Story 1: THE ADULTEROUS WOMAN

[DWill]

The topic of Camus' attitude toward the Algerians reminds me somewhat of our discussion of Conrad's toward the people of the Congo. It's a tricky area to be in. I'm not sure that, in the end, we are justified in drawing conclusions about a writer's beliefs about the real world from what he puts in his fictive world. In Camus' case, he chooses to make his main characters Europeans, and these are naturally the focus of his writing. It seems understandable to me that elements more in the background would not be individuated, would function more as backdrop for the experience of the main characters. There is a tendency to simplify these secondary features of the fiction just because the writer, perhaps especially in short fiction, needs to do one thing well.
DWill

[Robert Tulip]

Yes, the parallels with Conrad are strong. Maybe that is part of the attraction. Both are presenting humanistic perspectives on imperialism, picking up the conflicted emotions and perceptions of those caught up in the great game. But you can't divorce Camus from the political context of his work. My understanding is that he retained some support for French chauvinism in Africa, but wanted to analyse this against a psychological portrait of the French-Arab interactions, and an effort to understand the otherness of Algeria. Leaving the Arabs and Africans as cardboard cutouts without personality development is part of this bigger picture of how Europe interacted, and still interacts, with Africa. It is like the colonialists are trying to recreate a part of the metropolis in the wilderness, and cannot assimilate the brooding presence of the Congo/the Algerians into their controlling mentality.

[Yuvie]

I'm reading the new translation by Carol Cosman, which I'm not sure I like. But on page 5 there is this: "Above all, she loved being loved, and he [her husband] had flooded her with attentions. Making her feel so often that she existed for him, he made her existence real." From the little I've read of Camus, it seems everyone lumped him in with the existentialists even though he himself denied it. But putting his objections aside, you can think of existentialism as this inability to find meaning within oneself. (I don't have much experience talking about existentialism so if anyone would like to tweak me, feel free.) One of my classes talked a lot about the importance of the "gaze," a word Cosman uses a lot in her translation. You're validated, made real by other people seeing you, I presume because you can't find meaning in yourself. So whenever the other French soldier and Arabs refuse to see her, looking past her, Janine feels unnerved.

Thinking, then, of that first quotation about Marcel making Janine's existence real, I wonder if the title (which in the Cosman translation is "The Adulterous Wife") is possibly referring back to the moment on page 22: "She wanted to be delivered, even if Marcel, even if the others never were!" Her moment on the roof of the fort is adulterous, a betrayal, because she does not rely on her husband or anyone else for that moment of true existence (even if she is in a delirious state).

So why is she crying at the end? For one thing, Marcel turns on the light in an almost accusatory way ("He stood up and turned on the light, which slapped her full in the face."). I felt a suspense built up, thinking he would accuse her of slipping out to meet someone, but then you realize that he's not thinking of her at all. "He was ready to slip back between the sheets when, with one knee on the bed, he looked at her, bewildered." She believes herself "caught," the focus of his anger, only to realize she's nothing at all to him. Or maybe it's the realization that she doesn't need him, nor he her, and now she doesn't know how to validate her life. What do you do when everything you thought you relied on turns out to mean nothing?

[Yuvie]

On another note, this first story reminded me a lot of Paul Bowles's The Sheltering Sky, published in 1947 I think. He's an American author, but he writes about Algeria as well and his novel has many points of contact to this story in terms of character problems and philosophical questions, in case anyone wants to explore more.

[yodha]

The topic of Camus' attitude toward the Algerians reminds me somewhat of our discussion of Conrad's toward the people of the Congo.

Yes, I felt this similarity here to the settings in Heart of Darkness. Especially in the second story The Renegade.

[DWill]

I'm reading the new translation by Carol Cosman, which I'm not sure I like. But on page 5 there is this: "Above all, she loved being loved, and he [her husband] had flooded her with attentions. Making her feel so often that she existed for him, he made her existence real."

Saffron mentioned that the older translation (1957) wasn't well received. Could it be that this new translation attempts to more accurately reflect an existentialist vocabulary (even though Camus denied the label)?

I definitely think you're on to something in your post. I don't see anything sexually orgasmic happening to her when she is on the roof, but that would not, as you say, be necessary for the meaning of "aldulterous" to still come through.
DWill

[Saffron]

Yuvie wrote:

...Or maybe it's the realization that she doesn't need him, nor he her, and now she doesn't know how to validate her life. What do you do when everything you thought you relied on turns out to mean nothing?

I agree with Yuvie. Janine's moment on the roof of the fort is the adultery. She claims herself for herself. She now exists for more than just for her husband. Does this awake Janine, who exists separately from the husband still want him and the life they have together? I think these questions are why she is crying and feels accused by the light. When we are "awake" we can not not face ourselves and our lives. It does not make sense to me that because she has found her own meaning/existence apart from her husband and other external sources, that automatically everything she relied on in the past means nothing. Instead I suggest that Janine is wrestling with the changing meanings and her altered perspective.

[Robert Tulip]

Janine's moment on the roof of the fort is the adultery. She claims herself for herself. She now exists for more than just for her husband. Does this awake Janine, who exists separately from the husband still want him and the life they have together? I think these questions are why she is crying and feels accused by the light. When we are "awake" we can not not face ourselves and our lives. It does not make sense to me that because she has found her own meaning/existence apart from her husband and other external sources, that automatically everything she relied on in the past means nothing. Instead I suggest that Janine is wrestling with the changing meanings and her altered perspective.

But Saffron, adultery requires another, otherwise there is no adulteration. Her yearning for the vitality of Africa is her crime against France. She cannot be adulterous in isolation. How can one have meaning apart from external sources? She does not taste of the forbidden fruit, but the adultery is in her heart, which is not satisfied by what her husband represents and can give.

[Robert Tulip]

Further, this story is highly existentialist. Janine is entirely alone with her thoughts. In Heidegger's definition of existentialism, she is in a situation of finite freedom unto death. This lonely freedom is where she encounters her identity. However, her identity is conflicted, and Camus is using the story to show how French identity faced conflicts in its relations with Africa, as people caught up in the events struggled to reconcile them with their basic humanity. The story opens this problem of identity, as human beings are firstly human, and only secondly citizens. Yet the state demands that we place identity as citizens above identity as human beings, in the interest of stability, economy and law. Janine is privately rebelling against this state idea of identity, which suggests she should subordinate her common humanity with Africa to her duty to her husband and country.

[WildCityWoman]

I'm just going to paste the story as I go along - there shouldn't be a problem with this, seeing as how it's already online as a text doc:

A HOUSEFLY had been circling for the last few minutes in the bus, though the windows were closed. An odd sight here, it had been silently flying back and forth on tired wings. Janine lost track of it, then saw it light on her husband's motionless hand. The weather was cold. The fly shuddered with each gust of sandy wind that scratched against the windows. In the meager light of the winter morning, with a great fracas of sheet metal and axles, the vehicle was rolling, pitching, and making hardly any progress.

It's odd when you see a fly in winter time. Says a lot for the keepers of that bus - ha ha!

Janine looked at her husband. With wisps of graying hair growing low on a narrow forehead, a broad nose, a flabby mouth, Marcel looked like a pouting faun.

Does he mean 'fawn'? Is the spelling in other translations of the story?

At each hollow in the pavement she felt him jostle against her. Then his heavy torso would slump back on his widespread legs and he would become inert again and absent, with vacant stare. Nothing about him seemed active but his thick hairless hands, made even shorter by the flannel underwear extending below his cuffs and covering his wrists. His hands were holding so tight to a little canvas suitcase set between his knees that they appeared not to feel the fly's halting progress.