posted on 25 Aug 2021

Exile and the Kingdom by Albert Camus

Whenever I think of Camus’s fiction I think of the four books collected together in an old single volume edition published by Hamish Hamilton in 1970: The Collected Fiction of Albert Camus contained The Outsider, The Plague, The Fall and Exile and the Kingdom. I’ve read the first three a number of times, but I’m not certain that I have ever read the last. It is a series of six short stories, to the best of my knowledge the only short stories Camus ever published.

In atmosphere and execution they are more akin to existentialist parables. The majority are set in Algeria. They may not be Camus’s greatest or most widely read work but in some ways they reveal him at his most diverse. For instance, one of them (Jonas or The Artist at Work) has an almost light, satirical tone that I don’t think is found anywhere else in Camus’s fiction.

Initially, I was unsure that these relatively slight works would be sufficient to support the weight of Camus’s philosophical themes, but generally speaking I think they do, and all of the ideas Camus is most known for are here in one form or another: power and powerlessness, exile and loss, freedom and tyranny, moral choice, action and inaction, rebellion and resistance, isolation and loneliness…

The best succeed because for all the abstractness of the philosophical concepts that underpin them they are superbly written and deeply rooted in vividly imagined and powerfully described everyday circumstances. For example, a husband and wife travel by bus on the fringes of the Algerian desert, the husband seeking to sell goods directly to Arab merchants, thus boosting his failing dry-goods business (An Adulterous Woman); working class labourers at a barrel-maker’s workshop return following a failed strike and resist the boss’s efforts to re-establish cordial relationships, even after the boss’s young daughter is taken seriously ill (The Silent Men); a teacher at a remote primary school on an arid, stony plateau refuses to act as jailor of an Arab convicted of murder (The Guest). They may be parables but for the most part they are parables of the ordinary and therein lies their strength.

Perhaps the exception to this is also the strangest and the most viscerally intense of the stories, The Renegade. It involves a missionary who is captured, beaten and tortured – his tongue cut out – by a tribe who worship pagan fetishes. The missionary agrees to kill the next Christian missionary sent to the area and lies in wait for him. The story seems to be suggesting that the tyranny of fundamentalist belief can as readily serve one belief-system as another.

The most consistently startling presences in most of these stories are landscape and weather. They are hostile forces, clearly important to Camus both materially and metaphorically: arid stony desert and infertile soil (the biblically desolate plateau of The Guest is fit only for “harvesting rocks”); sandstorms that obscure the world with a dense, gritty, suffocating fog; extreme heat that turns as suddenly to bitter cold; palm trees that have a harsh, mineral glint as if cut out of sheet metal…

Not all the stories succeed equally well, I don’t think, but they are an essential element in Camus’s fiction. The prose is wonderful and the 1958 translation (Justin O’Brien) excellent. It is worth emphasising that despite his philosophical purpose, Camus never lectures in these stories. They may have what one critic has described as a “complex simplicity” but the reader is left to work out whatever freighted meaning she or he chooses to take from these passionately detached miniatures.

 

Alun Severn

August 2021

 

Albert Camus elsewhere on Letterpress

 

The Plague (Le Peste) by Albert Camus

 

Another view on Albert Camus’ The Plague