Summary
Albert Camus’s novel (1942), set in Algeria, read by Edward Said in Culture and Imperialism as a heightened form of historical experience whose plain style conceals the contradictions of French Algeria, rather than as a parable of the human condition (Culture and Imperialism, PDF p.212-213 / printed p.185-186).
Details
- Meursault kills an Arab, but this Arab is not named and seems to be without a history, let alone a mother and father; the blankness and absence of background in the Arab killed by Meursault follow from Camus’s obduracy on Algeria (PDF p.202-203, p.206-207 / printed p.175-176, p.179-180).
- The novel is about the deaths of Arabs, deaths that highlight and silently inform the French characters’ difficulties of conscience and reflection; the civil society it presents — municipality, legal apparatus, hospitals, restaurants, clubs, entertainments, schools — is French, although it mainly administers the non-French population (PDF p.208 / printed p.181).
- Meursault’s trial is, in Conor Cruise O’Brien’s phrase as Said takes it up, a most unlikely place to try a Frenchman for killing an Arab; at the end Meursault experiences relief and defiance together, in the passage Said quotes in French with translation beginning “J’avais eu raison, j’avais encore raison, j’avais toujours raison” (PDF p.212 / printed p.185).
- At the end Meursault also understands why his mother, confined to an old persons’ home, has decided to remarry — elle avait joué à recommencer, in Said’s French quotation (PDF p.212 / printed p.185; wording checked against the original and given without quotation marks, because the copy drops the accents).
- Camus’s readers have imputed to the novel the universality of a liberated existential humanity facing cosmic indifference; resituating it in its geographical nexus interprets it instead as a heightened form of historical experience (PDF p.212 / printed p.185).