Summary
Novelist of French Algeria, born in 1913 at Mondovi, a wine-growing satellite of Bône founded in 1849 on land expropriated from Algerian natives, the son of a Spanish charwoman and a French cellarman, read by Edward Said in Chapter Two, VII of Culture and Imperialism as a very late imperial figure whose fiction lays ontologically prior claims to Algeria’s geography (Culture and Imperialism, PDF p.198-199 / printed p.171-172).
Details
- Camus is the one author of French Algeria who can with justification be considered of world status; as with Jane Austen, the facts of imperial actuality have dropped away from his work, leaving a detachable ethos suggesting universality and humanism, deeply at odds with the geographical locale plainly given in the fiction (PDF p.199 / printed p.172).
- Like Orwell, he became well known around the issues of the 1930s and 1940s — fascism, the Spanish Civil War, resistance, poverty and social injustice — and for a plain style Barthes called écriture blanche; both men became exemplary figures whose significance seems to transcend their native context (PDF p.199-200 / printed p.172-173).
- Conor Cruise O’Brien, having exposed the connections between Camus’s novels and the colonial situation, lets him off the hook by placing him on “the frontier of Europe” and making him representative of “Western consciousness”; Said argues he is representative, rather, of Western dominance in the non-European world (PDF p.200-201 / printed p.173-174).
- Camus was born and brought up in French Algeria, produced a famous pre-war report on the miseries of the place, most of them due to French colonialism, and focusses on the individual in a social setting in L’Étranger, La Peste and La Chute alike (PDF p.201 / printed p.174).
- In the last years of his life he publicly and vehemently opposed Algerian independence, in a statement Said quotes in full in French with translation: there had never yet been an Algerian nation, and the French of Algeria were also natives, in the strong sense of the word (PDF p.205-206 / printed p.178-179).
- His narratives distill the traditions and discursive strategies of France’s appropriation of Algeria; counterpoised with the decolonizing literature of Germaine Tillion, Kateb Yacine, Frantz Fanon and Genet, they have a negative vitality, in which the tragic human seriousness of the colonial effort achieves its last great clarification before ruin overtakes it (PDF p.211-213 / printed p.184-186).
Related pages
Culture and Imperialism, L’Étranger, Emir Abdel Kader, Imperialism, Frantz Fanon