Strangers and Brothers in the Works of Albert Camus and Jules Roy

Abstract

Like contrary forces in a historical field, the metaphors and themes of stranger and brother, alienation and fraternity, mark and act as organising principles in the works of both Albert Camus and his Algerian compatriot and friend, Jules Roy, whom Philippe Bernet called his ‘héritier spirituel’.¹ The parallelism, suggested by the titles L’Etranger and Roy’s Etranger pour mes frères (1982), goes well beyond the use of the term. To the lyrical passages in Noces and L’Eté concerning the fraternity between the speaker and the natural world correspond similar passages by Roy, notably in Les Chevaux du soleil (1968–75), a series of novels concerning Algeria. Camus’s farsighted criticisms in Misère de la Kabylie (1939) of the unconscionable inequities in the Algerian economic system and social fabric are echoed in Roy’s La Guerre d’Algérie (1960) and Autour du drame (1961). Finally, the sense of exile and alienation visible in Camus’s 1942 masterpiece and elsewhere is paralleled, in its own register, in a number of Roy’s books. However, between the positions of the two writers, who were close friends from 1945 until Camus’s death in 1960 and who held many views in common, there was also, at the time of the Algerian war, a distance that did not mar their friendship but sheds a critical light on the texts of the Nobel Prize winner, including L’Etranger.