Albert Camus and (Post)colonial Amnesia

Albert Camus is one of the most controversial twentieth-century literary figures, whose works have been the subject of heated debates for decades. His position towards French imperialism, in particular, has been at the heart of these controversies, eliciting both admiration and bitter criticism from scholars in France and elsewhere. Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, who both supported the Algerian War of Independence (1954–62), were among the first French intellectuals to criticize Camus for his ambivalence toward French colonialism in Algeria. Both authors saw Camus’s outright condemnation of the Algerian War as an unequivocal endorsement of the French imperialist government. Sartre was particularly astringent with Camus: as he inveighed against his fellow existentialist writer’s complicity in French colonial politics, he also vigorously attacked colonialism and urged French intellectuals to support the Algerians’ struggle to destroy the colonial system in order to establish new relations between “a Free France and a liberated Algeria” (47).

Since the 1950s, several scholars have followed in Sartre’s and de Beauvoir’s footsteps and further indicted Camus’s collusion with French colonialism, highlighting the limits of his universalist ethics within Algeria’s conflicted colonial context. In his influential monograph Camus, published in 1970, Conor Cruise O’Brien was among the earliest scholars to point to Camus’s Eurocentrism and to see him as an apologist for French colonialism. Later, postcolonial scholars such as Edward Said, Nicholas Harrison, and myself have elaborated on Camus’s ethnocentric tendencies and complicity with French colonial politics to question the still-widespread view of Camus as a radical anti-colonialist figure. Many other scholars, including David Carroll and Ena Vulor, have instead emphasized Camus’s humanist outlook, arguing that his opposition to colonial oppression and injustice in Algeria is sufficient proof of his anti-colonialism. Camus’s writings contain enough of both colonialist and anti-colonialist statements to fuel each side of this critical divide. This demonstrates the difficulty of defining Camus in binary terms, as neither of these labels, colonialist or anti-colonialist, can fully account for his elusive approach to French colonialism and Algerian colonial identities.

My argument is that Camus is more fittingly defined as a para-colonialist writer, much in the tradition of western humanist and neo-humanist writers such as François Rabelais, Bartolomé de las Casas, Joseph Conrad, E.M. Forster, and André Gide, who criticized colonial atrocities in the European colonies without contesting the legitimacy of colonization itself, which paved the way for these atrocities. This article examines Camus’s relation to French colonialism in his final, uncompleted novel, Le Premier Homme (The First Man, 1994) and Noces (Nuptials, 1938) and shows how his para-colonialist outlook is articulated, in large part, through the prism of amnesia, a key colonial trope that is often overlooked in postcolonial discussions of Camus’s writing. In both works, Camus uses the trope of amnesia as a dramatic device to tackle the vexed issues of identity, colonial guilt and trauma, and cultural and class divisions, in ways that reveal the intricate connections between amnesia and imperial ideology, identity and nationhood, and ethics and aesthetics.

Amnesia refers to the deterioration of memory caused by a traumatic accident, old age, or an illness such as dementia. Few of Camus’s characters suffer directly from these physical, clearly identifiable amnesiac symptoms, whereas almost all his European settler characters in Le Premier Homme and Noces display signs of cultural and historical amnesia that alienates them from their surroundings. Catherine Cormery in Le Premier Homme is certainly the character who most distinctly illustrates Camus’s profound engagement in his fiction with memory and amnesia. Modelled on Camus’s own mother,¹ Mrs. Cormery suffers from a permanent memory disorder, combined with a speech impediment and impaired hearing caused by typhoid she contracted in her youth. Although it is not explicitly stated whether typhoid is the main source of Cormery’s amnesia, this disease may have, nevertheless, led to further deterioration of her physical and mental faculties. The narrator declares with compassionate sarcasm:

[Jacques’s] mother, who had no idea what history and geography might be, who...