The Frustration of a Blind Audience, A History Boy, 26/09/2016

In the early days of the blog, I wrote a long post about how Edward Said changed my mind radically about the masterwork of one of my favourite authors, Albert Camus. This week, I came across a couple of books that made me reconsider his work again.

Algerian writer Kamel Daoud wrote The Merseault Investigation, retelling the Arab’s side of the story of The Stranger. In short, it’s the narrative of the brother of the man Merseault killed on that beach – his own life as a Muslim African Algerian, marginalized in his own country.

My first exposure to Camus' work was when I bought a copy of The Plague
as a kid, knowing that its author was among my father's favourites.

And Ryu Speath’s piece also reviews Alice Kaplan’s book of literary history Looking for The Stranger, a research work that tries to reconcile the two competing views of Camus’ most legendary achievement.

When I first wrote a long-ish post about Camus, I discussed what Said brought to my understanding of The Stranger that I hadn’t thought of before – Its context as a work by a white Franco-Algerian. 

I’d always dealt with discussions of The Stranger in classrooms, instead of with how any artwork should be read. You should discover a work through a friend’s referral, or your own research because you like affiliated stuff, or it seems interesting when you stumble across it.

The Stranger’s reception when it first dropped was as the narrative statement of French existentialism – the most profound intensities of philosophical confrontation of humanity’s pretences with our finitude, pettiness, and mortality. And that was how its ideas were always discussed when I was in school.

There's "the absurd man" as the universal – reflected and described in the surreal imagery of Franz Kafka, the conceptual profundity of Jean-Paul Sartre, and the stark narrative of Albert Camus. 

One of the reasons my original post got so many pageviews was that I posted a link on a philosophy board at Reddit. This was long before I’d really discovered the depths of Reddit’s white supremacist and misogynist tendencies as a community – I was only ever a casual visitor. 

The Algerian War of Independence saw countless massacres, and was the
first major guerilla-terrorist uprising of a Muslim country against a
Western power. And under Charles DeGaulle's imperialist, nationalist
policies, the French government had it coming.

One commenter told me I simply didn’t understand the concept of the Absurd Man, because I was bringing all this information about real countries, histories, and populations to Camus’ abstract universal. 

So the two receptions of Camus over the 20th century were as a literary prophet of existentialism’s universality, or as a permanently compromised apologist for colonialism whose work continually erased the presence and lives of his Arab neighbours. How would we decide which was the right vision? Did it matter?

Is this basically just restating the basic idea behind “The Death of the Author”? Well, of course it is! But it’s an important enough idea that it still needs to be said. Our reception of Camus literally determines who he is – who he is in the whole world of humanity. How other people receive and understand us is central to all our roles in the wider human world.

It’s especially important for Camus, now that he can’t even get into fights with people over what his work could mean. This author is literally dead.*

* And part of why I find car crashes so interesting as narrative events. 

But just because who an author (or anyone) is depends on how we receive her, that doesn’t make the author entirely passive in this relationship. In this case, we can still uncover elements of Camus’ personality and positionality that can guide us to his intentions. 

And that’s what Kaplan’s book apparently does. When I read Said’s essay – both the general rejection of Camus in post-colonial literary studies and his own more nuanced take on The Stranger and other of the Algerian’s works – Camus was described as a white Algerian. His poverty was acknowledged, but he was still taken as someone who lived separately from the Arab population.

The war of independence brutalized Algerian culture and politics ever
since, with the newly liberated government consolidating a
military dictatorship and the only opposition being radical Islamist.

But that wasn’t actually true – among the very poor, which Camus was, there was a lot more social mixing with the local Arab population. The poor Franco-Algerian communities where Camus was raised suffered most during the war of independence and the ejection of French-speaking white people from free Algeria. They weren’t accepted as legitimate Algerians, despite having lived there for centuries, but they weren’t able to leave the country in mass because they were too poor. 

Said also depicted Camus’ opposition to Algerian independence and the anti-colonial rebellion in simple nationalist-colonial terms. But in Camus’ own correspondence and discussions, he wanted a more utopian achievement for Algeria and France. He wanted the two countries united in a post-national state where Arab Algerians, Franco-Algerians, white Europeans, and French Muslims could live together as neighbours. 

And it becomes clear what Merseault was originally supposed to be. When I finally got around to reading The Stranger, what struck me most – what I was never expecting from all the glowing depictions of the narrator as a literary voice of existentialism – was what an asshole Merseault was. 

Camus made him an asshole from the start. He didn’t want us to sympathize with Merseault – The Stranger’s narrator was a condemnation of French self-absorption and refusal to see people with any sympathy. 

Algeria's political environment today has no place for
secular-leaning, liberal intellectuals like Kamel Daoud,
who's risked his life to criticize the military regime and
Islamist opposition. In The Merseault Investigation he
writes of his country, "the beast fattened on seven years
of war had become voracious and refused to go back
underground."

The problem with its reception was that too many readers bought into Merseault’s self-lionization. They saw all Merseault’s dignity in absurdity, but were blind to the ethical (and political) implications of his actions – the only thing that could get the colonial French authorities to punish a white man for murdering an Arab was if he were already a pariah in the community.

So that’s the most recent serious reconsideration I’ve given to the point of view and ethics of this writer who’s been so important to me since I was a teenager. And this doesn’t diminish him in my eyes, no. 

All this complication, my picture of Camus, his work, all the meanings in his words, only makes the experience of reading him more rich and satisfying than it ever was before. I’m thankful to everyone who’s contributed to the complexity and the strangeness of this legendary writer.

I Would Rather Be Invisible Than Absurd, Jamming, 01/03/2014

I few months ago, I wrote a post about Albert Camus; to be more specific, it was about Edward Said’s reading of the colonialist presumptions and absences within his most famous work, The Stranger. I recently started reading Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, sparking a few thoughts in relation to Camus' work, which I think can be enlightening. When I first wrote the Camus post, I advertized a little more widely than usual — beyond Facebook and Twitter, I also went to a couple of Reddit boards — and it got more hits than any other. But there was one critique of what I had written that stuck out to me, which was that I didn’t understand the concept of the Absurd Man.

If you're making a film in Europe about the alienation of a
decadent, nihilistic character who symbolizes all the
existential emptiness of post-War European Man™, you
cast Marcello Mastroianni. Federico Fellini did it with La
Dolce Vita, and Luchino Visconti did it with his adaptation
of Camus' The Stranger.

Now, I can understand why this Reddit user would say such a thing. The Stranger is the fictional articulation of a universal posit about human nature itself, whose philosophical version is The Myth of Sisyphus. At least, this is how it’s most often presented to people. Camus had more philosophical subtlety than this in his writings, but one can definitely see the common territory between the two works. Basically, the philosophical point is that we all live isolated from each other, that no one can ever truly know our personal perspectives on life, and this personal viewpoint is the sole true source of meaning in our lives. Meursault is only interpreted as having no concern or emotional connection to the death of his mother because he doesn’t express it in the customary way. He practically alienates himself from people because he appears emotionally dead, externally. But this only shows our actual alienation from each other. We all have our own burdens to shoulder, and no one will ever help us or even be able to understand those burdens. 

There are other ways to explain absurdity, about as many as there have been literary theory papers about it. But this will suffice for my purpose today. Because reference to the universalism of what Camus is trying to say doesn’t overcome Said’s basic critique of The Stranger, as well as The Plague: its Arabs are invisible. This would be uncharitably interpreted as Said attempting to invalidate Camus’ philosophical perspective by reducing that perspective to an erudite expression of racism. And it’s exactly what a bad post-colonialist reading of the product of an imperialist culture does. It’s exactly why such reduction is a bad post-colonialist reading.

A good post-colonialist reading would understand how Camus’ universalizable idea failed to achieve all that it could precisely because of the invisibility of Arab people in the social world of his characters. There was an enormous, complicated aspect of Camus’ world that he left behind. The basic concept of the absurdity of life can hold, and remains philosophically rich and useful. The problem with Camus’ version is that Meursault himself is too solipsistic. Even The Plague, which is my favourite of Camus’ novels because it focusses on how worldly friendships and community-building can overcome our individual alienation, remains incomplete because these wider relationships are ignored. 

If Camus had lived long enough to write a truly political novel, it would have been brilliant. Camus was always a partisan for French colonial control of Algeria: he was a French Algerian, and Algerian independence under Arab rule would have disenfranchised its white and mixed citizens. Indeed, it did. But Camus never engaged with his own thoughts on Algerian independence as a wider social phenomenon; he only saw how people like him, the poor whites of French Algeria, would have been left behind. He couldn’t sympathize with Arab Algerians because his own personal heritage embedded him in that war on a partisan side. 

I don’t fault Camus for this lack of engagement. It takes a long time to understand the historical and cultural perspectives of a people who have declared themselves your enemy. A lot of people never do. I think Camus had that potential because of the nuance of his thought. I think an aged Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre could have reconciled their friendship after May 1968 and the conservative counter-revolution of Europe in the 1970s. 

Of course, that never happened because Camus died in a car crash in 1960, two years before the Algerian War even ended. He simply never had a chance to write a great political novel about poor white French Algerians: people who were shut out of the material wealth of the colonial elite, but who were never able to join the cause of the revolutionaries because their race made them complicit with the colonial powers in Arab eyes. He never got to write a gritty, brutal, philosophically deep, epic novel of the Algerian war from the viewpoint of people who always lose in every violent political revolution: poor people, no matter their race. I think that if Camus had lived, he would have had the potential to become one of Europe's great chroniclers of revolutionary war in the 20th century, alongside Gillo Pontecorvo. But he died.

I've heard criticisms of existentialism that it is an
apolitical philosophy that offers no ethical
guidance for your political life. This is true unless,
like me, you consider Invisible Man to be an
existentialist novel.

Instead, we have Ralph Ellison. I’m probably not the first to compare these books; indeed, the comparison strikes me as obvious. Ellison’s protagonist lives a life story punctuated by his attempts to strike his own perspective into institutions and movements that would make him no more than a cog in their machines, a voiceless element in a larger plan. Invisible Man speaks to the irreducibility of an individual’s singularity in the face of wider social values, conventions, institutions, and structures. Just as The Stranger did. But in this regard (as well as differences in style and form), Invisible Man is the better book. After all, imagine if The Stranger’s protagonist was an Arab.

Invisible Man presents a protagonist with a very different type of story, more multifaceted in what kinds of incidents it includes and what kinds of people appear. It’s about someone who just wants to make a positive statement for himself, always with justice in mind, but who is overcome and silenced by his surroundings. Meursault does the same thing, but can only justify it through his individuality alone; separate from political contexts, he only has his raw singularity. That raw singularity is important to understand, but we in our lives have more than our singularity on which to draw. Ellison’s narrator has mobilized his political existence, his entanglement with the world, to justify the singularity of his existence with a power from which Meursault has separated himself: a call for justice.

The Sad Truth of the Most Authentic Man: Albert Camus, A History Boy, 13/11/2013

I had a strange beginning with Albert Camus, an accident that continually impeded me from him, even though the idea of him fascinated me. I knew Camus was a favourite author of my father, and to get to know something of what he might have been like, I picked up a cheap copy of The Plague in a local bookstore. It was the longest book of his on the shelf, so I felt I’d get more literary value for my money. I was about 14. 

I was around one-third through the book when I left it for the night next to a potted plant. The plant’s pot leaked, and left my book soaked. It was still legible, but I had to leave off reading it for so long, I began reading another book and left it behind on my shelf. The book was well-preserved, so when I finally decided to crack it open nine years later, it still read perfectly fine. I don’t think it’s ever taken me that long to read one book before. And the story left me enraptured.

I discuss Camus because Edward Said helped me confirm something I suspected since I first read The Stranger last year. Yes, I know. It was only last year that I read The Stranger. And it was in French too, so I could experience the tactile aridity of the language. Everyone swears by The Stranger. The archetypical, almost stereotypical (no, actually stereotypical) Camus book is The Stranger. I stayed away from it precisely for the reason I prefer The Who to The Beatles and The Mets and Blue Jays to the New York Yankees. Everyone fucking loves The Stranger. It can’t be that good if nobody hates it.

Well, it must be good, because I’m that nobody. Yes, I’m that one guy who hates The Stranger. I think it’s brilliantly written; I think its narrative voice is perfectly constructed to convey the precise character of its protagonist in every word. That’s why I hate it. Meursault is an asshole. The perfect asshole.

But Said helped me identify something detestably admirable about this character. Meursault is undoubtedly an asshole, and not only that, he’s part of Camus’ colonialist erasure of the entire Arab people of Algeria. The thing about Algerian colonialism is that the French, since their first invasion in 1830, attempted essentially to do what the British did colonizing America: dispossess the natives and drive them into the desert where they may at best die or at least become a permanent underclass in our cities. Said’s interpretation is that French Algeria, as far as the mainstream culture of France was concerned, was an extension of France. As far as the French perspective was concerned, Arabs didn’t really exist anymore. 

At least this was the standard reading of Camus’ work which post-colonial literary theory has produced. I mean, what they say is basically true: in all Camus’ stories set in Algeria, Arabs are marginal figures at best, appearing in the background, as anonymous plague victims, and incomprehensible murder victims. The psychology Camus plows into, despite his pretensions to its universality, is that of the white colonial Frenchman for whom Arab Algerians are barely even phenomena.

Most people read Camus at a young age, which
is a wonderful time to make an impression,
but a terrible time to form a critical viewpoint.

I don’t believe in this reading of Camus, quite simply because it’s too neat, too plainly villainizing of him. I decided that an interesting angle to think about for the Utopias project, in the light of Arendt’s comments linking imperialism and fascism, was examining a few major accounts of the imperialist mind-set or worldview. What kind of concepts governed the imperialist mind? We typically deal with fascism so histrionically that maybe a solid insight into fascist philosophy can be gained in conversation with its older cousin. 

But I knew there were bad philosophical accounts of imperialism too. One of them results in the stilted us v. them reading of Camus above, which seeks to overwrite his focus on universal existentialist questions with a blanket racism. That’s the simple post-colonial perspective that Said masterfully argues against. To say that all the Arab inhabitants of Algeria don’t exist dehumanizes them. But equally, to say that all the French inhabitants of Algeria, with Camus as their symbolic representative, are capable of nothing but racism dehumanizes them. The colonialist was not a two-dimensional bloodthirsty villain. Even so, they did villainous things.

Said makes an important point in a throwaway line early in this chapter. Albert Camus was the son of a washer-woman and a farm worker who got drafted and died in the First World War. Not exactly the nephew of the British Raj. He was part of a community of rich, middle-class, and poor. A settlement of French people who were so socially separate from the Arab majority (thanks to the exclusionary and very violent tactics of the original military settlers), that they rarely if ever met any. Many French people thought of Algeria as France. Yet the French-Algerians themselves didn’t belong in European France, but their home was African France (really, Algeria). As the war for Algerian independence began, the French-Algerians literally had nowhere to go. 

Here’s where Said saved Camus for me, both from colonialism and Meursault’s dickishness. Camus was vocal in his support for keeping Algeria French, to the point where the conflict broke close friendships with many people he had known during the German Occupation, including Jean-Paul Sartre. Camus could not have been friends with these intelligent, profound, and perceptive critics and opponents of colonialism without understanding the inherent justness of the anti-colonial perspective. 

Yet he was an ordinary person, a slum kid from Algeria who made connections in the Resistance and parlayed them into a literary career where he published works that were rightly acclaimed as genius. He couldn’t have avoided knowing that the entire French presence in Algeria was unjust, but he also couldn’t have avoided knowing that thousands of poor people would be ejected from Algeria with nowhere to go. If he hadn’t gotten work in Paris just before the invasion, he would likely have been one of those people. 

As a French Algerian, he knew that not all the French inhabitants could be considered personally responsible for the injustice of colonialism. Nonetheless, they were physically trapped perpetuating that injustice by their mere presence, facing being forced out of the only place they called home for entirely just reasons. The military conflict was too brutal for the communities to settle their post-independence differences. Thanks to his history, Camus (says Said) had to advocate for French control of Algeria. He made himself an irredeemable ass, a moral bastard of the highest order, because he knew that his own people were created as an injustice: a civilian population to prop up a brutal military regime that lasted more than a century, left to superfluous existence after the military gave up. Vilified by the Algerians, abandoned by the French. Nowhere to go in between. 

If this is the existential dilemma facing your culture and your self-identity, why wouldn't you hate everyone, perhaps including yourself? So I may return to L’Étranger soon enough, and approach its narrator with a little more sympathy, if no more respect. It would be impossible to respect that jerk. But I would be able to understand him. 

Maybe after another nine years.