Written and Edited by Peter Buller
The Meursault Investigation undertakes the massive endeavour of simultaneously challenging and embracing the impact of a looming colonizing influence. In the same space as Albert Camus' The Stranger, Kamel Daoud's text confronts an absurd universe with a worldly estrangement even as the colonial context of Camus' novel is illuminated; yet for most critics The Meursault Investigation reads more as a rejecting Camus' novel as a reconstruction. Elisabeth Zerofsky of The New Yorker suggests as much in referring to the novel as "an Algerian rebuke" to The Stranger. Similarly, Claire Messud and John Powers' reviews of the novel conceive of Harun's narration as telling "the 'true' circumstances of [Meursault's] story and legacy" the force of which enables Daoud to "stand Camus' The Stranger on its head." This conception of Daoud as "interrogating Camus," to quote Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times, places Daoud's text in terms of what Helen Tiffin dubbed canonical counter-discourse. Alongside Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea and J. M. Coetzee's Foe, Daoud's novel challenges colonial-literary authority by undermining the canon constructed by The Stranger. Although this suggests Daoud aligns more with Frantz Fanon than Albert Camus, as Aaron Paul of The New Inquiry argues--writing that comparing the text to Camus' does the work "a great disservice"--this account seems at odds with Harun's own narrative. Paul's assertion that "there is something radically anti-literary" and the association of Daoud's text with Tiffin's counter-discursive tactics read Fanon's revolutionary ideas in to Harun's absurdist narration to contradictory effect. The most intriguing insight of The Meursault Investigation is thus not only its post-colonial riposte, but its unflinching cynicism of social upheavals--from both colonizers and colonized.
