Reading Albert Memmi

About this book

This study explores the points of contact between Albert Memmi's literary production and four specific critical shifts: the crisis of the authorial subject, the interrogation of the form of the novel, the resistance to ocularcentrism, and the rejection of the colonial project. It also engages with a question particular to the domain of Francophonie : how does the existence of a literary category like "Francophone"--given its cultural, institutional and linguistic iterations--inflect the way those works are read? Memmi's novels, essays, autobiography and interviews suggest answers to these questions while at the same time complicating the questions themselves. Chapter 1 both establishes and questions a history of Francophonie and the postcolonial as concepts relating to the crisis of the subject and the author. In this chapter, Memmi's prefaces to three anthologies of Maghrebi Francophone literature reveal his concern with categories, representation, and authenticity. Chapter 2 examines the ambiguous nature of the genres of novel and autobiography in works by Memmi and by two other Maghrebi writers, Driss Chraïbi and Mouloud Feraoun. Memmi's first-person narratives are doubly subversive: by employing the first-person pronoun they contravene Jewish and Arabic literary traditions, historically distrustful of the "I," while at the same time thwarting the "mark of the plural"--the notion that the non-Western individual necessarily represents the non-Western collectivity. The third chapter explores the recurrent tropes of blindness and the visual in Memmi's novels ( La Statue de sel, Le Scorpion ) and essays ( L'Ecriture colorée, Le Nomade immobile ). Whereas the representation of blindness appears to function as a critique of interpretation, aligning Memmi's oeuvre with the antiocularcentric discourse promulgated by many of his contemporaries, tropes of vision and an interest in the representative capacity of the visual complicate the initial reading. The final chapter historicizes and analyzes Portrait du colonisé précédé du Portrait du colonisateur as a literary artifact, while at the same time examining the role of the paratext--particularly Sartre's preface--in shaping readings of the essay.