Everything comes back, even if it is wrapped in different clothes.
Returns, in the France of Emmanuel Macron and the rise, perhaps irresistible, of Marine Le Pen, the dispute that marked French intellectual life in the mid-20th century and that confronted Jean-Paul regarding the revolution and left-wing totalitarianism Sartre with Albert Camus.
A book, titled
Forgetting Camus
and written by University of North Carolina professor Olivier Gloag, reopens the wound.
The book portrays Camus as a colonialist — and sexist, among other
sins
— writer, far from the image of a secular saint and irreproachable humanist icon.
“It is not about judging Camus, but about enriching the reading,” says Gloag from the United States.
“You have to continue reading it, but without seeing in it a fairy tale character.”
The Camusians did not like
Forgetting Camus
.
They accuse Gloag of “intellectual dishonesty”, of “tearing down statues” and of “cancelling” in the style of the North American university left, as has been read in
Le Figaro
.
Also about “redoing the Stalinist processes of the 1950s.”
What's fascinating is how the dispute that happened so long ago—the breakup between two friends who happened to be the most famous intellectuals of the time—has not ended.
Sartre, author of
Nausea
and
Being and Nothingness
, is read less and is considered to have been miserably wrong in some of his political commitments.
Camus, author of
The Stranger
, is a best-seller, he is read in school and politicians of all stripes invoke his memory.
As Mario Vargas Llosa wrote in 1981, “that controversy is still current,” because “every morning it is updated by the newspapers, with their share of havoc, and the political and moral dilemmas in which they plunge us.”
Four decades have passed and, although Camus has won the battle for posterity, the controversy remains open.
“I try to get out of an emotional position: it is not about knowing if one likes Camus or not,” says Gloag.
“If there is criticism, it is of its reception.
In the last 30 years, there has been a kind of idolatry.
It is almost sacred in France, as has been seen with the reactions to my book.”
What he seeks, in the 141 pages of
Forgetting Camus
(published in French by La fabrique and without a Spanish translation), is to desacralize him.
No, the author maintains: Camus, of French and Spanish descent and born in colonial Algeria to a poor family, was not anti-colonialist.
In
The Stranger
, a fiction narrated by a Frenchman who kills an anonymous Arab on an Algerian beach, “everything (...) seems,
de facto
, to deny the status of human being to Algerians.”
Camus, he says, is “the last colonial writer.”
The Plague
, Camus's other great novel, narrates an epidemic in the Algerian city of Oran.
It has been interpreted as an allegory of the Nazi occupation of France.
This is not the case, according to Gloag: “I propose a different reading.
The plague is not Germany or the Germans, it is the resistance of the Algerian people to the French occupation, an intermittent but ineluctable phenomenon, which is assimilated to a deadly disease from the point of view of the colonists.
And so the author proceeds, with an inquisitive and relentless reading of the work and biography of Camus.
From the resistance to Nazism to the commitment against the death penalty, through the break with Sartre, his relationship with the actress María Casares and women in general, and his reservations about the independence of the country where he was born and to which he felt deeply. attached
Jean-Louis Barrault, Pierre Brasseur, Madeleine Renaud, the painter Balthus, Arthur Honegger, María Casares and Albert Camus.
Paris, in Paris in 1948. Lipnitzki / Roger Viollet / Getty Images
“Reading his own words, his works and (...) his letters,” writes Gloag, “we discover the multiple facets of the character, which refute the mythical image that has been built of the beautiful novelist, upright, solitary, supportive, tormented. but fair.”
The title
Forgetting Camus
, he explains to EL PAÍS, does not mean that he is forgotten, nor that he should be forgotten.
On the contrary.
“What must be forgotten is Camus as he has been presented to us,” he says.
“Today in France there is a permanent use of Camus by the political
establishment
.
We have to get rid of this Camus who serves to justify everything and nothing.
"I propose to free Camus from abusive and complacent manipulations and look him in the face."
On the phone Mohammed Aïssaoui, born in Algeria (as Camus), son of a poor family (as Camus), writer and journalist in French (as Camus) and author of the recently published
Love Dictionary of Albert Camus
.
“This controversy has not surprised me at all,” he says.
During his lifetime, after the publication of the essay
The Rebel Man
in 1953, which caused the break with Sartre, the assault on the Camusian myth began.
Because he was already a myth, and he would be even more so when in 1957, at age 42, he was the youngest to receive the Nobel Prize in literature since Rudyard Kipling.
His death in a car accident in 1960 expanded the legend.
The controversies never stopped.
Camus, philosopher for high school classes,
was the title of an essay published in 1970. The great Irish intellectual and diplomat Conor Cruise O'Brien in the seventies, and the Palestinian-American Edward Said in the nineties already influenced the colonial aspect of his work.
“Controversy is common,” observes Aïssaoui.
“The only thing that is strange is that the attack always comes from a certain extreme left, when this political fringe should be proud that the son of a modest family, educated in the republican school, had become a great French writer.”
And he asks himself: “How can you blame him for being a colonialist?
It is forgotten that he was a son of Algeria, that at the age of 20 he went to Kabylia to see the misery and do a report that I would describe as almost Nobel-worthy, which was not at all distant from the Arab population.
Regarding the war, which broke out in 1954 and led to independence in 1962, he notes: “Evidently, it was his homeland and he felt torn by what was happening.”
Benjamin Stora is a leading historian of Algeria, the country in which he was born, and a man with a long career on the Trotskyist and socialist left.
He is outraged by the criticism of Camus for colonialism: “In France there is an old Stalinist current that endlessly brings up the same nonsense every 10 years.”
Yes, says Stora, Camus was not in favor of independence, and advocated a federal solution.
But he was one of the few to condemn the French massacre of Algerians in 1945 in Sétif.
And he was close to other nationalist leaders such as Messali Hadj.
What he opposed, he adds, was the hegemonic FLN, the single party.
“What politically grounds Camus is Spain, the Spanish revolution,” recalls the historian.
“But he was anti-Stalinist, his world belonged to the anarcho-syndicalists.”
There is, in essence, another underlying debate between the radical left, more Sartrean, and the social democratic, more Camusian.
Gloag accuses the latter, at the end of the book, of “insidiously masking her racism and imperialism with a false universality, and also masking the class struggle with a façade egalitarianism.”
“The two irreconcilable lefts”, as former Prime Minister Manuel Valls said.
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