Editor's Preface

Since Camus’s tragic death in 1960, the author of La chute seems to have lived down the destiny of Judge Clamence in the novel which Sartre, presumably atoning for years of vicious correctness, finally said that he very much admired, as the work of a new, uncompromising, though, like Judge Clamence, penitent Camus. Almost two generations past Camus’s much derided 1957 Nobel, the balance sheet remains on the whole negative. One major biography, by an American historian. But no major works of criticism on Camus, except for one famous 1960 article by René Girard in PMLA and one broad brush intellectual survey by Germaine Brée in the early sixties; no displays of curiosity among French or American glitterati—only dull admiration for the canonical bravura of the universally translated Etranger. One exception: the combined ressentiment of Conor Cruise O’Brien’s and Edward Said’s postcolonial discourses.

So it was the surprise of literary 1994 when Le premier homme, an unfinished manuscript, found in the wreckage of the Facel Vega but surpressed for thirty years by family and friends, was published in Paris and immediately translated worldwide to great fanfare. The mood was principally nostalgic: this was a new Camus, much poorer, more epic and lyrical than we remembered him, but unfinished. A patriarchal (Le premier homme) and nationalist (World War I, the conquest of Algeria and its war of liberation) project, to be sure, but in the main, fragile, divided, uneven, inchoate—the way we like our stories nowadays: delayed closure, split subjectivities, regional concerns, communal and matriarchal propensities even.

Yet it is abundantly clear to any unprejudiced reader of the Premier homme that this had in fact been Camus all along; that the author and his heros, Mersault, Sisyphe, Clamence, as well as the man himself, opposed to the simplistic ideological solutions of the Cold or Algerian Wars, Camus, who knew and liked America much less even than his dual nemesis, Jean-Paul and Simone, had been tried once too many times already; and that his work is, on the face of it, no more dated or passé than that of the Saint Germain des Prés leaders. Now is the time to rediscover, or, perhaps, since that word is no longer in favor, to reinvent, the unsuspected sweep, the unreflected brilliance and the delicate nuances of a thought unjustly neglected and canonized.

The pieces assembled here all testify to a pressing need to imagine Camus now in our intellectual future, not our past. Camus still holds many surprises, mostly perhaps because the critical work stays, much like the Premier homme, unfinished. Naturally Algeria and what remains of the interrupted colonial project continues to hold sway. But from Emily Apter, whose article echoes the ideological complaints of the age, to David Carroll and Lawrence Kritzman, who call for a more nuanced approach to fifties literary politics, this MLN issue is rich in sketches and drafts of what a post-Camus history might look like. Raquel Scherr Salgado invites us to reexamine how histories breed memoir; Claude Imbert and Simone Debout tell us how it was to live those Camus years; David Reid reminisces on Camus in New York and the rains of empire; Jack Abecassis sees the Premier homme in L’étranger; Elizabeth Constable speaks of Camus’s perennial shame and Marc Blanchard asks himself how Camus, all particulars and no universals, would have fared in our days of generalized ethics. André Aciman provides the view from afar, Alexandria, the seat not of Orientalism, but of a Levantine European Africa, so close and moving yet unnoticed.

Now that so many people have witnessed Mersault’s execution, we can legitimately ask ourselves who this Albert Camus was. We should care.