This is the second part of a two part series that attempts to read Albert Camus’ 1942 novel in a particular Algerian context. The first part outlines the argument (and can be read here). This second part provides further background evidence to support this argument.

1.

In the notes accompanying the unfinished manuscript for the novel The First Man, which Camus was writing in the late 1950s, up until his death in January 1960, there is, among other notes, the single line: ‘The sense of honour among Algerians.’ In the first part of this study we looked solely at the text of The Stranger, in comparison with Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological study of the Kabyle region of Algeria, “The Sense of Honour”; the latter helped make explicit what was otherwise implicit in the novel. Here we can broaden the range of documents to include other works, including non-fiction works, where Camus more directly demonstrates his understanding of, and his own implication within, this sense of honour in Algeria. But we can also embed these further using several other novels written by Algerian authors, contemporary with Camus, as well as from the generations that followed his death, in order to qualify and reinforce this implication.

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2.

Bourdieu’s work on this sense of honour is focused on the Kabyle. Mouloud Mammeri’s 1955 novel, The Sleep of the Just, which is structured by this sense of honour, supports Bourdieu’s findings. ‘There is the Almighty and there are men,’ the narrator states. ‘Each man receives his destiny from God. It was He who ordained the father’s poverty, but poverty is no disgrace; only to lose one’s honour is.’ Earlier in the novel, in the opening pages, there is this exchange between cousins, which sets up the conceit for the rest of the novel:

“But honour, cousin Toudert,” said Sliman, “the honour of us Kabylians means more than anything, more than peace, riches – more than life – than death.”

Again, later in the novel, when the figure, Raveh of the Ait-Hemlat, is retired from his position of influence in the town, he states: “I go happy in the knowledge of never having broken the laws of God or the Kabylian code of honour... The rest is of little concern to me.”

Previously, in the first part of this study of the Algerian context of The Stranger, I suggested – through my correspondence with Algerian scholar, Nabil Boudraa, and through J.G. Peristiany’s edited collection, Honour and Shame: the values of Mediterranean society, where in 1965 an abridged form of Bourdieu’s study first appeared in English – that this sense of honour in Bourdieu’s study extends beyond the Kabyle and is characteristic of Algerian culture generally, as well as finding its variations across the Mediterranean. This is shown, for example, in Yasmina Khadra 2013 novel, The Angels Die. When young Turambo, an Arab, first goes to Oran in the 1930s, he meets an older boy, Gino, a Jew, and they become friends. Gino’s family is better off than Turambo’s family, and at one point he gives Turambo a pair of trousers which he had outgrown. Afterward he gives furtive glances at Turambo to ‘make sure I wasn’t offended.’ The novel is in the first-person, from Turambo’s perspective: ‘Later, several years later, I asked him why he’d been so defensive when he was only trying to help a friend. Gino replied that it was because Arabs were sensitive and had a sense of honour so excessive they would be suspicious even of a good deed.’ This was shown earlier in the novel when Turambo told his uncle that he was going to start working as a shoeshine boy in the town. His uncle, Mekki, forbids him. “Our house may be nothing but ruins, our fields have been confiscated,” says Mekki, “but we still have our honour.” To which Turambo’s narrative states: ‘Mekki dared to talk to me about honour and abstract, solemn duties while I sniffed shame with every breath of air.’

In Kamel Daoud’s 2013 novel, this sense of honour is shown to operate even in working-class neighbourhoods of Algiers, and to include also those of European descent, the main point being – as we showed in the first part of this study – that they were ‘men’, rather than their particular ethnic background. His narrator states: ‘Men in working-class neighbourhoods of Algiers actually did have an exaggerated, grotesque sense of honor.’

Of course, this novel, The Meursault Investigation, is a special case in point, because it is written by Daoud in direct riposte to the challenge of Albert Camus’ 1942 novel, The Stranger. The narrator in The Meursault Investigation is the brother of the Arab killed by Meursault – in this novel his brother is named, Musa – and here, in this reference to ‘an exaggerated, grotesque sense of honor’, he is referencing the configuration of Musa (Arab), Raymond Sintès (Spanish), and Meursault (French). Previously, I showed that Bourdieu opens his study, “The Sense of Honour”, with three brief vignettes, recounting various interactions between Kabyle men, and he uses these as the basis of extracting what he calls ‘the rules of the game of challenge and riposte.’ I suggested there that with regards this ‘game’, the initial altercation between Sintès, his mistress, and her brother – later broadened to include also Meursault himself – would not be out of place amongst Bourdieu’s vignettes. Kamel Daoud here directly supports that suggestion.

Camus himself was, through his mother, of Spanish descent. In 1958, in the preface to the republication of his earlier lyrical essays – addressed to a largely metropolitan French audience – Camus writes about developing in his youth a ‘Castilian pride’, which he distinguishes from abstract moral principles and associates more closely with this cultural sense of honour in his native Algeria:

Like everyone, I’ve done my best to improve my nature by means of ethics. Alas, the price has been high. With energy, something I have a good deal of, one sometimes manages to behave morally, but never to be moral. To long for morality when one is a man of passion is to yield to injustice at the very moment one speaks of justice. Man sometimes seems to me a walking injustice: I am thinking of myself.... Surely I’ve never claimed to be a just man. I’ve only said that we should try to be just, and also that such an ambition involves suffering and unhappiness. But is this distinction so important? And can the man who does not even manage to make justice prevail in his own life preach its virtues to other people? If only we could live according to honor – that virtue of the unjust! But our society finds the word obscene; “aristocratic” is a literary and philosophical insult. I am not an aristocrat, my reply is in this book: here are my people, my teachers, my ancestry; here is what, through them, links me with everyone. And yet I do need honor, because I am not big enough to do without it! (emphasis added)

Recall here that scene in chapter four of The Stranger, when the policeman confronts Raymond (also of Spanish descent). Raymond is shaking because the policeman slapped him and he didn’t retaliate to this insult; because he had lost face in front of his ‘pal’, Meursault. Afterward Meursault assured him he didn’t expect him to do anything, and in that process Raymond was able to save face, to maintain his sense of honour.

This scenario is reversed in The Angels Die. Turambo, now older and a professional boxer, is in love with a Frenchwoman named Irène, the daughter of his main financial backer. At a party in Oran, she meets an old flame, André, a Frenchman and an off-duty Algerian policeman, who insults her and is racist toward Turambo. It is a brief scene of challenge and riposte in which Turambo gets the better of André, but André is likewise allowed to save face. Yasmina Khadra writes:

André again seized Irène by the arm and drew her to him. She pushed him away. As he returned to the attack, I grabbed his wrist in mid-air and forced him to move back. He glanced around; much to his relief, nobody was taking any notice of us. To save face, he shrieked, “Never put your dirty ape hand on me, you little shit, or I swear by all that’s holy I’ll thrash you in this very square until you’re just blood and pus...” (emphasis added)

3.

This note found among Camus’ papers after his death – ‘The sense of honour among Algerians’ – finds its corollary in the draft-manuscript of The First Man, in relation to the order of challenge and riposte, that previously we showed implicitly structuring the first part of The Stranger. In this draft, however, where Camus is describing a childhood incident of the protagonist Jacques Cormery, in Algeria, he is more explicit. Young Cormery is called a ‘teacher’s pet’ in class, which he takes exception to. This is how the scene and its consequences are described (the square brackets are in the original, and represent an addition Camus later pencilled into the draft-manuscript):

At the end of the day, Jacques asked who had called him a ‘teacher’s pet’. To take such an insult without responding would have meant a loss of honour.

   ‘I did,’ said Munoz, a big blond boy, rather flabby and insipid, who though undemonstrative had always shown his antipathy to Jacques.

   ‘All right,’ said Jacques. ‘Then your mother’s a whore [and your ancestors are whores]’ That too was a ritual insult that led immediately to battle, for to insult mothers and the dead had been from time immemorial the most serious of affronts known to the shores of the Mediterranean. Even so, Munoz hesitated. But a ritual is a ritual, and others spoke for him: ‘Come on, it’s the green field.’ The green field was a sort of waste ground, not far from the school, where sickly grass grew in scabby bunches, littered with old hoops, tin cans and rotting barrels. This was where the donnades took place. A donnade was just a duel, with the fist taking the place of the sword, but obeying the same ceremonial rules, at least in spirit. Its aim was to settle a quarrel where the honour of one the adversaries was at stake, either because someone had insulted his parents or his ancestors, or had belittled his nationality or his race, or had been informed on or had accused another of informing, had stolen or been accused of it, or else for the more obscure reasons that come up every day in a society of children...

   Jacques, having done his duty as a man by challenging Munoz, was certainly scared enough, as he was every time he put himself in a situation where he had to face violence and to deal it out. But he had made his decision, and in his mind there was never for an instant any question of backing out. This was the nature of things....

As an initial point of comparison, consider this passage from Mouloud Feraoun’s novel, Poor Man’s Son, written in Algeria during the late 1930s – the same period that Camus wrote The Stranger – although it was not published until 1950:

Never once did I ask my parents for help when an adversary was my age: I either accept the fight or, if I am scared, I run away. I carefully hide retreats and defeats. I speak only of my victories. There is no question that, apart from my mother, neither my father, my uncle, nor anyone else in my family would have agreed to help me. They would have been disagreeably surprised, first of all, to see me back down, and then would have forced me to confront my opponent. These things had already happened to me. My uncle had already exposed me to such risks more than once. When I returned the victor from one of these ill-timed battles, everyone congratulated me. When I was beaten, they showered me with insults...

If it is a boy my age, I have no reason to be afraid. My uncle angrily enumerates all my advantages: I am better fed, therefore I am stronger; or, “His father has never been to war” – the son of a coward shall not force a Menrad to back down; or perhaps, “It’s the son of a widow” – by definition lacking courage; or, finally, it is a boy from a rival clan – no retreat was permissible before an enemy.

   Deep down I recognize the full power of these irrefutable arguments, and I resign myself to show courage.

Such physical conflict, inculcated in the young, and reinforced by the opprobrium or support of the family, was indeed ‘the nature of things’.

How prevalent this was is shown in miniature in a vignette in Assia Djebar’s 1962 novel, Children of the New World, related to the Chicou brothers. At the largest of the Moorish cafes, the Chicou brothers (the ‘real Chicou’ and his brother-in-law) would start each day playing checkers, but as they got drunker during the course of the day, they entered into what is referred to as ‘the ritual’ – but which is the order of challenge and riposte – trading insults, about the real Chicou’s sister, the brother-in-law’s wife, ending each evening in a fight. “Son of a whore, or actually, whore’s brother!”

Within the circle that formed as soon as the second rejoinder was uttered, leaving just enough space for the final brawl as usual, the real Chicou takes another threatening step, and this time he knocks over the table.’

   “Defend your sister’s honor, I ask you, your sister who’s a whore, I tell you, on her back in my bed night after night!” – “My sister is a virgin, a white dove of paradise who soars above you and your scum, you poor wretches who know nothing but prickly pears!”

Later in the novel, the character Ali reflects on this daily occurrence, as a synecdoche for the culture at large, as shown in the rest of the narrative: ‘He spoke about the Chicou brothers, who at the Palais d’Orient had been fighting each other day in and day out for years, tossing the wife’s body back and forth between them, their obscene curses trampling her like a dog, the dishonoured sister above whose head they hugged, jostled, and made up again.’

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4.

Within this order of challenge and riposte, this nature of things, there are, however, certain rules and procedures – as the Feraoun passage above, and the section from The First Man, suggests. Significantly, Camus wrote the preface to, and republished, his earlier lyrical essays, in preparation for his embarking upon the writing of The First Man. It is therefore also significant to consider in this connection a third passage from Camus, drawn from one of these re-published lyrical essays, “Summer in Algiers”, published in 1938, around the time Camus was preparing to write The Stranger. Here he addresses directly the sense of honour at play amongst the men of Algiers, his own milieu:

The notion of hell, for example, is nothing more than an amusing joke here. Only the very virtuous are allowed such fancies. And I even think that virtue is a meaningless word in Algeria. Not that these men lack principles. They have their code of morality, which is very well defined. You “don’t let your mother down.” You see to it that your wife is respected in the street. You show consideration to pregnant women. You don’t attack your enemy two to one, because “that’s dirty”. If anyone fails to observe these elementary rules “He’s not a man,” and that’s all there is to it. This seems to me just and strong.

This basic rule of fighting – ‘You don’t attack your enemy two to one, because “that’s dirty”’ – is reflected in Bourdieu’s findings, as we saw in the first part of this study:

The rules of honour [are] also used to govern fighting. Solidarity required every man to protect a kinsmen against a non-kinsman, an affine against a man from another faction (suf), a fellow villager, albeit from a rival faction, against an outsider, and a fellow tribesman against a member of another tribe. But honour forbade several men to fight against a single man. (emphasis added)

We saw this enacted in chapter six of The Stranger, when Raymond and his friend Masson and Meursault come across the two Arabs on the beach. Meursault steps back and does not get involved, precisely because it would be wrong to fight three against two. In the same scene, he also (fatefully) took Raymond’s gun, because it would have been unfair to draw a weapon while those on the other side were apparently unarmed.

This basic rule appears also in Yasmina Khadra’s novel, The Angels Die. As a child Turambo is attacked by the Daho brothers, part of a gang; they always attacked first, two at a time, to surprise their victims. But on this occasion a nearby shopkeeper saw them both attacking Turambo, and intervened:

“Aren’t you ashamed of yourselves?” a providential voice rang out. “A whole bunch of you picking on a little kid?”

But here the shopkeeper is not so much helping Turambo from being attacked, as he is only reinforcing the custom by which such attacks can be fairly perpetrated:

   “If you want to take him on, do it one at a time.”

   I’d been expecting the shopkeeper to come to my rescue, but all he was doing was organising my beating in a more conventional way, which wasn’t exactly a lucky break for me. (emphasis added)

In Mouloud Mammeri’s novel, The Sleep of the Just, there is a scene on a worksite when the boss calls on a workman to catch a boy who is trespassing on the site. The workman hits the boy, and then the foreman appears and does the same. Then the boss starts in on the boy, too. Three against one. Sliman – whom we cited earlier saying that ‘honour means more than anything’ – reactively steps in to even up the fight. ‘Sliman never knew what drove him to do it,’ the narrator states. ‘He threw himself into the little group, and madly landed out blows all around.’ Lounas, another man, also enters the fray, to even out the numbers, supporting both Sliman and the boy, now three against three.

Afterwards, Lounas asks Sliman:

   “What made you start hitting out?”

   “I don’t know,” Sliman replied.

What this suggests is that such behaviours, guided by convention, once it has been inculcated into the young by their elders, have become reactive rather than conscious. Assia Djebar supports this when, in Children of the New World, she describes this condition as being like being ‘imprisoned in custom (and to experience that custom as an instinct).’ In the same novel, Djebar points out that the first daily ‘insult’ made by one of the Chicou brothers, which sets off the evening of challenge and risposte, is always unintentional, and purely ‘habitual.’

This instinctive, habitual, reactive subordination to such custom goes some way to explaining also the final moments of chapter six of The Stranger, when both Meursault and the Arab on the beach, without conscious intent, reactivate the order of challenge and riposte that had played out over the previous five chapters of that novel and which, until that moment, both parties thought had been resolved.

5.

What many of the examples from these Algerian novels shows – including The Stranger – is how underlying this order of challenge and riposte is an often suppressed, but always present, order of offence. And this order of offence is largely predicated upon male-female relations. Yasmina Khadra, in The Angels Die, offers the most succinct formulation: ‘At that time, a man’s honour was like a girl’s virginity: once you lost it, you couldn’t get it back.’ Later in the novel, when Turambo falls in love with a prostitute and wants to marry her, he seeks advice from an imam, regarding if it would be right to do so. “Restoring her honour to a poor woman robbed of her soul is equal to a thousand prayers,” the imam tells him.

In Children of the New World, the character Rachid reluctantly agrees to his father’s wishes that he marry the daughter of a family of equal rank. But when they marry he begins to defy convention – a father’s absolute authority – by saying that after the marriage he wants to live alone with his wife (and not have his wife move into Rachid’s father’s house, to join the extended family, as is the custom), and that if he has a daughter (which he later does) he wants to send her to school. Weary of fighting, Rachid’s father ‘pretends to give in’, stating: “She’s your daughter, do what you want! But when she’s a woman she must be the repository of our honor!” 

Later, Rachid’s daughter, Lila, learns what this means. One day a young woman is killed in the square. Lila stands over the body:

   “Who is she? Who is she” she exclaims in unrestrained anguish. She cries it out in Arabic; a man with a churlish look indifferent to her mysterious grief, has heard her and whispers:

   “A bitch’s daughter who was betraying her brothers! For her the hour of justice has come!”

The broad context for this is shown elsewhere in Djebar’s novel, when Cherifa describes her state of being ‘a happy wife, living inside a house she never leaves, as tradition has prescribed...

‘imprisoned in custom (and to experience that custom as an instinct, as if every woman in her family, in the neighbouring homes, in all the previous generations, had bequeathed it to her in the form of imperative wisdom). The custom of having that behaviour be intended only for a man, the husband, the father, or the brother, of being able to glimpse the thousand incidents in life only through the shelter of his authority, through the mirror of his judgement.’

The effects of this are elsewhere described in Djebar’s novel, in a sequence where the broader implications of this process of inculcating the young – particularly the young boys – into this cultural order, is outlined. As a very young boy, this is how the character Tawfik was introduced to the role of women in this sense of honour: 

“I was sullied... I was carrying a blemish.” As a child, he [Tawfik] was told that’s how a man spoke when his honor was offended by a daughter who gave herself to a stranger, on this road... But the girl whose memory still remains, the one who first gave her body without even selling herself, died near the river, her throat slit by her father. “I was sullied...” the head of the family said, before leaving town and heading toward the plains.

This background is given to explain how Tawfik, at age twelve, had earlier in the novel set the following chain of events in motion, regarding his older sister, Touma:

A year later she [Touma] was quarrelling with her brother, then barely twelve years old: he [Tawfik] couldn’t tolerate the fact the she was hanging out with Europeans in public, all the more because she was seen at their dances. Coming from the big city for this sole purpose, some of her uncles had intervened and locked her up in the house. She’d vanished two months later. Since then, three years had gone by. God only knew what had become of her, and to spare the mother, her name was never mentioned.

In the first part of this study I pointed out how the postcolonial criticism of The Stranger proceeded by denying the presence of the sister in the novel, Raymond’s mistress, who does have a name (a name which both Raymond and Meursault do know). And that by omitting this literary fact, omitted too is the literary fact that the Arab man killed on the beach in chapter six of the novel does indeed have a family, and a cultural background. Such critics have wilfully excavated this cultural background from the novel – the role of women as the source of this sense of honour, which protects itself through the order of challenge and riposte – and then tried to place the responsibility for this apparent absence onto the author. This also alleviates such postcolonial critic – and those who take them at their word – from the seemingly arduous task of actually reading the novel.

What makes Kamel Daoud’s 2013 novel, The Meursault Investigation, so remarkable is that it is very much based upon a close reading of Camus’ novel, and in doing so it offers a parody of this postcolonial criticism, by explicitly denying the existence of this sister – and so making her presence in Camus’ novel clear – while at the same time embedding the events of The Stranger directly in this sense of cultural honour, predicated as it is upon the role of women as a repository of such honour; or, as Daoud also shows, in this instance, of dishonour. 

At first, the narrator – the brother of Musa, the Arab killed by Meursault – is told that this crime is unrelated to him: ‘At first, Mama told me that a gaouri [a Westerner, a Christian] had killed one of the neighbor’s sons while he was trying to defend an Arab woman and her honor.’ Later, when he finds out that it is his brother, he immediately denies that the sister even exists: ‘Oh, right, there’s still the prostitute! I never talked about her, because her part is truly insulting. It’s a tall tale invented by your hero... A whore whose honor her Arab brother feels himself duty-bound to avenge.’ Again: ‘Let’s be clear from the start: There were just two siblings, my brother and me. We didn’t have a sister, much less a slutty one, as your hero suggested in his book. Musa was my older brother...’

But then the narrator confuses the issue by saying that all of the women in his neighbourhood were ‘sisters’: ‘In our neighbourhood, all the women were “sisters.” A code of respect prevented the more interesting sorts of romance...’ Here Daoud is suggesting how much of this custom operates upon forms of sexual repression, in which attraction is turned to judgment, and such judgement is rationalised as honour:

Now there were a few skirt-wearing, firm-breasted Algerian women who shuttled between our world and the world of the roumis [non-Arabs], down in the French neighbourhoods. We brats used to call them whores and stone them with our eyes... Those women often inspired violent passions and hateful rivalries, the sort of thing your writer alludes to a few times in his book. However, his version is unfair, because the unseen woman he mentions wasn’t Musa’s sister. One of his girlfriends, maybe. And there, I always thought, is where the misunderstanding came from; what in fact was never anything other than a banal score-settling that got out of hand was elevated to a philosophical crime. Musa wanted to save the girl’s honor by teaching your hero a lesson, and he protected himself by shooting my brother down in cold blood on a beach. Men in working-class neighbourhoods of Algiers actually did have an exaggerated, grotesque sense of honor.

Later in the novel, we find out that Musa is ‘a liar’ – that, in literary terms, he is certainly an unreliable narrator. It is later revealed that days after the end of Algerian war, in 1962 the narrator accidently killed a Frenchman, in an act that mirrors Meursault’s killing of his brother. And it is in order to deflect from his own act that he attempts to discredit the justification for Meursault’s prior act. His denials – which begin with the denial that their sister ever existed – extends into more elaborate denials: at one point, for example, he denies that Meursault’s mother even exists, claiming to have researched the retirement home she lived in and the cemetery where she was buried, and apparently come up empty handed.

More broadly, Daoud’s novel, which engages critically with Camus’ novel, is directed more toward criticising post-independent Algeria, its political dictatorship, and its oppressive Islamic fundamentalism. In the process, what is remarkable about Daoud’s novel is that in its combination of unreliable narrator and his explicit (unreliable) denials of Meursault’s story, the net result is to restore and support the very presence of Algerian culture in Camus’ novel.

6.

Daoud pushes the parody of postcolonial criticism to its extreme: Camus himself is eradicated completely from his story, just as he and his text are from much postcolonial criticism (where the text is ignored, the author caricatured). The ‘book’ that the narrator of The Meursault Investigation continually references – and which the reader assumes throughout is The Stranger by Albert Camus – is finally revealed to be a book called The Other by Meursault. In the fictional universe of The Meursault Investigation, Meursault, awaiting execution, is finally given a reprieve, after which he writes a book about his own crime, which becomes internationally famous. Here Albert Camus has never existed.

But this extreme point of denial contains a grain of truth. By focusing on what is otherwise considered absent from the figure of the Arab in The Stranger, what has often been overlooked is that Meursault himself is, in fact, the figure presented in that novel as being without history or background. Once more, this point is couched in our understanding of the sense of honour that structures the first part of this novel: Meursault is fatherless, the son of a widow, and a widow that is dead at the beginning of the novel. According to Algerian culture, such a figure is without honour, precisely because they are without family history; moreover, Meursault is also, by being without a father, by custom a coward. The ‘widow’s son’, according to Kabyle culture, is, as Bourdieu also suggested, ‘the one who is deprived of a past of traditions and ideals, because he has not received any paternal education.’ Once more, this point generalises across Algerian culture. Mouloud Feraoun states in his novel, The Poor Man’s Son: “It’s the son of a widow” – by definition lacking courage.’ The status of a widow is also suggested in Daoud’s novel: ‘Mama was the armala, the “widow”: a strange, sexless status construed as perpetual mourning, where the woman is not so much a dead man’s wife as the wife of death itself.’

This is Meursault’s inheritance.

Another Algerian novelist, Kateb Yacine, a contemporary of both Camus and Feraoun, relates in his 1956 novel, Nedjma, how in Algeria, all men live in the ‘shadow of their fathers’:

Do you understand? Men like your father and mine... It is the souls of our ancestors which possess us. Their eternal drama is substituted for our youthful expectation, our orphaned patience is tied still to their shadow, a shadow which, though it grows paler and paler, can be neither drunk nor uprooted...

Rachid, as we have shown, in Assia Djebar’s Children of the New World, was likewise described as living in ‘the shadow of family and father’, which he tried to get out from under. Meursault does not live under such a shadow, but it is not by choice; he operates directly under the naked glare of the sun. The only mention of Meursault’s father in The Stranger is in the second part. While awaiting execution, Meursault recalls a story his mother, the widow, once told him about his father, many years before, attending an execution: ‘Just the thought of going had made him sick to his stomach. But he went anyway, and when he got back he spent half the morning throwing up. I remember feeling a little disgusted by him at the time.’ (emphasis added).

7.

I have gone to some length to show the role of this honour-bound order of challenge and riposte and the associated order of offence that structures the first part of The Stranger. It points to a particular cultural context that operated in Algeria, particularly during the period in which Camus lived and wrote. But at the same time, in the figure of Meursault, Camus attempts to detach him from this, and at the level of the narrative, he partly succeeds, but only when it is too late.

Toward the end of part one, in the lead up to the final confrontation with the Arab, Meursault makes two statements which attest to this attempt at difference, when Meursault glimpses outside the order into which he is otherwise being inextricably drawn; his narrative invites us to do same. The first instance was while Raymond and Meursault and Masson confront the two Arabs, and Raymond hands Meursault the gun: ‘It was then that I realized that you could either shoot or not shoot.’ After this situation was defused, Meursault considers the situation and concludes: ‘To stay or go, it amounted to the same thing.’ What is interesting about both these statements is that the first choice in each is in accordance with the order of challenge and riposte: to shoot, to stay. While the second choice involves a deviation from this order: to not shoot, or to go.

It is only after this, when Meursault goes back to the beach by himself that he comes across the lone Arab. Besides thinking that the ‘whole thing was over’, Meursault and the Arab are once more – inadvertently because of the sun, and the physical movement of Meursault in trying to step away from its glare – drawn back into that order.

This attempt to offer a glimpse outside the prevailing cultural order is set up in the narrative in the very first chapter. Once more, this is associated with the role of women in Algeria, in relation to the order of honour and offence. At the retirement home where Meursault goes to bury mother, he finds out that his mother, toward the end of her life, had a boyfriend, Thomas Perez; the old man who crumples like a doll in the heat of day at the graveside toward the end of the chapter. Meursault does not comment on this situation until the very last paragraph of the novel: ‘For the first time in a long time I thought about Maman. I felt as if I understood why at the end of her life she had taken a “fiancé”, why she had played at beginning again.’ And yet, in Algerian culture, a widow does not take a second husband, as this is seen as dishonouring the memory of the first husband. By playing at ‘beginning again’, which seems innocent enough, Meursault’s mother was in fact deviating from the cultural order, and providing a space for him to do the same.

But he does not follow.

This particular point is one that Camus must have thought a great deal about because it reflects a situation in Camus’ own childhood, with regards to his own mother, herself a widow. Camus’ biographer, Herbert Lottman, relates the situation succinctly:

The mother’s life was one of silence and work. She never remarried, although in 1930 she did have one suitor, Antoine, a Maltese fishmonger, a handsome, moustachioed man who wore a bowler hat. She put on makeup and a bright smock, but Etienne [her brother, Camus’ uncle] made a scene – a typical North African European protecting his sister. When Hélène [Camus’ mother] cut her hair, her mother [Camus’ grandmother] called her a whore. She wasn’t given a chance to remarry.

For a seventeen year old Camus, soon to succumb to tuberculosis, this must have made an impression on him, becoming a structuring motif of his novel. Perhaps it was the first time he saw a change in his otherwise mute and obedient mother, and for once he could catch a glimpse of her wanting to follow her own individual desires, only to be thwarted by family honour.

It is significant, in this connection, to note that the first Arab to make an appearance in the novel is not the man that Meursault will eventually shoot, or his sister, but is actually another woman, in the very first chapter of the novel: a nurse at the retirement home where Meursault goes to bury his mother: ‘Near the casket was an Arab nurse in a white smock, with a brightly colored scarf on her head.’ What is significant about this nurse is pointed out to Meursault (and the reader) by the caretaker:

The nurse stood up and went toward the door. At that point the caretaker said to me, “She’s got an abscess.” I didn’t understand, so I looked over at the nurse and saw that she had a bandage wrapped around her head just below the eyes. Where her nose should have been, the bandage was flat. All you could see of her face was the whiteness of the bandage.

As with the introduction of his mother’s “fiancé”, Thomas Perez, the introduction of this nurse is presented without additional comment. What is commented on, however, is the fact that the caretaker had only recently emigrated from Paris. Beyond knowing that in Algeria they must bury their dead quickly because of the heat, while in France they mourn for four days before burying their dead – a point made to underline the discontinuity between Algeria and France – this figure is set up in the novel as being culturally ignorant of Algerian culture: he exemplifies, in part, most readers of the novel, particularly Western readers. The information that the Arab nurse has an ‘abscess’, coming solely from this outsider figure, may in hindsight be brought into question. Especially if the fact that this woman has clearly had her nose removed – ‘Where her nose should have been, the bandage was flat’ – is considered in relation to the order of offence that is introduced in the next couple of chapters of the novel.

As we have seen, in the first part of this study, the point of honour in Algerian culture is called nif, which means ‘nose’, with the cutting off of the nose marking a woman who has lost her honour. In chapter three, when Raymond considers ways of punishing his mistress, he asks his underworld friends, who suggest ‘marking’ her face. As this situation is also the introduction of the order of challenge and riposte that will dominate the remaining four chapters of the first part of this novel, I think it is a possibility that must be considered that this woman introduced in chapter one is herself a victim of such an order of honour and offence. Meursault passes over this scene in chapter one without comment; just as he passes over without comment the information that Raymond’s mistress (who Raymond suspects of infidelity) is herself ‘Moorish’, in chapter three; he has already agreed to writing the letter that will spark off the whole affair, and besides, as somebody already embedded in such a cultural order, such things are accepted without question.

It is only in the second part of the novel, while awaiting execution that Meursault reconsiders the role of women: in the final pages he realises that it didn’t matter that Marie, his own would-be fiancé, was probably with another man: ‘What did it matter that Marie now offered her lips to a new Meursault?’ This is in the penultimate paragraph to the novel, right before he claims to understand why his mother took a “fiancé” in her old age. In other words, the connection between the point of honour – women and their fidelity – and the order of offence which leads to the ever spiralling violence and death that results from unquestioningly following the order of challenge and riposte – resulting from women’s infidelity, either real or imagined – is brought into question by Camus’ novel.

Assia Djebar, in Children of the New World, also brings this point of connection into question, and seeks in her own fiction to imagine other ways of acting outside this order. Two figures are contrasted in the novel, in this respect. Lila, the daughter of Rachid, who raised her outside ‘the shadow of family and father’, is described as being somewhat liberated:

She believes this gave her the chance to reject attachments and restraint. She used to say blatantly to a smiling but disapproving Ali, “I have no ties, no constraints! Thanks to my father, thanks to happiness, I was able to escape from mother, grandfather, aunt, second cousin, the cousin’s son-in-law, and so on, with all their opinions, principles, fears, and cowardice – in short, from everything that remains of a clan, tribe, and a dead past!”

On the other hand, Cherifa, without the support of such a father as Rachid, initially struggles to know how to act on her own, as an individual. We’ve cited part of this above, but here is the full quote:

For a happy wife, living inside a house she never leaves, as tradition has prescribed, how for the first time to decide to act? How to act? It’s a foreign word for someone imprisoned in custom (and to experience that custom as an instinct, as if every woman in her family, in the neighbouring homes, in all the previous generations, had bequeathed it to her in the form of imperative wisdom).

This question, more broadly construed, is also at the heart of The Stranger: how for the first time to decide to act? How to act? But for Camus, as for other Algerian writers, such as Assia Djebar or Kamel Daoud, this question only makes practical sense against the background of their shared Algerian culture. 

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