The Meursault Investigation

Absurdism | Postcolonialism | Postmodernism | Metafiction

Terms to know

Musa: Used for the prophet Moses in the Quran. Also has the meaning of "drawn
from water" or "taken from water"

Harun: Brother of Moses: prophet; high priest

Postcolonial literature
Literatures in English emerging from the anglophone world outside Britain,
Ireland, and the United States constitute an important and growing body of writing,
often referred to as postcolonial or world literature in English. Many of the regions
and countries from which this literature emerges—the Caribbean, the Indian sub‐
continent, West Africa, in particular Nigeria and Ghana, East and southern Africa,
and Australasia and the Pacific islands—were once colonies of Britain, and now
form part of the Commonwealth, hence the term ‘postcolonial’. It is, however,
beset with contradictions, not least in respect of the chronological limits of the
postcolonial: did empire end with Indian independence in 1947, or in 1956 with
Suez, or was it later, when many of the African countries gained their
independence?

Nevertheless, the term ‘postcolonial literature’ is considered to be the most

convenient way of embracing the diverse body of literary responses to the
challenges presented by decolonization and the transitions to independence and
after. Postcolonial literature might be broadly defined as that which critically or
subversively scrutinizes the colonial relationship, and offers a reshaping or
rewriting of the dominant meanings pertaining to race, authority, space, and
identity prevalent under colonial and decolonizing conditions.

Many assumptions that are central to postcolonial literary studies emanate from the
influential work of the critic Edward Said, in particular his Orientalism (1978),
and Culture and Imperialism (1993). These include the critical perception that
cultural representations (of ‘savages’ and ‘cannibals’; or of primitive Africa or the
exotic East) were fundamental first to the process of colonizing other lands, and
then again to the process of obtaining independence (imaginative and otherwise)
from the colonizer. As Joseph Conrad was among the first to acknowledge, in his
‘Heart of Darkness’ (1899), assuming control over a territory or a nation meant not
only exerting political or economic power but also having imaginative command.
Overturning and replacing imperial systems of control therefore involved
contesting these European imaginative and literary versions of the colonial
experience, or as Indian‐born writer Salman Rushdie famously put it, it involved
the empire ‘writing back’.
Postcolonial literature, in seeking to awaken political and cultural nationalism, has
dwelt on popular revolts against colonial rule, exposing the lie of the passive and
indolent native. Writers as diverse as Caryl Phillips, Nadine Gordimer, Peter
Carey, and Arundhati Roy acknowledge that making a postcolonial world means
learning how to live in and represent that world in a profoundly different way.

Language is inextricably bound up with culture and identity, and as the colonizers
attempted, with varying degrees of success, to impose the English language on
subject peoples, the response from the formerly colonized has ranged from the
outright rejection of English as a medium through which to exercise their art, to the
appropriation of it with subversive intent.

There has been celebratory and affirmative acknowledgement of women's

experiences, following painful legacies of ‘double’ and in some cases ‘triple
colonization’ (as women, black, lower class, lower caste, ‘queer’, etc.) under
empire.

Postcolonial literature worldwide has registered the impact of modernist and also
postmodernist traditions of Anglo‐American writing. The subversive, playful
techniques of metropolitan postmodernism have been appropriated by postcolonial
writers in order to dramatize the unstable, provisional, and ever‐shifting
constitution of identities in the aftermath of empire. Postcolonial literature has
itself formed and informed modernist and postmodernist techniques.
http://www.postcolonialweb.org Postcolonial Web: resource for postcolonial
literature.

NOTE: The role of the French as Colonists- their language and religion.

Questions a post-colonial critic asks (links to page on our site)

Postmodernism
A disputed term that occupied much late 20th-century debate about culture from
the early 1980s. In its simplest and least satisfactory sense it refers generally to the
phase of 20th-century Western culture that succeeded the reign of high modernism,
thus indicating the products of the age of mass television since the mid-1950s.
More often, though, it is applied to a cultural condition prevailing in the advanced
capitalist societies since the 1960s, characterized by a superabundance of
disconnected images and styles—most noticeably in television, advertising,
commercial design, and pop video. In this sense, promoted by Jean Baudrillard and
other commentators, postmodernity is said to be a culture of fragmentary
sensations, eclectic nostalgia, disposable simulacra, and promiscuous
superficiality, in which the traditionally valued qualities of depth, coherence,
meaning, originality, and authenticity are evacuated or dissolved amid the random
swirl of empty signals.

As applied to literature and other arts, the term is notoriously ambiguous, implying
either that modernism has been superseded or that it has continued into a new
phase. Postmodernism may be seen as a continuation of modernism’s alienated
mood and disorienting techniques and at the same time as an abandonment of
its determined quest for artistic coherence in a fragmented world: in very
crude terms, where a modernist artist or writer would try to wrest a meaning
from the world through myth, symbol, or formal complexity, the
postmodernist greets the absurd or meaningless confusion of contemporary
existence with a certain numbed or flippant indifference, favouring self-
consciously ‘depthless’ works of fabulation, pastiche, bricolage, or aleatory
disconnection. The term cannot usefully serve as an inclusive description of all
literature since the 1950s or 1960s, but is applied selectively to those works that
display most evidently the moods and formal disconnections described above. In
poetry, it has been applied most often to the work of the New York school and to
Language poetry; in drama mainly to the ‘absurdist’ tradition; but is used more
widely in reference to fiction, notably to the novels (or anti-novels). Opinion is still
divided, however, on the value of the term and of the phenomenon it purports to
describe. Those who most often use it tend to welcome ‘the postmodern’ as a
liberation from the hierarchy of ‘high’ and ‘low’ cultures; while sceptics regard the
term as a symptom of irresponsible academic euphoria about the glitter of
consumerist capitalism and its moral vacuity. See also post-structuralism.

Metafiction
Fiction that draws attention to and directly comments upon its status as fiction.
Most often this takes the form of an intrusion of the ‘author’ into the work. One of
the earliest and most celebrated cases of metafiction is Laurence Sterne’s Tristram
Shandy (1760–7), which has the author commenting frequently on his failure to get
on with telling the story. But it can also take the form of a work of fiction about
either the reading or writing of fiction. The device is more common in late
twentieth-century fiction writing than it is in earlier periods and for this reason is
often associated with postmodernism, although there is no direct correlation
between the two. The device can also be witnessed in film and television.

Robinson Crusoe
The Life and Strange and Surprizing Adventures of A novel by Daniel Defoe,
published 1719. The story was in part inspired by the adventures of Alexander
Selkirk, who had joined a privateering expedition under William Dampier, and in
1704 was put ashore after a quarrel on one of the uninhabited islands of the Juan
Fernandez archipelago. He was rescued in 1709 by Woodes Rogers (1679–1732).
The story was told by Richard Steele in The Englishman (1713), and elsewhere.
Defoe's novel (told, like all his novels, in the first person, and presented as a true
story) is vastly more vivid, detailed, and psychologically powerful, giving an
extraordinarily convincing account of the shipwrecked Crusoe's efforts to survive
in isolation. With the help of a few stores and utensils saved from the wreck and
the dedicated exercise of labour and ingenuity, Crusoe builds himself a refuge,
maps the island, domesticates goats, sows crops, and constructs a boat. Suffering
from dreams and illness, he struggles to accept the workings of Providence, and
has disturbing encounters with cannibals from other islands, from whom he rescues
the man he later names ‘Friday’. After 28 years, an English ship with a mutinous
crew arrives; by some delicate management Crusoe subdues the mutineers, and
returns, finally prosperous, to Britain. In The Farther Adventures of Robinson
Crusoe (1719), Crusoe revisits his island, is attacked by a fleet of canoes on his
departure, and loses Friday in the encounter. Serious Reflections…of Robinson
Crusoe…with his Vision of the Angelick World, offering a pious and allegorical
interpretation of the adventures, appeared in 1720. The influence of the Robinson
Crusoe story has been enormous. The book had immediate and permanent success;
it was pirated, adapted, and abridged in chapbooks, translated into many languages,
and inspired many imitations, known generically as ‘Robinsonnades’, including
Philip Quarll, Peter Wilkins, and The Swiss Family Robinson. It was extremely
popular with male readers of the 19th century, being affectionately remembered by
William Wordsworth, Lord Macaulay, John Stuart Mill, George Borrow, Robert
Louis Stevenson, and John Ruskin. The novel has also inspired many artists and
film-makers. More recently it has been seen as an apologia for, or an ironic
critique of, economic individualism, capitalism, and imperialism; a study in
alienation; and an allegorical spiritual autobiography.

Questions to mull over as you interpret the story

1. Opening sentences: connections? Explain

2. Why open in a bar?
3. Why the name Musa?
4. How are the family relationships similar and different
in Meursault from Stranger?
5. How are the relationships between citizens and the justice system similar
and different in Meursault from Stranger?
6. Love of a woman: how is Harun's love for Meriem similar to Meursault's
love of Marie? How is it different?
a. that was romantic love -- what about maternal love?
7. How does The Meursault blur the line between fiction and reality? How
could the novel be a comment on our narrative understanding of the world?
8. In an interview, Daoud states that "Ever since the Middle Ages, the white
man has the habit of naming Africa and Asia’s mountains and insects, all the
while denying the names of the human beings they encounter. By removing
their names, they render banal murder and crimes. By claiming your own
name, you are also making a claim of your humanity and thus the right to
 justice" (Zaretsky). How does providing Camus' "Arab" with a name
amounting to justice?
9. Would this novel work without The Stranger?
10. If the sun was the primary symbol in The Stranger, what's the primary
symbol here? Similarities? Differences?
11. Use the questions that a postcolonial critic asks to deepen your
understanding of the novel.
12. How do you think Meursault can be classified as a work of metafiction?
How does looking at it through this critical lens deepen our understanding of
the work?
13. How do you think Meursault can be classified as a post modern work? How
does looking at it through this critical lens deepen our understanding of the
work?
14. Both novels are first person: why? How would it be different if narrated in
third person?
15. What do you make of the repetitions -- even of actual quotes from The
Stranger -- in Meursault? Do they distract or amplify or ____?
16. What are the similarities in the murders in the novels? Differences?
17. How are the legal systems similar in both works? Different?
18. How does Harun feel about his fellow Algerians?
19. What does the novel suggest about the power of language to control the
colonized? (see questions on postcolonial: 33; 89-90*; 128*
20. What, more generally, does the novel suggest about the power of narrative?
(this connects to metafiction) 16; 37; 57; 84; 121*; 132;
21. Could this also be a book about an existentialist worldview?

Quotes to mull over:

• “I’m going to do what was done in this country after Independence: I’m
going to take the stones from the old houses the colonists left behind,
remove them one by one, and build my own house, my own language. The
murderers words and expressions are my unclaimed goods” (2)
• "the murder he committed seems like the act of a disappointed lover unable
to possess the land he loves” (3)
• “What hurts me every time I think about it is that he killed him by passing
over him, not by shooting him” (5)
• “Without realizing it, in years before I learned to read, I rejected the
absurdity of his death, and I needed a story to give him a shroud” (21)
• “recently they’ve been closing all the bars in the country, and all the
customers are like trapped rats, jumping from one sinking boat to another. In
when we get down to the last bar, there will be a lot of us, old boy, you have
to use our elbows. That moment will be the real last judgment” (25)
• “In her language, she spoke like a prophetess, recruited extemporaneous
mourners, and cried out against the double outrage that consumed her life:
husband swallowed up by air, a son by water. I had to learn a language other
 than that. To survive. And it was the one I’m speaking at this moment.
Starting with my presumed 15th birthday, when we withdrew to Hadjout, I
became a stern in serious scholar. Books in your hero’s language gradually
enabled me to name things differently and organize the world with my own
words” (37)
• "everybody in the neighborhood knew the whole was empty, new mama
filled it with her prayers in an invented biography. That cemetery was the
place where I awaken to life, believe me. It was where I became aware that I
had a right to the fire of my presence in the world – yes, I had a right to it
summation point – despite the absurdity of my condition, which consisted in
pushing a corpse to the top of the hill before it rolled back down endlessly.
Those days, the cemetery days, for the first days when I turned to pray, not
toward Mecca but toward the world” (47)
• “we have a confession, written in the first person, we have no evidence to
prove him or so’s guilt; his mother never existed, for him least of all; Musa
was an area replaceable by thousand others of his kind, or by a Crow, even,
or read, or whatever else; the beach has disappeared, the race by footprints
or agglomerations of concrete; the only witness was a star, namely the sun;
the plaintiffs were illiterate, and they moved out of town; and finally the
trial was a wicked travesty put on by idle colonials. What can you do with
the man who meet you on a desert island and tells you that yesterday he
killed a certain Friday? Nothing” (49)
• “this story takes place somewhere in someone’s head, in mind and in yours
and in the heads of people like you. In a sort of beyond” (57)
• “Arab. I never felt Arab, you know. Arab–ness is like Negro–ness, which
only exists in the white man’s eyes” (60)
• “What’s inexplicable is not only the murderer but also the fellow’s life. He’s
a corpse that magnificently describes the quality of the light in this country
while stuck in some hereafter with no gods and no Hells. Nothing but
blinding routine. His life? If he hadn’t killed in written, nobody would have
remembered him” (63)
• “After independence, the more I read of your hero’s work, the more I had
the feeling I was pressing my face against the window of a big room where a
party was going on that neither my mother nor I had been invited to” (64)
• More to come

Group Questions

Day 2
 1. In an interview, Daoud states that "Ever since the Middle Ages, the white
man has the habit of naming Africa and Asia’s mountains and insects, all the
while denying the names of the human beings they encounter. By removing
their names, they render banal murder and crimes. By claiming your own
name, you are also making a claim of your humanity and thus the right to
justice" (Zaretsky). How does providing Camus' "Arab" with a name
amount to justice?
2. Would this novel work without The Stranger?
3. How does this quote address the absurd? “This story takes place somewhere
in someone’s head, in mine and in yours and in the heads of people like you.
In a sort of beyond” (57). First define the absurd, then connect that
definition to your explanation of the quote.
4. How does the definition of postcolonialism cited above and the questions
that a postcolonial critic asks deepen your understanding of the novel?

What the author/critics say

• Review of novel in The New York Times: final paragraph explains the
existential dilemma that Daoud lives with.
• Doud "What to do When Your Colonizer Apologizes" New York Times. 15
October 2018.
• Interview with Dauod: Middle East Eye
• Interview with Dauod: Los Angeles Review of Books
• Zerofsky, Elizabeth. "An Algerian rebuke to "The Stranger'." The New
Yorker. Accessed 13 March 2015.

ROBERT ZARETSKY: Your book is a tour de force: powerful and

provocative, moving and disturbing. But it is difficult to speak about your
work without speaking about Camus. At first glance, your novel seems like a
reply — a counter-investigation, to cite the original French title — of The
Stranger. To invite comparison to what your narrator, Harun, calls (more
than once) this “celebrated” novel carried risks, no? Why prompted you to do
it?

KAMEL DAOUD: Because I’m Algerian and The Stranger’s story bears on my
own. Because I am a Francophone writer and Camus is a master of the French
language. Because I am confronted by an absurd world that kills in the name of the
sun or Allah, and because I like to appropriate the great novels, rewrite, and make
them mine. With the anonymous Arab [the one who Meursault murders], I saw a
breach in this classic of 20th century literature, one that I took on as a literary,
historical, and philosophical challenge.
Camus once wrote that the French colonists (the pied-noirs) and Arabs of
Algeria were condemned to live together. He was wrong, of course. Given the
deep ties between your novel and Camus’s, could we say that the two works
are condemned to live together?

Yes! If the sea and war separate the two countries, we remain neighbors bound to
one another by a common sense of grief, denial, and unease. But it was not, for me,
a question of rewriting the history of our shared pasts, but instead a human history
whose pretext is the pain of Algeria’s colonization, the war and denial of the Other.
The two works are not condemned to live together, but rather to live together and
illuminate one another.

More than 20 years pass after the publication of The Stranger before Harun
discovers and reads the novel. How old were you when you first read the novel
for the first time? What was you reaction to it?

I was either 20 or 21, I think. My first reaction was boredom. I liked The
Rebel and Myth of Sisyphus much more than The Stranger. Like everyone else, I
barely noticed the Arab. Meursault’s crime was perfect because it was told in
language that was perfect. When I reread it at the age of 30, it was very different
— as were the times, the past, and my own awareness.

There are Algerian intellectuals, most notably Assia Djebar, who consider
Camus as a great Algerian writer. Was Camus, for you, an Algerian writer?
Or, instead, was he simply a French Algerian writer?

No, he was an Algerian writer. My own “Algerianess” is not exclusive and does
not exclude others: I assume everything that enriches me, including the monstrous
wound of colonization. Camus is Algerian because Algeria is larger and older than
French Algeria, Ottoman Algeria, Spanish or Arab Algeria.

There are striking parallels between Camus’s life and your own. Both of you
started out as journalists in Algeria; both of you have challenged the
country’s ideological and religious authorities; both of you are mavericks and
relatively isolated at home. What do you make of this?

It’s possible, but that only proves that Camus and I were born in the same country!

With the very first line of your novel — “Mama’s still alive today” — you
reverse the famous opening life of The Stranger: “Maman died today.” Yet
you also take your inspiration from a number of the novel’s characters and
situations, so much so that your vision is very Camusian. For example, I am
thinking of the confrontation between Harun and the FLN officer. Like the
judge in The Stranger, who thrusts a crucifix at Meursault while insisting on
the necessity of believing in God, the officer waves an Algerian flag in front of
Harun while insisting on the necessity in believing in the Algerian revolution.
Camus hated such abstractions; you seem to hate them too, no?

Abstractions are fascinating: they can cast light on the past, but not on the present.
They can also kill. For Meursault, there’s no difference between the crucifix and
sun. The two are equally absurd. I like ideas, but I like metaphors even more —
they are the body, the flesh, and sensations of writing. I prefer a life “experienced”
to a life “thought.” Today, it is abstractions that kill in the name of religion or in
the name of democracy.

One of your book’s themes, perhaps the greatest theme, is Harun’s demand
that his brother — universally known at the “Arab” — be given a name. “It’s
important to give names to the dead as much as it is to the new-born. My
brother was called Musa.” And then, a few pages later, Harun tells his
interlocutor: “My brother would have been famous if your author [Camus]
had simply deigned to give him a first name. H’med or Kaddour or Hammou:
just a name, damn it!” Could you say a bit more about naming and identity?

Ever since the Middle Ages, the white man has the habit of naming Africa and
Asia’s mountains and insects, all the while denying the names of the human beings
they encounter. By removing their names, they render banal murder and crimes. By
claiming your own name, you are also making a claim of your humanity and thus
the right to justice.

Later in the novel, Harun tells his interlocutor that his brother, Musa, was
“the second most important character in the novel, but he has neither a name,
a face, nor words. This story is absurd.” Two questions: First, do you think
Camus, who made famous “the absurd,” would agree with Harun? And
second: What are your thoughts about Camus’s last and unfinished
novel, The First Man? It is a work, after all, in which he tries to do for the
pied-noirs what Harun wishes to do for his brother.

I don’t know what Camus would have thought of my book. But one mustn’t read a
novel like this as if it were an essay: Literature goes beyond Good and Evil. Camus
was aware of colonial injustices, but literature is a dream that cannot be controlled
and does not lie. It is not an allegory. An entire life was necessary to pass from The
Stranger to The First Man — even more than a single life. If Camus gave Arabs
both bodies and names in The First Man, it shows that the dream led him to act on
the duty of naming the Arab. A novel is not a pedagogical exercise, but the
revelation of meaning. It does not accommodate itself to justice, but instead to a
vision of reality it can transform.

Another book by Camus haunts your novel: The Fall. Harun is an Algerian
Jean-Baptiste Clamence, the narrator in The Fall. Both novels are
monologues and the narrator’s voice in both is the only voice we hear. And
both narrators share deeply disturbing confessions that revolve around the
question of death and guilt. You seem to have a special relationship with this
novel.

To my mind, The Fall is Camus’s best novel. It is his truest and most sincere
novel, the one closest to his most personal vision of the world and sense of guilt.
I’ve always been fascinated by the novel and wanted, in my own way, to pay it
homage. The Fall is the story of religious guilt, of the human condition in the face
of cowardice and confession; it is a literary, philosophical, and religious exercise
all at once. Clamence looks like us!

Even before the publication of your novel, you already had a controversial
reputation in Algeria as a public intellectual and columnist for the
newspaper Le Quotidien d’Oran. What do you think is the role of intellectuals
in today’s Algeria? What are their duties, hopes and fears?

The intellectual is the unbending witness to his era, one that leads to liberty or
surrender. He’s the voice that carries and proclaims, but also reminds. In the face
of the rising totalitarianisms of our new century, it is a question of witnessing on
behalf of what is human, on behalf of humanity, but especially on behalf of liberty
— its value and its necessity. As I have said before, a society attached to just one
book is intolerant, while those that embrace many books are free and tolerant. My
struggle is for all books: to write them and read them, to cultivate their potential
and enjoy their freedom.

In an interview you gave to the newspaper Libération, you described Algeria

as a land “squeezed between the sky and earth.” This also resembles your
situation: You must face two powerful forces, the State and Islam, state
censorship and religious fatwas. Yet you remain in Oran. Do you sometimes
consider leaving Algeria and settling in France, where life would be easier and
less dangerous?

I don’t think of France, in particular, but do think about my children. Exile will
save them but kill me. Staying in Algeria will save my soul but will endanger my
body. This is an overwhelming choice to make, and an earlier generation was
already forced to make it. A friend of mine, the French writer Jérôme Ferrari,
wrote about this dilemma in his most recent novel The Principle. The story is
about the moral crisis experienced by a nuclear scientist in Nazi Germany. For
now, I don’t have an answer. I’m afraid, but I’m also horrified by the prospect of
surrendering.

Last question: could you tell us about your reaction to the massacres in Paris
by Islamic terrorists last January?

After two days of silence and shock that were impossible to overcome, I wrote that
between a cartoonist and a killer, I’ll always defend the cartoonist. It was essential,
I wrote, to save the world from those who wish to bring the world to an end. I
defended freedom and claimed the right to be insolent.