By Mursi Saad El-Din I am not sure what urges me to write about Albert Camus now. It is neither November, when he was born, nor January, when he died in a car accident. Perhaps the impetus is that I recently dug up some 1997 magazines with reviews of a then new biography of Camus by Olivier Todd, entitled Albert Camus : A Life. Apart from having read some of Camus' novels, notably L'Etranger (titled in the American translation The Stranger, and in the English translation The Outsider ) and La Peste, as well as some articles, I find that Camus is the writer for the times we are living in. Like many, if not all, French intellectuals, he was on the left, joining the French communist party for two years. But he shocked his leftist colleagues by denouncing Stalinism at a time when a large percentage of the French voted for the communist party. Camus could see the totalitarianism of the communist system, and clearly foresaw its fall. While Sartre and his followers threw themselves into the arms of Mao and Castro, Camus expressed his belief in human goodness. The leftist French intellectuals took him to task after he openly criticised the violent acts of the FLN (Front de Liberation Nationale). Although he was a supporter of Algeria in its struggle for independence and a vehement anti-colonialist, he was opposed to terrorism. In 1957, in an address to the students of Stockholm University, he said "I have always condemned terrorism and I must condemn a terrorism that works blindly in the streets of Algiers and one day may strike my mother and family. I believe in justice, but will defend my mother before justice." This led to his exclusion from the ranks of the French intellectual left. For them not to support the FLN was a heresy. Camus was denounced as a friend of imperialism, and even as recently as 1993, Edward Said wrote in Culture and Imperialism that Camus' work was "informed by an incapacitated colonial sensibility". Sartre, who dominated the French intellectual scene, attacked Camus in his journal Les Temps Modernes for his moralising and "his intellectual inadequacy". Subsequently, Simone de Beauvoir satirised Camus in her novel Les mandarins. Reviewing Todd's book, Bryan Appleyard, whom I greatly admire and respect, defends Camus against the Sartre-led French left. He describes Camus as the spokesman of his generation and the mentor of the next, not only in France but also in Europe and eventually the whole world. At the young age of 46, Camus received the Nobel Prize for literature. Camus' writings were about the isolation of man in an alienating universe, the estrangement of the individual from himself, the problem of evil and the finality of death. L'Etranger is a study of 20th-century alienation, with the hero, who is indeed more of an anti-hero, as an outsider or stranger condemned to death. Of course, there is the much- commented on erasure of Arab presence, as seen in the figure of the Arab who gets killed and whose murder is not what elicits comment on in colonial Algeria, the protagonist's indifference to his mother's death being what scandalises others. None of this, however, is to detract from L'Etranger, which is one of the greatest novels ever written. As for La Peste, this is a kind of symbolic account of the fight against an epidemic in Oran. Camus also underlined the necessity of defending such values as truth, moderation and justice. At a meeting of intellectuals, he proposed that "if we publicly say that we were wrong and that moral values exist, and henceforth we shall do what we must to establish and illustrate them, don't you think that would be the start of hope?"
