Le Premier Homme and the literature of loss

Abstract

Recent readings of Le Premier Homme (published posthumously in 1994), influenced by postcolonial theory and its emphasis on power relations between formerly colonised regions and colonising powers, have put Camus 'in dock' to answer for a list of offences ranging from overt racism, for example in L'Etranger, to 'special pleading' in defence of 'French Algeria' in Le Premier Homme. This chapter argues that ambiguities of Camus's writing and of representation of memory in Algerian context are more complex and intense than trial by political conviction allows. Read within a framework extending beyond postcolonial theory to memory studies, Le Premier Homme is a text of 'mediation' in sense that Avery Gordon defines 'haunting' as a particular form of mediation, describing the process that links an institution and an individual, a social structure and a subject, and history and a biography. A work of literary imagination that engages with memory work, Le Premier Homme is an interpretation of history and personal experience that haunts and continues to tell is much about anxieties of contemporary postcolonial cultures.