Exiting the Scene of Civilization: Wilderness as Implied Framework in Three Francophone Maghrebi Novels of Immigration

Abstract

Maghrebi novelists, in their polemical works depicting the plight of North African immigrants in France between 1950 and 1980, appropriated the opposition established in colonial discourse between Europe as civilization and North Africa as a wilderness. In this essay, I explore contrasting uses of this motif in three novels: Les Boucs (1955) by Driss Chraïbi, Topographie idéale pour une agression caractérisée (1975) by Rachid Boudjedra, and La réclusion solitaire (1976) by Tahar Ben Jelloun. These three novels exemplify the two uses of the civilization/wilderness binary, envisaged either as absolutely separate and opposed or as a dialectical pair. Boudjedra and Ben Jelloun in the 1970s posited the Maghreb as a space of wilderness outside culture from which to analyse the deleterious nature of the industrial environment. By contrast, in the final pages of his novel, Chraïbi's immigrants disappear into the French landscape, rejecting French society. Their exit from the scene of human life constitutes the emergence of a wilderness within the space of the metropolis: in effect, wilderness has become mobile. In exposing the process leading his characters to commune with nature, Chraïbi shows how wilderness is inexorably produced by a civilization which is also inherently critiqued.