Technique, Codes and Ambiguity

Abstract

Camus never actually used the term ‘roman’ (novel) to describe any of his books. L’Etranger, like La Chute, is a ‘recit’, a long short story or a novella. La Peste is ‘une chronique’, a chronicle, L’Exil et le royaume is a collection of ‘nouvelles’, short stories. It may be, had Camus lived to complete the book Le Premier Homme (The First Man), on which he was working at the time of his death, that he would have called it a novel. But he died before Le Premier Homme, which was apparently to describe the life of his father as he grew up in Algeria in the late nineteenth century, had become more than a series of preliminary drafts. The central character, someone even more culturally deprived than Lucien Camus had been in that he can ‘neither read nor write, [and] has neither morality nor religion’, consequently was going to be somebody who discovered the essential truths about human existence from zero. What sounds like an attempt to cast Lucien Camus in an almost mythical role would, had it been completed, have strengthened the possibility of reading Camus’s work as inspired, at least at the unconscious level, by the image of his absent father.19