A Distant Episode

“‘Does this café still belong to Hassan Ramani?’ he asked him in the Maghrebi he had taken four years to learn.

The man replied in bad French: ‘He is deceased.’

‘Deceased?’ repeated the Professor, without noticing the absurdity of the word. ‘Really? When?’

‘I don’t know,’ said the qaouaji. ‘One tea?’”

In this exchange, the professor’s dream of meeting his old friend is immediately destroyed. However, the qaouaji is completely indifferent to the professor’s distress. The exchange helps to establish the professor’s role as an apparent victim of fate. At the same time, the linguistic dynamics of the exchange hint at the professor’s culpability in what follows. The professor speaks in the language of the place he is visiting—a gesture that could be seen as respectful but also as presumptuous. The qaouaji takes it as the latter; by responding in French, he denies the professor’s implied claim to knowledge of the region and its people and reminds him of his status not only as an outsider but also as a colonizer.

“‘Everyone knows you,’ said the Professor, to cut the silence between them.

‘Yes.’

‘I wish everyone knew me,’ said the Professor, before he realized how infantile such a remark must sound.

‘No one knows you,’ said his companion gruffly.”

Here, the professor’s attempt at friendliness (implying that the qaouaji has many friends) is ignored and treated “gruffly.” Such failures of communication and rebuffed attempts at closeness are characteristic of the professor’s experiences throughout the story. The professor’s remark about being “known” again indicates his belief that he can immerse himself fully in the world of the colonized (or at least his desire to do so), while the qaouaji’s response again insists on his foreignness.

“Standing there at the edge of the abyss which at each moment looked deeper, with the dark face of the qaouaji framed in its moonlit burnous close to his own face, the Professor asked himself exactly what he felt. Indignation, curiosity, fear, perhaps, but most of all relief and the hope that this was not a trick, the hope that the qaouaji would really leave him alone and turn back without him.”

Although the professor is portrayed as somewhat naive, this passage does reveal that he understands that he is putting himself into a potentially risky situation. Rather than taking action to avoid danger, however, he continues to be passive in the face of his own impulses, developing the story’s interest in the unconscious.

“The man’s eyes were almost closed. It was the most obvious registering of concentrated scheming the Professor had ever seen.”

This line highlights the professor’s suspicion of the qaouaji. The paranoia has reached a fever pitch by the time that the qaouaji brings the professor to the cliff above the Reguibat encampment, and the professor can only try to observe whether the qaouaji will attack him. The atmosphere of menace that the story develops during its entire first half culminates in this moment of suspicion, but the professor misreads the qaouaji’s intentions: Where the professor, influenced by Orientalist stereotypes, expects an act of random violence (or perhaps one motivated by profit), the qaouaji instead intends to leave him to his fate and thus expose his foolishness and hubris.

“‘These people are not primitives,’ the Professor found himself saying in his mind.”

This line is ironic and telling. The fact that the professor has to remind himself that the Algerian people are not “primitives” suggests that he actually does think of them as such. That this nuanced view of the Algerian people also leads to the professor’s downfall can be read as an endorsement of Orientalism; the Reguibat do in fact behave violently toward the professor, which is what the professor here fears. At the same time, the professor is only in this situation because he has ignored the Reguibat’s reputation among other Algerians, implicitly dismissing their words as superstition or ignorance and presuming that he knows better. Moreover, it does not apparently occur to him that the Reguibat (or Algerians broadly) might have cause to dislike a French-speaking Westerner.

“The Professor was in a state of nerves. He lit another cigarette, and found his lips moving automatically. They were saying: ‘Is this a situation or a predicament? This is ridiculous.’”

It’s notable that the professor has already begun to lose agency over his own body. He finds himself moving his lips automatically, almost as if subject to outside forces. His attempt to label his circumstances and thus control them highlights the relationship between language and rationality, and yet even this gesture is instinctive, undercutting the idea that the two always go hand in hand.

“‘The Reguiba is a cloud across the face of the sun.’ ‘When the Reguiba appears the righteous man turns away.’”

These lines, presumably Algerian proverbs, express the reputation of the Reguibat as marauders and people not to be trusted. The professor’s knowledge of the region is highlighted—only someone who speaks Algerian Arabic would know these proverbs—but this knowledge only underscores the professor’s foolishness. Even knowing the Reguibat’s reputation, he puts himself at risk to visit their encampment.

“When they emptied the Professor out of his sack, there were screams of fright, and it took several hours to convince the last woman that he was harmless, although there had been no doubt from the start that he was a valuable possession.”

There is a comic quality to the professor’s reception among the wider Reguibat. The lighthearted reception is at odds with the psychological horror of the situation that the professor finds himself in, suggesting the gap between the two peoples. However, the fact that the women must be “convinced” that the professor is not a threat hints at the story’s colonial context and the Reguibat’s motives for treating the professor as they do.

“Even when all his wounds had healed and he felt no more pain, the Professor did not begin to think again; he ate and defecated, and he danced when he was bidden, a senseless hopping up and down that delighted the children, principally because of the wonderful jangling racket it made.”

This is one of the key turning points in the story. Here the reader learns that the professor has lost his cognitive faculties and regressed to an animalistic state. The wordless “jangling racket” the professor makes contrasts with his earlier speech, implying the role that the inability to communicate plays in his transformation.

“He easily fell in with their sense of ritual, and evolved an elementary sort of ‘program’ to present when he was called for: dancing, rolling on the ground, imitating certain animals, and finally rushing toward the group in feigned anger, to see the resultant confusion and hilarity.”

Here again, the horrible nature of the professor’s captivity is expressed in an almost lighthearted manner. The horror lies in the professor’s reduction to a state where he is complicit in his own abasement.

“The next day was an important one in the Professor’s life, for it was then that pain began to stir again in his being.”

This is another turning point in the story. Having regressed to an animalistic state, the professor now begins to feel the stirrings of rationality. It’s telling that exposure to a language he understands and would regard as “civilized” (classical Arabic) is what triggers the change.

“He walked straight to the street of the Ouled Naïl, because he was sure of finding the Reguibat there among the girls, spending the money. And there in a tent he found one of them still abed, while an Ouled Naïl washed the tea glasses. He walked in and almost decapitated the man before the latter had even attempted to sit up. Then he threw his razor on the bed and ran out.”

The swiftness and the brutality with which the Algerian villager murders the Reguibat tribesman is unexpected. It underscores the chaotic nature of life, one of the recurring messages of this story.

“On the white paper were black objects that made sounds in his head. He heard them: ‘Grande Épicerie du Sahel. Juin. Lundi, Mardi, Mercredi…’

The tiny ink marks of which a symphony consists may have been made long ago, but when they are fulfilled in sound they become imminent and mighty. So a kind of music of feeling began to play in the Professor’s head, increasing in volume as he looked at the mud wall, and he had the feeling that he was performing what had been written for him long ago.”

The professor relearns to read by staring at the French calendar on the wall of the Algerian villager’s house. Exposure to written language also brings back to the professor the memories of his former self, which a metaphor frames as arising like swelling music. However, these memories will eventually drive the professor out into the desert, as he cannot stand the knowledge of his state, nor the sense that it was foreordained.