After Albert Camus’ The Stranger, the Meursault plot thickens

A rereading of Albert Camus’ The Stranger transports the reader deep into Algeria, past and present.

Albert Camus, from the cover of the 2013 edition of his Algerian Chronicles.

The Meursault Investigation, the debut novel of Algerian journalist Kamel Daoud, was first published in Algeria in 2013, then in France last year, and now, finally, in an English translation by John Cullen.

On the surface, it retells part of the story of Albert Camus’s 1942 novel The Stranger. In that book the protagonist, Meursault, shoots an Arab on a beach and is sentenced to death. The Meursault Investigation is based on the conceit that The Stranger is not a novel written by Camus but a memoir written by Meursault himself after his execution was stayed.

Daoud’s novel is presented as a series of monologues by the dead Arab’s brother, Huran, told 70 years later, in Oran, Algeria. It is, in part, an attempt to retell Meursault’s story from the point of view of his victim (Musa, unnamed in Camus’s novel), and his victim’s family, particularly in the wake of Algeria’s independence in 1962.

Critics have suggested Daoud’s book is a belated response to The Stranger, although the author begged to differ in an interview with The New Yorker: “No. My basic idea was to start with Albert Camus’s The Stranger, to question the work, but to move on from there — to question my own presence in the world, my present and today’s reality … I wanted to pay tribute to his work and his thinking, but also to provide another version of the story … I’m not responding to Camus — I’m finding my own path through Camus.”

But the simplistic rebuke thesis has held sway over critics, which does a disservice to Daoud’s originality and Camus’s subtlety. It seems to be based on rehashing Edward Said’s influential but flawed postcolonial reading of The Stranger. Said’s attack on Camus began in the inaugural Raymond Williams Memorial Lecture, delivered in London in October 1989, which formed the basis of (and the central chapter in) his 1993 book Culture and Imperialism.

This argument resurfaces in Daoud’s novel, but with a twist that suggests Daoud was, if anything, offering a rebuke to Said, rather than Camus. Said’s argument begins and ends with the claim that the nameless Arab who Meursault shoots dead in the sixth chapter of The Stranger is “without history, let alone a mother and father” and that “Camus’s obduracy [regarding French colonialism] accounts for the blankness and absence of background in the Arab killed by Meursault”. This forms the basis of Huran’s initial criticism of Meursault’s memoir, with the opening page of The Meursault Investigation describing his brother as “an anonymous person who didn’t even have time to be given a name”. A point made repeatedly, and which he corrects by finally naming his brother, Musa.

But Said’s reading of The Stranger is limited and ignores the previous four chapters of the novel, in which the background of the Arab and the circumstances that led him to the beach that day are provided in some detail. Far from being rendered invisible by Camus, the entire plot of the first part of the novel makes sense only if the underlying Algerian culture is brought into sharp relief.

Raymond, a Spaniard, is dating a woman but he suspects her of cheating on him. He wants to trick her in coming back to him so he can spurn her. He asks Meursault, his neighbour and a French pied-noir, to help write the letter to lure her back. Crucially, it is only at this point, after Meursault agrees to write the letter, and when Raymond says her name, that Meursault real­ises she is an Arab. Raymond goes through with his plan, which brings the woman’s family into disrepute, and so her brother begins stalking Raymond to redress his family’s honour. This is the Arab who is eventually killed by Meursault.

The cultural background to this scenario revolves around the importance of honour in all Mediterranean cultures, including working-class pieds-noirs (such as Camus) and Algerian Arabs alike, which structures their behaviour and interactions with other. Daoud’s novel confirms this: “Men in working-class neighbourhoods of Algiers actually did have an exaggerated, grotesque sense of honour. Defend our women and their thighs!” Other aspects of this role of honour in structuring behaviour are present in other Algerian novels, such as Mouloud Feraoun’s Poor Man’s Son (1950) and Kateb Yacine’s Nedjma (1956) — for example, it is unfair to fight two against one or to insult somebody’s mother — just as it is present in Camus’s lyrical essays from the 1930s and his posthumously published novel about growing up in Algeria, The First Man (1994).

Said ignores this crucial aspect of the novel (and Algerian culture) completely. He omits the sister from his interpretation, emphatically stating the Arab has “no history” and is “without background” — just as he omits all women from his interpretations of Orientalism (for which feminist commentators have rightly criticised him). In fact, the first Arab to appear in Camus’s novel is the nurse at the old people’s home, in chapter one, when he buries his mother. She is described as having a bandage across her face, which is flat where her nose used to be. A sign of an honour attack on her. Honour in Algerian Arabic is nif, which also means nose. This is a punishment that Raymond initially considers for his Arab girlfriend but decides against it.

Daoud knows all of this. And what he does with it is interesting and initially disturbing. Unlike Said, Daoud doesn’t ignore the role of honour or the presence of the woman in Meursault’s story. But he initially denies she exists. “Let me be clear from the start: There were just two siblings, my brother and me. We didn’t have a sister, much less a slutty one, as your hero suggested in his book.” Although later he admits there may have been a woman, and she may have been Musa’s girlfriend, who he calls a “nameless, honorless woman”, although he immediately gives her a name, Zubida, only to question whether not she is real: “Ah, the mystery woman! Provided she existed at all.”

But Huran takes such denials to extremes. He not only claims that the body of his brother was never found but that the beach where he was killed no longer exists, that he could never find any evidence that Meursault’s mother ever existed or that the old people’s home where she was buried ever existed. In the end, however, Huran does admit that he is a “compulsive liar”.

The purpose of all this is that Huran needs to remove the source of the conflict, which led to his brother being killed, so as posthumously to restore his family honour. But it is also to obfuscate his own dishonour (which I won’t spoil here but is central to the novel). And it is also to clear a space to confront Daoud’s true target: religious fundamentalism.

For beneath the surface, The Meursault Investigation is a novel very much about contemporary Algeria and the political tensions that led to a civil war between a secular Arab government and rebel fundamentalist Islamists, from 1992 to 2002, with cultural tensions continuing to this day.

Daoud, who edits Algerian-based, French-language newspaper Le Quotidien d’Oran, was accused of blasphemy following the publication of his novel, and calls for his execution were subsequently made. In Algeria, this is no idle threat, with more than 70 journalists being killed there during the civil war.

Camus fell out of favour in his Algerian homeland during the war of independence in the late 50s (he died in 1960 before the war ended) because he was opposed to Algerian independence and the continuation of French colonialism, a position that confused both sides in the fight. There were also calls for Camus’s death. During the initial stages of the war for independence, for example, he returned to Algeria to make his plea for a civil truce in a town hall, while outside he heard chants of “Kill Camus! Kill Camus!”

But during the civil war in the 90s and beyond, many secular Muslim intellectuals, writers and journalists rediscovered Camus. They had been placed in a situation where they were being told, punctuated with deadly force, that they did not belong in their homeland. A stark choice was being imposed on them that was splitting the country apart and that they were seeking a language to describe. This was a corollary to the misfortune of Camus and it was one in which they now shared.

Quietly, slowly, a critical and open re-engagement with Camus’s works began. The Rebel, for example, concluded with a section titled Thoughts from the meridian — by which Camus meant Algeria — in which he called for a measured dialogue to appreciate and better understand the honour he believed all people carried within them. It is sentiments like this which suggest that, far from being a rebuke, The Meursault Investigation is precisely the dialogue Camus had always hoped for.

During a public forum in Stockholm in 1957, the day after receiving the Nobel Prize in literature, Camus was confronted by an Algerian militant, who grilled him onf Algerian independence. Camus’s often quoted response — “I believe in justice, but I shall defend my mother above justice” — ignores a further statement he made soon after, when asked about the Algerian man who had confronted him that day. We probably cannot guess how Camus would respond explicitly to The Meursault Investigation, but I think his response from back then may approximate a response to Daoud: “He knew what he was talking about and his expression was not one of hate but of despair and misfortune. I share that misfortune …”

Matthew Lamb is editor of Island magazine and The Review of Australian Fiction.

The Meursault Investigation: A Novel

By Kamel Daoud

Translated from the French by John Cullen

Oneworld, 224pp, $19.99