Abstract

Mustapha Marrouchi

‘Camus: The Flip Side’

Camus: The Flip Side is an investigation of the massive role Algeria played in the formation of Albert Camus as a writer at the height of French imperial domination. While Camus used the country of his birth as a canvas to carve a brilliant career in literature, which resulted in his being awarded the Nobel Prize in 1957, he also represented the Native Other as a kind of modern-day Friday: subordinate, silent, and forever passive. The assumption will be that Camus occludes or otherwise negates the cultural constitutive role of the dominated Other– namely the Arab figure, but also the Jew, the Berber–viewed as inferior, savage, primitive.
The essay pays special attention to the subaltern not only as someone who played a major part in the making of his master but also as an unlettered character who is not allowed to represent himself or herself or tell his or her story. In fact, he or she is scarcely perceived as having a story, which is not so much refused as ruled out by the author himself. This is made all the more acute by the writer's carefully controlled tone, what Roland Barthes aptly called “l’écriture blanche ”, which makes as little as possible of the function of the Other except, that is, as a subordinate operating from below. In the process, his quasi-presence creates a space in which the narrative is at liberty to move beyond itself, hence providing another way of telling and/or seeing. His resilience defines his canny presence as he stands for the interface between the reader and the text that keeps winking at us.
Within this context of incapacitated narrative it is tempting to ask the following set of questions: To what extent did Algeria – “earth, sky, man, woman, flora and fauna” – play a role in the making of Camus? How can we (post-colonials) read Camus today, not the intellectual, a kind of white aboriginal, a genius but, but rather as a modern, savage pilgrim who, in representing the native Other, disfigures him or her? What, after all, can a post-colonial reader do if he or she must confront what Edward Said, speaking of Kipling, another “intimate enemy,” laments as the absence of that utopian state called documentation? Is it even necessary to note the seamless (and of course shocking) candor with which Camus addressed the issue of the Algerian nation? How significant is the re-visitation of a colonial crisis that calls for a refinement of judgment concerning the “petits colons” of the Algerian saga? What about Camus the man who contained multitudes – the playboy from next door, the man of letters, the clean-shaved Humphrey Bogart-like figure who was driven by an insatiable sexual appetite for women yet despised them? And, finally, why does he come across as a deeply troubled and troubling figure? Of course Camus had redeeming qualities. Though some of them were problematic, he was never consistent in his awfulness. Driven really as well as allegorically around the world by the energy of his need to excavate and analyze the lumpier secrets buried in France’s cultural colonial unconscious, the author of The Plague and The Stranger was an all-too embarrassingly insincere archaeologist of what have since become politically incorrect emotions. The goal of my paper is to show that great works of art like Camus’ fed on the blood of the subaltern, who was then, at best, forgotten by history or, at worst, maddened by his exploitation and then clapped in an institution called “la colonie française.”


	Mustapha Marrouchi ‘Camus: The Flip Side’ Camus: The Flip Side is an investigation of the massive role Algeria played in the formation of Albert Camus as a writer at the height of French imperial domination. While Camus used the country of his birth as a canvas to carve a brilliant career in literature, which resulted in his being awarded the Nobel Prize in 1957, he also represented the Native Other as a kind of modern-day Friday: subordinate, silent, and forever passive. The assumption will be that Camus occludes or otherwise negates the cultural constitutive role of the dominated Other– namely the Arab figure, but also the Jew, the Berber–viewed as inferior, savage, primitive. The essay pays special attention to the subaltern not only as someone who played a major part in the making of his master but also as an unlettered character who is not allowed to represent himself or herself or tell his or her story. In fact, he or she is scarcely perceived as having a story, which is not so much refused as ruled out by the author himself. This is made all the more acute by the writer's carefully controlled tone, what Roland Barthes aptly called “l’écriture blanche ”, which makes as little as possible of the function of the Other except, that is, as a subordinate operating from below. In the process, his quasi-presence creates a space in which the narrative is at liberty to move beyond itself, hence providing another way of telling and/or seeing. His resilience defines his canny presence as he stands for the interface between the reader and the text that keeps winking at us. Within this context of incapacitated narrative it is tempting to ask the following set of questions: To what extent did Algeria – “earth, sky, man, woman, flora and fauna” – play a role in the making of Camus? How can we (post-colonials) read Camus today, not the intellectual, a kind of white aboriginal, a genius but, but rather as a modern, savage pilgrim who, in representing the native Other, disfigures him or her? What, after all, can a post-colonial reader do if he or she must confront what Edward Said, speaking of Kipling, another “intimate enemy,” laments as the absence of that utopian state called documentation? Is it even necessary to note the seamless (and of course shocking) candor with which Camus addressed the issue of the Algerian nation? How significant is the re-visitation of a colonial crisis that calls for a refinement of judgment concerning the “petits colons” of the Algerian saga? What about Camus the man who contained multitudes – the playboy from next door, the man of letters, the clean-shaved Humphrey Bogart-like figure who was driven by an insatiable sexual appetite for women yet despised them? And, finally, why does he come across as a deeply troubled and troubling figure? Of course Camus had redeeming qualities. Though some of them were problematic, he was never consistent in his awfulness. Driven really as well as allegorically around the world by the energy of his need to excavate and analyze the lumpier secrets buried in France’s cultural colonial unconscious, the author of The Plague and The Stranger was an all-too embarrassingly insincere archaeologist of what have since become politically incorrect emotions. The goal of my paper is to show that great works of art like Camus’ fed on the blood of the subaltern, who was then, at best, forgotten by history or, at worst, maddened by his exploitation and then clapped in an institution called “la colonie française.”