Chapter Four - Camus and the resistance to history

Summary

Salzburg would be peaceful without Mozart. [Salzbourg serait paisible sans Mozart.]

(Camus)

The metropolis … strange, fantastic, phantom-like.

(Derrida)

The phenomenon of cultural marginality finds a very particular focus in the work of Albert Camus, France's French Algerian Prix Nobel, whose position was regularly at odds with that of the metropolis. In 1939, in a decade when French public opinion was as ill-informed about life in the colonies as Montherlant's La Rose de sable demonstrates, Camus exposed the appalling living conditions in Kabylia in journalism designed to inform France of its responsibilities in relation to the destitute of colonization. Rejecting criticism that it was unpatriotic to campaign in this way, Camus insisted that France's reputation was best served through directly addressing issues of human justice in what he contentiously calls a French country (Ess., 936–7). Twenty years later, with colonial rule in crisis, the French left-wing intelligentsia hounded him for his failure to speak out against atrocities inficted on the indigenous population in the course of the Algerian War. This silence, together with his earlier campaigning zeal in highlighting Kabyle dispossession, captures the sense of contradiction that his culturally marginal position generated.

Exploring what from a Parisian viewpoint were the Algerian margins, this chapter considers the author's early lyrical essays, with their occlusion of colonial actuality and cultivation of a socially isolating innocence; Le Renégat, where Camus engages with cultural conflict in Africa through melodrama and hyperbole; La Chute, set in Amsterdam and yet conveying a North African subtext; and finally, his last work, Le Premier Homme, written in 1959 and published posthumously in 1994, with its uninhibited defence of the petits colons or working-class colonial Europeans.