Albert Camus begins The Myth of Sisyphus with “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question. All the rest comes afterwards.”
It is nearly as famous as his other opening paragraph: “Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don’t know.” That is from The Outsider (aka The Stranger).
In the latter, anti-hero Meursault, finding himself bored and irritated by the sun, shoots and kills an Arab on a beach in Algeria. It was published in 1942.
Seven decades later, Kamel Daoud, an Algerian journalist, tells the story from the Arab perspective in The Meursault Investigation. “Mama is still alive today,” it begins, and later turns the Camus philosophy on its head with, “Whether or not to commit murder is the only proper question for a philosopher, the only one he ought to ask. All the rest is chit chat.”
Harun - for that is the narrator’s name - gives the dead Arab a name (Musa), a family (it’s his brother), and a history, and by backgrounding colonialism introduces a tension and a whole new dimension. Algeria gained independence from France in 1962, by which time Camus had been killed in a car accident.
The Meursault Investigation is brilliant, funny, surreal, and as much a philosophical tract as The Outsider. It is like no other re-imagining of a classic. It presumes that Musa’s murder is a true story, Camus is the murderer, and Meursault is the author of the novel. Naturally, Camus’s name is never mentioned. Murderer and victim are bound together by fiction, rather like the ruler and the colonised are in history. So too are the narrators, one of whom kills an Arab and the other a Frenchman, in pointless acts highlighting the absurdity of existence.
You cannot – should not – read The Outsider without following up with The Meursault Investigation.
Edward Said once pointed out that in Camus’s novels, nameless, faceless Arabs have to die in order for Europeans to have fancy philosophical reflections.
Camus summed up The Outsider thus: “In our society any man who doesn’t cry at his mother’s funeral is liable to be condemned to death.” But is that a limited reading of it?
Daoud is telling us it is as much about ignoring the colonial as a person of no significance; it is about Arab identity and more. Harun explains that “Arab” appears twenty five times in the original book, but not once is there a name.
When an Imam tries to talk to Harun about god, he responds, “I had so little time left, I didn’t want to waste it on god.” By now Harun is indistinguishable from Meursault who had told the chaplain in The Outsider, “I didn’t have much time left. I didn’t want to waste it on god.”
The Meursault Investigation succeeds because it makes us think about the truth of a narrative, fictional or otherwise. Camus, who expounded the absurd, would have loved it.