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La Peste: Infected by the Bacillus of Self-Consciousness Steven G. Kellman T HOUGH WHITE IS A BLEND OF ALL COLORS and white noise is an amalgam of every sound, a veritably Bakhtinian em­ bodiment of the polyvocal, what Roland Barthes dubbed l’écriture blanche is a literature of absence. In this neutral, innocent degré zéro de l’écriture, contends Barthes, “la problématique humaine est découverte et livrée sans couleur.” 1 Barthes credits L ’Etranger with inaugurating this literary achromatism. In Camus’s first published novel, he found a definitive transparency, “ un style de l’absence qui est presque une absence idéale du style” (ibid., p. 109). Among the irritable appur­ tenances of style abjured by L ’Etranger in Barthes’s reading of it are linguistic opacity and narrative self-consciousness. Meursault’s story is told with the illusory immediacy that makes us forget the agency of words and the context of storytelling. Barthes was doubtless indulging in heuristics when he seized on L ’Etranger as the paradigm of neutral prose. But there is surely a para­ dox in cataloguing a book whose central actions are a murder and a capital conviction as a prototype of “ innocence.” The novel’s two-part structure as a representation of the hermeneutic experience—in which the reader is first presented with a record of apparently random events and then, during the trial, asked to reorganize and interpret those events— pushes Camus’s prose several degrees above zero. “ The result,” declares Brian T. Fitch, “is a text wherein the reader reads the story of his own activity. The experience provided by L ’Etranger is paradoxically that of its own reading.” 2If so, Le Degré zéro de l’écriture would seem a purer case of innocence than would L ’Etranger. Schiller might well have judged Camus—not quite the Algerian primitive that Left Bank intellec­ tuals thought they were patronizing—more sentimentalisch than naïve. Though Fitch’s book The Narcissistic Text provides abundant docu­ mentation of inter- and intratextuality throughout the Camus canon, the laureate of the limpid light of North Africa is rarely invoked in discus­ sions of metafiction. His moral earnestness and his sober prose (Is white the antithesis of purple?) make Camus seem as distant from Borges, Calvino, and Joyce as he was uncomfortable in the bookish cénacle of 22 Su m m e r 1991 K el lm a n Sartre and Beauvoir. Instinctually repelled by artistic flamboyance, Camus championed an aesthetic of literary asceticism in which the author renounces the temptations of embellishment and ego. “ La grande règle de l’artiste,” he wrote in “ L’Intelligence et l’échafaud” in 1943, “ est de s’oublier à moitié au profit d’une expression communicable.” 3 He aspired to an ideal of classicism that eschewed originality; “ Etre classique, c’est se répéter,” proclaimed the publicist of Sisyphus (ibid., p. 1898). And yet he also recognized that consciousness of the repetition was fundamental to achieving classical lucidity: “Etre classique, c’est en même temps se répéter et savoir se répéter” (ibid.). La Peste, over which Camus struggled for seven years, while he also wrote “ L’Intelligence et l’échafaud,” is usually discussed thematically, as direct witness to the virtue of resistance and rebellion against a “ claustrophobic world of war, prison, concentration camp, and tor­ ture,” in Germaine Brée’s phrase.4In his famous January 11, 1955 letter to Roland Barthes, Camus himself denied that the novel is anti-historical and encouraged critics to read it as a transparent allegory of resistance to the Nazi occupation. Though Fitch, who analyzes La Peste in a chapter he calls “ The Autoreferential Text,” counts 170 references to texts within the text of Camus’s translucent novel (Fitch, p. 15), few other critics have noted how thoroughly metafictional is this fiction about a plague in Oran. La Peste begins with an epigraph from the preface to volume 3 of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, one that—beyond the general effect of all epigraphs in alerting readers to the kinship of what they are about to read with other works of literature—foregrounds...

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