Post-colonial Intertexts: Hierarchies of Modernism (Mini-monographs in Literary and Cultural Studies, 3) 9004541055, 9789004541054

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1 Intertext and Influence
2 Women and Euro-Modernism
1 Gendered Historiography and Colonial Euro-Modernist Aesthetics
1 Access to History
2 Tropes in History and Narrative
3 Whose History
4 “Plot” and History
5 Gender and History in the Novels
6 Conclusion
2 Difference across Colonial/Post-Colonial Authorship
3 Euro-Modernist and Post-Colonial Masquerades
1 The Detective Story
2 Female Absence and Presence
3 Male Absence and Presence
4 The Post-Colonial Detective
5 The Crime
6 The Modernist Masquerade
7 Woman and Genre
8 Woman and Big History
9 Doubles
10 Colonial and Post-Colonial Romance
4 The Aesthetics and Literary Politics of Commodities
5 Geography and the Gendering of Place
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Post-colonial Intertexts

Mini-Monographs in Literary and Cultural Studies volume 3

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/mlcs

Post-colonial Intertexts Hierarchies of Modernism By

Geetha Ramanathan

leiden | boston

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Ramanathan, Geetha, author. Title: Post-colonial intertexts : hierarchies of modernism / by Geetha Ramanathan. Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill, [2023] | Series: Mini-monographs in literary and cultural studies, 2772-5464 ; volume 3 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022058747 (print) | LCCN 2022058748 (ebook) | ISBN 9789004541054 (paperback ; acid-free paper) | ISBN 9789004541153 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Modernism (Literature) | Intertextuality. | Postcolonialism in literature. | Daoud, Kamel. Meursault, contre-enquête. | Vásquez, Juan Gabriel, 1973- Historia secreta de Costaguana. | Camus, Albert, 1913-1960. Étranger. | Conrad, Joseph, 1857-1924. Nostromo. | LCGFT: Literary criticism. Classification: LCC PN56.M54 R355 2023 (print) | LCC PN56.M54 (ebook) | DDC 809/.9112–dc23/eng/20230206 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022058747 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022058748

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 2772-5464 isbn 978-90-04-54105-4 (paperback) isbn 978-90-04-54115-3 (e-book) Copyright 2023 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Hotei, Brill Schöningh, Brill Fink, Brill mentis, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Böhlau, V&R unipress and Wageningen Academic. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Requests for re-use and/or translations must be addressed to Koninklijke Brill NV via brill.com or copyright.com. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

In memory of Radha Ramanathan

∵

Contents Acknowledgements ix Introduction 1 1 Intertext and Influence 4 2 Women and Euro-Modernism 7 1

Gendered Historiography and Colonial Euro-Modernist Aesthetics 10 1 Access to History 11 2 Tropes in History and Narrative 12 3 Whose History 17 4 “Plot” and History 20 5 Gender and History in the Novels 21 6 Conclusion 33

2

Difference across Colonial/Post-Colonial Authorship 34

3

Euro-Modernist and Post-Colonial Masquerades 49 1 The Detective Story 49 2 Female Absence and Presence 50 3 Male Absence and Presence 51 4 The Post-Colonial Detective 53 5 The Crime 54 6 The Modernist Masquerade 55 7 Woman and Genre 56 8 Woman and Big History 58 9 Doubles 63 10 Colonial and Post-Colonial Romance 64

4

The Aesthetics and Literary Politics of Commodities 66

5

Geography and the Gendering of Place 80

Conclusion 94 Bibliography 97 Index 106

Acknowledgements I would like to start out by thanking Mona Fayad for gifting me “The Meursault Investigation” for Christmas 2015. Part of the research for this project was facilitated by two English graduate students of West Chester University, Jacob Mensinger and Donald Ian Kertis. I thank Dr. Eleanor Shevlin for administering this program. A small part of Chapter 3 was presented at the ACLA 2019 in Macau. A sliver of Chapter 1 was presented at Calliope 2021, Helsinki. My warm appreciation of the library and inter-library loan folks at FH Green, Dana McDonnell and Jennifer O’Leary. I wish also to thank Christa Stevens of Brill for her attention to this project and Peter Buschman for his assistance. The anonymous reviewers of the manuscript offered extremely helpful suggestions for which I am grateful.

Introduction The prolific scholarly production on post-colonial literature has recently started paying attention to the relationship between post-coloniality and ­modernism. These studies circle around how post-colonial themes interact with ­modernist techniques in specific texts; however, the question of how post-colonialism has impacted modernist studies has not been raised. My project approaches these issues by drawing attention to a new sub-genre in post-colonial ­literature, the post-colonial intertext. The post-colonial intertext can be defined as writing that purposefully pours itself inside out into a canonical euro-modernist text.1 I use the term modernism to include those generated in the global South and North, reserving the term euro-modernism for the high modernism in Europe starting in the 1890s and ending between the third and fourth decades of the twentieth century. I do this to mark euro-modernism, rather than, as is the hegemonic practice, the peripheral. For instance, a recent study, The Cambridge Companion to Modernism, tinkers with international currents, but returns solidly to a canon that names authors such as Conrad. Its inclusivity extends to european artists such as Dada, the surrealists, and Cézanne.2 Note the absence of any mention of women. Notwithstanding multiple efforts to broaden references to this particular shibboleth of literary criticism,3 the establishment has been more than ordinarily resistant. One critic notes that despite the nods to the elusiveness and restrictedness of the term “modernism,” literary genealogies continue to circle back to the “cultural landscape that extends from the last two decades of the nineteenth century to the second world war and possibly beyond.”4 Thus, 1 See Geetha Ramanathan, Locating Gender in Modernism: The Outsider Female (New York: Routledge, 2012) 1–7. 2 Luca Somigli, Manifesto Writing and European Modernism 1885–1915 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003) 218. 3 Andreas Huyssen, “Geographies of Modernism in a Globalising World,” in Geographies of Modernism: Literatures, Cultures, Spaces, ed. Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker (Abingdon: Routledge, 2005), 7; Urmila Seshagiri, Race and the Modernist Imagination (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010); Rebecca Walkowitz, Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond the Nation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 76–105; Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel, “Introduction: The Global Horizon of Modernism,” in Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism, and Modernity eds. Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 1–16; Susan Stanford Friedman, Planetary Modernism: Provocations on Modernity Across Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), 1–16. 4 Luca Somigli, Manifesto Writing and European Modernism 1885–1915 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003) 217. © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2023 | DOI:10.1163/9789004541153_002

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Introduction

the use of the term “euro-modernism,” serves as a corrective and restricts its domain to one territory, and can not be considered homogenising in the current literary context. Two novels, one from Algeria, the other from Colombia exemplify post-­ colonial intertexts that destabilise the valorisation of these entrenched definitions of euro-modernism. I take these two texts, Kamel Daoud’s The Meursault Investigation (2013) and Juan Gabriel Vásquez’s The Secret History of Costaguana (2007) as my departure point. Not only do they avail of the broad themes, but of specific characters and incidents in two canonical, colonial, euro-­modernist texts, Albert Camus’s The Stranger (1946), and Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo (1904). Admittedly, Conrad and Camus are very different writers; nevertheless both share similarities with each other and a range of writers from the european tradition that warrants the usefulness of the term “euro-modernist.” In the specific case of the two writers, they are colonial euro-modernist writers, who purposefully use anti-realist techniques. In Heart of Darkness Conrad’s narrator describes an approach to narrative that is a defining euro-modernist moment: “… To him [Marlow] the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze …”5 A deliberate murkiness. Camus’s The Stranger shatters any credence given to certainty of meaning in narration. While there are of course many twentieth century and twenty first ­century novels that reconceive earlier writings in some fashion, these texts by Daoud and Vásquez are distinctive in using the genre to practice literary criticism. The authors unearth the causes and consequences of the monumental ­institutionalization of euro-modernist aesthetics, while tackling the reception of the euro-modernist texts. My analyses draw these strands out in their work. My primary interest is in the intervention these post-colonial intertexts effect in our recognition of the impact of euro-modernist aesthetics. Without belabouring the point, the study is more invested in this new genre that produces literary criticism, while drawing our attention to the hierarchies of euro-modernism than it is in tracing various efforts to expand the definitions of euro-modernism.6 Many of the canonical euro-modernist texts, ostensibly reshaping ­narrative to accommodate subjective perceptions and multiple versions, were however 5 Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkess in A Conrad Argosy (New York: Doubleday, Doran and Co. Inc: 1942), 29. 6 Steve Walsh, “Corpora and Discourse: The Challenges of Different Settings,” in Studies in ­Corpus Linguistics 2008: 9–29. The slipperiness of the term is further exacerbated by the conflation between modernity and modernist aesthetics, and in applying the term to diverse time periods without paying attention to historic specificity. In the case of my study, the historical benchmark is european colonialism of France and Spanish America.

Introduction

3

subtended by themes that reflected the historical realities of colonialism. Camus’s “The Stranger” and Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” are among those staples used to illustrate modernist anti-narrative and its aesthetics. Literary criticism over the last thirty years has quarrelled against the hagiography of euro-modernism and in some cases insisted that the aesthetics of modernism was rendered possible by the necessity of, in the broader Jamesonian sense, cancelling realism.7 It follows that the imperative to repress, or to occlude the reality of colonialism indeed produced the aesthetics of a cancelled realism, or euro-modernism. Regarded variously as cosmopolitan, rebellious, and insurgent, colonial euro-modernist texts have nevertheless been subject to intense critiques of their politics.8 Very often these have assumed the form of taking the authors to trial and meticulously examining all their statements and philosophical positions regarding the hazy contours and imaginary geographies of the colonies under question.9 And yet history is being written in these fictions. Earlier critiques of realism10, as colluding with dominant ideologies have been challenged by critics of realism and modernism alike,11 including feminist critics;12 however, contemporary discussions of modernism largely exclude realisms13 to emphasise “self-reflection” and subjective perceptions. More often than not, post-colonial novels have turned to history in their writing, particularly the moment of decolonisation, or the struggle for 7 8 9 10 11 12

13

Fredric Jameson, “The Realist Floor-Plan,” in Narrative/Theory ed. David Ritter (New York: Longman, 1996), 313–25; and “Beyond the Cave: Demystifying the Ideology of Modernism,” in The Ideologies of Theory, Vol. 2 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988). Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books, 1994). First published 1993. Conor Cruise O’Brien, Albert Camus of Europe and Africa (New York: Viking Press, 1970). Colin MacCabe, Tracking the Signifier: Theoretical Essays: Film, Linguistics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 33–58. Daria Villaneuva, Theories of Literary Realism, trans. Mihai I. Spariosu and Santiago ­Garcia-Castanon (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 146. See Realism/Anti-Realism in 20th Century Literature, eds. Christine Baron and Manfred Engels (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010); Jean-Pierre Durix, Mimesis, Genres and Post-Colonial Discourse (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1998); Esther Leslie, “Interrupted Dialogues of Realism and Modernism: The Fact of New Forms of Life, Already Born and Active,” in Adventures in Realism ed. Matthew Beaumont, 125–41. (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007); For a feminist take see Geetha Ramanathan, Locating Gender in Modernism: The Outsider Female (New York: Routledge, 2012), 1–21. Luca Somigli, Manifesto Writing and European Modernism 1885–1915 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), 218. Feminist critics attempt to augment this model in useful ways for theories of feminist reading practises. See Sandra Kemp, “‘But How Describe a World Seen Without a Self’: Feminism, Fiction, and Modernism,” in Critical Inquiry, Vol. 32, No. 1 (1993): 100.

4

Introduction

independence from the coloniser. A whole slew of canonical novels that are instantly recognisable come to mind: Chinua Achebe’s “Things Fall Apart,” Ngugi’s “Grain of Wheat,” Sembene’s “God’s Bits of Wood” among many others, including a range of male and female writers that I don’t include because they don’t fit into this pattern of writing history. Many other novels are included in the early study, “The Empire Writes Back” that arguably made post-colonial novels accessible to teachers of literature in the academy.14 In these novels, the empire is addressee. They foregrounded the role of history through fiction, and, in various modes, recorded the lived existence of, and the struggles of people under colonialism. To some extent, these were corrective texts on the lived reality of native peoples; Daoud and Vásquez do not strive to offer a “correct” historical record. Rather, they pose epistemological questions regarding historiography, literature, and euro-modernist aesthetics.The new sub-genre necessarily touches upon all these topics with one major addition: they are organized around canonical euro-modernist novels; indeed, as mentioned ­earlier, they are post-colonial intertexts. Functioning as literary criticism, these texts put euro-modernist ­aesthetics, the content a by-product, on trial. Literature itself is forced to confront its unethical seduction that plunge readers into wilful amnesia. The narrators of the novels practice the same arts of seduction mockingly, invalidating modernism, avoiding realism, and revising history. 1

Intertext and Influence

In scrutinising the aesthetics and writing strategies of the two euro-modernist texts, the authors of The Meursault Investigation and The Secret History move well beyond what we might consider to be influence or even specific references that could fall under intertextuality. Both knew the the texts intimately and had studied them in their historical contexts. Since the world-wide reception of The Meursault Investigation, Daoud has routinely been asked how he came up with the idea of writing the book. In an interview with Carlin Romano at the Free Library in Philadelphia in 2015, he quips that it is not the right question, but then goes on to answer it. Firstly, he believes that the question should be why someone had not done it earlier. By 14

Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tifflin. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and P­ ractice in Post-Colonial Literatures, Taylor & Francis Group, 2002. ProQuest Ebook ­Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wcupa/detail.action?docID=181641. Created from wcupa on 2020-09-08 13:59:44. First published 1989.

Introduction

5

putting the matter in this way, he is signalling the relevance of The Stranger to the literary world of Algeria. Daoud explains that the story is “personal” to him, and that the murder of the Arab in The Stranger delineates a “crime scene” that remains in the national memory despite the erasure of Camus from all official Algerian historical and literary records because of his ambiguity regarding the Algerian war of independence. Hence, an alternate perspective of this event was needed, one that explored the ramifications of a murderer without a corpse, all existing in a book, even as the protagonist of The Stranger and later, The Meursault Investigation are considered people, agents in the real world.15 Discussing Michel Tournier’s “Friday, or the Other Island,” as representative of the story of the other, Daoud advances the notion that Camus’s The ­Stranger is a variation on this theme. Following this logic, he proposes that when ­Meursault kills the Arab, he kills difference.16 Daoud expands on his intellectual fascination with Camus’s philosophical ideas and his use of language. For him, Camus’s writing is analogus to “a desired body.” Robyn Cresswell suggests that Daoud’s response to his work is “reading and writing as bodily inhabitation.”17 As Daoud puts it, The Stranger is a novel that troubles all the generic certainties of the detective novel. Normally, the reader would have a body, but the murderer would prove elusive. Here, we don’t have the body, but we have the murderer, and his own account of the event. We don’t hear from the victim. And while we don’t hear from the victim in The Meursault Investigation, we do hear from the victim’s brother, and mother. Camus, Meursault, and The Stranger all play roles in Daoud’s novels; however, they are filtered through the perspective of Harun, the narrator. Further, Harun provides a context for writing the story, for getting a narrative out there that would question not just the namelessness of the Arab, but the fleshlessness. Daoud’s intention was to go beyond what Camus had written; he was not interested in “vengeance,” rather, it could be a way of commenting on Algerian society 70 years after the publication of The Stranger.18 No single event ties the two texts; the history of the pied-noir in The Stranger is obviated, while Daoud locates his texts in post-colonial Algeria, but looks back at the history of the pied-noir and the Algerian war of independence. 15

Interview by Carlin Romano, Author event: “Kamel Daoud and The Meursault Investigation.” The Free Library, Philadelphia, November 18, 2015. https://www.youtube.com /watch?v=6Mx2YHv3YIw. 16 Kamel Daoud, The Yale Lecture, Nov 9, 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oF5 kWeLGRv8. 17 Robyn Creswell, “The Force of Looking: Kamel Daoud in the Spotlight.” The Nation ­October 14, 2019. 18 Ibid.

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Introduction

Vásquez has authored two critical studies on Conrad.19 Further, he asserts the importance of Conrad’s Nostromo in no uncertain terms. He is emphatic that excepting fiction in Spanish, Nostromo is the best novel written about Latin America. In addition, he credits Conrad with being one of the precursors of the Latin American boom, seldom mentioned in the accounts of that movement.20 In the novel, Vásquez tackles Conrad, who is of immense consequence in modern Latin American literature, and Márquez. In tracing the process of how Conrad came to write Nostromo, a course of action Vásquez also follows in the writing of The Secret History, he [Vásquez] “distorts” the process.21 Distortion is not necessarily pejorative; rather, it is a reshaping of perspective. For Vásquez, Conrad is representative of those colonial writers such as Malraux in Indo-China who are completely separated from the people and the country they write about by geographic and linguistic barriers. Not only is he questioning Conrad’s narration, he is critiquing Márquez’s modernist aesthetic; consequently, the narrative course of the texts differ widely. One critic shrewdly points out that Vásquez in less invested in the magical than he is in the tragic, searching for a way to reimagine the past and narrate it. Thus, he chooses the genre of the detective novel, rather than the epic.22 Nostromo features a swashbucking captain, the european inhabitants of Sulaco, the mercantile representatives of the British, the Italian migrants, and the “royalty” of the island, the owners of the silver mine, the Gould ­concession, Charles and his wife Emilia. All are embroiled in the effort to “save” the silver from falling into the hands of the rebellious Monterists. An independence bid to free Sulaco from Colombia forms the dramatic core of the plot until its ­resolution in the secession of Colombia and the US leasing of the rights to the Panama Canal. The Secret History shifts the focus to the author of N ­ ostromo, who serves as a main, but not central, character. The narrator of the text explains what compels him to pick up the pen and write The Secret History;

19 20 21 22

El arte de la distorsión (Bogotá: Alfaguara, 2009), and Joseph Conrad: El Hombre de N ­ inguna Parte. (Colombia: Panamericana Editorial, 2004). Juan Gabriel Vásquez, El arte de la distorsión (Bogotá: Alfaguara, 2009) 147. “… Nostromo, se me occurre a veces, es uno de los antecedentes más claros (y menos señalados) del boom latinamericano.” Raúl Rodríguez Freiré,“Voltaire En Los Trópicos o Los Trópicos Sobre Voltaire: ­Civilización vs. Naturaleza En ‘Historia Secreta De Costaguana,’” Revista De Crítica Literaria ­Latinoamericana, Vol. 39, No. 78 (2013): 325. Hyeryung Hwang, “After Magic: Juan Gabriel Vásquez and Narco Realism in The Sound of Things Falling.” The Midwest Quarterly: Vol. 61, No. 2, 187.

Introduction

7

Conrad’s theft of his story, his history, his identity. The historical event that ties the texts is the seccession of the Panama from Colombia. 2

Women and Euro-Modernism

The study makes comparisons across the four texts to lay out their organising narrative hierarchies. This approach allows us to make connections across specific colonial contexts with the purpose of ascertaining the place of the native male, and the position or lack thereof, of the native female. Thus, the primary focus is not on natives, and women per se, but their structural positioning. There has been a significant amount of research on women, and women in euro-modernism.23 A canon has developed among these writings with Woolf playing the same role that Joyce does in this corpus.24 Definitely a welcome addition, it says little about women writers outside this canon; more often than not they are virtuously placed in nationalist literary canons, the geographic and historic information taking primacy over aesthetics; consequently, in canonical discourse on euro-modernism, their work is not considered. Spivak’s very early critique on feminism and imperialism obtains here.25 A feminist purview also pays attention to gender in the organization of the four novels, and in their framing. It exposes the absences of women and investigates the presences of women in the four novels within a comparative framework. How does the positioning of women—european and colonised— compare with the place of the male colonised subject? Such an approach is 23

24

25

Elizabeth Flynn, Feminism Beyond Modernism. (Carbondale: University of Southern I­ llinois University Press, 2002); Allyson De Maagd, Dissensuous Modernism: Women ­Writers, the Senses and Technology. (Gainesville: Florida, 2022); Erica Gene Delsandro, Women Making Modernism (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2020); Joyce E. Kelley, Excursions into Modernism: Women Writers, Travel and the Female Body (Burlington, VT., Ashgate Publishing Company, 2015); Emma Heaney, The New Woman: Literary Modernism, Queer Theory, and the Trans Feminine Allegory (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2017) among others. My aim is to underline that in colonial euro-modernist novels, women in the diegesis operate within very narrow spheres, not to make a claim that women are completely unrepresented in academic discourse on euro-modernism. A cursory exploration shows the investment in this canon: Harvena Richter, Virginia Woolf: The Inward Voyage. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970); Virginia Woolf and the Common(Wealth) Reader, ed. Helen Wussow and Mary Ann Gillies. (South ­Carolina: Clemson University Digital Press, 2014). Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism.” In “Race,” Writing, and Difference, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr., 262–81. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986).

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Introduction

more alive to the complex interactions between colonial ideas of gender and control on the one hand, and, on the other, post-colonial notions of gender and culture. Giving serious consideration to gender in the overall framing of the colonial enterprise, and in the production of literature, provides a further apparatus within which to identify tropes of masculinity and femininity in the genesis of colonial euro-modernism and its repercussions on post-colonial modernisms. Chapter 1 opens with an analysis of the tropes of history used in the novels and asks if women have access to the writing of history. Covering the history of the western philosophical tradition, the chapter discusses the excision of women from the writing of history. The discussion follows attempts to define a feminist historiography that would distinguish itself from “The Spirit of the Age” accounts to enable the participation of women in the writing of the past. The novels are scrutinised with a view to ascertaining the roles of native men, and women, including european women in remembering and in recording the past. Detailed exegesis suggest that euro-modernism erases the historical in Camus’s text and dodges it in Conrad’s. While Daoud’s novel is also immersed in male subjectivity, his post-colonial modernism allows for a communal and feminine role in the writing of history. Vásquez’s disavowal of an overarching historical narrative invites female participation, and indeed, the possibility of a feminist historiography. Transitioning to the process of accrual of authority in texts, particularly in the context of canonical modernist criticism, Chapter 2 pursues the relationship between author, reader, and subject material with special emphasis on female readers and subjects. In light of the euro-modernist aesthetics of The Stranger, the discussion untangles the complicated relationship of author to protagonist to find that authority is handed over to the protagonist of the novel. To the contrary, Conrad keeps his grip on the narration; however, the diffusion of auteurial surrogates in the novel mitigates against his allowing females any proprietorship over the narrative. Both post-colonial protagonists are exceedingly insecure about their authority, seemingly ceding it at times to the euro-modernist narrator, but ultimately registering the greater authority of women over the narration. Chapter 3 shifts to the human drama at the centre of post-colonial narratives, where is the post-colonial subject in the euro-modernist novels, and where is the body? The corporeal is routed through the genre issues the four novels raise. Both post-colonial texts open by suggesting that the colonial euromodernist novel “disappears” the native subject, male and female. The chapter draws out the different emphases the novels place on the male and female bodies. Given that these post-colonial texts function as literary criticism, I evaluate the charges made against them by looking closely at relevant sections of

Introduction

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The Stranger and Nostromo. Linking the reception of the euro-modernist texts to this trope of the missing native body, the chapter identifies the varied elements that blinded generations of readers and critics to this topic at the heart of the colonial matter. Grounding the study in the material interests that are referenced in the colonial novels, the next section opens with an overview on how commodities and goods—the colonial enterprise—impacted the formation of european literature in the eighteenth century and its legacy to the twentieth century euro-modernist novel. The latter is informed in part by an investment in commodities and goods. Using psychoanalytic and Marxist ideas, the chapter shows how objects and commodities are elevated to a higher order, sublimated, and then turned into fetish objects by Camus and Conrad. Implicitly, the female as the post-colonial female becomes a fetish twice removed. Taking recourse to some anthropological studies, in combination with psychoanalysis, the chapter argues that such fetishisation evades the post-colonial subject, who values the object differently, and ultimately is prey to a very literal fetishisation. The post-colonial novels maintain that the subsumption of indigenous products results in a new cosmopolitan commodity, euro-modernism. Matters of space have long been at the forefront of colonial and ­post-­colonial studies that have also paid attention to the use of the female trope in descriptions of the coloniser’s journey to the colony. Such blatant description is not a factor in these colonial euro-modernist novels; however, euro-­modernist aesthetics function to justify the dislocation of the protagonist caused by the feminine in The Stranger, as post-colonial modernist aesthetics validate the distaste for certain spaces associated with the feminine in The Meursault ­Investigation. The Secret History of Costaguana’s protagonist is, in general, more self-aware, and even as he identifies a potentially destructive force as feminine, he connects his intimate happiness to that elemental power. In short, this study seeks to highlight, by way of comparing two sets of texts—colonial euro-modernist, and post-colonial modernist—that: a a new sub-genre, the post-colonial intertext, has emerged, b the post-colonial modernist text functions as literary criticism of ­euro-modernism, c post-colonial modernism and narrative design differ from euro-­ modernism in that woman are central, either as authorities, interlocutors, or narrators. To conclude, the study reveals the impact of euro-modernist aesthetics on the literary establishment’s judgements on colonial and post-colonial texts and demands a reappraisal of the dominant western art movement of the ­twentieth century, high modernism.

Chapter 1

Gendered Historiography and Colonial Euro-Modernist Aesthetics Women, as historical subjects, and indeed in realist guise, enter the immense body of criticism on the modernist colonial novel and more recently on the twenty first century post-colonial novel only glancingly.1 It is important to acknowledge the many women writers of the third world have, in their fiction, assumed the roles of both post-colonial, and feminist historiographer. Assia Djebar’s corpus is exemplary in this aspect. Other women writers have also contributed to alternative post-colonial histories on contemporary colonialism such as Sahar Khalifeh and Isabella Hammad. The scope of this chapter, however, explores the intersection between modernism and gendered historiography in two colonial instances: the French in Algeria, and the Spanish/British in Latin America. The focus is on the construction of history in four fictional texts: Albert Camus’s The Stranger, Kamel Daoud’s The Meursault Investigation, Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo and Juan Vásquez’s The Secret History of Costaguana. Who in the diegesis is allowed to grip history and to insert themselves into its record? Further, I delineate and critique the revisionist history envisioned in these post-colonial intertexts. Mainstream critics of euro-modernism have claimed that this aesthetics excludes or at the very best occludes realism. And yet the absence of ­historical detail in Camus’s novel does not eliminate history but displaces it. To the ­contrary, Conrad’s Nostromo has proponents persuaded of the richness of ­historical detail. The protagonist of Daoud’s novel, Harun, challenges the narrative; here, the larger western narrative of Algeria’s history as presented in The Stranger; however, José Altamirano in Vásquez’s novel invokes an Angel of History that parodies a teleology of history.

1 Geetha Ramanathan, Locating Gender in Modernism: The Outsider Female (New York: ­Routledge, 2012). I should note that there are several excellent studies of post-colonial ­novels that focus on women, and a far greater number that concentrate on women in euro-­ modernism, particularly women writers, including the question of when modernism might have occurred for women. Instances of the former are evoked in the introduction. I am here confining myself to a very specific notion of discussions of women as writers of history in the euro-modernist and in the post-colonial novel. The above study makes an effort to identify the issue, but is richer on imperfect realism in modernisms than on women as commentators of history in post-colonial intertexts, euro-modernist, and modernist fiction. © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2023 | doi:10.1163/9789004541153_003

Gendered Historiography

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Access to History

The post-colonial novelists challenge euro-modernist aesthetics, and the elision of the colonised female. All the texts identify coloniser and colonised women as enigmas; yet, there are significant divergences from this conception in the post-colonial novels. These novels use local aesthetics that diverge from euro-modernism to offer a different view of the woman in history. Despite western theorisations that the native female and male cannot write history, Daoud and Vásquez provide models of native women and men who not only enter the scene of history, but also record their participation and understanding of the making of history. Western metaphysical tradition has been firm in its ownership of history, starting with Aristotle’s dictum that matter is female and craves the form of the male. Influential models, continuing to the present day, are uncritically sanguine about asserting that women’s writing of history is precluded by the fact that women don’t have access to history. In other words, women’s entrance into history is an impossibility because of nature. A glancing summary of the logic of this line of thought is useful to contextualise the importance of feminist historiography in general, and in particular in the colonial situation. According to the western classical conception, although women are regenerative in nature, they cannot be in technology and culture, as they function as raw material. In this “paterialist” framework, when the ­species parts with nature, human history is born; the opposition being: f: materialism/ m: idealism/. A Marxist version of history promises a more grounded, less idealistic conception; however, Goux argues that philosophical formulations have a “sexual archaeology.”2 Marxists do view history as class struggle, and alienation as a function of the movement away from nature. It follows that class divisions will fall away when human beings reunite with nature, making this conception materialist, rather than idealist or paterialist. However, Goux finds that Engels, who wrote on this topic, shares a philosophy with Freud. The universal category of technology over matter brings back the ahistoricism of the idealist. Therefore, according to Goux, Engels arrives at the historical imaginary of Freud’s scheme that the male has access to something arcane and prior to the mother, a place that the mother herself does not have access to. In Engels’s scheme the move to technology is itself a move away from the natural, or the maternal. Hence, all history is male: “History is the history of man.”3 2 Jean-Joseph Goux, Symbolic Economies: After Marx and Freud Chapter 10 Trans. Jennifer ­Curtiss Gage (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990) 213. The term “paterialist” is Goux’s. 3 Ibid., 215.

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Goux concludes that Engels is not able to escape Freud’s “structuring role of symbolic and imaginary conditions.”4 What’s a woman to do? Clearly the logic is based on a generative matrix imposed on human deeds and revolves around notions of the male subject finding his place in the ­symbolic and history. The euro-modernist colonial novel with its emphasis on the male subject’s struggles with alienation in the colonised country, often presented as the native woman’s body, and his efforts to retain his grip on the ego even as it is threatened, would suggest that the paterialist strand subtends many male authored euro-modernist colonial novels. Feminist scholars have critiqued mainstream models of historiography for their obvious neglect of the histories of women.5 For instance, in the French colonial context, one critic asserts “… the gendering of the French empire has failed to acquire pride of place in academic conversations, despite the ­existence of a great deal of scholarship.”6 This suggests that when feminist historiography is practised, it does not enter the institutional apparatus.7 Do the novelists avail of models offered by subaltern and feminist historians who are devastatingly critical of both colonial and nationalist historiographies?8 Daoud’s and Vásquez’s novels are layered in that the “palimpsest” effect of an Ur-text slides in at the level of discourse, or meta-history; paradoxically in Daoud, and more antagonistically in Vásquez. The novels self-consciously record another discourse, aware of their own writing as meta-history. The ­layered approach registers the accounts of the native female and male. 2

Tropes in History and Narrative

All four texts, euro and post-colonial modernist, include historical material, both in the realist and modernist modes. In provisionally accepting all four 4 Ibid., 216. 5 Janet Afary, “Some Reflections on Third World Feminist Historiography.” Journal of Women’s History Vol. 1, No. 2 (Fall 1989) 147–152; De Gay, Jane, “Virginia Woolf’s Feminist Historiography in Orlando.” Critical Survey Vol. 19, No. 1 (2007) 62–72. 6 Rebecca Rogers, “’Cherchez la femme”’: Women and Gender in French Scholarship on Empire.” Journal of Women’s History Vol. 28, No. 4 Winter (2016) 124. 7 Ibid., 128. See Rogers for institutional impediments, and resistance from the community of historians to the inclusion of gender. 8 Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid (eds) Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonial ­History (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990); Suruchi Thapar-Bjorkert, Women in the Indian National Movement: Unseen Faces, Unheard Voices 1930–42 (New Delhi: Sage ­Publications, 2006); Mrinalini Sinha, The Global Restructuring of an Empire (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006).

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texts are writing history through narrative we can also read them through the tropes historians have borrowed from literature, in conjunction with literary aesthetics. The novelists use the modes of euro-modernism, incomplete modernism, or imperfect realism, or a combination of these modalities, sometimes in the same text. Such an analysis forwards our understanding of the writing of colonial and post-colonial history in euro-modernist and post-colonial texts. The two post-colonial texts are intertextual and metafictional, broadly raising the question of whether, as Linda Hutcheon, in her discussion on the methods of fiction maintains,9 “Historiographic metafiction, for example, keeps distinct its formal auto-representation, and its historical context, and in so doing problematizes the very possibility of historical knowledge.” Even as both narrators focus on the shrouding of history by euro-modernist fiction, they do not discount the possibility of other modes of historical knowledge; oral in the case of Daoud’s narrator, and testimonial in that of Vásquez. Borrowing Hayden White’s tropologies, David Scott, in his reading of CLR James’s commentary on the history of the Haitian revolt against the French in the eighteenth century, identifies the James text as traversing the romantic, tragic, and ironic modes.10 Are these modalities exempt from gender coding? Feminist critics have challenged the innocence of genre quite effectively both in high literature and popular culture.11 Epics, for instance, are coded masculine for their heroism while melodramas are for women. This is partly based on perceptions of readership. In general, as Andreas Huyssen has convincingly detailed, women are identified with mass culture.12 The rise of the novel in the UK is itself based on the increased literacy of the middle and lower middle classes, many of them women, leading to plots and content that shifted away from aristocratic settings and characters.13 Do the three tropes—romance, tragedy, irony—similarly reveal gendered inclinations in the writing of specific histories? Obviously, generalisations are highly suspect and militate against the very specifics of the historic, but 9 10

11 12 13

Linda Hutcheon, Poetics of Post-Modernism (New York: Routledge, 1988) 106. C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (New York: Random House, 1963) Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987); David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004). Geetha Ramanathan, Feminist Auteurs: Reading Women’s Films (London: Wallflower, 2006). Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986). Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957).

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perhaps these gendered overlays in the use of tropes can be identified in specific instances. A question relevant to this study would be how contemporary critics of modernisms dealt with recording the history. The euro-modernist and post-colonial novels obliquely indicate who can write their history and meta-reflexively comment about writing on their history, thus offering both their history and that of its writing. In this context, it is noteworthy that, as mentioned earlier, while writing on women euro-modernist novelists has been amplified, canonical arbiters still balk at the inclusion of women historiographers. Urmila Seshagiri makes a convincing case to this effect: The journal’s [Modernism / Modernity] commitment to interdisciplinarity, along with the spatiotemporal coordinates of our field shines through the list. But even though several of these themed issues feature excellent feminist scholarship, the artists, critics, and philosophers named for intellectual colloquy—are all Anglo-European men. There are no women.14 A damning statement if ever there were one, pointing to the differences between writing on women euro-modernists, and the place of that critical writing in euro-modernist historiography. Early attempts to critique historiographic practice are useful in pointing to histories of men embodying the “Spirit of the Age” as implicitly, if not explicitly, masculine.15 In this sense the notion of the ideal embedded in the spirit of the age could be considered Romance for its fullness; plenitude carrying the value of masculinity and the ideal that connotes Romance. One feminist symposium, engaged in approaches to history from a feminist perspective, asks that women search in history for those exclusions and occlusions in triumphant “Histories of the Age.” Precisely one such attempt observes that women were “spectral” largely because of the inhibitions that hemmed them in. Therefore, a feminist historiography that links the post-modern with the Early Modern

14

15

Urmila Seshagiri, “’Mind the Gap”: Modernism and Feminist Praxis,” in Modernism/ Modernity Aug 7, 2017 Vol. 2 cycle 2 https://doi.org/10.26597/mod.0022. In these studies, Woolf is the exception who is often featured. Bill Goldstein,. The World Broke in Two: Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster, and the Year That Changed Literature. (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2017); Julia Kuehn, A Female Poetics of Empire: From Eliot to Woolf (Routledge Studies in Nineteenth Century Literature. (New York: Routledge, 2013.). De Gay, Jane, “Virginia Woolf’s Feminist Historiography in Orlando.” Critical Survey, Vol. 19, No. 1 (2007) 62–72.

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can uncover the constructed categories of periods such as the medieval and the Renaissance.16 Clearly, Camus’s The Stranger does not fit into the model of the “Spirit of the Age,” or even the grand récit. However, the text, despite the absence of descriptions not funnelled through the subjective narrator, bears more than a trace of colonial history, land, and culture, rendering it open to “strife” in the very “emergence” of the text. This is not the same as suggesting that the text contains contradictions, but that the effort at “worlding” the text, renders visible what was invisible in the violence inherent in revealing colonial control.17 In other words, the strife is inherent in the process of writing about two different geo-political entities under one umbrella.18 Is Meursault an emerging subject? His disengagement with colonialism is apparent. Thus, the history Camus is writing is partial, not the grand story. In slivering off and doing only the embodied subject, the sensations of the body that Meursault experiences, Camus is not totalizing, but rather questioning how narrative is constructed, particularly in the second half of the novel. Sections of the novel that pertain to the contemporary colonial moment are more clearly noticeable in the second portion where Meursault excoriates the colonial apparatus as manifested in two institutions, the law and the church. This segment is vital to establishing Meursault as the authentic hero, for it details the legal establishment’s sidelining of the murder to focus on his psychic differences, thus “othering” him in the colonial context. As Carroll puts it, the murder is only a “pretext” to present Meursault as the victim of an injustice, tried and convicted for the lack of emotion shown towards his mother.19 Thus, very indirectly, the novel can be said to gesture towards the effacement of history on the part of the colonial authorities, and the pied-noir’s own unawareness of the system. Meursault is presented as an unquestioning man, an average pied-noir, unreflective. Special markers in the novel are coffee, cigarettes, male desire, pleasure in the body, displeasure of the body. The text reveals the fractured 16 17 18

19

Notable disruptions of this idea are Sor Juana, and Marguerite De Navarre; nevertheless, “spectral” still stands. Ranjana Khanna, Dark Continents: Psychoanalysis and Colonialism (Durham: Duke ­University Press, 2003) 4. I have borrowed the term “strife” from Ranjana Khanna. The term “anxiety” has also been used for canonical euro-modernist texts in line with the linkage between modernism and colonialism; yet the anxiety is used to explain the resistance of high euro-modernist aesthetics to colonialism. See Mara de Gennaro’s M ­ odernism after Postcolonialism: Toward a Nonterritorial Comparative Literature (­Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020) 11. David Carroll, Albert Camus, the Algerian: Colonialism Terrorism Justice. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007) 28.

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embodied subject of modernism that does not engage in any of the master tropes of history but critiques them through Meursault’s interiority.20 The physical seems more important to Meursault than the cultural aspects, but he fails to see the colonised subject’s body, or to register the culture of the land. Harun, in The Meursault Investigation tells the story of the sleight of hand by which the murderer is turned into an outsider because of what Meursault sees as the idiocy, and Harun, the criminality of the colonial apparatus. Where Meursault’s response is disproportionately centred on his plight, Harun’s ­critique of post-colonial Algeria’s judicial, religious, and cultural systems is heavily contextualised. The novel pays attention not just to the colonial past, but mocks the more recent pieties that have been set in place in the name of the new nation state. Daoud’s narrator understands The Stranger as having erased history in favour of colonial male subjectivity. However, his own writing of how that history is produced is similarly marked by the “strife” in the narration. Conrad’s Nostromo, in comparison to Camus’s The Stranger is more self-consciously reflective, not merely in the narration, but in each of the characters’ musings. Juan Vásquez’s novel uncovers the wilful contortions that the coloniser and colonised undergo in the colonial situation, exposing the strife to x-ray vision in many instances. Thus, the general proposition that colonial and post-­ colonial historiography can be written based on the simple assumption that its primary interest is in capturing the spirit of the times, or recording the changes introduced due to colonial rule, is blown out of the water. The tension implicit in narrating an encounter between two peoples with different histories, one colonial, the other subordinated, suggests that all notions of a balanced and judicious history are absurd. Indeed, when history is narrated and becomes a “story” it ceases to be merely an annal or a historical record. Hayden White distinguishes between two types of historiography. Narratives would have a beginning, middle, and end, and primarily use the third person; discourse would use uncertain tenses and first-person ­narration.21 This characterization brings us back to the familiar divisions of realism and modernism, history and fiction. The connections are over-simplified: true=real=realist narrative, subjective=unreal=modernist anti-narrative. These 20

21

Denise Albanese, “Making it New: Humanism, Colonialism, and the Gendered Body in Early Modern Culture,” in Feminist Readings of Early Modern Culture: Emerging Subjects, eds. Valerie Traub, M. Lindsay Kaplan and Dympna Callaghan, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987) 16.

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definitions do not augur well for claims that euro-modernist novels also participate in colonial historiography. Yet, Daoud’s insistent critiques of Camus’s modernist aesthetic in The Stranger confirms that the latter text’s exclusive, if self-concealing, subjective perceptions amount to a writing of history. ­Critics have catalogued Conrad’s many sources, historical and invented; however, many, citing Conrad himself, aver that the inscrutabilities, and temporal lapses of Nostromo remove it from historiography. It is noteworthy that Americanist and Latin American critics, regardless of debates on aesthetics, acknowledge the novel, not only as historical, but also as important in the contemporary real of Latin America. One critic recounts that in 2002 a Latin American economist “compares the then newly elected Alvaro Uribe to General Barrios, a seasoned soldier of the wars of independence … who offers comforting advice to foreign investors in Latin America. But General Barrios does not come from the annals of history: he is a fictional character in Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo.”22 Here, fiction becomes history, and is then deployed to reinforce and amplify colonial ventures. Vásquez’s The Secret History of Costaguana quarrels openly with the author as historical character figure on the two counts of stealing both the ­history, and its writing. 3

Whose History

The post-colonial texts tackle the problem of archives that are constructed to “foreground the agency of white, Western, male actors” in the history of decolonisation.23 The Meursault Investigation and The Secret History of Costaguana can be read as post-colonial historiography that acknowledges the native female and male. The Stranger pays scant attention to the native male and female in colonial history, in comparison to Nostromo that gives a nod to the historical point of view of women identified with europeans. European idealist schools of history, following Hegel, would deny the colonised subject history altogether, arguing that history, or the writing of history is possible because of the conflict between law and desire in the legal subject. Since colonised subjects do not have full access to the law, they do not have access to the 22

23

Luz Ramirez, British Representations of Latin America (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007) 77; Christopher Robin, “Time, History, Narrative in Nostromo” in Joseph Conrad: Voice, Sequence, History, Genre ed. Jakob Lothe, Jeremy Hawthorn, and James Phelan. (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2008) 196–217. Priyamvada Gopal, Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent. (London: Verso, 2019) 11.

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­ istoriographic that would enable their narratives to be written as histories. h In other words, their story need not be told. It is very tempting to suggest that this is Meursault’s unthinking assumption in his encounter with the “Arabs” in The Stranger. In light of Meursault’s response to his trial, one could consider his shooting of the native an unrecognised effort to identify himself with the colonised extra-legal subject. Daoud’s The Meursault Investigation features a protagonist who points to the excision of the Algerian people in the modernist history of The Stranger. Moreover, the protagonist, Harun, claims that his efforts, and by extension of others, to insert themselves into history remain unsuccessful, as he merely recounts stories and does not write them down. Nevertheless, by framing Harun as an oral raconteur, Daoud engages in subaltern historiography. Nostromo is equivocal about the natives of Sulaco as legal subjects; despite some broad caricatures, the drive of the novel is towards writing a history of the place. Whether this includes Latin Americans as having access to writing their own history is laid to rest by the afterword of the novel that claims, in a presciently post-modern move, that the history written by a character in the novel, who is identified with Europe, is the true source of Conrad’s narrative. Conrad maintained in no uncertain terms that his own fictions were truer to history implicitly because fiction allowed him to narrate outside of the ethnographic record model. Carey Snyder attributes Conrad’s euro-modernist aesthetic to his departure from the claims of european evolutionary superiority advanced by explorers like Stanley.24 While Vásquez does not directly attack Conrad’s modernist style, he does confront the ethnographic dimension, by consistently pursuing the theme of the insider participant, as opposed to the ethnographic historian. However, the narrator’s own claims to post-colonial historiography are self-mocking, and at times parodic. The scope of the discussion regarding who actually has access to history, who can function as historical subject, and who can record history has been conducted in exclusively masculine terms that disregard the narratives of women whether they are located in the colonial metropolises or the colonised territories. Strikingly they also exclude men from colonial spaces. Pursuing the notion that the scale of the historical narrative, and the centrality of the male subject gives form to the writing of history, one could conclude that history itself is the property of colonial male subjects. In contrast, the story-telling that Virginia Woolf wishes to narrate to throw light on the very misconception of traditional idealist history as history, would be regarded as fiction. In 24

Carey J. Snyder, British Fiction and Cross-Cultural Encounters: Ethnographic Modernism from Wells to Woolf (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) 60.

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this framework, a further routine separation of realist fiction to supposed ­anti-realist modernist fiction genders euro-modernism, and its privileging of ambiguity as feminine. The most valued asset of euro-modernist novels lies in their emphasis on subjective interiority, and in the tentativeness of their style, particularly when describing colonised spaces. Time takes on different meanings for coloniser and colonised. For the former, it is the time of the conquest, the writing of history, and the fullness of modernity; for the latter, it is the time of subjugation, the erasure of history, and the test of cultural practice. In psychoanalytic terms the wariness of the approach has been read as the authors’ own difficulties with assimilating into the colonial situation.25 The intersection between the psychoanalytic, the historical, and the ­stylistic ­suggests that the texts compensate for their deliberate movement away from colonial authority, whether purposefully or not, by overwriting the euro-­ modernist style, coded as feminine according to the realist credo that is marked as masculine. One might expect that if euro-modernist texts are coded as feminine because of the dominance of the fictional, colonised subjects and women from both centre and periphery would be written. However, they become, in effect, stories in the colonial male narrator’s history, through the male narrator’s increasing involvement with his own fracturing subjectivity. In sum, the euro-modernist style does not succeed in covering over the historical real of the coloniser’s place in the colony. In the colonial situation, the spaces the coloniser and colonised occupy and view are epistemologically different. The setting of the two colonial modernist novels lays it out: two different worlds in the same geographic terrain. It is self-evident that colonial surveillance and control of land was crucial to the production of wealth for the colonising country. That the two groups would experience time, its passage, the changes wrought during a specific period, differently also obtains. The colonised country is subject to a compulsory modernity while still deeply immersed in the rhythms of cultural life. This “time lag” between coloniser and colonised is articulated in the colonial euro-modernist and post-colonial novels.26 Time as both measure and allegory feature in these texts complicating historiographies. Its use carries gendered valences that impact the positioning of the colonised men and women, and women, aligned with the coloniser, as subjects and writers of history.

25 26

Ranjana Khanna, Dark Continents: Psychoanalysis and Colonialism (Durham: Duke ­ niversity Press, 2003) 145–204. U Ibid., 15.

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“Plot” and History

In the telling of history in the european medieval period, plot was considered important in lending shape to events. Euro-modernist texts, in general, and the post-colonial intertexts in this study, buck at the notion of plot lending coherence to the novel. However, if we were to provisionally identify what chief events occur in the novels, leaving aside the question of motivation, that lends plot its plenitude, we could suggest some pegs around which history is written. Intellectual debates surrounding the Algerian war of independence ­featured the difference of opinion between Sartre and Camus regarding the means to achieve the liberation of Algeria. While Sartre advocated “unconditional action, Camus strove to draw out the implications of “passionate convictions” that are unquestioning.27 The Stranger is written during the time of these debates, portraying an individual’s attempt to understand the personal, not just his own, implications of the events of the moment. The novel tells the story of a man, who receives news of his mother’s death, and within a few days of the funeral, shoots another man to death without the kinds of motivations usually attributed to such actions; jealousy, love, vengeance. As a consequence, he is brought to trial and then executed. Within this bald scheme that has no historical body, there lie the historical bones of the story, its mode of telling, and the hierarchies that determine who submits the story to the historical register. If The Stranger’s plot is hard to discern – bareboned, The Meursault Investigation is twice removed from the notion of plot itself. The plot, as it were, narrates the story of a writer, and the book he writes that effaces the narrator’s brother and his history. Here, the active quest is for the historical body, the real of the story. To the contrary, Conrad’s Nostromo is very much self-involved in the telling of the story of the South American republic of Sulaco. The plot revolves around the actions of the characters regarding the silver in the mines, known as the Gould purchase, and its development. The actions of nations and peoples are governed by the mine. The Blancos and Goulds are spurred by ideals of progress. The motivation is more personal for Nostromo and the natives, if tied to the territory. Newly Paris returned Martin Decoud also needs the silver to fulfill his revolutionary aspirations. By covering this aspect of the story from a number of different vantage points, Conrad leads us to his beliefs on who the truth-teller is. Truth is of importance in The Secret History of Costaguana, but it is not an absolute truth. Two strands, of the theft of the history of Costaguana, and of the wealth of the 27

Daniel Just, “The war of writing: French literary politics and the decolonisation of ­Algeria.” Journal of European Studies (2013) 43 (3): 227–243.

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nation through the building of the Panama Canal, follow the narration that forsakes all simulation of plot and works with providing witness statements to a jury composed of the narratees and the readers. Thus, we find out if the post-colonial male and female have access to the history of their country, and the right to narrate it. 5

Gender and History in the Novels

A critical glance at the construction of gender in The Stranger suggests that the narrator is vaguely impervious to women; whether it is his mother, his lover, Maria, the nurse, the old woman who cries incessantly at the funeral, the women at the beach, or the native women. He is presented as being matter of fact about them, although there are uneasy intimations at some points that he feels insufficient both with mother and lover. There is some rationalisation involved in his comment that his mother was happier at the old age home, but when the residents mention his infrequent visits, Meursault is prey to that ultimate euro-modernist theme, guilt. Meeting Marie, his lover, in prison, he feels the same, so it could be averred that women are the cause for his primary feelings of guilt and alienation from society. The narrative motor is of course his trip to his mother’s funeral; baldly, a dead woman is the motivator of action. An epic narrative, such as the Odyssey had plotted women as both motivators of action, and threats to the hero’s quest; here, the presentness and absence of women destroys the protagonist’s comfort. Notwithstanding these elements, the women are obviated both from participating in history and writing it. In part, this is ocassioned by the texts’s handling of time. Camus’s The Stranger illustrates the very gendered and indeed colonial cast lent to time. The opening of The Stranger is arresting in its innocuousness, narrating a seemingly simple fact. However, the plainness of the opening line becomes overladen in a rereading, concealing and revealing, as it does, the narrator’s existence in competing spaces and temporalities. They carry many temporal markers disguising psychic uncertainty: “Maman died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don’t know.”28 The paragraph begins with a time marker, “today,” suggesting immediacy, and perhaps even that the narrator is still in the process of grasping that his mother has died. The second time marker is doubly tentative, throwing doubt on the clarity of the previous sentence. The “or” that precedes, and the “maybe” that succeeds the “yesterday” in the second 28

All quotations are from Albert Camus, The Stranger Trans. Matthew Ward (New York: Random House, 1989) 3. Originally published as L’Étranger 1946.

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sentence renders the time irrelevant. More disturbing is the “I don’t know” that follows the doubtful “maybe.” This passage has been read as witness to the brilliance of Camus in the construction of an authentic, if unreliable, subject in Meursault. The time of the funeral comes under the cloud of further uncertainty, ‘“Mother deceased. Funeral tomorrow. Faithfully yours.” That doesn’t mean anything. Maybe it was yesterday.” (3) The time of the funeral seems to be further at issue as the last sentence is unclear about whether the funeral was yesterday, or the death was. The comment after the reference to the funeral home, “That doesn’t mean anything” could imply metaphysical uncertainty, or the vagaries of telegraphic communication. The “that” as demonstrative pronoun in its vagueness could include the possibility that the death of the mother does not mean anything. Further, the lack of meaning can be attached to the particular—the death of the narrator’s mother, or the death of any human being in the universe. In shaking every temporal marker regarding his mother’s death, the narrator has effectively put her existence outside history by not marking the time of her death in conventional terms. Rather, the narrator’s comments are pertinent to his own moment, the present, in time. The male colonial subject, Meursault, has arrogated power over the mother’s existence. The euro-modernist perspectival approach has obscured the reality of the mother’s death. An allegorical approach to this paragraph, however, indicates a very sharp awareness of France’s impending exit from Algeria, and the dangers for the “pieds-noirs” in Algeria. This allegorical reading is based on the colonial propensity to call the colonising country “the mother country.” Another favoured association that is plastered on is “the home country.” Again, the alignment with the maternal and feminine is patent. Kristeva has argued that women are barred from cursive time, or entrance into history.29 Instead, they are locked into monumental time.30 Women’s representational value appears to exceed their value as living, historical subjects. In effect, the narrator has blocked out the possibility of French rule in Algeria coming to an end; rather, he has imbued it with the durability of the monumental. Women in The Meursault Investigation are firmly embedded in historical time. Here, the mother is the motivator of action, while Meriem, the Camus student, is the impetus to knowledge. The native woman is named, and is for a 29 30

Julia Kristeva, “Women’s Time” in The Kristeva Reader ed. Toril Moi (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986) 187–214. This is not always the case, particularly in Expressionist works where monumental time and mythical time are seen as male prerogatives. See Geetha Ramanathan, The Female in German Modernisms: The Visual Turn (Stuttgart: WiSa Ibidem, 2019).

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while, the object of a quixotic search. However, she does not become a “cause” in a nationalist struggle, retaining her own separateness from the narrator’s doings. And so it is with Meriem. Unlike the narrator of The Stranger, Harun strives to understand his complex feelings towards women, but projects masculine imagery when describing cityscapes. Nevertheless, female characters, and the women’s community are depicted within the cultural context, and the historical time. As with The Stranger, Kamel Daoud’s The Meursault Investigation begins with an epigraph on time indicating the measure of its importance in the text, with a specific reference to the monumental: The hour of crime does not strike at the same time for every people. This explains the permanence of history. —E.M. Cioran Syllogismes del’amertume (Italics in the original)31 The opening line is relatively clear, framing the “crime” of the coloniser and colonised occurring at different times, presaging the rough plot of the novel, and indicating the structural differences between the two. Whether the “crime” of the colonised can be compared to the coloniser’s is open to debate. The coloniser’s crime is a crime because it is enacted on subordinate peoples. The history of decolonisation shows that the reverse cannot be upheld, as the people struggling for independence do not have total authority over the coloniser. Thus, any ‘crime” would also inevitably redound on other post-colonial subjects. The Meursault Investigation does ponder the absurdity of the time of the “crime” in the case of the protagonist, Harun. At the end of the novel, Harun is faced with the meaninglessness of his action in killing the Frenchman, Joseph.32 A difference of minutes decides whether the actions of the protagonist are patriotic, part of the freedom struggle, or criminal, the wrong-doing of an individual. The epigraph’s reference to “the permanence of history” is 31 32

All quotations are from Kamel Daoud, The Meursault Investigation Trans. John Cullen (London: Oneworld Publications, 2015) NP. Originally published as Meursault, contre-­ enquête (Algiers: Éditions Barzakh, 2013). Catherine Talley makes the larger point that Haurn, like Meursault, is confronted with the absurdity of the colonial world and its consequences for the post-colonial. See “The Absurdity of the Aftermath in Daoud’s Meursault Contre-enquête.” French Forum Vol. 45, No. 3, (Winter) 2020: 225–239. Alice Kaplan also makes this point forcefully in “ Meursault Contre-enquête de Kamel Daoud.” Contreligne June 2014 www. Contreligne/eu/2014/06 accessed September 28, 2022.

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vaguely threatening and almost defeatist in its conception of history. Or, perhaps, more cynically, that the colonised will commit the same crimes as the coloniser. As mentioned, the plot of the novel raises questions about what constitutes “crime” at different times. A key theme in Harun’s story emphasizes that in The Stranger Meursault’s killing of the native is wiped out by the euro-modernist aesthetics unleashed by Camus, the author. The prospect of the entrance into history, following the Cioran epigraph, is marked by violence, indirectly gesturing to a concept of history built around great confrontations. If the epigraph is discomfiting, akin to Camus’s destabilisation of the category of time through his protagonist, the opening paragraph reveals other elements that firmly locate the woman in history. In a seemingly precise imitation of the introduction of The Stranger, Daoud too begins with the rhythms of the opening; however, the meaning of the words, and how to evaluate them is regarded very differently by Daoud’s Harun: Mama’s still alive today. She doesn’t say anything now, but there are many tales she could tell. Unlike me: I’ve rehashed this story in my head so often, I almost can’t remember it anymore. (1) The emphasis on “still” and the firmness of “today” acknowledges the mother’s presence as an entity distinct from the protagonist. That she can still tell stories, although she doesn’t tell so many anymore, points both to her ability to narrate history and her own physical corporeal passage through time. The contrast with the narrator’s own memory, the impact of the repetitive trawling through memory to find the story, is telling in that it confers authority on the mother of the protagonist and gives voice to the unvoiced mother of The Stranger’s “Arab.” Thus, Daoud in the very opening practices a subaltern, or feminist historiography in writing the story of the “victim” of a “crime,” or of the colonised. The mother is placed in cursive time. Daoud’s narrator locates himself in time too; it is fifty years after the death of the native in The Stranger. The question the narrative poses bears on modernist aesthetics and the writing of history. Harun, the narrator of The Meursault Investigation takes issue with the distortion of the narrative of The Stranger, and the lies naturalised by the narrator’s memory that are respooled to the reader: “… the act of writing betrays its purpose and turns into an agent that nullifes memory.”33 The narrator, however, does not immediately reference the 33

Abdelbaqi Ghorab, “Historiographic Metafiction and the Interrogation of Collective Memory in J. M. Coetzee’s Foe and Kamel Daoud’s Meursault Contre-enquête.” Research in African Literature Vol. 52, No. 2. (Summer) 2021: 60.

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Camus text, but discusses the singular focus on Meursault to the exclusion of the native: … they mention only one dead man, they feel no compunction about that, even though there were two of them, two dead men. Yes, two. Why does the other one get left out? (1) Harun’s answer is that the “guy,” Meursault, who got to tell the story had extraordinary writing skills whereby, it is implied, the real victim is forgotten, and the perpetrator is presented as a victim. In other words, Daoud is pointing to modernist subjectivity that allowed Meursault to filter out the historical real in favour of the individual perception. Harun’s reading of the text is extraordinarily accurate in that generations of euro-modernist teachers and students can attest to the accuracy of his claims; for the focus in teaching and criticism has been on the aesthetic innovations, suspending all political and moral values until the advent of ideological criticism that took aim at Camus’s stance on Algeria, often turning to the biographical.34 These critiques did not isolate the modernist aesthetic of The Stranger as instrumental, or at the very least, important to the core modernist values of authenticity, fractured subjectivity, individual ethic vs. community norms. Camus’s modernist historiography sidelines both the female and the ­colonised subject in its writing, privileging the male coloniser’s subjective anxieties and alienation, caused by his own tentative participation in the colonial situation. While Daoud’s text features a partial narrator, whose subjective perceptions also filter the historical real, the intention of the narrator is to tell, not write, a historiography that centres women and the colonised in history. More scrupulous than the narrator of The Stranger, the omniscient teller of tales in Nostromo describes women in their own right. Each of the women characters has a role in the plot; some more significant than others. The women’s importance emerges from their influence on the male characters. Signora Teresa, from the protagonist’s community, is the most outspoken, but this does not result in Nostromo’s compliance. Emilia Gould, who does play a crucial role in the plot, is the most idealised of the characters, typyfying the role of the benevolent european woman. Antonia Avellanos, european native of Sulaco, portrays the revolutionary female hero. Signora Teresa’s two daughters are plotted into the romance narrative, the older betrothed to Nostromo, the 34

Conor Cruise O’Brien, Albert Camus of Europe and Africa. (New York: Viking Press, 1970).

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younger the object of his passion. Thus, each of the female characters needs the male intermediary to effect action in their own place and time. Conrad’s Nostromo appears to depart from euro-modernist perceptions of time, and is, like Daoud’s novel, particular about periods in history, but its ­treatment of time, as several critics have noted, is more in keeping with the temporal shifts of the euro-modernist novel than the linear scheme of the ­classical realist novel.35 Conrad’s opening line, “In the time of Spanish rule” ­signals the novel’s historical aspirations, to narrate the changes that had occurred in this fictional Spanish American country.36 The accent on periods suggests that the history will be oriented by the Spirit of the Age, what feminists have critiqued for obviating subordinate groups, including women. The salient feature of the opening, despite its tribute to natural beauty is the lack of industry, a clear indication of the colonial framework of the novel. The wildness and calmness of nature alike need to be conquered by enterprise. Conrad’s historical framing is pointed in the title of the first part, “The Silver of the Mine.” In centering an object Conrad has deftly displaced human agency and attributed the making of history to objects. But those who have powers to produce these material objects, even if they were to be led by the objects, would be participants of history. The object, in this case, silver, is the natural that cannot function except through technology, consequently only those who participate in the silver enterprise can have access to history. In Nostromo they are all men. The issue of whether any of the characters has the power to write history is to some extent removed by the use of the omniscient narrator. The two main historians of the town, the Sulaco patrician Don Avellanos and the Englishman, Captain Mitchell are provocatively used to problematize the question of who produces what history. We are privileged to both Captain Mitchell’s thoughts, and the omniscient narrator’s reflections on the character: Captain Mitchell, feeling more and more in the thick of history, found time for an hour or so during an afternoon in the drawing room of the Casa Gould, where, with a strange ignorance of the real forces at work around him, he professed himself delighted to get away from the strain of affairs. (108) 35 36

Eloise Knapp Hay, The Political Novels of Joseph Conrad: A Critical Study (Chicago: ­Chicago University Press, 1963) Chapter Five, Luz Ramirez, British Representations of Latin ­America (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007) 94. Joseph Conrad, Nostromo (London: Penguin, 2007) 5. All quotations are from this edition. First published 1904.

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The man’s vanity is exposed, as is his ignorance. He is neither a participant in history, nor is he a historian. Rather, he is a hanger-on at the Gould family residence, enjoying the aura of their ownership of the silver mines. Commentators have also noted the self-mockery implicit in the n ­ on-diegetic authorial note that credits the novel’s veracity to its source “Fifty Years of ­Misrule” authored by none other than Don Avellanos.37 Here, Conrad’s crediting of Avellanos reveals his effective sidelining of the native. As one critic has pointed out, José Avellanos functions as a surrogate for Pérez Triana who had furnished Conrad with much of source material that Conrad used to design Nostromo. Although a native of Sulaco, Avellanos is of european descent. However, there are glimpses of another history noted by women, who while not being able to participate in it, can nevertheless comment on it. In N ­ ostromo, Conrad departs from the symbolisation of the colonial as the female. In Heart of Darkness, he had used the figure of the Intended to incarnate the colonial. Nostromo’s colonial historical reality is concretised outside of the european male’s subjectivity. Vásquez’s novel departs from any idealisation of women, and affords them central roles in the formation of the protagonist. Through much of the novel, the narrator of The Secret History recounts the incalculable influence of the women in his life; his mother, his wife, and his daughter. He dwells on his relationship with them, and his betrayal. Like Daoud’s narrator, who is impelled to action by his mother, Vásquez’s narrator is driven to writing by a woman, his daughter. The other spur is the death announcement of “the great English novelist.” Unlike Daoud, who refers to Camus’s writing in his opening, Vásquez invokes the author of Nostromo in his opening by referring to him as “The Great English Novelist.”38 Before the first paragraph is concluded, we find out that he is referring to Conrad, preceding this announcement with particulars of C ­ onrad’s biography, and then proceeding to specifics of his death, including the date, August 7, 1924. This strictly temporal marker is further reinforced by the ­narrator’s linking the date to the anniversary of the Battle of Boyacá commemorating the liberation of Colombia from the Spanish Empire. At first glance, it would seem that the narrator was entertaining a monumental history 37 38

Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan, “Whose Story? Whose History?: The Conradian Hetero-Text of Latin-American Fiction,” Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas, Vol. 17, No. 2 (2019) 373–374. Juan Gabriel Vásquez, The Secret History of Costaguana, Trans. Anne McLean (London: Bloomsbury, 2011). All quotations are from this edition. First published as Historia secreta de Costaguana 2007.

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centred around major events, quite like Conrad. However, the very personal crops up without fuss: While in Colombia they commemorate the victory of the armies of independence over the forces of the Spanish Empire, here, in this ground of another empire, the man has been buried forever, the man who robbed me … .” (4) The grand récit has been transformed into a tale of personal grievance, linked with his native Colombia, a colonised country. Like Daoud’s narrator, Vásquez’s narrator stakes a claim to writing the history of the subordinated. The piling of realia to embed the text in the historical is tempered by the insistence on the subjective that nevertheless makes truth claims. In this instance, José Altamirano, the narrator of The Secret History of Costaguana distinguishes himself from the unapologetically personal, corporeal narrative that Meursault in The Stranger offers. Working within different time frames, even if they are attached to historical markers, Altamirano pushes himself into the writing of history with an overtly comparative orientation. In The Meursault Investigation Harun’s insertion of himself into the writing of history is less glaring, in that he identifies himself as the brother of the victim. Altamirano states baldly that he is the victim of theft, and although he does not explicitly link it to Colombians, the previous reference to the battle foregrounds the theme of colonial exploitation. Far from linear, Altamirano systematically arrests the diegesis, and uses caesuras to bring in larger historical occurrences, many of them natural, to arrive at a view of history as accidental, but replete with “coincidences.” In using the language of “destiny,” Vásquez would appear to be following Conrad; yet, he anchors his in the individual to puncture the teleological; veering towards a fragmented view of history, as being composed of accidents of micro-history. The narrator’s question is not rhetorical: “What can a famous novelist have in common with a poor, anonymous, exiled Colombian”? (4) Of the four novelists, Vásquez alone poses a directly historical question. The epigraph to Part 1 of The Secret History is ominous about the history of the country he is writing about, “There is never any God in a country where men will not help themselves. Joseph Conrad, Nostromo.” Vásquez, unlike Daoud, does not explicitly mention “history” in his epigraph, but the use of the word “never” is darker than the possibilities opened up by Daoud’s epigraph of human actors. Here, the sentence is flatly declarative in the reference to the relationship between the place and human agency, “where men will not help themselves.” (NP) Thus, the probability of a history of human progress, or economic

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development, the dominant western idea pertaining to the advance of civilisations is not open to Colombia, according to Conrad in this one sentence in the epigraph. An epigraph is generally used to frame the content of the book, and according to the OED, “indicate[s] a leading sentiment; or motto.” A badge of honour, or dishonour? Is Vásquez’s gesture ironic, self-mocking, accepting with infinite self-contempt what the great English novelist is saying about his people? On the surface of the novel that one is tempted to call post-modern, the author does tear strips off the pretences of the Colombian political and literary phalanx, many times the same, but in the story of the narrator, José Altamirano, a tragic note is sounded that complicates the flatness and paucity of the progressive notion of history. The epigraph then is an anti-epigraph. The titles of the two novels also have contradictory aspects. One critic contends that following his Heart of Darkness, Conrad wished, with Nostromo, to write “a novel in which historical process could be seen (as it could not in Heart of Darkness) as the real subject of the story, more important than any of the people in it.”39 Yet, the title points to a focus on one man, in conjunction, or in contention, with other people. Nostromo would appear to be, not about some grandiose scheme of progressive history, but about an ordinary man, “nostro uomo,” or “our man” or Nostromo. The “our” however seems to set him apart, if Captain Mitchell, the self-appointed historian is to be believed; Nostromo represents the great enterprising spirit of the British colonisers. Nostromo is Italian, but no matter; he serves the mission of the development of Sulaco. Although Captain Mitchell’s history has holes in it, Conrad’s depiction of Nostromo’s attempt to be “our man” among the natives and stevedores of Sulaco’s maritime undertakings, essential to the colonial product, indeed suggests a Man who embodies the Spirit of the Ages, that while different in tone from the tragic in The Secret History, nevertheless has a strain of the tragic. Discussions of Sulaco’s history among the europeanised elite take up a fair amount of space in Nostromo, but always with a view to how the country can be “productive,” or in other words, how labour here can supply wealth to the industrialised nations. In this context, the kind of government that Sulaco has is imperative, and hence the interest in a history that is patently oblivious to the history of the people. Rather, it is an economic and political history of colonial elites, the local aristocrats, the “blancos” and their interaction with the natives. The Secret History of Costaguana insists in the title that it is about history, not about an individual. Although one critic maintains that Vásquez subverts 39

Eloise Knapp-Hay, The Political Novels of Joseph Conrad: A Critical Study (Chicago: ­ niversity of Chicago Press, 1963) 162. U

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euro-modernism by offering a Lukácsian model of history, the novel is ironic about claims of fullness, and offers, rather, a partial history.40 Nevertheless, the reference to “secret” apprises the reader of larger revelations not made by Conrad’s colonialist historiography. In terms of “the time lag” mentioned earlier between the coloniser and the colonised in the colonial situation, the title indicates that the colonised have a separate history. Through metalepsis “history of Costaguana” suggests both the separate history and the promise, on the part of the title, to reveal it. If Conrad and Vásquez both avail of the tropes of tragedy and irony, their historiographic framing is to be distinguished. The investment in production and the symbolic equivalence with civilisation makes Nostromo open to the charge of colonialist male historiography. In acknowledging the specificity of Colombia’s history, and its burial because of colonialist historiography, Vásquez’s novel aligns itself with the unspoken or the “secret.” Yet it remains open to question whether the narrator’s framework accommodates feminist understandings of that “secret” history. In Conrad’s Nostromo the first exploration of the feminine occurs when the heroic Nostromo arrives to rescue the town, including a fellow Italian’s family from “ladrones and matreros, thieves and murderers from the whole province” viz. inhabitants of the campesinos, or natives. (13–14) Conrad’s modernist sleights of hand with temporality, combined with a cancelling out of the markers of historic realism – who, where, when, why, what—in the guise of a realist description by the resident european historian Mitchell obfuscates the stakes of the “riot” or “uprising.” However, Conrad counters this perspective through the mother of the Italian family, Signora Teresa, wife of the Italian Republican dubbed Garibaldino, and not incidentally, the mother of two daughters, one who is described as “the fair Giselle,” both seemingly in need of the strong youthful manly protection of “Nostromo,” or Gian Battista. While the resident historian, Captain Mitchell, insists on claiming Gian Battista as “our man,” effectively displaying open proprietorship without the slightest sense of self-conscious irony, Signora Teresa despises the appellation, and finds it insulting. She lets the reader know from the outset that “Nostromo” has a presence outside the colonial sphere as Gian Battista. Afraid for her family’s safety, she is racked by his abandonment, and when he comes to their rescue is less than appeased:

40

Hyeryung Hwang, “After Magic: Juan Gabriel Vásquez and Narco Realism in The Sound of Things Falling.” The Midwest Quarterly: Vol. 61, No. 2: 198.

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“… That is all he cares for. To be first somewhere—somehow—to be first with these English. They will be showing him to everybody. ‘This is our Nostromo!’” She laughed ominously, “What a name! What is that? ­Nostromo? He would take a name that is properly no word from them.” (20) Signora Teresa is perceptive about the protagonist’s vanity. She draws our attention to how the English address the “hero” by way of a fiction, an invention, a creation of their ability to lend form to matter. In giving “Nostromo” a name that has no place in the structure of grammar, or referent in the lexicon, the English and Sulaco elite place him in a pre-linguistic realm that effectively denies him access to historical subjectivity. Signora Teresa’s bitter foreboding observation, described as “ominous” by the omniscient narrator, shows her resistance to the official, if mythical history in which Nostromo is placed. Indeed, her earlier reference to him as “traitor” is, on rereading, a layered rejection of his participation in the productive enterprise, and his subsequent placement in that colonial historiography.41 Vásquez’s novel similarly explores the relationship between official, if mythical history and the role of ordinary individuals in the making of that history. Developing from the promise of an alternate history in the title and epigraph, Vásquez gives us a narrator who continuously sorts out various skeins of history, separates them, so to speak from the mighty official version, to deflate and even to ridicule the official version. The narrator uses an example to highlight the lure of gold held out by the Panama Railroad Company. The Company essentially offered the Materialist group in Colombia cadavers, “dead Chinamen,” as the Church would not ­permit the use of Christian corpses. The diseased men who had arrived in Colombia, after working on the canal, tell their story to the narrator’s father: All this the dead Chinaman tells my father. But what my father hears is slightly different. My father does not hear a story of personal tragedies, does not see the dead Chinaman as the nameless worker of no fixed address for whom no grave is possible. He sees him as a martyr, and sees the history of the railway as a true epic. The train versus the jungle, man versus nature … The dead Chinaman is an emissary from the future, an outpost of progress. (18–19) 41

Conrad does poke holes in the teleology of western history, but does revert to it. For a ­different perspective see Luz Ramirez, British Representations of Latin America (­Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007) 93–117.

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The narrator first emphasizes that ordinary people do speak; this very ­marginal “coolie” brought here to die, and to have his cadaver used by the Materialists, tells the narrator’s father of the harshness of conditions in working on the Panama Railroad, including the number of workers who have died, “nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-eight.” Ironically, the narrator’s father, the liberal Miguel Altamirano, is indecently impervious to the death of the workers. Instead, he ignores the workers for an abstract concept of progress and views this enterprise of advancing trade as truly gargantuan, “epic” in scope and grandeur, worthy of history to take note. The narrator is incisive in pointing out the skeletons in the colonialist enterprise. He repeats that the “dead Chinamen had a story to tell,” (16) a savage footnote to the amplitude of the colonial enterprise. At the very outset, the narrator, unlike Conrad’s omniscient narrator, establishes his ironic distaste for the economic enterprises of the colonisers. Indeed, at the philosophical level, the narrator of The Secret History has already exhibited his resistance to history as part of the reason for his writing the novel, the “strife” that impels him, “I, who came in flight from Big History, now go back a whole century to the core of my little story, and shall attempt to investigate the roots of my disgrace.” (6) In setting up his role in history in oppositional light, unlike Daoud’s Harun, José Altamirano does not insist that the colonial author is the only criminal; rather, he suggests that he too is one. The judges of the crime, initiated by a resistance to the grand récit are the readers, and an unknown woman called Eloísa. The emphasis on the narrator’s father’s early history with the Panama ­Railroad, and the tale of the narrator’s own genesis are very much within the grand patriarchal structure of narratives of fathers and sons. The son, however, seeks as judge, not the father, or the father surrogate, but a young woman, whom we later understand to be his daughter. His resistance to that colonial patriarchal history is manifested in his address to his daughter. His invitation to all the readers to stand in judgement of him throws light on the participation of ordinary people in the making and writing of history. Despite the overlay of the historical, the reference to time periods, and even to particular verifiable dates, Vásquez’s novel is not realistic in its use of ­temporality and its brazen unmooring of verifiability by demanding that the reader and Eloísa be the judges of the crime. A specific post-modern use of ­history is made apparent here, vaulting by both euro-modernism, and ­modernism per se.42 42

As mentioned in the introduction, I use the term modernism to include those generated in the global South and North, reserving the term euro-modernism for the high ­modernism

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The “solid” melts into the “air” with the post-modern creating an opening for alternate historiographies.43 The only judges of the “crime” in Nostromo are the pitying omniscient narrator, and the largely absent reader. Conrad’s realist overlay is smothered by the very obscurities of euro-modernism that hinder any approach to narrating an alternate history. Rather, the text deploys the tropes of romance, tragedy, and irony under the overarching rubric of the value of the colonial economic enterprise. Paradoxically, the only glimpse into an alternate history, a resistance to the colonial narrative, is through the feminine. 6 Conclusion The overlay of the realist in colonial euro-modernist texts, the immersion in individual male subjectivity genders historiography as masculine. The Meursault Investigation equally immersed in subjective perception offers an expansive view of communal subjectivity. The novel directly shifts to women’s presence, moving towards feminist historiography. In Nostromo the intersection between the euro-modernist and historical facilitates a colonialist masculine historiography, punctured by female resistance—the acknowledgement of other voices, but not the possibility of a feminist historiography. Vásquez’s centering of history and the importance he places on the female interlocutor, and the reader, suggest the possibility of an alternative, and a feminist historiography. 43

starting in the 1890s and ending between the third and fourth decades of the twentieth century. I do this to mark euro-modernism, rather than conferring normative status, as is the hegemonic practice the peripheral. Linda Hutcheon, Poetics of Post-Modernism (New York: Routledge, 1988) 106.

Chapter 2

Difference across Colonial/Post-Colonial Authorship The practice of euro-modernist aesthetics foreclosed women from the ­writing of history in Camus’s The Stranger, while the use of incomplete modernisms, ethnographic undertones, and post-modernisms allowed women partial access to history in The Meursault Investigation, Nostromo, and The Secret History of Costaguana. Each of these novels feature male protagonists who wield authority in different ways offering us a conduit to understanding the author’s historiographic practice, and his ownership of the text. The narrator of The Meursault Investigation, Harun, does not credit himself with any authority, but cedes it to the other author, “the good storyteller” while he himself “peddles offstage silence.” Yet his purpose is extraordinary in that he practices a kind of ventriloquism, speaking for someone else, his dead brother, Musa. The very effort to have Musa “speak through” Harun effects a transpositioning, a symbolic eqivalence, that renders the assumption of authority, less an effect of violence, than one of painstaking dismantling, ensuring the telling of the loss of authority in the speech of the colonised. The speech will be half speech, the sentences have already been begun by two dead men, his brother, and the other dead man in The Stranger (1).1 Notwithstanding the tenuousness of the protagonist, Meursault, in The Stranger, the exclusive self-absorption raises questions about his indifference to his position in the world. That he operates on the assumption that he has the freedom to record his story reveals his unexamined entitlement. Even the casual description of the event that initiates the narrative, and his own existential crisis, his mother’s death, does not have any reality outside the hermetic boundaries of his narrative. Indeed, as many critics have observed, the act that leads to his imprisonment, is similarly described within the limits of his own body, and of his self-awareness.2 Critics who have viewed the metaphysical 1 All references and quotations are from Kamel Daoud, The Meursault Investigation Trans. John Cullen (London: One World, 2015). 2 Anne Sejten, “Irréductible et délivrante: la nature dans l’écriture de Camus.” Nature (1997) 37; Terry Otten, “Mamam (sic) in Camus’ The Stranger.” College Literature Vol. 2, No. 2 (Spring 1975) 109; Agnĕs Hafez-Ergaut,“L’absurde, la nature et les arabes dans L’Étranger.” AUMLA: Journal of the Australasian Universities Modern Languages Association 101 (2004), 102, Daniel © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2023 | doi:10.1163/9789004541153_004

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and the absurd as relevant to the universal have perpetuated the protagonist’s own literary interpretation in their criticism. Harun makes the latter point forcefully. Juan Gabriel Vásquez’s narrator, José Altamirano, tops the diffidence of Harun in The Meursault Investigation. The two epigraphs that precede Part 1 hand the word over to Conrad. The epigraph to Part 1 seems to sanction the dismissal of Costaguana, while the epigraph to the novel points to Conrad’s accrual of authority, if with a touch of embarrassment: I want to talk to you of the work I am engaged on now. I hardly dare avow my audacity—but I am placing it in South America in a Republic I call Costaguana. (NP)3 Robert Cunningham Greene had indeed introduced him to Santiago Pérez ­Triana that accounts for the “hardly dare to,” stemmed by the strength of the verb, “avow” or take an oath, to his “audacity,” his fearlessness in venturing on his project. Triana had provided Conrad with extensive geographic and historical context. However, the opening of Chapter 1 triumphantly announces the death of the author. A word on the death of the author that bears on all. In 1969 Foucault asked, “What difference does it make who is speaking.” In 1970 Barthes officiated over the “death of the author” and the “birth of the reader.” Or should we say the enigmatic all signifying text? Paradoxically, despite Foucault and Barthes’s fond hopes of liberating the text from the grip of the author, modernist texts that are extraordinarily ambiguous about the historical commentary of the authors are elevated, revivifying the “myth” of the author. Two such authors are Camus in the francophone, and Conrad in the anglo-phone world. The critical consensus on Camus and Conrad invites us to consider their complex narrative strategies. However, the author’s death is a trope that occurs in Camus scholarship, whereas the bulk of Conrad scholarship acknowledges the author in the text. Of the former persuasion, Berthold argues that Camus “adopts an authorial position as stranger to the reader”; perhaps it would be more apt to say that the protagonist, Meursault, assumes this posture.4 The Berthold, “The Author as Stranger: Nietzsche and Camus.” Idealistic Studies Vol. 42, Nos. 2 and 3 (2013) 231. 3 All quotations are from Juan Gabriel Vásquez, The Secret History of Costaguana, Trans. Anne McLean (London: Bloomsbury, 2011). 4 Daniel Berthold, “The Author as Stranger: Nietzsche and Camus.” Idealistic Studies Vol. 42, Nos. 2 and 3 (2013) 229.

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author, if separate from the character, lends Meursault an authority that frees him, the author, from responsibility. Berthold observes that Foucault states that the author plays “the role of the dead man in the writing.”5 The operative phrase here is “playing a role,” a sentiment Daoud’s narrator would agree with. Daoud and Vásquez avail of Camus and Conrad as characters securing their authority over them. The opening of Chapter 1 of The Secret History announces the “death of the author.” The death, corporeal, has a symbolic dimension. The death births this author, the narrator, José Altamirano, who now assumes the mantle of the author. That both post-colonial protagonists function as authors in the text makes it impossible to shy away from their authorial surrogacy, despite the many demurrals. In Nostromo, Conrad, turning to some practices of the classic realist novel assumes authority as a matter of course, and further augments it by using the power of history, and the historical annals of Don Avellanos. Where the postcolonial texts arrogate authority to the colonised, Nostromo reserves it for the authorial voice, not the colonised male protagonist. If Camus detracts considerably from the author function by creating a character unselfconscious of his authority, Conrad asserts his on all the other narrators in Nostromo by passing judgement on them through authorial glossing. The colonial plot in euro-modernist novels centres on the coloniser’s perceptions, many times exclusively euro-centric, sometimes leavened by partial access to the subjectivity of the colonised as in E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India and Conrad’s Nostromo. The notion of plot is compromised in the euromodernist novel, actions do not follow any logical sequences. As Camus’s protagonist claims, he himself does not know his motivation in killing the colonised man; in other words, the set of events that lead to major turning points in the narrative are obscure. The author’s allowance of the absurd in plot confers greater authority on the protagonist, particularly over the subordinated man and the colonised woman. Paradoxically, while the perceptions of the narrator, Meursault, pervade the narrative, they are further rendered, what Daoud might call “innocent,” by the persistent use of description in Part 1 of the novel. When Meursault is invited to his neighbor Raymond Sintès’s apartment, the colonised male is introduced so very obliquely that his very presence could be obviated except for the physical mark on the coloniser. Sintès claims that the mark is proof of the colonised male’s aggression, “He said he’d been in a fight with some guy who was trying to start trouble.” (18)6 After some detail about the “fight” where Sintès insists “he was asking for it,” we are then told: 5 Foucault, qtd in Berthold, ibid., 229. 6 All quotations are from Albert Camus, The Stranger Trans. Matthew Ward (New York: ­Random House, 1989).

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“I knew this lady … as a matter of fact, well, she was my mistress.” The man he’d had the fight with was this woman’s brother. (29) (Ellipses in original). Clearly, the narrator has understood that this was not a random fight, but was related to Sintès’s treatment of a woman,7 yet the narrator meets this comment with silence, and his very blankness shields his self-image from blame. The rich historical and cultural context provided by one critic, indicating that pied-noir men would know about local women in Algiers, suggests that the narrator knew it was a native woman even before he acknowledges it. Despite details of beating, bleedings, and tears, the narrator remains quiescent, becoming complicit with Sintès. Invoking “authorial identification” with the protagonist, Horowitz makes note of “his [Meursault’s] curious indifference to various brutalities.”8 The salient point here is that Meursault takes it one step further, sealing his position as authorial surrogate: I wrote the letter. I did it just as it came to me, but I tried my best to please Raymond because I didn’t have any reason not to please him. (32) The level of what some critics of the absurd might consider the narrator’s disengagement, that some feminist critics might construe as deliberate “identification” with Raymond, is in no way breached by any authorial intrusion. Indeed, as mentioned earlier, the very style of indirect reporting makes it possible for both author and narrator to be, or to posture, an alienation from the neighbor beating his “mistress” up.9 However, Meursault’s “understanding” of Raymond’s need to punish the unnamed brother consolidates male colonial authority. Meursault’s writing of the letter places him in the surrogate position of the author lending his weight to Raymond Sintès’s colonial control over the native woman and her body. The authorial set-up, explaining the narrator’s sympathy for Sintès, invites the reader to participate in Meursault’s dispatching of the “Moorish” woman. Sintès wants to find a way to “brand” her. Meursault performs this service

7 Christine Margerrison, “Ces forces obscures de l’âme”: Women, Race, and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus (Amsterdam: Brill/Rodopi, 2008) 103. 8 Louise K. Horowitz, “Of Women and Arabs: Sexual and Racial Polarisation in Camus.” Modern Language Studies, Vol. 17, No. 3 (1987) 54. 9 Christine Margerrison, “Ces forces obscures de l’âme”: Women, Race, and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus (Amsterdam: Brill/Rodopi, 2008) 112.

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through the power of writing: a sanitized, legitimate controlling of the local woman. The narrator’s authority prevails when he is in prison, for the simple reason that he is granted the privilege of his philosophical indifference being recorded. His interlocutors are perplexed, but are blind to the fact that he is wielding the same power they are, that of the coloniser. In refusing to entertain their linguistic systems, he reduces them to silence, even as he is being recorded: He [the examining magistrate] seemed to be very tired. He didn’t say ­anything for a minute while the typewriter, which hadn’t let up the whole time, was still tapping out the last few sentences. (69) Even as there are recognitions of his loss of authority, his subject position is reconfirmed by his awareness of his own thinking. His authority is most perceptible in his persistent refusal to recognise the colonised subject he had killed as a thinking being, “My fate was being decided without anyone so much as asking my opinion.” (98) The scene has shifted from his actions to a milieu where the limits of his authority are revealed, but since that particular loss guarantees his “authenticity” to the legion of Camus readers, and the rebelliousness of the outsider himself, he accrues a grander authority, a moral one, that obviates the colonised subject. Ostensibly, the narrator of The Stranger is compelled into writing a narrative not of his own choosing. It is his story, and to some extent gives the impression that he is countering a colonial narrative authorised by an absurd law: The fact that the sentence had been read at eight o’clock at night and not at five o’clock, the fact that it could have been an entirely different one, the fact that it had been decided by men who change their underwear, the fact that it had been handed down in the name of some vague notion called the French (or German, or Chinese) people—all of it seemed to detract from from the seriousness of the decision. (109) Authorial control is discernible in the assured relativising of nationality as in the mockery of the administrators, and in his undoubted philosophical superiority over them. The authority of Daoud’s narrator is knocked at the outset; for, he has had to learn a language that is not his and thus he has the double task of both dismantling the master’s tools and then building a new linguistic system, “… I’m going to take the stones from the old houses the colonists left behind, remove

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them one by one, and build my own house, my own language.” (2) To that end, Harun has to deconstruct the legitimacy of that other author which he does by disembodying him: “I know the book by heart, I can recite it to you like the Koran. That story—a corpse wrote it, not a writer.” (5) Harun first shows the false basis on which the author’s proprietorship rests, claiming his ownership, before disassembling the author’s structure. Harun appears to be claiming a doubled authority, that of the persona of the protagonist unseating the author, and further, of the other author, who may not “know” the story, but “writes” it. The importance of “writing” is here diminished by the crucial insistence on “knowing.” Yet, Harun’s access to the tools of language, particularly writing, is based on dire necessity. He tells the story of how one of his “illiterate” friends had learned to decipher writing. (7) His friend’s father had received a telegram that no one could read. Baldly, the news was that the father’s mother had died. The son learns to read so that his father will never feel so helpless. And then Harun claims, “Basically, my reason’s the same as his. Well, go on, read some more even if the whole thing is written in my head.” (7) The tables are turned. Now, it is the western educated who may try to read, but will not know. The point here is that if he has attained author status, it is not through western modes, not through putting pen on paper. Even to confirm the existence of his brother, whose body was never found, he needs writing, “How can you tell the world about that when you don’t know how to write books”? (13). Harun’s imperative to give voice to his brother is seen in a similar way by Dana Strand, “Since Haroun’s (sic) voice replaces that of his dead brother, his authority over the narrative is already compromised …”;10 however, this is countered by yet another amplification to the spare modernist style – the ghostly presence of his brother, the “haunting” because of the marking and shooting of the “Arab.” Here, we are reminded of how Raymond Sintès wanted to mark the colonised woman and Meursault agreed with equanimity, putting it in writing, so to speak. Thus, the haunting of Musa, and the many Musas that Harun encounters every night urge Harun to perform the task of the oral historian: to retrieve the lost history of subordinates.11 This strategy enables the narrator to bring those lost voices into the text, a task not possible if Harun were to assume the authority of the traditional western or euro-modernist narrator. 10 11

Dana Strand, “Reading Camus in Oran: Kamel Daoud’s Meursault contre-enquête.” ­ ontemporary French Civilisation Vol. 41, Nos. 3–4 (2016) 453. C Assia Djebar’s work merits special reference in this context, particularly, Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade, Trans. Dorothy Blair (Portsmouth: Heinemann, 1993), and the film, La nouba des femmes du Mont-Chenoua.

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Critics note that access to French offers Harun a measure of freedom from his mother, who plays a central role in his excavation of his brother’s death. However, Poteau-Tralie and Miller add that maternal authority still holds sway here, as Harun invokes the One Thousand and One Nights, and his childhood which was enveloped by his mother weaving his brother’s murder out in like manner.12 It would appear then that the root of Harun’s authority is maternal, a model of authorship at odds with the western patrilineal model. Harun’s authority is a parcel of his mother’s effort in seeking justice for her son’s death, a quest that he participates in only reluctantly. Even if his mother can not acquire French, she clings to a newspaper article, thus ritually ­passing authority to her son. The advice of the Camus scholar, Meriem, is also ­significant in directing him to learn the French language; thus, inviting him to acquire colonial authority. Harun credits Meriem with his command over the language: With Meriem. She helped me more than anyone to perfect my knowledge of your hero’s tongue, and she was the cause of my discovering and reading and rereading the book you carry around in your bag like a fetish. (89) In another instance, he also refers to Meriem’s tutelage regarding interpreting Camus’s The Stranger. Unlike Maria, she is “pugnacious” about identifying the “Arab’s” family. Again, it the woman who is conferring authority on the protagonist. Meriem’s “authorship,” comparable to his mother’s, lies in her setting Harun on the path to deconstructing the Camus text, and contesting its narrative. Even after learning the language, Harun resists the colonial format of authorship and follows his mother’s model of auditory orature. But, he seeks those auditors who have institutional power, Camus critics, including Meriem, one of the primary narratees of the text. The other narratee is similar in being a student pursuing scholarly work on Camus. This model is further rendered nuanced because Harun’s mother becomes dependent on his authority for the first time when she stumbles on two newspaper clippings that refer to her son, Musa’s murder. Her raison d’être becomes two paragraphs in print, a comment on how colonial rule restricts women’s established rights. Although remaining an oral storyteller, Harun himself is deeply affected by colonial print culture. He finds he can not inhabit this rich oral world that seems, like the modernist 12

Mary Poteau-Tralie and Suzanne Miller, “Maternal Metaphor in Kamel Daoud’s Textual Grafting upon Camus’s L’Étranger.” Postcolonial Text Vol. 15, No. 1 (2020) 2.

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novel, to disavow history. “A husband swallowed by air, a son by water,” his reading of his mother’s story, leaves no room for concrete detail and is pathetically close to the “Arab” killed by sunlight featured in The Stranger. If the narrator of The Meursault Investigation is trying to name the “Arab” in his account, he is also naming and reinscribing two female characters, the native woman, and Marie. The native woman’s brother is the “Arab” in the beach in Camus. In The Meursault Investigation Harun has no sisters; rather, the woman, perhaps Zubida, is the “girlfriend” of his brother, Musa. In Harun’s narrative, despite his scorn over male investment in their honour through women, Zubida offers a way of attributing meaning to Musa’s death. He died for something, not as was the case with all Musas, for no reason at all. Marie is given little voice by the narrator of The Stranger. Meursault notices that she gives him an odd look, her role is confined to glances. As others have noted, she is the object of deep indifference. Far from an object of indifference to Harun in The Meursault Investigation, Meriem inspires both affection and admiration, for her intelligence, her poise, and her beauty. Where Meursault becomes increasingly removed from Marie, Harun in The Meursault Investigation credits her, at a personal level: “She’s the only woman who found the patience to love me and lead me back to life.” (67) This rendition values and authorises the native woman, vitiating any vestigial remnants of masculine authority in the account. Critics have noted that “Daoud takes Camus’s language as his own” which could be taken as a usurpation of the author’s sole claim to a unique voice, a sly addendum to the very paucity of the style; still, the many times Harun charges modernist aesthetics with dishonesty gives us pause.13 Unlike Meursault’s rendition, the passages that detail Harun’s attempts to get to the bottom of the story are filled with vivid detail and extremely expressive in registering emotion, a characteristic elided in The Stranger. Further, Harun is constantly doubtful about his version, undermining his masculine authority. Unlike ­Meursault who appears to have no feelings, Harun is overtaken by complex emotions. Take, for example, finding out about Musa’s murder in all of its ­tortured inchoateness: And then, all of a sudden, I heard this long low moan, swelling until it became immense, a huge mass of sound that destroyed our furniture and blew up the neighborhood and left me all alone. (23) 13

Ibid., 9.

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There is a sense of a life suddenly ruptured, a grief that absorbs all the air, its sheer volume leaving them with no place to sit or sleep, even as it wrecks not just his house, but the community’s. And then there is the overwhelming solitude that persists in the narrator’s life, seventy years after the event. Daoud portrays the impact of the colonial tutelage when Harun comments that through the many books he read, he was shadowing Meursault; the places he visited, and in so doing loses himself in both Meursault and Musa, ‘He [Meursault] trembled with fear at my resurrection, after he’d told the whole world I’d died on a beach in Algiers.” (90) Does Harun here believe that he was the other native on the beach with his brother that day, or does he believe he is his brother? Harun’s shadowing is ambivalent; a duty enjoined on him that turns into a loss of the self, a real fracturing of identity, perhaps bewitched by the colonial aura that he consumes wholesale in their words. In such instances, Daoud appears forcefully to comment on his protagonist’s difficulty in recognising himself as an author, or interpellating himself as such. However, for Kamel Daoud, ostensibly tracing the same path, but finding a radically different one becomes, as it were, an extraordinary establishment of authority. One critic puts forth the idea that the pattern of engagement in the novel is “dialectical,”; perhaps it is more dialectical than it is parasitic; however, the novel diverges sharply from The Stranger in setting the metaphysical aside and developing the historical.14 As is readily apparent, Harun conflates Meursault with Camus; he is definitely not alone in this. But for Harun, this is in keeping with Meursault’s authority because of his first- person rendition; in other words, he doubts the euro-modernist notion that first person narration undermines the authority of the narrator. The relative absence of authorial cues serves to make the charge of guilt levelled at Meursault to carry over to Camus. José Altamirano of The Secret History of Costaguana, unlike Harun, whose aim is, in part, to dispute the “absurd” story Meursault spins, seeks to uncover the secret behind the history Conrad attempts to capture in Nostromo. To this end, he challenges Conrad’s legal paternal rights to the text. He forcefully ­suggests that it was a theft, here availing of the well-known account that Conrad had sought extensive help from Pérez Triana. Conrad is presented as the desperate would-be-author seeking material for a book he needed to write to remain financially solvent. Part 3 of the novel is entitled “Conrad seeks help.”

14

Hamza Karam Ally, “The Stranger and the Other: Radical Alterity in Albert Camus’ The Stranger and Kamel Daoud’s The Meursault Investigation.” Otherness: Essays and Studies Vol. 6, No. 2, (Dec 2018) 259.

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Juan Gabriel Vásquez, like Daoud, begins with the author’s death, but in this case it is not an authorial surrogate, Meursault, or the long dead Camus. There are dates affixed to the death of the Great English Novelist. Unlike Daoud, who turns to the long flow of the narrative and folds his comments on “Albert Meursault,” Vásquez expresses his scorn through the techniques of print culture; capitalisation, hyphenation, the alternation of very long paragraphs with two word sentences. His realistic apparatus is further augmented by dates in the precise telling of the long history of Colombia. For instance, the novel opens with the news of Conrad’s death and then quickly gives us the date: 7 August 1924. The date has significance because it is the 105th anniversary of The Battle of Boyacá where “the armies of independence” triumphed “over the forces of the Spanish empire. (4) Vásquez signals openly that this will be about Colombia’s history, or the history of Costaguana, over which the narrator has control. However, the narrator throws himself at the reader’s mercy putting himself on the dock. Running away from “Big History,” from its logical and neat narration of events, he arrives at the “roots of [his]disgrace.” (6) In this, the narrative impulse seems closer to The Stranger than The Meursault Investigation. And in the case of Conrad’s Nostromo, the opening description of the foreign land without any attempt to explain why the author/narrator is embarking on this project legitimizes Conrad, who as Author of prior texts, can now assuredly wield authority over this text. As mentioned in an earlier chapter, the narrator of The Secret History of Costaguana asks Eloísa, his daughter, to “deliver” her verdict; thus, seemingly giving the narratee, or the surrogate reader power over the interpretation of the text. Nevertheless, he too pulls back and describes himself as “a benevolent father, [who] will gradually provide the necessary information as the tale proceeds …” (Ellipses in original) (4) He goes on to say that he would narrate the events according to a time line of his choosing, and further, would seek to conceal and reveal according to his will, and finally that he would digress for the pleasure of reveling in his memories. This explanation, coming before his address to Eloísa, refers specifically to the author’s ability to create a design, and his joy in being able to do so. On the one hand, the statement is a reaffirmation of the traditional ideas of the male author’s paternal proprietorship of property, but on the other, it is a demystification of the writing process, revealing that the author is not the great mysterious mind, but merely the physical wielder of the pen. The narrator, José Altamirano comes to the story of his authorship of Conrad’s novel on Costaguana by way of his father, Miguel Altamirano’s flight from Colombia to Panama. Miguel Altamirano, like Joseph Conrad, will be called

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a fake author. The former fakes authorship by publishing glowing reports of the history of colonial progress, specifically French, in the construction of a canal in Panama, a province of Colombia. Conrad’s fake authorship is uncovered by “authenticating” the authorship of the Colombian writer, Triana who had indeed written “Down the Orinoco in a Canoe” (1902). Here Vásquez, a Conrad critic himself, knew about Conrad’s source material for Nostromo. Conrad had asked his friend, Cunningham-Greene for help with the context of a novel set in South America. Cunningham-Greene points to Pérez Triana. Here, Vásquez takes over and insists that José Altamirano, having arrived in London, after Panama had seceded from Colombia, is sent to tell Conrad its history. Thus, the narrator lays claim to authentic authorship, based on his knowledge as a subject, colonised successively by the Spanish, and then by British and US economic interests. The father, Miguel Altamirano, professional liberal firebrand, anti-Spanish, anti-Jesuit rebel dramatically loses his authority as the virtuous colonised ­subject fighting for progressive ideas when progress becomes identified with colonial ventures. As chief sympathizer of the French investment in the canal in Panama, and cheerleader of railroad, he loses all claim to legitimate, or even credible, authorship. The narrator’s mother, named after Antonia Avellanos in Nostromo, can aspire to authorship, starting with her rejection of Miguel Altamirano’s volumes of writing to her. We recall the Antonia Avellanos who had some reach in history in Conrad’s Nostromo. Antonia de Narváez, while married, has a brief affair with Miguel Altamirano. José Altamirano’s paternity is concealed from him for very long, and when he finds out, he goes in search of his father to Panama. During his travels, Miguel Altamirano writes to Antonia de Narváez. Her response to his first letter calls him out, “Your words are excessive … illegitimate.” (47) She also accuses him of “incredible arrogance” in claiming to know what she feels. After not replying to a series of letters, she commands him not to write to her, and to consider her dead. Thus, the author is deprived of his audience. When the son finally learns of his paternity, the father’s letter writing features prominently, but as “unreal,” novelistic, and definitely not credible. Antonia de Narváez, who uses the oral to tell her son the story of his birth, wedges the written letters in, exposing the adventures Miguel Altamirano has. The narrator informs us that “none of the letters received a reply” but ends with “And she told me.” (60). This is followed with the recounting of another adventure that is then interrupted by the son/interlocutor, “All this my mother told me.” (61) This is immediately followed by “And kept telling me.” (61) This emphasis on the telling, the repetition of the phrase through the mother’s story of his engendering, sanctions the mother’s story and her interpretation, a trend that will become stronger when José is in Panama.

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It would seem to be ironic that José reprises his father’s attempts at authorship in writing this novel very much in the present continuous, as his address to the audience interjects the writing. Not only does José consider his father a fake author, he also knocks his narrative skills, reassuring us of his far superior skills, a self-mocking nod to the possibility of his own inauthenticity. If Meursault in The Stranger would appear to be authentic in his presumed indifference to society, José declares himself a “fraud”; thus, the notion of authorship, of its singularity, as of its authenticity is suspect. Consequently, the legitimacy of all colonial writing, and by extension, post-colonial, is subject to the same lack of authority. José Altamirano does not establish his authority through his first person narrative; rather, he allows the other embedded realistic narrator, Triana, to set up his position. In doing so, he assumes both singularity and community. As mentioned earlier, Pérez Triana had been approached to help Conrad, but chooses instead to anoint José. The election is not without irony and deserves to be quoted in full: Pass on to Mr. Conrad, however, that certain recent events allow me now to have other ways of helping him. I do not presume to know better than the author what his needs might be, but the information he could receive from an exile of long-standing, by way of a questionnaire sent by third parties, is invariably inferior to what he could be given in person by a direct witness to events. Well then, what I can offer is even better than a witness. I offer him a victim, Mr. Pawling. A victim. (95) The gap between witness and victim is wide; the witness, as observer, ostensibly being impartial, the “victim” as sufferer, being subjective. What Triana wants from Conrad is not an “objective” history that would inevitably be pretty completely colonial, but a subjective one that could put forth the complexity of Panaman history, its connection with Colombia as José Altamirano has experienced it. Its depredations on Altamirano’s own life certainly warrant the term “victim.” His wife is killed in one of the absurd stand-offs, his father is doomed by the mirage of progress the canal represents, and Altamirano himself is shattered by the necessary effort of trying to hide his little life from the ravages of Big History. A journalist like his father, José Altamirano, nevertheless seems more sharply aware of his complicity with colonial preoccupations, in part because of his utter frustration with how easily his countrymen are swayed from one ­particular persuasion to another. Thus, despite José Altamirano’s cries of theft, he acknowledges that the possibility of an authorised post-colonial version, or at least a single one, is untenable.

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Another kind of author, more fully colonial, appears in the person of Gustav Madinier, a French engineer, author of two books on the damming of rivers and a new theory on cables. A doppelgänger to Miguel Altamirano rather than José Altamirano, Madinier is a reflection of the author as mischief maker with delusions. In a parody of Madinier’s worship of progress, and consequent selfaggrandizement, the narrator sporting his omniscience, confides in us: No: our Madinier, our dear Gustave, who at this very moment is ­ejaculating into his wife while reciting to himself: “Give me a lever and a fulcrum on which to place it and I shall move the earth” was responsible for twentynine bridges that cover the French Republic … (134) Note the cosy, intimate tone with the reader, and the “our” in reference to Madinier. The tone is self-evidently mocking; its ridicule laced with the ­personal. Madinier’s wife would later become José Altamirano’s wife, thus placing Madiner along with his doppelgänger, Miguel Altamirano, as father and author figures worthy of derision and contempt. It would seem fitting, if slightly vengeful, that the father, Miguel Altamirano, meets his fate through the ­auspices of another author, who attacks among financiers, and industrialists, “corrupt journalists,” for the disastrous canal construction. (191) If that spelled the death of the author, resonating with the death of the Great English Author announced in the opening pages of the novel, it appears that the ultimate power to change the fate of nations lies with an anonymous writer, a “shameless author” who in a newspaper article first moots the idea of the secession of Panama from Colombia. (252) That particular separation of province from country effectively deflates the other authors who proliferate in the text, including the thundering Colombian orators, and Poet Presidents. It is important to note that José Altamirano will eventually tumble into just such a solution. Unlike the other three texts, author figures function as characters, rather than authorial surrogates. Arguably, the notion of authorial surrogacy is amplified by the premise that the narrator is author of the novel he is writing now, and Conrad’s novel on South America. Unlike Harun in The Meursault Investigation, who purposefully conflates author and narrator, José keeps Conrad and Nostromo separate. As a result, José Altamirano views Conrad as a doppelgänger but again, as distinct from Harun in The Meursault Investigation, he inserts his story orally prior to Conrad’s finishing, and publishing the novel, thus laying claim to authority over Conrad’s South American novel and the one that he is writing. And what about the great English author? How does he impress his authority upon the story? If one clear authorial figure is an indication, he is deeply dubious. As mentioned briefly in Chapter 1, Conrad’s “Author’s Note” credits Don José

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Avellanos’s “impartial and eloquent “History of Fifty Years of Misrule”’ as the authoritative source of his Nostromo. (451) In discussing Avellanos’s work in the novel, the omniscient narrator regards him as both generous and even-handed, nominally worthy qualities; yet tinged with a hint of barely discernible irony. In the same section, Conrad stages a critique of Avellanos’s perspective through the commentary of Martin Decoud, a young Sulaco native recently returned from Paris. Hence, doubt is cast on Avellanos, in that his view is restricted, compared to the omniscient narrator who has the ability to consider the work from varied perspectives. Thus, the colonial author’s version appears more nuanced than the patriotic version presented by the local historian/author. As Pamela Demory argues persuasively, Conrad’s rhetorical devices, such as borrowing the name Avellano from Cervantes’s Avellaneda in Don Quixote, as much a fictional historian as Don Avellanos serves to challenge the legitimacy of Avellanos’s writing, in spite of his witnessing many of the events and offering realistic details. Don Avellanos and his daughter are also the authors of State papers promoting peace and prosperity; however, Gould, owner of the silver mine, and his American financier, Holroyd, are the real power-brokers, and king makers, “Thus, Don José’s political savy and power are undermined, as is the ­authority of his historical work.”15 In its stead, Conrad substitutes the greater validity of fiction to puncture Avellanos’s teleology of progress through ­relentless descriptions of how the Blancos twist with every new threat to their material prosperity, aligning themselves with, according to Martin Decoud, “an ignorant, boastful Indio, like Barrios.” (135) These expedients enable Conrad to consolidate the credibility of fiction, and his own status as a novelist. One critic asserts Conrad’s sway over the authorial pretenders in the texts, the historians, by turning to the Argentinian writer, Borgés. Using Borgés’s “Guayaqil,” she notes that: Borgés’ profound engagement with Conrad’s Nostromo goes well beyond the claim of the rightful “ownership” or of the “true” story of Latin American history—the fictional abdication of the historian-narrator of story … and the metafictional abdication of the author [Borgés] who concedes Conrad’s primacy and authority in this context—challenges the ostensible truth claims of historiography in relation to fiction.16 15 16

Pamela H. Demory, “Nostromo: Making History,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Vol. 35, No. 3 (1993) 334. Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan, “Whose Story? Whose History?: The Conradian Hetero-Text of Latin-American Fiction,” Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas, Vol. 17(2) (2019)380.

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The salient factor here is that the native South American author of great repute acknowledges the creative authority of Polish/Englishman over the “history” of South America through the craft of fiction. Fiction’s superior ability to convey authentically, a theme that Conrad foregrounds, and persuasively enough to convince Borgés, reinforces Conrad’s self-authorising in Nostromo. Conrad’s exercise of authorial control is less tempered than Camus’s whose surrogates are presented with subtlety, filtered as subjectivity. Nostromo ­wrestles with the genres of history and fiction, and hence sets up characters as historians only to abridge their power or outright deride it. Camus’s ­Meursault wields singular authority over the native woman, even as women have ­insignificant access to writing, and native women none. Conrad grants some autonomy to female characters; a rare europeanised woman carries some weight; however, his novel on the history of the country does not include a single native woman. Daoud in The Meursault Investigation traces the complicated path the male protagonist pursues, presenting post-colonial authority as a process of loss and gain, not a privilege or right that is a colonial arrogation for Conrad and Camus. Vásquez is slippery about the authorial surrogate’s narrative, who successfully narrates his version of Panama’s history while telling the story of how it was stolen.

Chapter 3

Euro-Modernist and Post-Colonial Masquerades The genre, the mode, and the address to the narratees, in part, explains the measure of authority each author wields. In this chapter, I look at how these elements shape the roles of the colonisers, and the colonised in the texts under scrutiny. 1

The Detective Story

Both The Meursault Investigation and The Secret History of Costaguana appear to follow the model of many euro-modernist novels that hinge on the ­perceptions of the main character. Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, James Joyce’s Ulysses, Camus’s The Stranger are textbook examples of the techniques of high ­euro-modernism. However, there is a difference in the urgency of the tone in both the post-­ colonial novels that suggests a structure other than the exploration of the self. The scaffolding of the detective story is a plausible overlay. However, the search does not feature an eager, smart detective, who takes the narratee or reader, on the journey to solve the mystery. The detective/­protagonist has arrived at the end; the reader is left to solve the mystery. Both protagonists freely confess that they are both storyteller and narrator, author and narrator; thus “inventing” and “narrating.”1 And both narrators insist that all will be told in due time, but like every artist, each wants to tell the story his own way. Harun directly addresses the male Camus student narratee, and by extension, the reader: “You want the truth … Be patient, I’ll tell you about it.” (28) The assumption here is that the narratee believes a fabrication, and he, Harun, has access to the truth, which he will impart, only if the narratee, and reader, really wish to listen to it. Similarly, José Altamirano adjures patience on his readers, after letting out that “the man has been buried forever, the man who robbed [him] me.” (4) And this he does after seemingly stopping himself from carrying on with the story: But No. Not yet. It’s still too soon. (4) 1 Henrik Skov Nielsen, “Natural Authors, Unnatural Narration” in Postclassical Narratology: Approaches and Analyses Ed. and Intro Jan Alber and Monika Fudernik (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2010) 275. © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2023 | DOI:10.1163/9789004541153_005

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While Altamirano of The Secret History keeps the reader at arm’s length, ­suspensefully delaying the story of the secret, Harun, of The Meursault Investigation often digresses to offer literary criticism on Camus’s The Stranger. The Meursault Investigation is more open about its inquiry, which assumes the guise of a literary investigation, disputing the judges’ or the critics’ assessment. José Altamirano’s scheme in The Secret History sets itself up as grandiose, promising to uncover the extraordinary dealings of that abstract character, the Angel of History, while revealing the story of the crime. In The Secret History the ur detective story is brought into the mix. Like the original western riddle solver, José Altamirano will go on a quest for his origins, in search of his father. In a loose parallel with the Vásquez text, Harun’s dive into his own father’s ­disappearance, and his life with his mother is presented as a vital part of directing narratees and the readers to what the original trial judges, the ­devotees of modernism, had completely missed. And then there is the thread of Daoud’s protagonist, Harun, arriving at his position of barstool warmer, raconteur of his life and his brother, Musa’s. This envelops all the Musas of colonial and post-colonial Algeria. Similarly, Juan Vásquez’s José Altamirano sketches the portrait of how he becomes a writer. The impetus is lodged in the urgency that both protagonists experience to set their stories, their witnessing, side by side, with the colonial versions of the master euro-modernists, Camus and Conrad. 2

Female Absence and Presence

In the classic male detective story, the enigma is the female. The male detective seeks to solve the riddle of the woman. If he can discern the woman’s motive, then he can crack the case. The female’s desire, her secrets direct the plot and hurtles the male detective into acts that partially reveal the woman, but never completely. If the female doesn’t figure, except in absent modes, in any of the narrative propulsions in the euro-modernist novels, it is because these stories are revealed as having absences where women’s presences were dominated by easily constructed male plots. The “plot,” if indeed it can be so called, in The Stranger, is shockingly simple. The pied-noir narrator, Meursault, kills an Arab because the sun glints in his eye. Consequently, he faces trial. The plot is displaced in Nostromo to the silver mine that performs the office of the conventional protagonist. All the characters are impacted by its presence, development, and absence, and their actions are influenced by the various enterprises to develop the mines. The consequences of the absences of women are catastrophic for both narrators.

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Post-colonial feminist readings however depart from this monolithic a­ pparatus and suggest that the native woman is the motivation for ­Meursault’s murder of the native man in The Stranger. Despite being unnamed, and unvoiced, the native woman is the impetus for the narrative. In The Meursault Investigation, she is both named and embodied. Equally importantly, she is not the only native woman in the novel and is part of a group of native women who have access to both speech and action, Meriem, and Harun’s mother. Even if with a tinge of sarcasm, the native woman also becomes the cause of the native male’s heroism, further separating her presentation from the trope of woman as enigma. Vásquez’s novel renders the male competition between the colonial and post-colonial author sharply, consigning the female characters to the role of props, in the quest of the protagonist to find two father figures, Miguel Altamirano and Joseph Conrad. Yet this struggle is exposed by the protagonist, who throws his fate into the hands of the primary female narratee, Eloísa. He also makes it clear that he awaits the judgement of the narratees and the ­Readers of the Jury. 3

Male Absence and Presence

In The Meursault Investigation, Harun, who speaks for his brother Musa, the murdered native, is impelled to understand what happened to the body of the murdered native man. The singular narrative goal is revealed by exposing the depredations wrought by colonialist writing, the search for the native male’s corpse. Sitting on his barstool, even as Harun tells the story, he feels disembodied. Where is the body? The stakes are equally high for José Altamirano in The Secret History, again in the discursive field of writing, and including the realm of public history. Where in Conrad’s Nostromo is the native historian? Vásquez’s José Altamirano addresses his daughter in the last paragraph of the novel. The charge he lays on Conrad is that Nostromo effectively obliterated the presence of the native, not just from his [the native’s] own country, but his own life, which blights his life with his daughter. He tells her that he “would go on remembering that afternoon when [he] I disappeared from history by magic.” (301) The appeal of the protagonists to the narratees extends to their attempts to persuade their narratees and readers of their interpretations of euro-­ modernism. The opening sally of The Meursault Investigation against the ­critical establishment that elevated the absurd philosophy and modernist aesthetic is fierce. He insists that Camus’s writing style accounts for the obviation

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of the native subject, his brother. Given that this commentary occurs in the third full paragraph of the novel, it is worth quoting in full: It happened, and everyone talked about it [the murder]. People still do, but they mention only one dead man, they feel no compunction about doing that, even though there were two of them, two dead men. Yes, two. Why does the other one [the murdered native] get left out? Well, the original guy was such a good storyteller, he managed to make people forget his crime. (1) The “people” while ambiguous could refer to the manner in which the popular, and perhaps, elite audiences accepted the word of the literate/literary establishment, identified with the author, Camus, and his commentators. Daoud’s particular inflexion registers the towering influence of Sartre’s 1943 essay on The Stranger applauding the authenticity and existential courage of the hero, Meursault. Other literary luminaries, including Maurice Blanchot, Nathalie Sarraute, and Alain Robbe-Grillet assented.2 The narrator thus sets himself up against metropolitan readers/critics, and a literate author/narrator, Meursault, in contrast to his own illiterate brother, the native. In The Meursault Investigation, Harun addresses the interlocutor whose identity is vague on how “everyone,” a pronoun he will return to, substituted letter for flesh; more precisely, a novel for a corpse. He describes the perfection of the style, and its capacity to evoke sympathy for the killer of the native male, Meursault: Everyone was knocked out by the perfect prose, by language capable of giving air facets like diamonds, and everyone declared their empathy with the murderer’s solitude and offered him their most learned ­condolences. (4) Note the use of the word “condolences,” governed by “learned,” suggesting that the criticism was contaminated by Meursault’s account which seductively elicited sympathy for his isolation, in place of a realistic grasp of what had actually occurred. The narrator’s language does not single out the european establishment but indicates a global literary environment. His insight is borne 2 Delphine Munos, “From the Stranger to the Outsider: The Different English Translations of L’Étranger, the Postcolonial Reception of Camus’s Classic, and the Memorialization of Camus in Post-Imperial France”, in Translating the Postcolonial in Multilingual Contexts, Eds. Judith Misrahi-Barak and Srilata Ravi (Alberta: Presses universitaires de la Méditerranée, 2017) 187.

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out by a cursory appraisal of Camus criticism running through to 1970 when a post-colonial critique emerges that becomes more dominant after Said’s essay in 1993. Daoud, who publishes The Meursault Investigation in 2015, has thus had the opportunity to witness the hold the euro-modernist approach had on the literary establishment, variants of which survive even today, in their continued emphasis on Meursault. Hence, Daoud’s protagonist seeks to challenge the settled story told in The Stranger by telling his own story to the stranger in the bar who may turn out to be a “man who’ll listen.” (6) Nevertheless, he puts himself firmly out of the scene of writing. Rather, he establishes the setting: the bar, the storyteller / the drinking raconteur; the audience, the vaguely defined listener. The barroom companion, Camus student, listens intently, and as befits a student with a professor, takes notes. The “scholar student” offers Harun the opportunity to be heard in writerly circles, and to invade the canonical literary establishment. 4

The Post-Colonial Detective

The modernist colonial novel has addressed the narrative either to a ­metropolitan colonial implied reader, or to metropolitan narratees, or to both; the techniques perfected by the modernist aesthetic simultaneously directed to the human condition and to the colonial. Post-colonial authors, as ­readers, critique this aesthetic,3 even as they are aware that these colonial narratives are not merely glancingly referring to colonial history, but that “History is not merely referential for narratives but constitutive of the formation of narratives.”4 As reader, Vásquez takes this approach to Conrad’s writing of the history of a Latin American country in Nostromo. The narrator, José Altamirano’s response is directed exactly to the raw material, the historical stuff that shapes the narrative. According to José, it is he who provides Conrad, the other author in the novel, with a detailed account of the secession of Panama. Thus, unlike Harun of The Meursault Investigation, who narrates his story many years after the publication of The Stranger, José Altamirano played a vital role in the making of history, but like Harun’s brother was “eliminated,” murdered, by the magic of writing. After reading Conrad’s account, Altamirano reacts, “Here, “I whispered, my back to the thief, “I do not exist.” (298) 3 The most widely known such critique is Chinua Achebe on Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. 4 Sue J. Kim, “Introduction and Decolonising Narrative Theory.” Journal of Narrative Theory Vol. 42 No. 3 (Fall 2012) 240.

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Both narrators are readers before they become authors. Harun, in The Meursault Investigation claims that he learnt how to read in order to understand how his brother had disappeared into writing. The very shock of reading an extract from Nostromo propels José Altamirano into acting as a witness for his country by recording the personal and public events that went into the formation of the new republic, Costaguana. As the reader, The Secret History’s José Altamirano offers us a phenomenological response, telling the narratee, his daughter, Eloísa, exactly what he experienced while reading, even setting up the reading context. Pérez Triana’s comment about Altamirano’s now being “part of the memory of mankind” sets up Altamirano’s reading experience. (294) The embodied response approaches a “mix of excitement and terror” verging on the sublime. (295) The anticipation in the reading of a history that he has participated in, promising his entrance into history, and recounted by him specifically as an explanation, an apology to his daughter, is overwhelming. When Altamirano does start reading, after delaying it by many hours, unlike Harun in The Meursault Investigation who is pointedly critical about ­euro-modernist techniques in The Stranger, José Altamirano is swallowed by Conrad’s language, finding nothing recognisable in that depiction: I carried on, between oranges and galleons, between sunken rocks and mountains that sink their heads in the clouds, and began to wander like a sleepwalker through the story of that fictitious republic, and I travelled through descriptions and events that I knew and at the same time did not know … (296) Altamirano has been rendered a stranger in his own land. The word sleepwalker conjures up the sense of unreality, almost the uncanny, when scenes are familiar but oddly frightening. For the euro-modernist literary critic, Altamirano’s language speaks to the brilliance of Conrad’s efforts at “making it new,” producing estrangement, or ostranenie in the reader. Except of course that at the literal level, for the european reader, the situation was strange, but became universalised, while for the native reader, the familiar had disappeared, ­putting him/her out of his/her home and world. For the former reader, the experience is enriching, for the latter, depleting. 5

The Crime

As the “native informant,” a humble enough role, Conrad’s artistic recreation of the raw stuff of history amounted to pure theft, an analogue to the

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import of raw materials from the colonies, the export of finished goods from the centre. The conversation begins with Conrad asserting the sovereignty of literary genres: This, my dear sir, is a novel. It’s not my story. It’s not the story of my country. “Of course not,” said Conrad. “It’s the story of my country. It’s the story of Costaguana.” (298) The temerity of Conrad’s use of the pronoun, “my” is astonishing even within the context of euro-modernist dogmas of the autonomy of the literary text; it is worthwhile to remember that western traditions did not really arrive at this exclusive model of imaginative command to this magnitude without the combined efforts of euro-modernist authors and their literary critics. Clearly, we are to understand from Conrad’s comment that José Altamirano’s expectations that Conrad should get the history straight have no merit. Under cover of the euro-modernist framework, the writer can abnegate any social accountability by arrogating imaginative authority. Indeed, as one critc avers, the creation of the style is in part caused by the difficulty of the imaginative ethnographic encounter with natives, and native territory, and the desire to “distance” oneself from ethnographic accounts.5 In setting up the contexts of reading and writing, the two post-colonial authors are able to demonstrate the literary impact of euro-modernism on public understandings of colonialism, using the same genre, the novel, that the colonial authors had used. Daoud’s and Vásquez’s texts fulfil the expectations of the genre of literary criticism, and of the novel, creating the new genre of the post-colonial novel as literary criticism. 6

The Modernist Masquerade

The post-colonial critiques expose the modernist masquerade—the corpse/ the corporeal “disappeared.” In both The Meursault Investigation and The Secret History the protagonists are deeply ambivalent about their success in “fleshing out” the vanished body, only partly convinced that their criticism will hold against euro-modernism’s continued influence. The detective work the protagonists follow is not parallel. Daoud’s Harun plays the role of the detective on 5 Carey J. Snyder, British Fiction and Cross-Cultural Encounters: Ethnographic Modernism from Wells to Woolf (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) 92.

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the trail of a cold case while Vásquez’s Altamirano’s more personal search for his father gets derailed as he immerses himself in Colón. The Meursault Investigation features Harun as a detective who contextualises the murdered victim and psychoanalyses the murderer through literary criticism. Harun’s question to the narratee is almost hypothetical, and grows into the rhetorical, as though Harun himself does not know who the murdered native man was. He outlines his investigative procedure: I maintain that when you’re investigating a crime, you must keep in mind its essential elements: Who’s the dead man? Who was he? ... You carry off your book, I’ll take up the body, and to each his own way. (11–12) Harun draws a distinction between the crime story and the crime itself; the euromodernist book covers [up] the murder; the body, if found, will reveal the crime. Altamirano, in The Secret History provides historical and geographical context of a country and its grip on the author of Nostromo, and in the process, stretches out some of Conrad’s source material. He arrives at an imaginative rendition of Conrad’s memories of the Caribbean by way of the machinations of an overarching Big History that links Conrad to Altamirano. An apostrophe to Conrad frames the story of Altamirano’s arrival in Colón, “Why does that seem so implausible to you, my dear Joseph?” The parity between the two of them, a strange doubleness, brings the two to the same place at the same time, but for very different reasons. Conrad is on the ship, ‘Saint-Antoine” on its voyage in the Caribbean, while Altamirano has come to Panama for more intensely personal reasons: I came to Colón because I was told that here I would find my father, the well- known Miguel Altamirano, but …– all those stories of Oedipus and Laius, Telemachus and Odysseus – went very quickly to hell. (69–70) Altamirano’s quest for the father is replaced by his curiosity about this farflung province of Colombia. Yet, both The Meursault Investigation and The Secret History identify their journeys with reference to their distance from the euro-modernist novels of Camus and Conrad. 7

Woman and Genre

Over the course of the detective’s investigation, Daoud’s Harun pays far more attention to the impress of women in the colonial euro-modernist text,

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whereas Vásquez’s protagonist is embedded in an increasingly more masculine world. Nevertheless, native females, and the european female lend the book its generic shape. Harun, of The Meursault Investigation is systematic about the expunging of the native female in the structure of The Stranger. His sarcasm is evident: … And his [Musa’s] involvement with a nameless, honorless woman. I’m Not sure, Mr. Student Detective. Ah! The mystery woman! Provided that she existed at all! (20). Where’s the body takes on a new meaning here; is this woman flesh and blood, does she exist, or is she a chimera? Harun channels Meursault’s report from The Stranger with some bitterness. He throws doubt on whether the girl ever existed, hinting that the murderer, Meursault, uses it as a pretext. This, ­however, is only temporary, revealing subtly the many ways in which the euromodernist text can be interpreted to foreground the colonial subject’s narrative and ­consciousness at the expense of the native subject, male and female. The reference to the native woman as less than virtuous, and of course nameless, because of her presumed sexual behaviour, a popular stereotype about Arab women in Europe, is pointed in its attack on the coloniser’s sexual subordination and public dismissal of Arab women.6 Paradoxically it is the “name” that alerts Meursault in The Stranger to the native woman’s identity. Her body is all too corporeal in that the pied-noir, Sintés, despite his formality with M. Meursault, is graphic about his treatment of the woman’s body. In part, Meursault reports it in dialogue: “But first I smacked her around.” (30) A little later, Meursault describes it in indirect speech and continues with the dialogue: He’d beaten her till she bled. He’d never beaten her before. “I’d smack her around a little, but nice-like, you might say. She’d scream a little. I’d close the shutters and it always ended the same way. But this time it’s for real.” (31) The lack of framing, of introducing the character, of orienting the reader, including the matter of fact, unsurprised, emotionally neutral language, routine in its everyday register is exemplary of the Absurd in attaching neither value nor meaning to the act, or to the word. That Sintés should feel free to discuss the 6 Danielle Marx-Scouras, “Portraits of Women: Visions of Algeria,” in The Cambridge Companion to Camus Ed. Edward J. Hughes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007) 131–144.

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matter with Meursault suggests that such behavior was all too commonplace. Harun, in The Meursault Investigation, although often seeing ­Meursault as a double, separates himself from Camus/Meursault in the treatment of women. Nevertheless, he acknowledges that those Arab women who had access to the pied-noir society, while “fascinating” were considered “whores” by the boys. Yet, Musa chose to defend “a nameless, honorless woman” who may not have existed at all. (19, 20). Like Daoud’s Harun, The Secret History of Costaguana’s Altamirano ­emphasizes the centrality of women in the text, despite its seemingly singular preoccupation with Conrad’s handling of the secession of Costaguana from Colombia. Indeed, Altamirano lends pride of place to Charlotte Madinier, the Panama Canal’s chief engineer’s wife, and subsequently, his own. He tells the remarkable story, with a tinge of the marvellous realism he deplores, of how Charlotte, a French woman is transformed into a native woman: … when she [Charlotte] came out on the cloudy green surface of the ­Chagres she was already a new woman…It was an almost mythic event. Charlotte Madinier as a Panamanian Faust. Readers of the Jury, did you want to witness another Metamorphosis? (167) The specificity of the geographic markers confirm her rebirth in this new land. After the fevers in Colón had taken both son and husband from her, Charlotte Madinier, a tragic lost figure, hides herself from the ­Altamiranos and the public. Eventually they hear that she wanders around the docks in an unreal way, selling herself or giving herself to sailors and dockworkers. ­Seemingly peripheral to the story of Altamiranos, father and son, she is nevertheless central to both. Miguel Altamirano’s open letter to the Madiniers, and Charlotte’s agreeing to stay behind after her son’s death enables Altamirano’s quixotic and false writings on the progress of the canal. After her rebirth in the River Chagres, Charlotte becomes the motivating force in the son, José Altamirano’s life. 8

Woman and Big History

José Altamirano guards Charlotte Madinier’s private thoughts as he reconstructs her attempt to sink in the river Chagres. The “reincarnation” becomes the occasion for the protagonist to reject Big History altogether, and later, when she dies, to seek it with a vengeful masochism. A larger figure than the ­maternal one played by the narrator’s own mother, it is Charlotte’s absence that propels the narrator into the troubled currents of Big History, walling him

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into perpetual mourning. Her presence saves him from Big History, her absence destroys him by driving his participation in the “Spirit of the Times,” his personal foray into becoming the dangerously insufficient “Man of the Times.” Like the meta-historical layer in The Secret History, the meta-critical in Harun’s story in The Meursault Investigation is explicit. The “unnamed” but clearly identified native woman, the unacknowledged narrative expedient of The Stranger, is fleshed out and contextualized in Daoud’s text. The young Harun remembers an aura of tension a few days before Musa’s encounter with the murderer. In hindsight, he puts it down to female rivalry, a threat to the relationship of the mother with Musa that is overpoweringly possessive, in contrast to the passivity ascribed to Maman in The Stranger. Harun, unsure, wants to believe that a woman he and his mother encounter in Algiers, is the woman whose name his brother had uttered in his sleep, the night before his death, Zubida. (20) He is frank about his confession that he needed Zubida to exist, and to have a physical existence. Yet, she doesn’t speak. Harun is open about her value to his narrative: I needed Musa to have had an excuse and a reason. Without realizing it, and years before I learned to read, I rejected the absurdity of his death, and I needed a story to give him a shroud. (21) Harun does not point out that the hero of The Stranger had insisted that, ­outside of the glint of the sun, he had no reason to kill the native man. Neighbourhood rumours are the first indication that the young boy, Harun, has of his brother’s death. According to this version, a native woman was at the bottom of the murder of a native man: “At first, Mama told me that Gaouri had killed one of the neighbour’s sons while he was trying to defend an Arab woman and her honor.” Italics in the original. (23) The heroism of the native male is the crucial part of the story, the native woman herself is quite insubstantial. A brief description of her clothes, “short skirt and tacky stockings” is a nod to her difference from the women in Harun’s community; nevertheless, she is included in the ideal of Arab womanhood and male honour. (20) In contrast, Meursault in The Stranger describes the native female body’s use value for colonial male aggression and control. It is noteworthy that european women in the colonies were also “also associated with thinly veiled forms of commodified sexuality.”7 This provides some context for Meursault’s restricted descriptions of Marie, almost exclusively referring to sexual pleasure.

7 Jennifer Sessions, By Sword and Plow: France and the Conquest of Algeria. (Cornell: Cornell University Press, 2017) 236.

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Yet, Harun too is dismissive of the honour of women, inevitably signifying the honour of men. Consequently, Harun mocks the Arab ideal he invokes, “Defend our women and their thighs.” (19)8 Harun thinks it is “feudal,” but believes it make bizarre sense because “women were all our guys had left.? (19) While finding it retrograde, he believes, as he maintains, that this is a feasible “explanation,” for Musa’s death, a narrative that will redeem his death from the Absurd. In this turn, he merely names what The Stranger’s hero either conceals or does not recognise. Thus, Harun’s assessment of the concrete plot, obscured by reams of Absurdist philosophy is, “The story in that book of yours comes down to a sudden slipup caused by two great vices: women and laziness.” (19) Harun may well be referring to both the native woman and the european, Marie. Harun’s specific reference to the time when he could, with a sense of irony, acknowledge “male honour” as hypothetical reason for his brother’s death is disingenuous to say the least. He can relay the accounts of the community that turned Musa into a hero, but Harun’s own understanding imbricates both the character of the pied-noir, Meursault, and the colonial context. Indeed, Harun’s scorn for these male nationalist notions of honour tied to the female body are made explicit by his condemnation of the mullahs’ control of male and female sexuality in post-colonial Algeria. He is very clear that decolonisation has not redressed these issues, and that the decolonisation of the body is yet to come.9 In a different register than The Meursault Investigation, the body of the female is a central part of the discursive struggle between Big History and Little History in The Secret History of Costaguana. In keeping with the romance/ adventure thread of Nostromo, Conrad casts the european females both as objects of love interest, and as motivators of the denouement of the novel. Emilia Gould, wife of proprietor of the Gould concession, plays a central role in deceiving her husband in a crucial plot twist that decides the future of Sulaco.

8 A whole body of research shows that the ‘protection” of Arab women was one of the few ways Arab men could retain their Mediterranean masculinity in the face of an emasculating ­colonialism. Christine Margerrison, Ces forces obscures de l’âme: Women, Race, and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus. Amsterdam: Brill/Rodopi, 2008. Chapter 4. For biographical links to textual material, see Antony Rizzutto,. Camus: Love and Sexuality. Gainesville: ­University Press of Florida, 1998. See Chapters 2 and 3. 9 Harun here ventriloquises some of the author’s own opinions on the influence of the mullahs in contemporary Algerian society that has impeded the decolonisation of the native male and female. Kamel Daoud, Chroniques: Selected Columns, 2010–2016 (New York: Other Press, 2018) 4 “And how did I get here? On a beach, facing the Mediterranean, forbidden access to my own body by the sick taboo of religion and by a withdrawal into false origins.”

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A melodramatic deathbed scene that has all of the elements of romance is set to highlight the theme of human corruption in the face of material interests. Nostromo has been shot by the old Garibaldino in an irony that condemns the hero to a dis-honourable death, the price of attempted theft. The old man shoots Nostromo, believing he is a suitor of his younger daughter, little knowing that he has shot her secret suitor, Nostromo himself. On the surface, the novel is about a tragic hero, betrayed by his own generosity into theft of the silver, and his daring romantic nature into a secret liaison with the Garibaldino’s younger daughter, when he is engaged to the older one. The romantic plot obscures the political impact, the consequences of Nostromo’s not having brought the silver back, effectively giving the Blancos the upper hand against the native rebels. Thus, Nostromo has betrayed the people of Costaguana, a theme that is submerged in talk of personal honour and integrity, and above all, loyalty to the Blancos. In the deathbed scene, Nostromo insists on seeing Emilia Gould. At this point, he muses about what might have happened, had he brought the silver back. Emilia Gould is party to the conspiracy, kept secret from her husband, to hide the silver, and then claim it lost. However, her participation is couched in noble anti-materialist terms, even as the Gould concession is being excavated for more and more silver. Nostromo, despite his theft of the silver, emerges as noble; he simply does not want his reputation tarnished. Four of the ingots were missing from the site. Conrad presents Emilia Gould as a woman unable to effect change on a large scale, but full of lofty ideas that are in direct contradiction to her material and social situation, both a byproduct of the Gould concession. Credited with insight, she nevertheless succumbs to the dream of the enterprising master of the mine: The profound, blind, suffering expression of a painful dream settled on her face with its closed eyes. In the indistinct voice of an unlucky sleeper, lying passive in the toils of a merciless nightmare, she stammered out aimlessly the words – “Material interests.” (412) Emilia is of course further burdened by her deception of the silver; female deception being an ancient trope stretching back to the women in Homer’s Odyssey. It is plain that her “incorruptibility” corrupts Nostromo; she refuses to let him tell her where the silver is. (442) Conrad gives the readers access to her ideas on material progress when she conspires with Martin Decoud, proponent of Sulaco’s independence. She consents to dispatching Decoud and Nostromo with the silver, thus ensuring success for the Blancos against the rebels.

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Yet, she advances material interests against her own instincts, furthering her deception at Nostromo’s death, by lying that Nostromo had not mentioned the silver. While Conrad shows how Big History renders women invisible, and ­self-deceived, Vásquez follows a protagonist who understands that Big History can be defeated by women’s physical presence. The narrator, José Altamirano, loses himself in the body of Charlotte Madinier, who asks him to stay with after her miraculous resurgence from the River Chagres’s undertow. He describes his sexual relationship with her in a disturbingly colonising fashion: … At the age of thirty-one I found myself, suddenly and unexpectedly, cohabiting with a widow who barely spoke a couple of words of Spanish, colonising her youthful body like an explorer who doesn’t know he’s not the first and feeling myself to be brazenly, convincingly, dangerously happy. (169) Altamirano’s language is key to the transformation that Charlotte Madinier, Frenchwoman has undergone. She does not speak Spanish, a colonial ­language, if spoken by native Colombians. In casting himself as “explorer,” the narrator admits to the use of native women by colonised elites. Over her years in Colón, Charlotte Madinier has slowly moved from being part of the French elite with its cultural heft to assuming the identity of a native woman. Living with Charlotte Madinier, the narrator is blessedly free of Big History and the grand schemes of his father, Miguel Altamirano. When Charlotte is killed later by a random deserter in one of the Colombian wars of Liberals and Conservatives, José Altamirano imaginatively reconstructs her death: He [the deserter] followed the voices to the kitchen and discovered that he’d been mistaken: it wasn’t two women, it was just one (white, but dressed in a black woman’s clothes) who was singing in an incomprehensible language. (227) That the death is re-envisioned through the deserter Anatole’s eyes adds to the absurdity of her death, enhanced by the chilling visual beauty of the scene. Magical realist tones convey a devastatingly anti-magical realist effect. ­Charlotte’s absence unleashes Big History and its deathly consequences on the narrator, who in his role in the secession of Costaguana, what he calls “the betrayal,” moves close to becoming Nostromo’s double.

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9 Doubles The “secret sharer,” or the “hypocrite lecteur, mon frère” trope so prevalent in euro-modernism, works to bring political melancholy to the post-colonial texts in this study. In The Meursault Investigation the personal is enlarged to extend to both colonial and post-colonial worlds. Political melancholy suffuses the protagonist, Harun’s tone. Melancholy itself is understood as a loss of a loss, or a double loss. If the euro-modernist male protagonist suffers from the sense of being split because of doubling, it can be argued that the doubling, despite ­differences, speaks to a common bond with the double. In other words, the personal is fused with the larger world; for instance, in the exemplary insight in Heart of Darkness that Marlow could well be Kurtz’s double. This, despite the latter having kicked civilisation loose, and the former having tied himself to its mast. In The Meursault Investigation Harun’s doubleness, and alienation is most similar to Meursault’s after he (Harun) kills the Frenchman, Joseph. A concrete personal manifestation of Harun’s killing is the loss of desire, and sensuality. Meursault too had become indifferent to all desires. Harun has further lost a sense of ethics, and fantasises killing all sorts of people. In some profoundly disturbing way, he has beome distant from himself, feels the “strangeness” of a ghost, like his brother Musa. (97) The multiple ­victims, the copies of the slain brother, floating as ghosts in The Meursault Investigation speak to a post-colonial melancholia, rooted in the political. In The Secret History of Costaguana, the account of the machinations over the rights to the Panama Canal, laced as they are with scorn, and further carrying a parodic turn, result in the protagonist’s acknowledgement of an unremitting melancholy that he will experience all his life. José Altamirano encounters Conrad, not as a double, but as someone who can never be a double. Initially, innocuous coincidences connect Altamirano and Conrad, but later the contact proves destructive to the protagonist. Conrad subsumes Altamirano, absorbs him completely, leaving him with no self, no identity – a post-colonial reality. Euro and post-colonial modernist modes grafted to the detective plot occasion melancholy, in part because the mystery in The Meursault Investigation is never completely resolved. In The Secret History of Costaguana, the protagonist’s recognition brings him no respite from his bitter anger and despair. The inclusion of meta-fiction in The Meursault Investigation and historiography in The Secret History of Costaguana further complicates the generic lay-out with respect to the female and the post-colonial subject. Yet, a vestigial strain of romance, in terms of a love interest, makes a brief appearance in Daoud, Vásquez, and Conrad’s novels, but enjoys a larger share of generic and thematic outlay in Nostromo.

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Colonial and Post-Colonial Romance

Conrad’s seaboard tales had been billed as adventures/romances of travel and the seas. Conrad himself was secure with this label. Many critical accounts tell of how he was taken up with the figure of an Italian, a gunrunner, whom he had encountered in the Caribbean. Conrad had transported guns for a conservative cause. The stereotypically swashbuckling Captain of the Cargadores is referred to in these terms, repeatedly, if with a touch of irony, by the Blancos in Sulaco in Nostromo. Juan Vásquez too mentions it with the usual ­rhetorical fanfare he unfurls whenever he brings up the Angel of History’s fortuitous coincidences whereby Korzeniowsky’s (Conrad’s) path very tangentially crosses José Altamirano’s in The Secret History. The romance of silver, a topic named for what it is in The Secret History, the Panama Canal, is treated as tragic in Nostromo. Here, Nostromo’s ambiguity is marked; he is clearly prized for his brawn and his command over the other cargadores upon which the colonial economy turns. Although nominally white, Gain Battista (Nostromo), and the old Garibaldino’s family are treated the way southern Italians would be in the Americas, “above” the natives but definitely not part of the blancos. Nostromo’s “fatal flaw” is stretched out in due course, diverting us from the real betrayal of the natives by hiding the silver in the first place. Nostromo’s physicality is described intently, as is his generosity, that the Garibaldino’s wife sees as drifting into a vanity. Where Nostromo’s loyalty is cherished by the Blancos, the Italian woman, or the “old witch” as Nostromo refers to her, sees it as disloyalty to their tribe. Viewed starkly, he is no more than an overseer, an enforcer of the Gould Concession’s production operations. Almost the protagonist of a melodrama, Nostromo has to weigh the differences between duty and love. Duty demands that he marry the older daughter of the Garibaldino; yet, he makes extravagant romantic quasi-fairy tale promises to the younger. All the three Italian women are described in conventional terms based on appearance and comportment; physicality hinted at but submerged. Nostromo is still capable of the grand passion, and dies a “heroic” death, name intact, preserved by the silence of another woman, Emilia Gould. José Altamirano in The Secret History is thrilled when Charlotte Madinier takes him as a lover. And here, it is passion born of mourning that overtakes the woman, fulfils the man, and brings regeneration with the birth of Eloísa. Madinier is embodied and clothed, all described with some vividness. Romance however does not feature after the adventure of the protagonist’s journey to Colón in search of his father. If the Madiner/Altamirano mingling is marked by journeys that take them from romance to tragedy, and from adventure to disillusionment and cynicism,

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the coupling between Meursault and Marie in The Stranger is presented by the narrator as purely lustful. Camus’s critics make much of his admiration of the Mediterranean model of masculinity and his view of women as belonging to a category apart.10 Mixed in as these elements are, The Stranger consistently reveals Meursault’s discomfiture with women at a social level, the bonds in the novel being homosocial, and to some extent, homoerotic. The author’s elevation of the mother, shared by other Algerian writers, including Daoud in a self-mocking vein, is another trope critics reiterate.11 Of The Stranger, one can only conclude that the sexually active woman, when expressive of emotion, appears as a strange being, vague and indistinct as an individual. In The Meursault Investigation, the doubling with Camus/Meursault that Harun cringingly admits to, combined with his own mother’s dominance, leaves Harun immature and romantically inexpressive. The body of the colonised male is nowhere to be found in The Meursault Investigation, briefly appears in The Secret History. The sexually active female is just as ghostly in The Meursault Investigation, definitely far more visible in The Secret History. Yet, both post-colonial novelists acknowledge the central significance of the presence and absence of women. In the colonial novels, women remain expedient to the material and cultural interests of the coloniser. 10 11

Antony Rizzutto,. Camus: Love and Sexuality (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998) 56–58. Mary Poteau-Tralie and Suzanne Miller, “Maternal Metaphor in Kamel Daoud’s Textual Grafting upon Camus’s L’Étranger.” Postcolonial Text Vol. 15, No. 1 (2020) 3.

Chapter 4

The Aesthetics and Literary Politics of Commodities Then, one day, the White man said: “No more slaves! Slaving is now against the law. So slaving came to be against the law, and the ­people who had made it their life’s work were left without a ­livelihood. Now the White man said, “Palm oil”! Again all the men went into palm oil. The palm fruit that used to rot on the trees suddenly became very valuable. Our people became a palm oil people, spending most of their time harvesting the fruit, extracting the oil, cracking the kernels.1 … the circular voyage touches on the deeply symbolic meanings attached to commodities themselves under the nineteenth-century (neo) colonial division of labour. Uniformly “raw” or “natural” products are traded for “elaborated” or “civilized” goods.2

∵ The economic interests of the colonisers have been partly critiqued by ­euro-modernist writers; yet a particular symbolic value is attached to the concrete objects that secure those interests. The objects, or commodities are then elevated to a principle of a higher order. This is nowhere clearer than in C ­ onrad’s treatment of the Sulaco silver mine in Nostromo. In choosing mining, Conrad was deaing with an economic industrial enterprise extremely ­important to Latin America in the nineteenth century; yet its material base yields to the metaphysical.3 Miller notes the many instances whereby the object, the ­silver, is exalted to a mythic status; its production promising modernity, democracy, and “civilisation.”4 1 Obinkaram Echewa, I Saw the Sky Catch Fire (New York: Penguin: A Plume Book, 1993) 32. 2 Ericka Beckman, Capital Fictions: The Literature of Latin America’s Export Age (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012) 54. 3 Luz Ramirez, British Representations of Latin America (Gainesville: University Press of ­Florida, 2007) 96. 4 Brook, Miller. C., “Holroyd’s Man: Tradition Fetishisation and the US in Nostromo.” The ­Conradian Journal of the Joseph Conrad Society 29:2 (2009) 14–30. © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2023 | doi:10.1163/9789004541153_006

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Extending as far back as the seventeenth century, the european demand for commodities informs the avid desire for trade in the colonies, and subsequently, control of the colonies. C.L.R. James attributes the wealth of the Bourbon empire almost entirely to the imports from Haiti, particularly sugar, that in turn was based on the slave trade, and the slave economy.5 Algeria’s importance to the French economy is similarly disproportionate. Historian Jennifer Sessions notes that “In the commercial arena, it [Algeria] alone accounted for between one-third and one-half of French empire trade and by the 1930s had become France’s primary trading partner …”6 The early twentieth century colonial euromodernist novels are the inheritors of this world history. Conrad, for instance, completely understood the role of commodities and trade, when in Nostromo, he dubs the Gould silver mining concession “imperium in imperio.” Thus, trade itself is wholly bereft of any innocence; commodities, and the possibility of governing commodities dominating the world view of the european colonisers. Their importance under a different guise, that of a productive settler colonialism, is advanced even in the instance of the development of Enlightenment ideas.7 Much has been written on this subject, but a small digression foregrounds the significance of commodities in the intellectual framework of politicians, philosophers, and policy-makers alike. The abolitionist movement in the UK is acknowledged as being a moving force in ending the slave trade in the UK; however, there are other motivations that made it politically viable. C.L.R. James contends that Pitt, Prime Minister of UK, recognises the imperial sweep of France in the eighteenth century, correctly attributing it to the riches Haiti heaps on bourgeoisie and nobility alike in France.8 Those, in turn relied on the ever-increased importation of African slaves to Haiti, transported by British carriers. Were the source of their labour supply cut off, Britain need no longer fear France’s ascendency, all the while experiencing the beatitude of virtue. Two centuries later, the colonised subject provides the labour. The interest in commodities, and trade routes for them, are as strong as ever. Conrad, plying some of these routes, was uniquely positioned to write about these trades, and the rivalry among colonial powers, the US emerging as one by the early decades of the twentieth century. Indeed, much of Conrad’s tales of the seaboard are trade routes crucial to commodity transportation during the age of sail. 5 CLR James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. (New York: Random House, 1963). Second Revised edition, first Vintage edition. 6 Jennifer Sessions, By Sword and Plow: France and the Conquest of Algeria. (Cornell: Cornell University Press, 2017) 7. 7 See Chapter 4 of Jennifer Sessions, By Sword and Plow: France and the Conquest of Algeria. (Cornell: Cornell University Press, 2017). 8 CLR James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. (New York: Random House, 1963).

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To frame the place of objects and commodities in the colonial euro-­ modernist novels and their very different appraisal in the post-colonial ones, some genealogy of the objects found in the colonies, or available to the ­colonised subject through colonial trade, and the history of their entrance into literature is enlightening. In her provocative book on the scientific and ­artistic impact of objects used in the colonies, Rajani Sudan argues that the use objects were put to in the periphery, through a process she defines as alchemy, makes its way into the centre influencing rational ideas of science in the west from the seventeenth century onwards.9 An object that functions as a “techne,”; for e.g. mud, mortar, ice is transformed by its use value in the construction of buildings, creation of artefacts, and control of climate. Western scientists understood these transformation as alchemical processes crucial to the “technologies of colonialism and empire.”10 These objects carry more than monetary value; they contribute to intellectual thought in both the scientific and artistic arenas.11 Starting with Defoe’s writings, moving to Pope’s “Rape of the Lock,” and then to Johnson’s “Rasselas,” including Jane Austen’s “Emma,” Sudan discusses the chain of linguistic signification of commodities such as jaggery, or paper: “… They are the things that make dominion possible but only through a process that begins with sublimation and ends with abjection.”12 It is not ­accidental that a critic writing on Nostromo hits upon this theme. In both cases, the ­writers are referring to the lack of agreement between colonisers and ­colonised. ­Disagreement among members of each group militates against the commodity achieving an absolute value, hence the sublimation, and the abjection: The sublimatory process, which, working ideally through the alchemy of human culture, ought to transform excrement into pure value itself, ­cannot work without widespread agreement about its trajectory.13 9 10 11

12 13

Rajani Sudan, The Alchemy of Empire: Abject Materials and the Technologies of Colonialism (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016). Ibid., 7. In addition materials such as the “marble columns salvaged from Roman ruins in Algeria and bronze from guns taken at Algiers in 1830” are used in the Colonne de Mazagran in Paris to parade the concrete glory of the coloniser who now owns the material of the colonised. For the impact on architecture and the topography of the city see Jennifer Sessions, By Sword and Plow: France and the Conquest of Algeria. (Cornell: Cornell University Press, 2017) 156. Ibid., 15. Daniel Bivona, British Imperial Literature 1870–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) 123.

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Thus, in the history of imperial British literature, both the material history and the techne are mystified even as their surfacing reveals the anxieties of the author. In the Latin American context, Ericka Beckman makes an intriguing ­connection between the object and the very modality of literary writing. To differentiate the accent of her work from Sudan’s a brief comparison is merited. Sudan argues that for e.g., Pope’s references to colonial/Indian objects that were popular in Queen Anne’s England paper over, and sometimes absorb anxieties about the ransacking of goods that he would write up in the royally commissioned Pax Britannica. Beckmann elaborates on how the influx of capital because of trade is at the origins of literary movements in the periphery; yes, trade births a literary/artistic movement. On the one hand, the influence of european writers and poets on modernismo is a pedigree of sorts, but Beckman looks at a different kind of import from the centre to the periphery. She argues that in the wake of Latin American trade with Europe, the modernismo movement emerged, made possible by trading the country’s natural resources for French luxury objects. Analysing the Cuban writer Julián del Casal’s journalistic ventures and his sonnets, she points to the contradiction whereby the woman consumer is perforce included in the catalogue of modern import objects. The poem refers only to the aesthetic theme: “the commodity form becomes invisible in the sonnet.” Further, “woman, the consumer par excellence in the department store is thereby removed from the sonnet.”14 Three relevant features in this analysis are generally pertinent: (1) the commodity is subsumed, (2) the subject in the periphery is compelled to consume the product in the interests of belonging to the modern world, (3) the subject is removed from the “commodity form.”15 As mentioned earlier, the colonial euro-modernist novels had inherited a world that assumed the free flow of colonial commodities, and possibly a tradition of references and sublimations that imposed the ideational on the object. Unlike modernismo that takes pride in the contemplation of the beauties of imported commodities and objects, the colonial euro-modernist novel obscures the commodity form by layering philosophies of identity and civilisation. Nevertheless, it can be argued that the colonial euro-modernist novel definitely carries some of the features of the commodity form.

14 15

Ericka Beckman, Capital Fictions: The Literature of Latin America’s Export Age (­Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012) 77 and 79. Ibid., 48.

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Daniel Bivona correctly asserts that Conrad goes through comparable chains of substitution to arrive at sublimation.16 The use of euro-modernist aesthetics in effecting the sublimation is however not broached, the burden falling upon the narration of history in Nostromo. The subtle shift in focus from the commodity per se to the impact of the silver on the consciousness and actions of the characters, and its ultimate excision in the plot, its status as a “secret” testifies both to its importance in elevating the material motivation of the plot, while entangling it in quests for personal nobility, order, democracy, and progress. Yet, in the novel, the discussion of ideas, and the references to european intellectual debates depend on the location of the silver, the dread and the promise, its settledness in this land reliant on native labour. Each action in the novel is driven by the commodity. The silver mines are at the centre of this convulsive conversion from commodity to ideal, rather than to fetish. Perhaps it is the seamless chain of substitutions mentioned above that inspired Jean Franco to call the novel a “fable” mocking the seriousness of its euro-modernist virtuosity.17 Vásquez’s introduction to Panama, Conrad’s fictional Costaguana/Sulaco emphasises at every opportunity the geography of the land, its very location, unrivalled for the transportation of commodities on grand scales. The shift from the coloniser depleting commodities from the colony to the coloniser using the location to ship commodities is a subtle one. On the one hand, it appears that the power of the native government is greater in that it has to allow development in the land, but on the other, it appears that control not just of commodities and labour, but also of use of land is being ceded under the aegis of progress. The narrator is quite often on the verge of parodying the various contrivances of coloniser and colonised in following a chain of substitutions that leads the narrator’s father to believe that progress, rather than the movement of commodities, is at stake. Writing about the canal in terms of progress, dismayingly akin to colonial tracts, the narrator’s father obviates the commodity form. In highlighting the naivete of Miguel Altamirano in imaginging progress, Vásquez is part of a genealogy of Latin American writers, including Márquez,who are aware of how Colombia’s aspirations to civilisation are deeply attached to the value placed on commodities. After the interminable wars between the Liberals and 16 17

Daniel Bivona, British Imperial Literature 1870–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) 124. Jean Franco, “The Limits of the Liberal Imagination: One Hundred Years of Solitude and Nostromo” in Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude: A Casebook ed. Gene H. Bell-Villada (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2002) 94.

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Conservatives (1899–1902) that Márquez describes in marvellous terms, “the liberal visionary and man of “progress,”’ General Rafael Uribe Uribe dedicated himself to outlining new sources of export wealth for the country.” The emphasis on the export of goods is well-taken, its dire importance heightened by the loss of the isthmus of Panama in 1903.18 The novel is set in Panama during the years preceding the US lease of the Panama, and conveys the delirium that Miguel Altamirano experienced regarding the speed with which goods could be ferried from Colombia’s Pacific to Atlantic coasts. As the inhabitants of Macondo see the railroad as a conduit to this progress, the Panamans regard the building of the canal as a modern, and magical, tour de force that would signal their prosperity and civilisation. They may have the land, but they are persuaded into believing they need ­foreign techne. The western engineers see inert matter in the land that their technology can overcome, both to dominate, and to control labour and the flow of goods. Vasquéz’s José Altamirano, on the other hand, appears to accept this land effortlessly and without judgement, relatively indifferent to it. He is far more interested in the town, the people, the culture. The novel ultimately ends in the failure of the engineers at a technical level while the commercial interests ensure that they will be successful at a later point. This is a clear indication of colonial mercantile obliviousness to the colony’s terrain except in terms of how it can be reconstituted for economic purposes. The primacy of the object or commodity is very much concealed in Camus’s The Stranger, and connects France less directly to Algeria; however, a series of objects including cigarettes and paper reveal the offices of colonial trade both as material objects and as techne. Daoud’s use of material objects in The Meursault Investigation emphasizes colonial consumption and control. After the conquest of Algeria, French people were vastly enamoured of objects that were either from Algeria, or were popular items featuring the theme.19 In the French post-colonial context, objects used by the native population that were collected for museums, became the site of a struggle on the significance of these objects to ethnographic understanding, and implicitly, control of knowledge, “… France’s colonies had since at least the conquest of Algeria played an important role as a supplier of specimens with which to test the evolutionary

18 19

Ericka Beckman, Capitalist Fictions: The Literature of the Latin America’s Export Age (­Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012) 9. Jennifer Sessions, By Sword and Plow: France and the Conquest of Algeria. (Cornell: Cornell University Press, 2017) 130.

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schemas and racialist classifications of physical anthropology.”20 Thus, the investment in the objects of colonised peoples continues to have an extended after-life.21 The combination of modernist and post-modernist aesthetic styles in The Meursault Investigation and The Secret History of Costaguana function to critique the blindness of euro-modernist texts to the importance of objects and commodities in the design and matter of their writings. The protagonists of the two post-colonial texts arrive at a similar conclusion; these material objects and the processes by which they are transformed in literature to assume imperial control produce false narratives; including, indeed, fake news. Conrad’s Nostromo, as mentioned in an earlier chapter, sought to tap into the spirit of adventure and exploration that the subscribers to periodicals enjoyed. The trope of adventure into a far-off terrain conjures up thrills and excitements with fantasies of richness on a world canvas where the european adventurer stalked forth, the only animate figure in the so-called new spaces. In and of itself, it successfully detached the specificity of space and concreteness of objects, their use, exchange, and symbolic values as practiced there. Even as Nostromo plies the adventure trope, part of Conrad’s critique in the novel is through the various values attached to the silver by Nostromo and Emilia Gould as distinct from Charles Gould, the owner of the mine, and ­Holroyd, the US financier. This shrewd critique of differences between market value and what one critic calls the value of the house, is mitigated by an impressionist word ­palette.22 When objects and their placements are detached, routed through impressions, and then recirculated in a more familiar socius they acquire a market value that determines the value of both the place and its people. Much has been written on Part One of Nostromo, “The Silver of the Mine,” particularly the vengeful ghosts, the “two gringos, spectral and alive,” who are still in the “peninsula of the Azuera,” forbidding, rocky territory, coming close to the forbidden. While this can be read as an apocryphal warning against greed, and is understood as such by the inhabitants, the effect is to enhance the danger of exploration, the daring of the entrepreneur, Gould, and the advanced ideas of western utilitarian establishments that don’t brook any superstitions. The hostility of the terrain is in direct proportion to the richness of the reward, 20 21 22

Daniel J. Sherman, ‘“Peoples Ethnographie”’: Objects, Museums, and the Colonial ­Inheritance of French Ethnology.” French Historical Studies Vol. 27, No. 3 (Summer) 2004: 675. Ibid., 686. Glenn Willmott, Modernist Goods: Primitivism, the Market and the Gift (Toronto: ­University of Toronto Press, 2018) 115.

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wholly merited because of the strenuousness of effort that speaks to virtue, prudence, husbandry. Following the tyrannical role of the “monster” dictator, Bento, the historian, Don Avellanos is successful in organizing the selection of Ribiera for President, securing political power for the blancos, or the elites (113). His mandate is to ensure peace and regain international confidence by meeting reasonable demands (112). The Gould concession is central to this goal: “… from the conviction of practical necessity, stronger than any political doctrine … Charles Gould had flung the silver of San Tomé into the fray” (113). Indeed, it had become a “weapon,” that secured imperial, US international market power. Its exchange value has been amplified to ensure commerce, and perhaps an externally secured peace. Yet, Conrad’s criticism of imperial market economies is at odds with the role of silver in the plot. The curious matter of the silver not being exchanged, or the buried silver, hearkening to the ominous opening that introduces the motif, suggests a ­process of sublimation that allows the lie of progress, and the myth of the independence of the Occidental Republic or Sulaco to persist. The story goes that Nostromo is asked to hide the silver from the approaching Montero and his followers from having the means to take over and rule.23 Thus, its absence, or its effective concealment, both a physical and symbolic matter, satisfies Mrs. Gould, the putatively ethical centre of the blanco group. The omniscient author connects this thematic to dwell on how the hidden silver treasure has corrupted the noble Nostromo, whose reputation had been his wealth. Yet, he is punished for his petty trivial intercourse with silver. Working within world imperial geographic parameters, Gogwilt avers that Conrad’s grand political scheme is to suggest that the anti-colonial nationalist aspirations resolve into anti-revolutionary movements, in part because there is no real bourgeoisie in Costaguana. Arguing that Nostromo is the opposite of the classless people, who redeem themselves by their struggle for and achievement of nationhood, Gogwilt describes Conrad’s denouement trenchantly “… Conrad’s Nostromo plots the obverse of this—the degeneration of the “stout working man” into a petty criminal discredited in his own eyes … .24” However, the greater tragedy is that Nostromo reveals no awareness of his alignment with the blancos and his repudiation of the classless people. Regardless of the political discourse 23 24

For a historical key to the various type of Latin Americans presented in the novel, see Luz Ramirez, British Representations of Latin America (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007) 100. Christopher Gogwilt, The Invention of the West Joseph Conrad and the Double-Mapping of Europe and Empire (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995) 208.

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of the novel, the story returns to personal and ethical choices made during ­conditions of revolutionary possibility. Nostromo, identified ethnically as Italian, remains superior to the people of slave origin, the classless, and while this is made apparent, the hero is not shown to have come to any recognition of it; rather, his recognition is the bitter one of having followed the blancos. Class awareness, yes; revolutionary possibilities, no. And silver it is that has tainted him. In the meanwhile, the large-scale exploitation of the Gould concession and Costaguana, is rewritten during the post-independence era as correcting the years of misrule that had preceded it. As with Conrad’s Nostromo, where the forces of progress were invested in commanding the machinery and labour to tap into the silver mine’s resources, Vásquez’s Secret History elaborates on a similar process. What is at stake is grander – the possibility of international trade through a canal that would connect the Atlantic and Pacific sea-routes. The French, flush with the success of the Suez Canal, try to engineer a “geographical alchemy” by “transubstantiating an alien landscape” that will aid them in the vastly improved enterprise of moving merchandise around the globe, the Panama Canal.25 Where ­Conrad talks of the veins of mines, and material interests, Vásquez’s narrator, José Altamirano charts the progress by which the turbulence of nature, regarded as inert by the europeans, is attacked for the purposes of techne. The town’s life revolves around this economy bloated with promises for the future. The abstractness of the material, its transvaluation into the idea is already apparent in the narrator’s first introduction of the canal: In accordance with article XXXV, the country that was called New ­Granada granted the United States the exclusive right of transit across the Isthmus of the province of Panama, and the United States undertook, among other things, to maintain strict neutrality in questions of internal politics. And here begins the disorder, here begins … (Ellipses in the ­original) (10). Although seemingly peripheral, drastic rearrangement of the economy as a consequence of imperial interests is devastating at the personal, cultural, ­political, and economic levels. José Altamirano proceeds to recount this ­gradual, planned destruction of personal life, linking it explicitly with the intellectual notion of historical progress as announced by the Angel of History. The ideational is lifted to the anagogical until the material—the land, the sea, the 25

Rajani Sudan, The Alchemy of Empire: Abject Materials and the Technologies of C ­ olonialism. New York: Fordham University Press, 2016.

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river, the machines, the labour, the human being—all become insubstantial. In comparison to Conrad whose impressionist resonances gloss over the absoluteness of the material, rendering it subject to individual value and ideational instrument, in the above description and at every point, Vásquez underscores the tangibleness and physical impact of the material, here the terrain itself. The very prospect of the idea of a canal, a secondary idea, leads to a process of sublation that erratically but cunningly erases traces of the corporeal. José Altamirano, we recall, has had cause to mention “the dead Chinamen” from Panama that was the impetus for Miguel Altamirano to come to Panama. The links between the Chinese and Panama are clear from the outset. It is a Panama Company man who offers as many dead Chinese as the Liberals might require for their scientific experiments, forbidden by the Conservatives and the Church. Thus, the material, here the body of the Chinese men, would ­furnish the techne whereby Latin American progressives could advance and proclaim their knowledge and modernity, instruments of control, or assertions of equality with the europeans. The elevation of the idea at the cost of understanding what the supply of dead Chinese men means is forgotten in pretensions of enlightened superiority: “… this was more than a debate in the press: it was a fundamental battle in the long struggle of Light against Darkness” (15). According to the imperial world view, objects of a subordinate or colonised country, and their geography are seen as inert, pliant, waiting for Big History to bring european colonisers to lend them form and make use of them. Here the case illustrates the brutality of the principle, the “Chinaman” lives to die. Firstly, the Chinese men are required to die in numbers; while the european engineers work with their instruments, the Chinese men are sent to carry out the europeans’ precise formulae calculated to reconstitute the terrain. When the canal is erected, it will stand as a fine testament to european adventurousness (crossing the ocean), ingenuity (scientific calculation), perseverance (the many dead Chinese men, unmentioned). Secondly, the dead Chinese men are sold to the hospitals in Colombia that need cadavers for scientific inquiries. When the scientists discover anything, the results disclosed follow the pattern described above, of applause for originality of inquiry, ingenuity, and perseverance. This design of what we might call Big History reportage is punctured through Vásquez’s narrative. The colonial story then is an invented one, constructing a recorded history that almost succeeds in stamping out the material. The most powerful of these instruments of Big History are fake newspaper reports supplied by the narrator’s father, and “the book”. The book is equal to the task of sublating the object. The “book” written by the smooth stylists, Conrad and Camus, takes on a hard physicality in the post-colonial novels. The materiality of the books draw

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attention to their relative obscurity in Conrad and Camus. One assumption is that they are able to take the presence of paper for granted, supremely unaware of their place of production, the colonised land that yields the resource, the labour that develops and transports it. Sudan observes that paper and the literary genre that it spawned in the early British eighteenth century, letter writing, yielded literacy of a particular kind for the non-gentry, while it meant commerce for the landed gentry, such as Mr. Knightley, in Jane Austen’s Emma.26 Such is the case with Meursault in The Stranger. Among euro-modernist texts, The Stranger is arguably the most material, exploring the corporeal in every experience. While the narration is euro-­ modernist, the narrator is not given to the introspections on the scale of a Woolf, Kafka, or Joyce. He is closer to Franz Biberkopf of Berlin Alexanderplatz, but more exclusively attuned to his sensory pleasures. Meursault records the physical pleasures available to him; indeed, the novel could be considered a register of sensations, both pleasurable and unpleasurable. The coffee and cigarettes that crop up in the opening segments of The Stranger are the pleasures afforded by their abundance in France’s colonies, including Haiti and Algeria; their consumption is scarcely innocent. Later at Meursault’s trial, the cigarette, signifier of urbane pleasure, is singled out for condemnation by the French officials. Yet, Meursault’s social practices are scarcely different than theirs.27 This ease with material goods makes a contrast with the Algeria of that time that Harun in The Meursault Investigation describes. Where coffee and cigarettes, in their sensuousness, offer plenitude to the coloniser, for Harun, they spell emptiness. These material objects have devoured his brother. The sleight of hand in narration takes the presumably transparent signifiers, coffee and cigarettes, and then interjects them into a material colonial economy; the consequences experienced through a semiotic chain. Harun says, “I’ve got some pictures in my head, they’re all I can offer you. A cup of coffee, some cigarette butts, his espadrilles, Mama crying …” (9). Similarly, the protagonists of the two novels engage with writing very differently. In The Stranger, Meursault almost glancingly mentions the letter he writes to the native woman on behalf of his neighbour, Raymond. As discussed in an earlier chapter, Meursault unresistingly transcribes Raymond’s threats. The letter Meursault writes for Raymond, and its techne mirror the protagonist’s own writing. They function as examples of colonial arrogation of material 26 27

Ibid., See Chapter 5 123–49. David Carroll, referring to Pierre Nora, Les Français d’Algérie (1961) on the psyche of the pied-noir community in Albert Camus, the Algerian: Colonialism Terrorism Justice. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007) 22.

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and techne as signifiers of enlightenment, having abjected the concrete traces of the origins of both paper and writing. Even as we are made aware of Meursault’s moral lethargy, we are also attuned to the colonial habitus that frames moral choices. In this context, Camus presents Meursault as unexceptional. Meursault does feel uneasy; he notes that “he [Raymond] had stopped calling me[him] “monsieur.” (33) Meursault is only dimly aware of the power exerted by the material act of writing; however, the author, Camus, journalist, intellectual, and writer is almost certainly aware of the power of writing in a colonial context where oral culture is dominant. This is the charge laid on Camus/Meursault by Daoud’s protagonist, Harun. Locating the book and writing in the colonial theatre of commodity exchange provides insight into the different valuations placed on the book and writing by the coloniser and the colonised. Referring to Baudrillard, Appadurai notes that the object, in this case, the book carries symbolic value that is not commensurate to its market value, a phenomenon that can be observed in capitalist societies. Following Appadurai’s distinction between commodity fetishism as Marx described it, and literal fetishism in the colony, as a nonsymbolic fear or adoration of the object, we can forward the notion that for Daoud’s Harun, the book and its writing are literal fetishes.28 Harun later understands that in the western capitalist market, Camus’s The Stranger is symbolically fetishized, where the book erases hierarchically unequal relations, and covers over the socio-historical conditions of its own production. Notwithstanding the written literary tradition of classical Arabic, Harun is more intimate with the oral tradition as are many in the culture. The Stranger, written in French, poses another obstacle to those that don’t have access to colonial education. The newspaper article, and then subsequently knowledge of the book and the author have the effect of astonishing Harun by their newness, their very existence. It is repellent and monstrous at first but then he understands that it is an intellectual commodity that is being sold, and he is definitely not envisioned as a consumer. Indeed, through its packaging of euro-modernism, distant from the oral tradition where narrative legitimacy is assumed, the object or commodity has been removed thoroughly. For Harun, the only path to unearthing it is through the oral, through the memory, imprecise as it may be. Harun unearths his brother as the banished commodity in The Stranger. His repetition of the theme of his brother’s disappearance in The Stranger, his invocation of the many Musas in every locale, reveal the pain of the indigenous body sublimated into the commodity of euro-modernism. 28

Arjun Appadurai, “Introduction” to The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural ­Perspective ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986) 53.

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As in The Meursault Investigation, Vásquez’s novel identifies the book as a source of mystification, and more generally, writing as the primary instrument of colonial investment in commodity trading. The first source of betrayal of the physicality of the terrain itself is the protagonist’s father, Miguel Altamirano, henchman to the colonial authorities, and strident ideologue of their vision of progress and development. The second betrayal is that of the surrogate father, Korzeniowsky or Joseph Conrad. Here, the protagonist is subtle in understanding that history becomes the abstract casing for the packaging of materiality. According to the protagonist, the construction of the Panama Canal, with the many lives, including that of his father, Miguel Altamirano, that it claimed is re-envisioned in Conrad’s Nostromo. Consequently, according to the narrator, Nostromo contributes to a global narrative of western development, loosely hanging on Enlightenment notions of progress. These colonial imports, relevant to the wars fought in Europe, are an ­unwelcome invasion in the lives of the Panamanians. Conrad does refer to the Indians who had been the sacrificial offering; yet, traces of this material ­wreckage of life and land are effaced in the individual goals and crises of the elite of Sulaco, and the titular character’s struggle with honour in Conrad’s Nostromo. (75) In one of his disquisitions on the extraordinary paths the Angel of History traverses, Vásquez’s narrator talks of how when he first crossed the Magdalena, the river he sails to get to Panama, the material commodities of colonialism had radically changed to keep pace with the new demands of the economy.: I sailed a Magdalena colonised or dominated by the alternating traffic of the two warring parties [Conservatives and Liberals], or by barges filled not with cacao or tobacco, but with dead soldiers whose putrid stench was stronger than the smoke coming out of the funnels. (65) The banishment of José Altamirano from Nostromo is similar to the obliviousness about the native in The Stranger. Korzeniowsky “doesn’t know the names or ages of the one thousand three hundred and thirty-five victims” (82). The character, Korzeniowsky, is culpable in a lethally charged affair. Guns that he had transported into the Caribbean to support the Conservatives have claimed these lives. The ammunition that is delivered is tangentially linked to the rifles sported by the Liberals and carried by a deserter named Anatole, who shoots José Altamirano’s wife, Charlotte. While he cannot claim complete innocence, Korzeniowsky’s delivery of this cargo is not responsible for José Altamirano’s wife’s death. What he was responsible for was eliminating the details of the

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story to write Big History. And in it the material body of the woman that makes Altamirano put a spoke in the wheel of Big History is completely absented. The protagonist had enabled the transfer of power from Colombia to ­Panama, the use of the canal to the US, to avenge himself on his country, and more abstractly to smash the lies of the Angel of History. However, the Angel’s triumphant arrival and consolidation is cemented by Conrad’s ambiguities regarding the concerted interests of the capitalists. The impressionist use of language, the supposed telling of history through euro-modernist techniques completes the damaging operation. As in the detective story, the question becomes where’s the body, where are the bodies? In The Meursault Investigation, the book’s status as commodity is threatening, but necessary for the protagonist to grasp the process by which colonialism sublimates the commodification of native histories. Harun needs an intermediary, whether Meriam, or other Camus students, to take his words forth. As oral raconteur, he will not subject the story of his brother, Musa, and other Algerians to the mystification of the book. José Altamirano in The Secret History of Costaguana similarly centres colonial sublimation of commodities around writing and the book. Unlike Harun of The Meursault Investigation, José Altamirano is well versed in the manipulation of this process, as he observes his father, Miguel Altamirano, abjecting himself to a so-called enlightened sublimation of the liberal. But as for José, the book, that artefact that stole his story, and his country’s history, will never be completed. He finds that he can only tell the story of the theft, not the history of his country or his life. He fails to write the book. Both post-colonial novelists expose the burial of the material and its sublimation into the existential or the historical through pointing to euro-­ modernist individualist layerings. Indigenous materials have been subsumed to produce a different kind of intellectual commodity for metropolitan elites: euro-modernism.

Chapter 5

Geography and the Gendering of Place Africa has always been represented as a beautiful woman whose head is crowned with ears of wheat, symbol of abundance; France could not, therefore, make a more important conquest than that of its ­northern shores [Algeria].1

∵ Whereas the search for commodities had animated the western colonial ­enterprises including the French, particularly in the Caribbean, this was not the case with Algeria where land itself was the primary objective once military superiority had been established. The trope prevalent in colonial novels that betray the anxiety of the voyager on confronting the alien land is represented in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. The voyager, european, male, innocent, travels to the interior. The landscape’s geographic features are obliterated by the voyager’s visualisations of entrance into the darkness and depths of the other female’s sexuality, and the male other’s unknowable, highly dangerous, and hence avoidable difference. This model does not obtain in its classical form in either Nostromo or The Stranger. The conquest of land, in gendered, sexualised, and colonial terms resulting in boastful triumph is a dominant trope in the discussions on the colonization and settlement of Algeria in France from 1840 to the end of the century. Framed in self-righteous terms, the earlier colonial adventuring in pursuit of commodities and luxury items is now condemned in favour of an “enlightened” form of colonialism. This version folded in earlier stereotypes of the Arabs as uncivilized, presenting the agricultural development of the rich land in Algeria as a noble cause that both suited French notions of equality, as well as advanced the possibility of French colonials in Algeria supplying France with the products it now imported.2 Thus, the land of Algeria was inert, passive, and fertile, 1 Quoted in Guide de Français à Alger in Jennifer Sessions, By Sword and Plow: France and the Conquest of Algeria. (Cornell: Cornell University Press, 2017) 218. 2 CLR James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. (New York: Random House, 1963). The loss of Haiti meant that France could not count on the sugar, tobacco, and coffee that they supplied. © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2023 | doi:10.1163/9789004541153_007

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lying somnolently in wait for the vigorous european male to fructify it.3 The overt sexually graphic rendition of the language used to advertise settlement in Algeria, and that prevailed in discussions of Algeria, do not seem to have disturbed contemporary French commentators. The land was imagined as unpeopled despite volumes of historical and cultural artefacts that proved otherwise. In her discussion on how Algeria was “sold” to the French population, Jennifer Sessions observes that the French imagined that “one had only to peupler in order to fertilizer. Algeria was a “a soil that awaits the plow.”’4 Camus criticism has extensively analysed the few sentences in The Stranger that described the sharpness of the sun, and the coolness of the water and linked it with the mother to suggest the subject’s guilt, or Kafkaesque angst, a euro-modernist theme repeated with some frequency. Here, the gendering is of a psychological nature, bringing it back to the unique euro-modernist perspective. This is of course a welcome addition to earlier interpretations that spoke loftily of the absurdity of life having occasioned the killing of the native. Critical interpretations of the land and its climate insist that the novel’s descriptions serve to draw attention to the Absurd in the human condition The sun in The Stranger “makes the world thick, and man’s (sic) behaviour meaningless.”5 This is a world where “man” refers to the male euro-subject and stands for his kind, not the exalted universalist relationship between human being and nature that is posited. The description of the sun at the funeral of the mother, and the killing of the native has been reiterated by many, solidifying the psychological interiority explanation. One critic examines formalistic and lexical repetitions between the two to suggest the protagonist’s identification with his mother, and the psychological disturbances in its wake.6 Another strand of Camus criticism that avoids the political argues that nature in its elemental form is othered in his writing. The political is erased, and the elemental raised to the metaphysical. However, the point remains that the nature described is in colonised territory, tantamount to setting up the colonised land as other or inimical.7 Critics are correct in pointing out that the protagonist of The Stranger is scarcely a regular colon; his lack of interest in going to Paris is proof of his imperviousness and “alienation,” his refusal to call the police on the 3 This trope is ubiquitous in european literature, starting with Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, but given a different twist by Michel Tournier, Friday or Another Day. 4 Jennifer Sessions, By Sword and Plow: France and the Conquest of Algeria. (Cornell: Cornell University Press, 2017) 215. 5 Michel Benamou, “Romantic Counterpoint: Nature and Style.” Yale French Studies No. 25 (Camus 1960) 47. 6 Terry Otten, “Maman” in Camus’ “The Stranger.” College Literature Vol. 2, No. 2 (Spring 1975) 108. 7 Anne Sejten, “Irréductible et délivrante: La nature dans l’écriture de Camus.” Nature (1997) 33.

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neighbour’s violence against the native woman a further sign of his distance from the colonial government. Yet, every action he takes is inevitably informed by the weight of colonial freight, political and cultural, mocking the very idea that decisions to act are individual ones. This, then, is the drumbeat of Harun’s disquisition in The Meursault Investigation. For Harun and the community, it is a foregone conclusion that one’s actions are determined by the colonial structure. This indeed accounts for the ­absurdity of Meursault’s trial that ignores the crime itself from start to finish. Rather, it appears that Meursault’s “outsider” status in the pied-noir society, his “individualism” is under attack. And it takes Harun a long time to come to the understanding that the literate western community believes in the colon’s individualism. Although these ideas are not new, they are worth recalling because they draw our attention more closely to the remapping of colonial spaces that subtends colonial action, and away from individual differences. Still, the “outsider” motif is what lends the euro-modernist text its renegade status. In puncturing this key trope, and turning to the colonial remapping of spaces, euro-modernist aesthetics is dragged in. Where Jameson correctly notes that euro-modernism a function of colonialism, I would add that euro-modernism, while spawned from colonialism, effaces those colonial remappings to absent colonialism, high-light euro-modernist aesthetics, and necessarily render it a purely european intellectual product.8 The narrator of The Meursault Investigation describes a couple of the main settings of The Stranger, the beaches, and the city of Algiers. The description is almost claustrophobic reminding one of the pan-colonial architectural design that separated natives from colonisers.9 Although not specific, these descriptions are far from being “opaque” as one critic would have it. However, Harun’s sense of “dislocation” from virtually all the settings in the novel is accurate. N ­ everteless, his descriptions contain far more realistic material than ­Meursault’s renditions.10 The Algiers of speed, movement, and pleasure that Meursault enjoys is far from Harun’s experience. Harun can’t wait to leave Algiers: The oil fumes nauseated me, but I loved the virile, almost comforting roar of the engine, like a kind of father that was snatching us, my mother and 8 9 10

Fredric Jameson, “Modernism and Imperialism,” in The Modernist Papers (London: Verso, 2007) 152–70. E.M. Forster, A Passage to India among many others. (New York: Harcourt Brace ­Jovanovich, 1924). Yasmina Bahi, “Héros marginal, récit fragmenté, écriture transgressive: Meursault ­Contre-enquéte de Kamel Daoud.” Synergies Algérie 24 (2017): 77.

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me, out of an immense labyrinth made up of buildings, downtrodden people, shantytowns, dirty urchins, aggressive cops, and beaches fatal to Arabs. For the two of us, the city would always be the scene of the crime, or the place where something pure and ancient was lost. Yes, Algiers, in my memory, is a dirty, corrupt creature, a dark, treacherous man-stealer. (21) Harun is aware of time, land, and the human lost to colonialism. The ­colonial development of the city is hostile to the native, its natural terrain deadly. Their sense of connection to their identity, rooted in their history in the land is ­submerged by a culturally unrecognisable transformation.11 The very sea, ­supposedly eternally there, has become an enemy, reminding us of how Paul D in Toni Morrison’s Beloved tells Sethe that even the stars can’t be enjoyed when a human being is not free. Harun is not enslaved, but the sea is more threatening than indifferent nature. Paul D longs to enjoy the land, Harun shrinks from the sea. Harun insists that it is not only the colon who does not recognise himself as such, but the western audience as well. He systematically refers to Meursault/ Camus as the “writer,” and “your writer” to the narratee. This reference mocks the western critical establishment’s differentiation between the coloniser and the intellectual writer/thinker much apparent through the twentieth century and continuing to the present day. Crossing the writer’s path is deadly; Harun reflects unceasingly on the multiple Musas in the bar who have somehow escaped crossing the writer’s path, “how they would have survived a shot fired in bright sunlight, or how they managed never to cross paths with the writer of yours or, in a word, how they’ve managed not to be dead yet.” (25) At the Oran bar, even as Harun unburdens himself, he doesn’t claim to be completely separate from the writer/character Camus/Meursault. While many euro-modernist novels feature the secret sharer, the alter ego, the doppelgänger, Harun is presented as psychically freighted, no doubt, but also politically, culturally, and socially damaged; the post-colonial doppelgänger. Where the colonial texts mentioned earlier lean heavily on gendered and sexualised tropes to discuss the landscape of the other country, particularly expansiveness and obscurity of its vastness, Harun deploys the same tropes

11

See for difference in native and settler’s relationship to land in Algeria. Ahmad, ­Fawzia. “Mohammed Dib and Albert Camus’s Encounters with the Algerian Landscape” in Maghrebian Mosaic: A Literature in Transition Ed. Mildred Mortimer (Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2001) 101–19.

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unfailingly on the city, identified with French colonial development.12 The emphasis in some instances is circuitous, “Yes, I love this city, even if I adore bad-mouthing it at least as much as I do bad-mouthing women.” (26) He is referring to Oran here. The beach and the water are benign, amusements for pleasure for the narrator of The Stranger in contrast to the country where “with the sun bearing down, making the whole landscape shimmer with heat, it was inhuman and oppressive.” (15) The inhumanity of the landscape is worth observation, its very nature rendering it wild and undomesticated. Given that the vast majority of colonial settlements were in the cities, or simulated its pleasures in country settlements, the abstract idea that the land would be “receptive” of the coloniser is jolted by the The Stranger.13 Meursault’s urbanity is readily apparent in his sensory discomfiture with natural elements outside the city. One critic notes that Camus’s status as pied-noir influences his connection to the terrain. For a writer such as Mohammed Dib, the land is watan, a concept that includes the history and community of the land. Not so for Camus, who “appropriates its physical character for himself, but does not project his own feelings/sentiments into it.”14 While part of the description fits in with Meursault’s physical enjoyment of the urban beach, it does not mitigate the subjective memories attached to such pleasure. Given that Meursault, in part, understands at the surface level, that his actions are prompted by physical stimuli, it is difficult to prise the embodied apart from the emotive. In prison, the very joy of being with Marie, indeed Marie as a woman, is connected to their times in the beach by the sea. When isolated, one of his spontaneous expressions of freedom also evokes the beach, “For example, I would suddenly have the urge to be on a beach and walk down to the water.” (76) Meriem, in The Meursault Investigation is associated with books and language. Harun writes of her in a deeply contemplative way; he loved her but could not “keep” her, his “strangeness” a function of the death of his brother. (116) When Harun meets her, it is in the quiet of the land, not the brightness of the beach, or the tumult of the sea. 12 13 14

“The vast majority of Algeria’s Europeans lived in cities throughout the colonial period …” See Jennifer Sessions, By Sword and Plow: France and the Conquest of Algeria. (Cornell: Cornell University Press, 2017) 216. Ibid., “… in the pages of the illustrated journals, representations of a fertile, peaceful landscape awaiting new European inhabitants …” See Jennifer Sessions, By Sword and Plow: France and the Conquest of Algeria. (Cornell: Cornell University Press, 2017) 228. Fawzia Ahmad. “Mohammed Dib and Albert Camus’s Encounters with the Algerian ­Landscape” in Maghrebian Mosaic: A Literature in Transition Ed. Mildred Mortimer (­Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2001) 102.

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The beach by the city is peopled, and The Stranger’s Meursault has no ­ esitations about diving in the water, and sporting with other young men and h women; the touch of the “breasts,” and their bodies, with a tinge of the naturalness inherent in the sexual, routine almost. Meursault is never so comfortable again in any other setting in the novel. The sun too appears to hold no danger here, “When the sun got too hot, she dove off and I followed.” (20) This ease in an environment is out of the question for the post-colonial doppelgänger, The Meursault Investigation’s Harun. Harun is alienated from all of his surroundings, even from the bar that he frequents. Paradoxically, The Stranger’s ­Meursault, the paradigmatic outsider, is completely at ease in his surroundings in the city beach, and the open spaces of the city. Their relationship to the colonial structure is manifest in their response to land and nature. However, Meursault in The Stranger has a radically different perception of the natives’ relationship to the terrain compared to his. When he encounters two natives in the beach, the afternoon of the shooting, he appears startled that they are in harmony with nature. Critics have noticed the subtle blending of the natives with the natural scenery that Meursault in The Stranger registers just before he shoots the native subject: They [the two male native subjects] seemed perfectly calm and almost content. Our coming changed nothing. The one who had attacked ­Raymond was looking at him without saying anything. The other one was blowing through a little reed over and over again, watching us out of the corner of his eye. He kept repeating the only three notes he could get out of his instrument. (55) The narrator’s alienation from land, people, and possibly self is patent here. The problematic of describing, or narrating colonised terrain while absenting the population underlies the plot explosion of the murder of the native, ­providing, as it were, motivation. That is to say, the freight of doing colonialism without natives is aesthetically expressed by Meursault killing the native subject. The killing is an aesthetic solution to the colonial problematic, eloquently foregrounded by the oneness of the natives with the land and the water. The music of the reeds, the three notes also signify their ability to speak, to belong, and to be heard. While the one looks at Raymond, the other more than looks at Meursault; indeed, he observes him. They own both gaze and voice. Taking on the political criticisms of Conor Cruse O’Brien and Edward Said on Camus’s The Stranger, Hafez argues that the natives are symbolic of the protagonist’s interiority and totality; mythical archetype of permanence and

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integrity.15 Hafez sees the killing of the native subject as a symbol of the protagonist’s inability to hold the totality of the universe; thus, if one were to accept the condition of colonialism itself as part of the totality, such a reading would be exclusively euro-modernist. Consequently, we circle back comfortably to the fractured west european subject. Nevertheless, we can also view this in another light, not perhaps intended by Hafez. The fractured west european subject is a consequence of the human subject almost uniformly abridged by colonial subject formation. Perversely, then, in my reading, the west european subject becomes the euro-modernist subject because of colonialism, claiming the breakdown of autonomy, but not recognising its causes. In other words, the euro-modernist subject has usurped the place of the post-colonial subject in euro-modernist literary/philosophical terms. The relationship of the postcolonial protagonists to the land is riven with ambiguities comparable to the euro-modernist subjects’ apprehensions. The Secret History of Costaguana records the colonial assessments of ­Costaguana’s value in a wry tone. Clearly, the progress of science can’t be held back by the most implacable natural obstacle when in the interests of trade. The enthusiasm for the canal, despite the challenges presented by the terrain are overlooked for the promise of an accelerated trade route through an inter-­oceanic canal. These discussions held in Paris by the powers that be were focused on a goal that although concrete was abstract and futuristic. About a Lieutenant Wyse, who had no engineering credentials, the narrator reports: To a question about the monstrous volume of the River Chagres, the history of its floods that seemed taken from Genesis and the inventory of shipwrecks that lay on its bed as if it weren’t a river but a mini Bermuda Triangle, he replied: “A French engineer does not know the word problem.”’ (123) The rhetoric of conquest, but this time, neither through sword, nor plow, but through engineering suggests the masculine shading of the enterprise. The relationship between the developer and land in the context that Vásquez details is not specifically between the coloniser and the colonised country, but rather the concerted interests of imperial countries, including 15

Hafez-Ergaut, Agnès. “L’absurde, la nature et les arabes dans l’etranger.” AUMLA: Journal of the Australasian Universities Modern Languages Association (2004) 106. “Partie intégrante de cette totalité, érigé en symbole archetypal, l’Arabe dans L’Etranger, loin de constituer une metaphor de l’exclusion, renvoie au contraire à l’intériorité, ce principe mythique de l’unité primordiale que chante Camus dans Noces.”

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France, the US, and the UK, all uploaded on former Spanish colonial territory in South ­America. This particular scenario is also depicted in Conrad’s Nostromo. As Ramirez points out, this new virile imperialism was to exceed the Spanish colonial interest in Sulaco’s trade in oxhides and indigo.16 Conrad makes it a point to throw the aspirations of private capitalists into the mix. Conrad’s critics take pains to analyse his scrupulous differentiations among colonialisms and imperialisms, and between the traditional and modern varieties. And yet there are limitations to his narrative of a Latin American county. As Gogwilt states, “The contingent relation between geography a “people,” and political character sets a revealing limit to the novel’s historical scope. The past, for Conrad’s Costaguana, is vaguely set …”17 Taking as his point of departure, the country’s independence from Spain, Conrad plays with the idea of the country’s republicanism, disarrayed by competing “material ­interests.” Here, the difference between colonialism and imperialism is not commodity ­exploitation as compared to land exploitation for settler colonialism, but between the British and the US, who impede the republican interests of the blancos in Sulaco. Despite the grace with which the head of the Railway ­company comes to Sulaco to begin the process of constructing the railroad, the land is inevitably viewed as an instrument to be shaped, but with some awareness of the cultural factors that are salient in this environment: What concerned him most at the time was the acquisition of land for the railway. In the Santa Maria Valley, where there was already one line in existence, the people were tractable, and it was only a matter of price … It had been lying for ages ensconced behind its natural barriers, repelling modern enterprise by the precipices of its mountain range, by its shallow harbour opening into the everlasting calms of a gulf full of clouds, by the benighted state of mind of the owners of its fertile territory—all these aristocratic old Spanish families … (31) The railway that Conrad uses as a mark of desired progress has its parallel in the Panama Railway that opened in 1855. The expected resistance to the railroad is from the representatives of the old european guard in South America;

16 17

Luz Ramirez, British Representations of Latin America (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007) 97. Christopher Gogwilt, The Invention of the West Joseph Conrad and the Double-Mapping of Europe and Empire (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995) 212.

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the indigenous people are pliant.18 The danger of the mountains, the placidity of the waters are both equally challenges that need to be surmounted. Hegglund adds a dimension to the contradictions in the specificity of colonial thought on colonised lands. The prevailing ideology of environmental determinism presented a specific problem to colonisers when confronting colonised territories. On the one hand, techne had enabled europeans to achieve what they regarded as a level of modernity; yet, if environmental determinism were to be trusted, the colonisers would not be able to satisfy their material interests. Hegglund observes, “This dilemma [environmental determinism] was not only at the heart of the new geography; it was also a crux that modernism continually addressed in one form or another: do Europeans have the ability to master the difficult environments of the colonial world”?19 On the one hand, the will to master, and the other, the anxiety about loss of superiority; if environment had deemed the europeans superior, and if the colonised were able to develop a similar modernity, then it would appear that the determinist theory was flawed, and consequently their belief of superiority was based on faulty premises. In thinking the possibility of the railroad through mountainous terrain, the trope of heroic [male] energy is summoned. The male undertow is not sexualised; nor is it named male, but its [male] potency and attendant nobility is assumed, “… There was generated a power for the world’s service—a subtle force that could set in motion mighty machines, men’s muscles, and awaken also in human breasts an unbounded devotion to the task.” (34) A plausible inference is that the devotion that would be “awakened” would be in women. If one were to invoke the insistence of the letter upon the unconscious, one could speculate that “breasts” also speaks to female fervour, not male labour. For example, Emilia Gould, helpmate par excellence to the Rey of Sulaco, Charles Gould, presented as devoted to her husband’s aspirations, is not c­ apable of heroic energy. The fierce impetus to alter, to remap nature is not exclusive to the ­europeans. The most fanatic devotee at the altar of progress in this terrain is The Secret History of Costaguana’s Miguel Altamirano, the narrator’s father. The history of Colombia in the nineteenth century is riven with controversies 18 19

Luz Ramirez, British Representations of Latin America (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007) 96. Hegglund, Jon, “Worldviews: Metageographies of Modernist Fiction” (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012) 9. Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: May 2012 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199796106.001.0001.

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and wars between the Conservatives and the Materialists or the Progressives. The ­Conservatives imitated a religious, strict, socially rigid model of Europe, the materialists swore by science, and the possibility of Colombia and Latin America being acknowledged for its grand contributions to modern society. Altamirano could well be an example of Roberto Schwarz’s “misplaced idea,” transplanting liberal ideas from europe, but readjusting them, so that society did not change, but the status quo was garlanded with the rhetoric of the Enlightenment.20 Yet the nationalist imprimatur is based on the kind of distorted practise the liberal idea undergoes shown by Altamirano’s worship of “progress” and the particular shape it assumes.21 At any rate, Miguel Altamirano blinds himself to the possibility that there are real problems with the construction of the canal, deluding himself and others. He sacrifices every human ­relationship for this ideal. José Altamirano observes his father’s single-minded devotion to the construction of the Panama Canal but preserves his independence. He is aware that the land and water are animated, their instrumental value is of no moment to him. Freiré argues that in the context of contemporary political violence, many Latin American writers show political violence transforming the land or the body, but that technology and city practices also brought barbarism to the wilderness rather than the civilisation that Miguel Altamirano is yearning for. Vásquez parodies the ideal by taking the ocassional ribald swipe at the French engineers and their machinery, departing from realism, not to turn to the marvellous, but to its parody to mock the straight faced realist form of the Conradian version of progress.22 Comparing the features of nature in Vásquez’s novel to its use in magical realist texts, Freiré suggests that in an inversion of magical realism, Vásquez shows how techne practiced in the land bears the stamp of barbarism.23 While the ideological framework is apt, the details show magical realism creeping in, despite Vásquez’s own disavowal. The river Chagres, regarded as a fierce force by the progress contingent, to be tamed for machines and commerce appears in a different light to José. The river gifts José his life when Charlotte Madinier is rebirthed in its waters. 20 21 22 23

Roberto Schwarz, Misplaced Ideas: Essays on Brazilian Culture ed and intro by John ­ ledson (London: Verso, 1992). See Chapter 2. G Elías José Palti, “The Problems of ‘Misplaced Ideas’ Revisited: Beyond the ‘History of Ideas’ in Latin America.” Journal of the History of Ideas (2006) 150. Ibid., 161. Raúl Rodríguez Freiré,“Voltaire En Los Trópicos o Los Trópicos Sobre Voltaire: ­Civilización vs. Naturaleza En ‘Historia Secreta De Costaguana,’” Revista De Crítica Literaria ­Latinoamericana, Vol. 39, No. 78 (2013): 323.

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Where the engineers are confronted with the turbulence of the waters, José Altamirano finds that it yields life and love. Madinier’s miraculous rebirth, Altamirano’s real chance at a life are a function of the river’s beneficence; primal, maternal, female. It is not accidental that when José Altamirano conspires to advance the technological cause, fleeing to London to tell his story, he is completely bereft. Vásquez, like Daoud, in tracing similarities between the colonial ideologue and post-colonial subject in their recognition of colonial modernity, does not draw a radical line of difference between the two. Rather, the two post-colonial novelists painstakingly scrutinize the intersections between the two; Daoud’s protagonist is largely bitter, Vásquez’s ironic. The overdetermined, unconscious relationship of the pied-noir to Algeria in The Stranger is subtly distorted for the narrator of The Meursault Investigation. Discussing his visualization of the terrain, Harun can fix on the place of his birth, up above, but the sea below is unmarked. Harun’s embodied experience is claustrophobic. Where the wide expanse of the water holds no fear for The Stranger’s Meursault, it agitates Harun physically. When Harun emerges from this tightening of the body, it is anti-climactic. His visual and cognitive perceptions are at odds with his embodied responses: I have that feeling every time I get close to the sea. A bit of terror at first, an accelerated heartbeat, followed rather quickly by disappointment. It was as if the place was simply too confined! ... In my view, my brother Musa’s story needs the entire earth! (55) The story that fills his entire mental universe is reduced to a humiliatingly infinitesimal part of the vast stage it should have, and with it, the corresponding diminishment of the protagonist. The source of Harun’s consternation is identified yet again with the model of the author/narrator’s control over euro-modernist narrative aesthetics. The anchor of the realist novel is the setting, the specificity of the location, the concrete realia that can be discerned there. Harun wastes his time trying to find the places that Meursault in The Stranger mentions. And he warns the narratee not to follow the same path. Harun has tried to find the house, that according to The Stranger, Meursault’s mother had apparently lived in, the home she was supposedly placed in, and the cemetery where she had presumably been buried. He comes to the conclusion that all of this may have been invented. His brother’s murder is all too real for Harun; hence he assumes that the story told about it should be real. Harun never considers the proposition that a historical event could be “fictionalized,” or even that the narrator/author of The

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Stranger could have availed of another’s experience. One could conjecture that Daoud portrays the disbelief of the various Haruns at their lives becoming fictional fodder, rendering them insubstantial and spectral, while the narrator of The Stranger stalks through fiction/history—history/fiction. And in neither does his brother Musa or the other Musas play a part. Harun’s overwhelming sense of betrayal on reading The Stranger where he had hoped to find the who, where, what, when, why of his brother’s death, and family’s subsequent lifelong trauma is shared by the narrator of The Secret History of Costaguana. José Altamirano of The Secret History is highly literate and is persuaded through the novel that the world of affairs is one he would rather bypass. Yet, when he does get involved with the negotiations between the Panamanians and the Americans, he is pleased to have played a decisive role in separating Panama from Colombia, satisfying his desire for revenge against Colombia. He believes that the political doings of the Colombians, their disparagement of Panama, their use of Panama as a site to stage their internecine battles has directly resulted in his wife’s death. There is more than a hint of resentment towards the Colombians absenting the land, the people, and the culture of Panama, using the terrain much as a coloniser would. When José Altamirano absconds from Panama without telling his daughter, he goes to London, and is encouraged by Triana to tell his story to the great English writer, Conrad. Altamirano’s anger against Big History is assuaged by his narration of its construction. He believes his existence will be justified when Conrad has written about the pokey holes that constitute Big History. Like Harun of The Meursault Investigation he is mystified when he is nowhere featured in the novel, and Big History emerges the victor. His sense of betrayal is exacerbated by Conrad’s mockery of his (José’s) assumption of moral authority over the narrative. Conrad forcefully asserts his right to control his content. Shamefully, José, despite attempts cannot claim moral superiority. His betrayal of his country makes him similar to Conrad. The worst betrayal of course is José Altamirano’s, his abandonment of his daughter. In his disavowal of Colombia, he, in strange kinship with Conrad, feels an alien in Panama. Betrayal, what it constitutes, who betrays who, serves as theme, enigma, and resolution. According to Vásquez, the model for the hero of Nostromo is a Corsican that Conrad encounters in the Caribbean. One critic asserts that the imaginative repeopling of Sulaco, and even the Golfe Placide, is based on the time Conrad spent in the Mediterranean in Hyères.24 The point is moot, as the omniscient narrator’s descriptions in Nostromo are not consistent with such a sense of 24

Alain Dugrand, “Nostromo: paysage d’Hyères.” Magazin littéraire Vol. 297 (1992): 35–40.

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belonging in Sulaco. This would suggest a complete blindness to the terrain of South America that seems improbable. In writing about a fictional South American republic’s bid for independence, Conrad necessarily begins with the landscape, a fairly routine opening for colonial euro-modernist novels. But where then is the native subject in this landscape? Jameson suggests that the occlusion, or invisibility of the native subject, results in a “strategy of representational containment,” of the systems of colonialism that carry objective effects that are, I would add, smothered by the exclusion of the native’s relationship to the system. His comment is worth quoting as their implications for Conrad’s Nostromo are made apparent in the following discussion: Its effects [the depopulation of the natives in the land] are representational effects, which is to say a systematic block on any adequate ­consciousness of the structure of the imperial system: but these are just as clearly objective effects and will have their most obvious consequences in the aesthetic realm, where the mapping of the new imperial world system becomes impossible, since the colonised other who is its essential other component or opposite number has become invisible.25 Articulating totality without the presence of native subjects allows for the ambiguity of interpretation that euro-modernist critics, for a variety of r­ easons, champion. In Vásquez’s novel, Conrad is featured as unrepentant and claiming mastery over José Altamirano’s territory and story. Conrad’s critics note that he was quite tentative about writing it, but as mentioned earlier, preferred the fictional to the ethnographic or historical. Jameson’s suggestion that cartography played a role in the euro-modernist novelists’ relatively new understanding of space is of relevance to Conrad the sailor/novelist. Jameson argues that a new sense of spatial perspective emerges with Joyce and Conrad that he links to objective properties offered by cinematography, thus detracting from the discourse around the subjective perceptions of space. However, the aesthetic effects of spatial perceptions in Nostromo are linked more to the older art of painting, suggesting little of the restless movement of the cinematic, while succeeding in linking the spatial experience to the temporal.26

25 26

Fredric Jameson, “Modernism and Imperialism,” in The Modernist Papers (London: Verso, 2007) 156. Ibid, 158–59.

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Following these guidelines, Conrad’s depiction of the landscape is amorphous, and very much in the impressionist mode that he is celebrated for introducing. Indeed, his visual techniques are deliberately distanced from the realism favoured by photographers. Rather, his strategy is comparable to the arts of watercolours and nature paintings such as a Monet of 1886, “Port-Domois at Belle-Ile.” The deliberate formal repetition of contrasts between the “barely and sharply visible” detract from the power of the visual over land and ­sea-scape. Instead, as Jonathan Crary stated about spectatorship of paintings and optical apparatuses in the nineteenth century, abounding in the ­possibilities of knowledge through the visual, the subject was embodied and experienced the landscape through a range of senses.27 One Conrad critic evokes a similar concept in suggesting that characters in Conrad experience space in a similar way. In addition, he notes that history and experience make a difference to how one character evolves in his/her perception of the land and sea.28 The opening reveals this pattern of the barely and sharply visible: From the middle of the gulf the point of the land is not visible at all; but the shoulder of a steep hill at the back can be made out faintly in the sky. On the other side, what seems to be an isolated patch of blue mist floats lightly in the glare of the horizon. (5) Here, it is the omniscient narrator who comments on this landscape. ­Combined with the dangerous disorderliness of the landscape, he too exhibits a visceral response. Nostromo’s most desolate moments, on the sea and land occur in similar natural settings. His authority over sea and land is questioned when he takes off with Decoud in the darkness, or what Conrad deems obscurity, not of vision but of insight. Whether because of a nostalgia for what he has not experienced, as with Harun in The Meursault Investigation, or bitterness for the historical interference with land as with José Altamirano in The Secret History of Costaguana, the protagonists of both novels are jostled by the terrain as are the colonisers. Where the colonial euro-modernist novel is about conquering the land, making the land yield, enjoying the terrain, rendering it profitable, the postcolonial novels in this study are about how colonialism has made them uninhabitable. 27 28

Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (­Boston: MIT Press, 1999). John. G. Peters, “Joseph Conrad and the Epistemology of Space.” Philosophy and Literature Vol. 40, no 1, (April 2016) 104.

Conclusion This study took as its departure point, two novels, Kamel Daoud’s The ­Meursault Investigation and Juan Gabriel Vásquez’s The Secret History of Costaguana that availed not only of the broad themes, but of specific characters and incidents in two canonical, colonial, euro-modernist texts, Albert Camus’s The Stranger, and Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo. While there are of course many twentieth century and twenty first century novels that reconceive in some fashion ­earlier writings, these texts by Daoud and Vásquez were distinctive in using the genre to practice literary criticism. The authors unearth the causes and consequences of the monumental institutionalization of euro-modernist aesthetics, while tackling the reception of the euro-modernist texts. My analyses draw these strands out in their work. I focus on the reception of The Stranger and Nostromo to add depth to the post-colonial novels’ understanding of what is at stake in our celebration of the themes and techniques of euro-modernism; the absenting of native ­people—their history, their voices, their bodies, their material, their land. I scrutinize the received wisdom that these novels impart cosmopolitanism. Within this framework of received views of insurgent euro-modernism, the study points to the birth and development of a new genre of resurgent post-colonial novels. Even as the post-colonial novelists’ critique of the euromodernist aesthetics is at the centre of every chapter, the book explores the possibilities of how these topics might redirect our attention, if we were to consider gender integral to the process of both insurgent euro-modernisms, and resurgent post-colonialisms. Based on close readings of the four texts, the book considers the role of gender in constituting the texts’ architecture. I examine both groups of texts in the interests of tracing the emergence of feminist historiography. The analysis identifies the pressure points in the text where historiography could shift from the masculine and colonial. Bringing the four texts together allows us to observe how each detail reveals the choices the authors make, their inconsistency and the imprudent intrusions of plot and action that don’t fall neatly into the historical trajectory. Given that the post-colonial novels do have a recognisable source, and indeed use the historical authors, Camus and Conrad as characters, the book draws out the differences in gendered authorship between the two sets, particularly because the post-colonial writers are dealing with the euro-modernist writers as agents, rather than treating their novels as disembodied texts. As the euro-modernist authorship model is anathema to the post-colonial novelists, © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2023 | doi:10.1163/9789004541153_008

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the book compares the post-colonial narrative choices to the euro-modernist constructions. Moving to the economic and material conditions of colonialism under which the euro-modernist novels were written, the study finds not just that euro-modernism is birthed by colonialism, but that subsequently intellectual notions of colonialism were dictated by euro-modernist philosophies and aesthetics. The use of objects, and places in the four novels is instructive in pointing out the differences in value attached to these on the part of the coloniser and colonised. Interestingly, the protagonists of the post-colonial novels reveal their kinship with the narrators of the euro-modernist texts, underlining a reciprocity that impacts both groups. The specificity of the critiques of the post-colonial novelists on diverse aspects of euro-modernist themes and techniques, has enabled us to identify gaps in euro-modernist reception, and literary criticism. Detailed comparisons of the aesthetic modalities used by each throw into relief subtle differences in the address and locution of gender. The post-colonial critiques are not demolition exercises; rather they are instruments to see how the literary establishment, influenced by the most powerful art movement of the western world in the twentieth century, high modernism, has regarded the colonised world and its writings.

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Index Achebe, Chinua 4, 53n3 Algerian War of Independence 5, 20 Borgés, Jorge Luis 47, 48 Cervantes, Miguel 47 Djebar, Assia 10, 39n11, 99 Fetish 9, 40, 70, 77 Fetishisation 9, 66n4, 77,102 Fetishism 77–78 Forster, E.M. 14n14, 82n9 Haiti 13, 67, 76, 80n2 Heart of Darkness 2–3, 27, 29, 53n3, 63, 80, 98 Irony 13, 30, 33 Kristeva, Julia 22, 101 Lukács 30 Márquez, Gabriel Garcia 6, 70n17, 71, 99 Marx, Karl 77 Marxist 9,11 Modernismo 69 Morrison, Toni 83

Odyssey 21, 61 One Thousand and One Nights 40 Ousmane, Sembène 4 Panama 7, 21, 43–46, 74–75, 78–79, 91 Panama Canal 21, 44, 46, 58, 63, 74, 75, 78, 86 Panama Company 31, 75 Panama Railroad 31–31, 87–89  Political Melancholy 63 Romance 14, 33, 60–61, 64–65 Said, Edward 3n8, 85, 103 Sartre, Jean-Paul 20, 52 Schwarz, Roberto 89n20, 104 Subaltern Historiography 12,18, 24 Techne 68–71, 74–77, 88–89 Thiong O, wa Ngũgĩ 4 Tournier, Micheal 5, 81n3 Tragedy 13, 30, 33, 64 Triana, Santiago Pérez 27, 35, 42, 44–45, 54, 91, 104 Uribe, Alvaro 17,71 White, Hayden 13, 16, 104 Woolf, Virginia 2, 7n24, 14n14n15, 18, 49, 55n5, 76