Claudia Esposito  (Brown University)
Mediterranean Metaphors: Towards a New Comparative Framework

The notorious dispute that put an end to Sartre and Camus' turbulent friendship was, in part, a consequence of the ideas contained in the latter's last chapter of L'Homme révolté entitled "La pensée de midi". Here Camus draws on his previous conceptions of a Mediterranean Humanism--which grew out of his uncomfortable personal and political relationship to the issue of French Algeria--and criticizes a Hegelian view of history grounded in absolute ideologies and polarizing political tendencies. Despite much criticism that has been leveled against Camus for his belief in a Mediterranean Humanism, I would like to suggest that it may serve not as a model, but as a catalyst for reconceptualizing the way a number of contemporary Francophone authors from the Maghreb can be read.

In view of the fact that such authors hail from ex-French colonies, criticism of such literature has tended to be read through the lens of postcolonial theory, which, even when purporting to problematize binary oppositions (colonizer/colonized, centre/periphery, etc), often implicitly reinstates them in the place of more complex discursive positions. In Anglophone postcolonial theory, this framework has been contested by critics such as Arjun Appadurai and Mary Louise Pratt. However, Francophone literature from the Maghreb has yet to be freed critically from the shackles of its ties to France or to be viewed in terms of a nuanced postcolonial theoretical paradigm. My focus will be on recent works by Tahar Ben Jelloun (L'Auberge des pauvres, 1999, Le Labyrinthe des sentiments, 1999 and Partir 2006) that are set in Morocco, Italy and Spain and on several works by Abdelwahab Meddeb that are informed by Sufi mysticism as well as by Dantean thought (Talismano, 1979 and Phantasia, 1986). I will argue that their approach (thematically, stylistically and, implicitly, politically) does away with a 'neither/nor' perspective in favor of an affirmative endeavor to open up a discursive space of multiplicity.

Despite the fact that they write in French and are published in France, Ben Jelloun and Meddeb, among others, bring forward an ethos and a philosophy of being, which crosses multiple national and cultural boundaries within a Mediterranean space whilst negotiating between a singular self and a plural belonging. Drawing on the works of Deleuze, Nietzsche and Foucault, and to a lesser extent Fernand Braudel, I suggest that a distinct tension between being and becoming is posited in the texts in question and that the Mediterranean, always caught between unity and disunity, becomes a metaphor for existence. A Mediterranean ethos, although not homogenous throughout time and space, unequivocally addresses and questions origins, nations, teleologies and history itself.

I ask the following questions: how do these writers both retain and move beyond their historical relationship to France? How might identity be (re)conceptualized by a subject (author or character) who moves between numerous cultural spaces that are both foreign and familiar? What textual strategies are used to express such identities? What implications might these movements and negotiations have on a political and cultural level? My paper will conclude with the suggestion that a Mediterranean perspective enables a comparative framework for the analysis of postcolonial Maghrebi literary texts. Several French-speaking Maghrebi writers (including Mohsen Melliti and Salah Methnani) have, for example, chosen to write in Italian rather than French, thus displacing the role of France in the standard postcolonial paradigm.