Revolution and Modernity: Assia Djebaris Les enfants du nouveau monde

With the 1985 publication of her landmark novel L'amour, la fantasia, Algerian writer Assia Djebar moved into a position of increasing international visibility and critical attention. With its blending of history, autobiography, and fiction, this work would position Djebar alongside authors like Bessie Head (A Question of Power, 1974; Serowe, 1981) and Sara Suleri (Meatless Days, 1989) as a lucid critic of gender, history, and subjectivity in colonial and postcolonial contexts. Djebar's earliest works, however, in a career that stretches back to 1956, are rarely mentioned in recent critical debate. ¹ Her wartime novel Les enfants du nouveau monde (1962)is nonetheless long overdue for critical revival, for it reveals an early moment in Djebar's evolving interests in the problem of subjectivity, during the period of anticolonial struggle. ² My argument here is that while the novel in many ways takes part in the Weberian discourse of modernization that male francophone commentators frequently employed in their construction of an Algerian nationalism, the clear interest in female subjectivity within Les enfants finally leads the novel toward a more original, and prescient, vision of a revolutionary modernity.

In its narrative structure, Les enfants juxtaposes a number of different individual points of view. A third-person narrator moves with abrupt or sometimes nonexistent transitions from the mind of one character to another. There is no clear hierarchy among these individual perspectives, and it would be difficult to isolate one character's perceptions as central. Indeed it is the parallel experiences of many different characters that seem to be the emphasis here, in a text where various points of view are juxtaposed for our comparison. In its thematic content the novel focuses on rapidly changing self-identification and the redefinition of agency among its set of characters. Set in the small Algerian city of Blida, the novel follows the events of one day, 24 May 1956, in the early years of the fight for national independence. Thrust into radically new, often dangerous situations because of the war, characters must invent new behaviors and attitudes. For each character in turn, old habits of feeling are reevaluated and rejected, in the face of often brutal new realities. Subjectivity is set into screeching motion, provoked toward crisis, or challenged to the point of undoing, by the events of the revolution.

In its evocation of a world through consciousness, in its sketching of multiple, atomized points of perception, the novel presents on the level of its form some of its most interesting and difficult interpretive problems. How are we to understand these narrative devices, so typical of a European modernism of the preceding decades? Rather than seeing Djebar's narrative form here in terms of European precursors, however, the novel should be understood within a particular Algerian modernism of the revolutionary moment. ³ The novel is modernist, I will argue here, not in the sense that it borrows aesthetic features from European artistic movements of several previous decades, but in the sense that Anthony Appiah has described: "Modernism," he writes, "in literature and architecture and philosophy [. . .] may be for reason or against it: but in each domain rationalization—the pervasion of reason—is seen as the distinctive dynamic of contemporary history" (145). ⁴

The spread of instrumental reason and the decay of various received codes of behavior is pervasively shown through the novel's portrayal of working-class and professional men and both "modern" and "traditional" women. The central characters are confronted with situations that escape the categories of their earlier lives, and each must think in synthetic and critical ways to devise the best responses to desperate and often brutal events. However, it is also through these experiences of individual reasoning that characters find new social and political connections, and these new affiliations stand for an emerging set of horizontal links that will define the new Algerian national polity. It is in...