"Hath not an Arab eyes?": Paul Smail and the Conformist Inferno

On October 26^th, 1998, the audience at New York University's Maison Française was treated to a rare spectacle: Tahar Ben Jelloun reading extracts from Paul Smaïl's novels. ¹ It was an especially appropriate moment on a number of levels. First, Ben Jelloun is a capable actor who knows how to bring a text to life. Second, this sort of rendition is probably what Paul Smaïl himself would have wanted, for he well understands the importance of theatricality in the construction of identity today, at this millennial moment in the république black blanc beur. Smaïl's oeuvre negotiates his identity as a French citizen of Moroccan ancestry in French society of the 1990s. (The term "citizen" is especially appropriate; his grandfather died fighting for France in World War I; his father was a lifetime employee of the SNCF.) In the following essay, I would like to trace Smaïl's preoccupation through the autobiographical novels that he has written so far, with a view to exploring the construction of identity as represented in French fiction at the end of the twentieth century. I use the term "French" advisedly, since part of my point is that Paul Smaïl, like several other writers often placed under the beur label, is in fact French, not Arab--historic connections to the Middle East and North Africa notwithstanding.

My analysis will make use of a term coined by Francis Fergusson: the "histrionic sensibility," or habit of thinking about the self as a "role," be it fictitious, theatrical or televised. ² Roger Shattuck has extended the scope of Fergusson's analysis to explore its ramifications and relationship to the concept of an identity, calling attention to "the ways in which playacting and character formation have mingled in the modern post-revolutionary world" (122). Since citizens of the modern state are no longer born into a pre-determined station in life, it is incumbent upon them to create an identity for themselves, which depends on the performance of the self being developed. For Shattuck, this state of affairs makes acting the salient feature of modernity. Drawing on key moments in La Chartreuse de Parme, Baudelaire's "Une mort héroïque" and Sartre's L'Être et le néant, he recounts the development of a mode of existence where being and acting are bound inextricably with each other:

Stendhal's jubilant tone gave the young prince [Ranuce-Ernest V] the very means he needed to assume his new station. What he learned from the duchess still resembles the kind of training Castiglione prescribes in The Book of the Courtier, training in roles fully appropriate to the noble's condition and to the status quo. In Baudelaire and Sartre, however, the situation has become distinctly uneasy. The reasons of state that require Fancioulle's death are more metaphysical and psychological than political. The actor practices a magic so effective that it seems to threaten the prince's authority and the status quo that it rests on. In Sartre the status quo has simply vanished. Having no given being (en soi), the man employed by the café must be what he is not, in order to do his best to become a waiter. He plays a role. There is something terribly wistful about Sartre's semi-comic description. He presents the waiter so that we see him as "alone--with onlookers," as Valéry says of Stendhal's characters. It is the very condition Stanislavsky finds exalting for the actor: "solitude in public" (An Actor Prepares). These two quotations reveal not so much a passive narcissism in the human psyche as our profound reliance on self-performance. The footlight phase ³ sets the terms of our freedom. (ibid. 122-23)

And so it is in the first-person, autobiographical novels of Paul Smaïl. Theatrical role-playing is the key mechanism through which selves are defined. Sma&iuml...