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.
Harun's opening statement that "Mama's still alive today," taken mostly as a reversal of Meursault's indifferent attitude, maintains the conflicted relationship between mother and son established by Meursault. However, where Meursault's emotionless response to his mother's death represented his indifference to the world, Harun's passing comment indicates a constant nagging pull to a mother whose sorrow for her son spills its regrets upon himself. That he loves her is clearly stated, though at the same time "she seemed to resent me [Harun] for a death I basically refused to undergo." Unlike Meursault's mother, who dies before the story begins, Harun's mother remains pervasive throughout the story, impacting his life by manifesting Musa's ghost-hood through demanding Harun wear his clothes, hunt down witnesses, translate newspaper clippings, and ultimately commit his own murder. Daoud's emphasis on the mother-son relationships emblemizes a greater relationship between individual and nation. Harun describes Algiers as a city "with its legs spread towards the sea," and a "dirty, corrupt creature, a dark, treacherous man-stealer." If the mother is the nation--to borrow Fanon's conceptualization--then Harun is the individual, a man with "a lot of resistance," a trait his mother could sense "in a confusing sort of way." Harun and his mother thus vie for control over Musa's death, whose lasting memory and short-lasted significance clouds their every action. Daoud's conceit to the novel is the mother's silence, Harun's playful deceit, and Meursault's looming presence as murderer-writer. All of which is conferred through extended nights at a bar haunted by the ghosts of other Haruns coping with other Meursaults.
Puzzlingly, this didn't stop The Meursault Investigation from being accepted into the position of dethroning The Stranger. Much like Camus' infamous novel, Daoud's text seems to have accrued a deceptive simplicity. The result has been writers and critics rushing to interpret the novel as uprooting Camus' legacy, despite the text's profound nods to his absurdist philosophy. Shifting the scope from Camus to Daoud, Meursault to Harun, simultaneously changes everything and nothing. After reenacting and reversing Meursault's murder, Harun further mirrors the pied-noir's circumstances with a crime dissatisfying the local police due to his indifference to the affair. Harun's murder, like Meursault's, did not inspire frustration in the authorities. It was "that other crime, the one intuition could guess: my strangeness" that agitated the officers in charge. Harun's murder "bothered a great many people" because he was "sitting in there in the middle, in that intermediary state." While the rest of his country worked to decolonize the nation, Harun remained shackled to his past, frozen in a state of transition from a decaying civilization towards a sprawling land of dreams; and his (dis)placement in this state illustrates this new civilization's apparent limitations.
In this light, granting Paul a reading of Daoud via Fanon rather than Camus makes less sense than the apparent correlations otherwise suggest. Fanon and Camus' images of the ideal rebel may not differ so much in the grander sense of triumph, and ultimately in the rebel's assumed disposition as a wielder of liberating violence. Homi Bhabha writes of Fanon's violence as pertaining to the psychic fracture experienced by the colonized, and searches "for human agency in the midst of the agony of oppression." (Wretched of the Earth XXXVI, Grove Press 2004) Out of Césairean inspiration, the colonized assumes the oppressor's violence--the colonizer's dominance over the colonized--reversing the power dynamic so as to restore integrity to the colonized. Harun's murder provides a striking challenge to this conceptualization of revolutionary violence. Unlike the Rebel of Aimé Césaire's play (and by extension, Fanon's ideal revolutionary figure), Harun seems to lack real agency for his murder. Despite pulling the trigger, it remains the force of his mother, "her eyes on my back like a hand pushing me," that drives his actions, hence his later confession that "the truth is, she committed the crime. She held my arm steady, while Musa held hers..." Harun does not receive the benefit of assuming freedom over others, as is necessary for Fanon's decolonizing violence to heal its wielders wounds. Instead his murder becomes swallowed into the very revolution promising to liberate him from his oppressors; the reversal of his family's particular fortune over Meursault's, trivialized by the revolution.
Harun is arrested by the FLN not for committing murder "but for not having done so at the right moment." He is also not brought in for questioning on the grounds that he will answer for any wrongdoing. Much like Meursault, Harun's crime is not the one he committed, but his disposition assumed while committing the crime. "I was there because I'd killed him all by myself, and for no good reason." The officer interrogating Harun holds him accountable because he "should have killed him [the Frenchman] with us, during the war, not last week." The precise timing of Harun's murder, two o' clock in the morning, contrasted to Meursault's two in the afternoon, becomes problematic to Harun's new officials. The crucial ritual component that allows for Harun's liberation from Musa's looming shadow becomes scrutinized by his nation's liberators. Harun's clarification regarding the importance of the timing, and the officer's subsequent slap across his face, signify an odds between the ends. Harun's murder does nothing to meet their ends, hence the officer's musing: "Your brother's a martyr, but you, I don't know..." The revolutionary need for precise actions, to apply violence as a building block of decolonized society, cannot accommodate Harun's individualistic application of violence. Since Harun's use of violence resonates only in himself and his mother, it means nothing to the officers of the national revolution; however, their dismissal of his murder, expressed by freeing him without a sentence, impacts him because of their indifference to the crime:
I wanted to be relieved of the heavy shadow that was turning my life into darkness.... I found their casual attitude toward my crime almost insulting.... Didn't they see they were disqualifying my act, obliterating it, by treating it like that? The gratuitousness of Musa's death was unconscionable. And now my revenge has just been struck down to the same level of insignificance!Harun's act to resolve his psychic fracture fails, displaced by the very revolutionary promise that allowed it to happen at all. Whatever authority over his actions left to him by his mother's influence was robbed from him by the newly independent officers of his country. His feelings of being cheated out of regaining meaning in his life resurges when Harun explodes in a confrontation with an imam, in which he bemoans the meaninglessness of his life to one who insists otherwise, in one final mirroring of Meursault.
Harun's warm account of these incidents, told with the rambling digressions of an old man drinking away his nights, succeeds in traversing a complicated double-bind: that is, of retelling the colonizer's tale while scrutinizing it at the same time. Daoud's genius lies in this clever act of literary reincarnation. He does not replace Camus; instead he joins in his conversation, showing us the logical progression to Camus' philosophical arguments without outright dismissing them. In fact, the writing of his work is so convincing that--as he notes of Meursault--"it makes you forget the crime." This at least seems to have happened with some of his critics, who seem to accept the novel as "explaining the facts," rather than exploring them, and more crucially, expanding upon them. None of this prevented, of course, Powell's Books from placing the novel under a shelf dedicated to recent publications of Muslim works in light of Ramadan; nor has it prevented critics like Laila Lalami and Robin Yassin-Kassab from construing the relationship between Harun, Musa, and Joseph in Quranic/Biblical terms, despite Harun's intense impatience with the perspective this lends. Going forward, The Meursault Investigation will not be read for replacing The Stranger, but for re-imagining it.
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