Revue Romane. Langue et littérature - Volume 52, Issue 1, 2017

Based on the analysis of Faulkner’s novel Requiem for a Nun and its stage adaptation by Camus, this article focuses on the elements that connect the two authors and aims to illustrate their relationship with Dostoïevski’s work. The interest is mainly directed towards the theme of suffering as it is revealed in the Russian novelist’s writings and its exploitation through Faulkner and Camus’s dramatic art and work.

Though Camus admires Faulkner, he differs from him in his accomplished novels, in as far as he lets no doubt emerge about his characters’ identity or the reality of events revealed in the plot. This is all the more evident because the short sentences in his novel L’Étranger contrast with the intricate and often abstruse parts of The Sound and the Fury. However, when Camus explores the most indefinable aspects of his self in the last chapter of Le Premier Homme, he regenerates his écriture in such a way that the resemblance critics had found with the American writer, in retrospect, seemed to be justified.

This article reveals the connection existing between A Fable by Faulkner, La Peste by Camus, and La Route des Flandres by Simon, with the three novels sharing a parabolic and symbolic vision of war. While Faulkner’s novel evidences a true christology with a lot of biblical references, Camus and Simon sometimes refer to the Bible, as the American writer does, or to ancient mythology. The fictional characters are shown facing clearly the same dis-membering of time, as well as an implacable and very Faulknerian evil that strikes them inevitably, and against which Faulkner and Camus’s characters revolt.

Unlike other adaptations that he has himself chosen, Requiem for a Nun, which was adapted and staged in 1957, is the fruit of a proposal to which Camus responded positively. That’s why I want to examine Camus’ personal motivation for writing this play. I will analyze it in the light of one of Milan Kundera’s texts: Jacques et son maître, Hommage à Denis Diderot en trois actes – which is an adaptation of Jacques et son maître by Denis Diderot – and I will try to see if it is an adaptation, a variation (term borrowed from the music and from Kundera) or a tribute from Camus to Faulkner.

Camus’s interest in stage adaptations and mainly the problem of evil as it is raised in Faulkner’s Requiem for a Nun tempted the French writer into adapting it for the stage. The reference found in this version to Dostoïevski’s Brothers Karamazov is not meant to assert a Christian faith, but on the contrary to grow away from it. Hence Camus keeps his distance with the part played by Nancy. His adaptation of the Requiem breaks away from the religious interpretations it has been submitted to, so in reality Camus moves along the same line taken by Faulkner, when he was re-writing his first version of the Requiem for a Nun, as Noël Polk has shown. So Faulkner has structured a modern tragedy. The revolt against destiny finally makes it possible to compare the Requiem to Les Justes, making it possible to read it in the light of L’Homme Révolté

His dislike for psychological analysis accompanied Albert Camus throughout his life and had a profound impact on his idea of theatre. Especially in his early years, he sees psychology as the antagonist of the kind of theater that he envisages, the “modern tragedy”. In the last decade of his life, Camus worked on the novel “Requiem for a Nun” by William Faulkner, whom he greatly respected, in order to stage it. The confrontation with this work and its highly psychologically driven plot makes Camus virtually give up on his anti-psychological attitude.

This article links Camus’s recurrent lyrical themes and motifs with those of Faulkner. The speeches delivered by the two authors on receiving the Nobel Prize clearly underpin their conception of the art of writing, torn between suffering and beauty. For them the landscape alone can serve as a generative core to reveal the country itself. This article questions the tension raised by the South (Algeria and the imaginary county of Yoknapatawpha) and the authors’ aspiration for a lyrical prose liberated from the pressure of fiction writing. It outlines a parallel between their destiny and their accidental deaths.

This work deals with the main interests of William Faulkner and Albert Camus as far as modernity is concerned, and includes the problems of time, conscience and truth, as well as guilt and man’s future. Through the reality of their individual experience, and facing the ethical demands of collective history, as well as the questioning of temporality, the American novelist and the French essayist have shown the dramatic contingencies of historical events. In the darkness of present times they searched for the hope for man to survive which lies in himself, in his capacity to transform the transient, ephemeral present into the capture of the possible by human conscience, and to leave the door open to the possibility of connecting the self to others.

Camus and Barrault collaborated in 1948 to create the ill-fated L’État de siège. The two theatrical figures had already crossed paths, however, at a different time and for different reasons, thanks to Faulkner’s work and Maurice Edgar Coindreau’s translations. Barrault chose As I lay Dying for his first production in 1935, and Camus opted for Requiem pour une nonne in 1956. This study analyses archival documents and press clippings about these two works in order to provide a deeper understanding of the adaptive process and the staging solutions adopted by Camus and Barrault in their respective productions.