, with an extensive bibliography, written from a feminist and sociological perspective. Christine Margerrison, disclaiming any ideological stance or final judgement, focuses principally on the prose fiction. Inevitably there is an element of arbitrariness in the interpretations of some aspects of Camus’s complex personality and work. The author wishes to show that a ‘female stereotype’ is central to Camus’s creative imagination. She establishes a paradigm into which she fits not only all the women in his writings, but also the indigenous peoples of Algeria and elsewhere, and all flawed male characters (Clamence, for example). Camus, she suggests, sees lucidity as the birthright of the male, woman being a body without a soul, instinct without intellect. His women are not so much virgins and whores as mothers and others, the pale-complexioned (European) mother representing racial purity and cultural priority. Nonetheless, even she is ambivalent, corruption and disease being passed on through her body. Female sexuality means loss of control and boundaries and thus signifies the disintegration of the colonial world. Margerrison chooses the early essay ‘La Maison mauresque’, written in 1933, when Camus was not yet 20, to set the perspective and interconnections: the architecture of the Moorish house becomes the embodiment of the dangerous ‘femininity’ of the harem, which, deep in Camus’s psyche, it is claimed, characterizes the whole Arab world and women in general. The awakening of the intellectual and spiritual potential of the young male, Margerrison says, always requires the death of the Woman (L’Etranger, Caligula, La Chute), who is thereby reduced to absolute silence. Disagreeing with Rizzuto, Margerrison does not believe that Camus in any way deepened his sympathy for women or understanding of them. She places a good deal of emphasis on Camus’s debt to Nietzsche, allowing however that his view changes as a result of the war. Camus dreamed of a natural aristocracy of labour and the intellect. We may add that it is d’abord l’acceptation de certains devoirs (Carnets III). This is in line with an ideal much older than Nietzsche’s Übermensch. Nor can Camus’s attitude to Christianity be reduced, as here, simply to an acceptance of Nietzsche’s contemptuous epithet: slave religion (i.e. fit only for women!). Camus’s contacts with the Dominicans and Bruckberger, or with the Jesuit Didier, his rebuke to an interviewer in 1948 (‘Je réfléchirais avant de dire comme vous que la foi chrétienne est une démission. Peut-on écrire ce mot pour un saint Augustin ou un Pascal?’, Essais, p. 380) amply show that while he refused Christianity, he never failed to respect it. Incidentally, the Renegade is not a priest, and he murders the priest who comes with le visage de la bonté. Women and Arabs are the great ‘absents’ from Camus’s work (les absents ont toujours tort). Camus’s deepest fears and fixations, les forces obscures de l’âme, are inferred from the fiction and essays, leaving a lot of room for discussion. Margerrison does not want to condemn Camus for being ‘a man of his time’, but, all the same, she puts the case for the prosecution very vigorously.