Abstract

Peter Dunwoodie

‘Confrontation or Negotiation: Camus, memory, and the colonial chronotope’
History brings to the work of memory a critical, evaluative element and a coherence that memory alone cannot provide. Yet, like history, memory is a process of recovery in which the claim to meaning and truthfulness can overshadow the elements of forgetting and selection without which the work of memory would be impossible. In the midst of the worst years of the Algerian War Camus's oeuvre underwent a major shift when, in Le Premier homme, he sought to invoke both memory and history, the personal and the collective, in order to confront the challenge facing the European Algerian community in which his identity was grounded. Relying partly on Paul Ricoeur's work on time and memory, partly on colonial Algerianist intertexts, this paper will explore some of the factors involved in that intro/retrospective narrative (the slippage between personal and collective memory, processes of selection, traces and archives, rewriting...). Caught between a colonial chronotope long rejected, and a nationalist project whose identity politics left no place for the European Algerian, Le Premier homme seeks to counter those positions by imagining a less conflictual past and a positive, fraternal future, a community in which, to paraphrase Renan, 'tous les individus ont beaucoup de choses en commun, mais aussi ont oublié bien des choses'. The key issue, therefore, is what is recalled, what is erased, and what resurfaces in the interference affecting those operations? That the problems and solutions envisaged in this text have so many echoes in today's world is evidence that the duty to forget - which would allow politics (or, in Camus's terms, dialogue) to find a way forward - is still too often sacrificed in the name of "historical rights" backed, and ultimately undone, by violence.


	Peter Dunwoodie ‘Confrontation or Negotiation: Camus, memory, and the colonial chronotope’ History brings to the work of memory a critical, evaluative element and a coherence that memory alone cannot provide. Yet, like history, memory is a process of recovery in which the claim to meaning and truthfulness can overshadow the elements of forgetting and selection without which the work of memory would be impossible. In the midst of the worst years of the Algerian War Camus's oeuvre underwent a major shift when, in Le Premier homme, he sought to invoke both memory and history, the personal and the collective, in order to confront the challenge facing the European Algerian community in which his identity was grounded. Relying partly on Paul Ricoeur's work on time and memory, partly on colonial Algerianist intertexts, this paper will explore some of the factors involved in that intro/retrospective narrative (the slippage between personal and collective memory, processes of selection, traces and archives, rewriting...). Caught between a colonial chronotope long rejected, and a nationalist project whose identity politics left no place for the European Algerian, Le Premier homme seeks to counter those positions by imagining a less conflictual past and a positive, fraternal future, a community in which, to paraphrase Renan, 'tous les individus ont beaucoup de choses en commun, mais aussi ont oublié bien des choses'. The key issue, therefore, is what is recalled, what is erased, and what resurfaces in the interference affecting those operations? That the problems and solutions envisaged in this text have so many echoes in today's world is evidence that the duty to forget - which would allow politics (or, in Camus's terms, dialogue) to find a way forward - is still too often sacrificed in the name of "historical rights" backed, and ultimately undone, by violence.