Kamel Daoud's Meursault, contre-enquête (2013) and Camus's L’Étranger (1942): from Postcolonial Remake to De-Narration

Abstract

In his debut novel, Kamel Daoud retells the story of French novelist and philosopher Albert Camus’s 1942 novel L’Étranger. Told from the vantage point of Harun, the brother of the nameless Arab killed in L’Étranger, Daoud’s Meursault, contre-enquête (2013) is a complex tribute to the Nobel prize-winning author. This essay argues that Daoud’s creative reworking of Albert Camus’s classic lies in the way it reframes the question of postcolonial rewriting in terms of literary affiliation – a question of choice – rather than of filiation – a question of lineage and hierarchy. It then offers to reread the ‘postcolonial remake’ as an act of ‘de-narration’ – a creative act of revision – that enables Kamel Daoud to evade the stereotypical postcolonial readings of his novel. What is most ingenious in the narration of Meursault, contre-enquête is its constant reference to the performance of rewriting Camus’s text not as a form of cultural reappropriation but as a metanarrative exposing its own story to the same critical scrutiny as he does Camus’s. Even when literary and political problematics converge in Daoud’s novel, they do not suggest the postcolonial tale of retribution. Rather, they elicit a new model of literary and social bond.