The Guest (Camus)
The guest (French: L'Hôte ) is a novella by Albert Camus that first appeared in 1957 in the L'Exil et le Royaume collection published by the French publisher Gallimard . It plays in Algeria shortly before the outbreak of the Algerian War .
content
The main character of the novel is Daru , a French elementary school teacher living in Algeria who lives in his school far away from everyone on a plateau. One day he sees two people climb up to him: Balducci , an elderly gendarme of Corsican origin from the next village, and a prisoner who is only called l'Arabe , the Arab, in the novella . He killed his cousin because of unpaid grain debts and is due to be moved to another prison due to impending unrest. Balducci, who has to return immediately due to the unrest, has the task of delivering the Arab to Daru so that Daru can then in turn hand him over to the nearest police station in Tinguit. Daru disgusts the bloody act, but refuses to accept the order and hand over the Arab. When Balducci cannot change his mind, he leaves the school angrily and leaves it to Daru to deal with the prisoner.
Daru feels disturbed in his quiet solitude, but encourages the Arab to flee in vain through words and deeds - for example, he does not put his chains back on him. After dinner together, they finally go to bed. The following night Daru can hardly sleep and constantly watches the Arab lying on a cot. When he suddenly gets up in the middle of the night and leaves the room, Daru is almost relieved about the apparent escape. A short time later, however, the Arab returns.
The next day, Daru and the Arab set off towards the village. As in the night, Daru says that he can hear the footsteps running around the school, but he can't find anything suspicious. After a long walk you will come to a fork in the road. One way leads into the desert to the nomads and thus to freedom, the other to the village and thus to the prison. Daru explains to the Arab that he should decide for himself which way he would like to go and turns back. When Daru turns around again from a distance, he sees that the Arab has taken the path to the prison.
Back at school he looks sadly out the window over the plateau. Behind him on the blackboard is written: “Tu as livré notre frère. Tu paieras. ” -“ You handed our brother over. You will pay. ”Daru feels more lonely than ever in the land he once loved.
background
With the story, Camus addresses the conflicts between Arab and French Algerians in the French colony shortly before the start of the Algerian War of Independence . The French title L'Hôte already points this out, as it can be translated as both The Guest and The Host .
In the tradition of existentialism , Camus emphasizes with this story that there cannot be a really neutral position. There is an external compulsion to choose that cannot be circumvented. At the same time, Camus also takes up his turn from existentialism to the philosophy of the absurd , interpreting this choice, which follows the acceptance of hopelessness, as one out of freedom, as a revolt against hopelessness.
Camus can be recognized in the teacher Daru. During the Algerian war of liberation, Camus sympathized with the Algerian population's aspirations for emancipation, but on the other hand identified with the pied noirs and therefore argued for a common future for French and Arab Algerians in a largely autonomous, but not completely independent Algeria. He criticized that the Algerian revolution was an important part of a new, from Egypt, Arab imperialism with an anti-Western character influenced by Russia. Like Daru, Camus was also sharply criticized for his undecided, differentiating position from both sides.
filming
David Oelhoffens film Den Menschen so Fern (2014) is roughly based on the novella. Viggo Mortensen and Reda Kateb took on the leading roles . The film premiered at the 2014 Venice Film Festival competition . There he was honored with the SIGNIS Award, the Arca CinemaGiovani Award and the Interfilm Award for Promoting Interreligious Dialogue.
literature
- Albert Camus: L'Hôte , Reclam, Stuttgart 2008, ISBN 978-3-15-009041-1 (in French).
- Albert Camus: Der Gast , dtv, Munich 1993, ISBN 3-423-09105-3 (bilingual).
- Germaine Brée, Georges Markow-Totevy: Contes et Nouvelles 1950-1960 , Holt, Rinehardt & Winston, New York 1961 (French).
- Pierre De Boisdeffre: Une histoire vivante de la littérature d'aujourd'hui , 7th edition. Perrin, Paris 1968 (French).
- Carina Gadourek: Les innocents et les coupables. Essai d'exégèse de l'oeuvre d'Albert Cames , Mouton, The Hague 1963 (French).
Web links
Website about "L'Exil et le Royaume" (French)
Individual evidence
- ^ Actuelles III: Chroniques Algeriennes , 1939–58
- ↑ Venice Film Festival Lineup Announced: 'Manglehorn', 'Good Kill' In Competition; Bogdanovich, Franco, Levinson, Von Trier Also In Official Selection at deadline.com, accessed on July 14, 2015
- ↑ Collateral Awards of the 71st Venice Film Festival ( Memento of the original from October 16, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. at labiennale.org, accessed July 14, 2015
