Camus, the Nouveau Roman, and the Postmodern

Abstract

In focusing on the complexity and originality of Albert Camus’s writing some fifty years after his death, a unique opportunity is presented to conduct a reappraisal of the significance of Camus’s fiction for the nouveau roman and more generally for contemporary literary aesthetics and poetics. Although existentialist writing was to some degree rejected by the emerging generation of writers and critics in the late 1950s and 1960s as being associated with an outmoded aesthetic and philosophical/political position, Camus was in fact influential in changing the intellectual, literary, and cultural landscape, and was hailed as an initiator of minimalist ecriture blanche by Roland Barthes and Alain Robbe Grillet. In the light of Robbe Grillet’s comments in his three-volume pseudoautobiography or autofiction titled Romanesques, and in the essays collected in Le Voyageur and Preface a une vie d’ecrivain (2005),1 it is now possible to reexamine the ways in which Camus’s narrative experimentation has been instrumental in the formation of a new mode of writing, and whose impact on twentieth and twenty first century literature has been considerable.