a postcolonial fiction: conor cruise o'brien's camus

A Postcolonial Fiction: Conor Cruise O'Brien's CamusAuthor(s): John FoleySource: The Irish Review (1986-), No. 36/37 (Winter, 2007), pp. 1-13Published by: Cork University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/29736341 .

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A PostcQlpj^a^Fiction: Conor Cruise O'Brien's

Camus

JOHN FOLEY

'Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself. I am large, I

contain multitudes.'

Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

Published

in 1970, Conor Cruise O'Brien's book on Albert Camus

remains one of the most influential English-language books on the sub?

ject and is widely credited with inaugurating the postcolonial critique of

Camus in the English-speaking world.1 Such criticism as there has been of

the book has largely tended to the view that the author did not go far

enough in his criticism of Camus' attitude to Algeria, and Algerian inde?

pendence in particular. This is the view of Edward Said, for example, whose

Culture and Imperialism (1993) is usually understood to have completed the

task that Cruise O'Brien began. Said's contention, which is also the con?

tention of the Irish critics I will discuss later on, is that Cruise O'Brien's

book fails to the extent that his 'agile d?mystification' of Camus' supposed colonialist prejudices ultimately falls short of a complete condemnation. Said

argues, and the others would agree, that having 'shrewdly and even merci?

lessly exposed the connections between Camus' most famous novels and the

colonial situation in Algeria', Cruise O'Brien ultimately lets Camus 'off the

hook'.2 What I want to do here is offer a sort of counternarrative, which will

explain why I think Cruise O'Brien's analysis is faulty, and then I will briefly consider the curious endorsements his book receives from Declan Kiberd,

W J. McCormack and Tom Paulin.

There is a fatal weakness at the heart of Cruise O'Brien's argument, in

that he pays scant attention to Camus'journalism, specifically the journalism devoted to Algeria. It would seem self-evident that an informed view of

both the significance and the limitations of Camus' thinking with regard to

FOLEY, 'A Postcolonial Fiction', Irish Review 36-37 (2007) 1



French?Algerian relations can best be achieved through a careful considera?

tion of his journalistic writing on precisely that subject. In these writings we

see that Camus argued consistently for a radical liberalization of French rule

in Algeria, extending equal rights to all inhabitants: ultimately he calls for an

end to colonialism and the introduction of a federalist system.3 While it is

true that Camus rejected the idea of an independent Algeria, it is also true

that he remained a vocal opponent of the status quo in Algeria. However, Cruise O'Brien largely disregards this abundant political testimony, and con?

centrates his attention instead on Camus' novels, which his book ruthlessly

interrogates in order to reveal their political secrets. Furthermore, the testi?

mony he extracts from the novels is, I believe, false. Contrary to Cruise

O'Brien's assertion, Camus' fiction, to the extent to which it can be said to

comment on the socio-political reality of Algeria under French rule at all, is

entirely congruous with the journalism.

Centrally, Cruise O'Brien considers Camus' fictional output in terms of

its truthfulness or honesty with regard to historical fact. This search for truth

in the realm of fiction is, I think, a justified approach to Camus, who after all

wrote philosophical novels; novels which are supposed to contain some sort

of truth, or exhibit some sort of honesty about the world and our lives in it.

The central contention of Cruise O'Brien's book is that, with specific regard to the realities of the French colonial presence in Algeria, up until the publi? cation of La Chute in 1956, Camus' writing was untruthful and dishonest.

According to Cruise O'Brien this lack of truthfulness is spread thickly across

the pages of the two novels for which Camus is best known ? L'?tranger

(1942) and La Peste (1947). In an article in the Listener in 1971 he argues that

while it is possible to be a great writer with obnoxious politics ? he notes

that Yeats' best poetry was written while he was 'very near indeed to being a

fascist' ? the writer is nonetheless obliged to 'tell some sort of truth'.4 With

Camus in mind, he adds that if the writer fails in this duty, if he defends, for

example, a colonial war by stylish r?gurgitation of the propaganda of the

perpetrators, such as that the war 'is being fought in defence of human free?

dom, then [that writer] would be lying'.5 The first such colonial fiction is to be found in L'Etranger, the novel

which, as is well known, tells the story of a young French Algerian or pied noir named Meursault living in Algiers in the 1930s. The first part of the

novel begins with the funeral of Meursault's mother, at which he exhibits a

disconcerting lack of emotion, and closes with Meursault's killing of an

unnamed Arab, an act for which he demonstrates a similar lack of concern.

The second part of the novel is taken up with Meursault's trial and execu?

tion. While Camus declared that Meursault was killed because he 'refuses to

lie',6 according to Cruise O'Brien, the novel portrays not any kind of

2 FOLEY, 'A Postcolonial Fiction', Irish Review 36-37 (2007)



philosophical or political truth, but a nefarious fiction about colonial

Algeria: 'What appears to the casual reader as a contemptuous attack on the

court is not in fact an attack at all: on the contrary, by suggesting that the

court is impartial between Arab and Frenchman, it implicitly denies the

colonial reality and sustains the colonial fiction', the 'fiction' being that a

Frenchman in Algeria who had killed an Arab would be condemned to

death, a fiction that Cruise O'Brien argues is 'vital to the status quo , to the

legitimacy of French colonial domination of Algeria (p. 23). The perceived dishonesty of this depiction of'impartial'justice in Algeria

leads Cruise O'Brien to cite with implicit approval the judgement of Henri

Kr?a and Pierre Nora, for whom Meursault's act is '"the subconscious reali?

sation of the obscure and puerile dream of the 'poor white' Camus never

ceased to be'", and for whom Camus was, like other pieds noirs, '"conscious?

ly frozen in historical immobility'",'unable to confront the problem of the

European-Arab relation' (p. 25). According to Cruise O'Brien, even Camus'

journalistic writing on Algeria evinces nothing more than 'a painful and

protracted failure' to come to terms with 'the situation in question' (p. 26). In fact, there is a far greater weight of evidence to support the inclination

of his 'casual reader', than Cruise O'Brien admits. There is a very strong case

to be made, by a careful reader, for the claim that Meursault was indeed con?

victed and executed for failing to behave in a socially conventional fashion

at the funeral of his mother. For example, Meursault explains that when first

arrested after killing the unnamed Arab, 'nobody seemed very interested in

my case'.7 It was only later on, once they discovered his behaviour at a time

when convention dictated Meursault should be publicly mourning his

mother's death, that people began to 'eye [him] with curiosity'.8 Later still, when in bewilderment at the way that the trial is being conducted, Meur?

sault's lawyer asks whether his client is being accused of burying his mother

or killing a man, the prosecution replies that the two cannot be dissociated:

'Yes [. . .] I accuse this man of burying his mother like a heartless criminal.'9

According to this interpretation, Camus was suggesting that a European

Algerian was more likely to be condemned to death for failing to express himself according to social convention than he would be for killing an Arab.

Cruise O'Brien also detects a lack of honesty in Camus' post-war novel, La Peste. This novel, which recounts the struggle of the population of the

Algerian city of Oran against a mysterious plague, is generally interpreted as

an allegorical account of European resistance to Nazism. However, Cruise

O'Brien's attention is drawn to the fact that the city is fictionally recon?

structed without a noticeable Arab population, and argues that this erasure

can be explained by the fact that for many Algerian Arabs 'the fiction of a

"French Algeria" was a fiction quite as repugnant as the fiction of Hitler's




new European order was for Camus and his friends. For such Arabs, the

French were in Algeria in virtue of the same right by which the Germans

were in France: the right of conquest' (p. 48). From this perspective, says Cruise O'Brien, the characters of the novel are not heroes battling the

plague,'they were the plague itself, and the absence of Arabs constitutes an

'artistic final solution to the problem of Arabs of Oran' (p. 48).

However, the absence of Arabs from Camus' La Peste is neither malicious

nor miraculous; it is meticulous. The novel is self-evidently a philosophical novel ('self-evidently', because of what many see as its clunking moral bag?

gage), and the novel can, with some justification, be criticised for its

moralizing tone. However, its character as a philosophical allegory can also

explain the absence of Arabs from the novel, since the political and social

questions which would inevitably be raised by their appearance (we are told

at the beginning of the novel of the poor living conditions in which the

Arabs of Oran are obliged to live) would likely overwhelm the more abstract

moral questions being asked, about the nature of evil and resistance. In fact, Camus was acutely aware of the plight of the Arab majority in Algeria, and

indeed a month before La Peste was published he himself compared the

practice of French colonialism in Algeria (in S?tif in 1945) and Madagascar

(in 1947) to atrocities committed by the Nazis against the French.10

In 1954 burgeoning Arab discontent in Algeria erupted in a concerted

revolt against French occupation, and from Cruise O'Brien's perspective it is

from this point that the true nature of Camus' relation to Algeria begins to

emerge from the flotsam of his political pronouncements. While Camus

condemned the French repression, unlike many of his peers in Paris, he

refused to support the FLN rebellion. According to Cruise O'Brien, at this

point Camus' position on Algerian independence was simply incongruous with his other political commitments at that time, notably his defence of the

Hungarian uprising against the Soviet Union in 1956. However, unnoticed

by Cruise O'Brien, Camus did indeed offer an explanation for his condem?

nation of Soviet imperialism in Hungary and his support for the continued

existence of French Algeria. In a letter to Encounter^he explained that any effort to 'assimilate the Algerian question to the Hungarian' comes up

against the 'historical fact' of the existence in Algeria of over a million

Algerian-born pieds noirsi'The Hungarian problem is simple: the Hungarians must be given back their liberty. The Algerian problem is different: there, it is

necessary to assure the liberties of the two peoples of the country.'11 Whatever one thinks of this argument, it is unlikely to have persuaded

Cruise O'Brien, who is convinced that by now Camus was, in fact, beginning to confront the hopeless contradictions in which his political pronounce?

ments were entangled. He claims that this confession appears obliquely in the




enigmatic short novel La Chute, published in 1956. In this book, set in

Amsterdam, Cruise O'Brien's interrogation reveals a confession that 'he who

had talked so much of justice must now abjure such language, since there is

something he prefers to justice' (p. 83). Through its conspicuous absence, La

Chute is the novel in which Algeria is most painfully present. Here, in the

ironic monologue of the self-exiled Parisian lawyer, former specialist 'in noble

causes' we hear Camus' own confession: 'Essentially Camus is beginning to

take the side of his own tribe against the abstract entities. He is heeding that

call which reached him most deeply, thus taking an ironic distance from those

universals which had hitherto dominated his language' (p. 83). The political significance of Camus' new style is, for Cruise O'Brien,

made explicit in what he calls Camus' only public statement on the subject of the Algerian war 'that has the ring of complete candour' (p. 75). This was

the comment made at Stockholm University in December 1957. Asked by an Algerian student why he had so readily intervened in Eastern Europe, but

never in Algeria, Camus replied that he had indeed intervened on behalf of

Algerian nationalists, and had long advocated the extension of democracy to

Algeria, but he added that he was implacably opposed to the indiscriminate

terror engulfing Algeria: 'I have always condemned terror. I must also con?

demn a terrorism practiced blindly, in the streets of Algiers, for example, and

which one day could strike my mother or my family. I believe injustice but

I will defend my mother before justice.'12 This deeply provocative statement

has occasioned a fair degree of analysis and debate, but for Cruise O'Brien,

who showed himself to be among the most sophisticated readers of La

Chute, it meant only that 'the defence of his mother required support for the

French army's pacification of Algeria' (p. 75). Here at last, thinks Cruise

O'Brien, Camus is being honest about his real political commitments, and

these are not to liberty or to justice, but to 'his own tribe', to the pieds noirs

of Algeria:'if France in Algeria was unjust, then it was justice that had to go,

yielding place to irony' (pp. 83, 85).

However, as with the claims regarding the colonial fictions pervading L'E?

tranger and La Peste, there are quite compelling reasons for rejecting this

aspect of Cruise O'Brien's argument as well; its fundamental weakness is eas?

ily pointed to: although Cruise O'Brien sees La Chute as heralding a new era

of honest quietism in Camus' writings ? with his belated admission of his

political commitment to the pieds noirs ? the writing of the novel actually coincides with Camus' effort to persuade both the FLN and the French to

accept the principle of a civilian truce, which would mean the end of the

deliberate targeting of civilians by both sides. While Cruise O'Brien does

acknowledge this effort, calling it Camus"one concrete idea' (pp. 72?3), he

quickly dismisses it, asserting that when Camus went to Algiers to promote




the truce he was 'barracked by the Europeans' and 'largely ignored by the

Moslems' (p. 73). However, Camus' civilian truce was not as absurdly fanciful

as Cruise O'Brien suggests. Rather than jeer at Camus, rightwing pieds noirs

issued death threats against him, and attempted to hijack the meeting at

which the idea of the truce was launched. Furthermore, not only did Mus?

lims not ignore the appeal, Camus was joined on the podium by Ferhat

Abbas, who was to become independent Algeria's first President (Abbas, a

moderate nationalist, aligned himself with the FLN shortly after the failure

of the civilian truce and in 1963 resigned his presidency when the FLN

declared Algeria a one-party state). And indeed while the FLN publicly dis?

avowed the appeal, they secretly infiltrated the committee set up to oversee

it, and made certain that the conference was protected by FLN militants.

They evidently knew what Camus had as yet not realised: that the French

would never accept it.

Furthermore, Cruise O'Brien's interpretation of Camus' statement

regarding his mother and justice, that it amounted to a confession that 'the

defence of his mother required support for the French army's pacification of

Algeria' (p. 75), is disingenuous in the extreme. Since the early 1940s Camus'

political thought had concentrated on the excesses committed in the name

of justice, especially the suffering of civilians, as is exemplified in his

attempted civilian truce. He devoted a play, Les Justes (1950), and much of

his best philosophical work, L'Homme R?volt? (1951), to the question of

legitimate political violence. The point he was making in Stockholm was

that an idea of justice which, in his estimation, licences the indiscriminate

killing of innocent civilians ('terrorism practiced blindly in the streets') is an

idea of justice that he would never defend.

Such is the argument of Cruise O'Brien's Camus, and in subsequent arti?

cles and reviews nothing substantial has changed: L'?tranger and La Peste

remain colonial fictions, which lend a veneer of respectability to the reality of colonial oppression, and, later, when the Algerian War forced Camus to

admit to his real political commitments, he did so with lyrical and ironic

candour in La Chute. I have already suggested that the coherence of this

argument relies, to a very large extent, on giving scant attention to those of

Camus' writings that deal specifically with Algeria. This weakness is again

highlighted in Cruise O'Brien's 1995 review of the English translation of

Camus' posthumously published novel Le Premier Homme [The First Man], on

which he was working when he died in 1960 ('The Fall', The New Republic, 16 Oct. 1995). In this review Cruise O'Brien declares the novel to be a

'backward-looking book','displaying strong evidence of literary and psycho?

logical regression', and is inclined to this view because, in his account, the

novel constitutes a nostalgic paean to the pieds noirs of Algeria, and has




nothing of the ironic self-criticism he enjoyed so much in La Chute, and

none of the self-critical honesty that that implied. He objects to what he

considers the nostalgic language with which the pieds noirs are evoked, a lan?

guage in which recurs the 'self-righteousness' and 'moralism' of U?tranger and La Peste, language deployed in order to grant the pieds noirs some level of

spurious legitimacy ('nostalgia [. . .] is the hope of those who feel condemned

by history'). Indeed so disappointed is Cruise O'Brien with what he takes to

be the regressive politics of Le Premier Homme that he insists that 'Camus' real

"final work", his final complete work and his final testament, remains The

Fall [La Chute]! Whatever the merits of this interpretation of Le Premier Homme, it clearly

contradicts Declan Kiberd's claim, in Inventing Ireland, that at some point after 1970 Cruise O'Brien 'revised his view [ . . . ] and concluded that

Camus had been right'.13 Cruise O'Brien nowhere exhibits sympathy for

those, such as Camus, who rejected Algerian demands for independence. It is

obvious from the fact that he reads Le Premier Homme as a nostalgic paean to

the pied noirs and identifies in it 'strong evidence of psychological and liter?

ary regression' that in his view the moral imperative of decolonization

supplanted those rights to which the pieds noirs, even liberal pieds noirs such

as Camus, believed themselves entitled. And while Cruise O'Brien's review

does suggest that post-independence Algeria was a socioeconomic failure, this is neither something new (he had been saying this sort of thing about

postcolonial states in Africa since the mid-1960s, specifically since his expe? riences working at the University of Ghana), nor does it in any way imply that the process of decolonization was a mistake.14

Kiberd requires a change of mind in Cruise O'Brien's thinking about

Camus, because it is necessary for the coherence of his own narrative, which purports to trace in Cruise O'Brien's writing a downward intellec?

tual trajectory, from principled anti-imperialist to paranoid unionist.

However, while his political convictions may have changed over time ?

most notably with regard to Northern Ireland ? there is a frustrating con?

sistency in Cruise O'Brien's writings on Camus, and consequently, Kiberd

has himself invented a change of mind in Cruise O'Brien. Other Irish read?

ings of the Camus book have faced the same difficulty, and have employed different critical strategies to explain its apparent incongruousness with

Cruise O'Brien's other well-known political commitments, particularly those to Ulster unionism. As is well known, Cruise O'Brien became an

increasingly vocal defender of the union between Northern Ireland and

Great Britain, culminating in his joining Robert McCartney's United

Kingdom Unionist Party in 1996.

One such interpretive strategy is offered by W J. McCormack in his Battle




of the Books (1986).15 McCormack recognizes and appreciates the particular

significance Cruise O'Brien ascribes to La Chute, but finds not just acuity of

interpretation but approval, arguing that 'this atavism, this rejection of social?

ism', which Cruise O'Brien detects in Camus, has 'its louder echo in Dr.

O'Brien's own political odyssey'.16 In this interpretation, close reading shows that Cruise O'Brien's writings were never quite as radical as has been

thought, least of all his Camus book, and 'a surer guide to the author's con?

cerns' is his first book, Maria Cross: Imaginative Patterns in a Group of Modern

Catholic Writers (1952/1953).

Indeed, while McCormack congratulates Cruise O'Brien for his observa?

tion that the heroes of La Peste were themselves the plague, and compliments him for 'his trenchant opposition to colonialism and imperialism', he also

observes what he takes to be a revealing slip on the author's part.17 In the

closing paragraph of his chapter on La Peste, Cruise O'Brien states:

Eight years after the publication of The Plague, the rats came up to die in

the cities of Algeria. To apply another metaphor of Camus's, the Algerian

insurrection was 'the eruption of the boils and pus which had before

been working inwardly in the society'. And this eruption came precisely

from the quarter in which the narrator had refused to look: from the

houses which Dr. Rieux never visited and from the conditions about

which the reporter, Rambert, never carried out his enquiry18

McCormack quotes the paragraph in full, and finds in it the 'drastic sugges? tion that the Algerian Muslims of 1955 have inherited a role previously

assigned to their French masters and even to their (temporary) German

masters. The silent beneficiaries of these interpretive flourishes would

appear to be the opponents of both Algerian independence and French

democracy ? les colons!19 However, this interpretation is easily refuted by

the simple observation that the endnote accompanying the passage in ques? tion states explicitly that those rats that 'came up to die' in the streets of

Algiers, Oran and elsewhere represented not the agents of the Algerian

insurrection, but 'the rats of colonialism, an old sickness that was dragging on in Algeria'.20 While McCormack's determined deflation of the imagined radicalism of the Camus book permits a perspective on Cruise O'Brien's

subsequent political pronouncements (on South Africa, Israel/Palestine or

Northern Ireland) no longer hindered by inconsistency, his interpretation does seem somewhat Procrustean.

A far more convincing, if no less forgiving account of Cruise O'Brien's

paradoxical politics is given by Tom Paulin in an article in the Times Literary

Supplement in 1980, entitled 'The Making of a Unionist'.21 Here he identifies

the Camus book as among the best of Cruise O'Brien's early career, declaring




it a 'lucid and brilliant study', which 'displays O'Brien s cultivated intelligence at its most joyous pitch'.22 However, he also judges the book to be 'remark?

ably inconsistent' in the context of his other work. The clearest sign of this

inconsistency appears to be in his attitude to political violence, and Paulin

argues that while Cruise O'Brien had justly accused Camus of ignoring the

'"question of violence used to defend the status quo'", in his own later work, Cruise O'Brien himself 'scorns the phrase "institutional violence" and

defends the status quo'.23 Paulin concludes that what has been called Cruise

O'Brien's 'vertiginous swerve to the Right'24 can be attributed to the devel?

oping political crisis in Northern Ireland, and he notes that while extolling the virtues of revolutionary consciousness (and, it seems, even revolutionary

violence) in New York he was, at almost the same time, when writing to a

British audience about the civil rights movement in Northern Ireland

inclined to advise caution to the point of quietism, criticising not just politi? cal violence, but even non-violence 'by suggesting that it is responsible for

political terrorism'.25

There does seem to be ample support for this view. For example, while

addressing a New York audience in 1966, Cruise O'Brien warned of the

threat posed to the 'vital function' of effective social and political scholar?

ship by the self-subordination ofWestern intellectuals to the United States'

strategic policy of sowing counterrevolution abroad, thereby assuring the

preservation of the political status quo in countries otherwise susceptible to

the influence of revolutionary ideologies. He called this phenomenon

'counterrevolutionary subordination' (a phrase later taken up by Noam

Chomsky).26 A year later, referring directly to the 'terror used by the

National Liberation Front [in Vietnam], and by other revolutionary move?

ments', Cruise O'Brien was able to assert that 'there is a distinction

between the use of terror by oppressed peoples and the use of terror by their oppressors in the interests of further oppression. I think there is a

qualitative difference there which we have the right to make.'27 On the

same occasion he quoted with a measure of approval the assertion of the

nineteenth-century Irish nationalist, William O'Brien, that 'violence is the

only way of ensuring a hearing for moderation'.28 In 1969, in a similar vein,

he argues:

we may find that the man who has refused to make the decisive intel?

lectual and moral sacrifices for the revolution will go on to make them

for the status quo and in that cause proclaim: 'This sham is true, these

injustices are just, these oppressed have all the opportunities of the free

world'. These sacrifices, whether made for the revolution or for the

counterrevolution, constitute, of course, the abdication of the intel?

lectual.29




In the midst of these pronouncements (made, it should be remembered, from the position of celebrated radical professor at NYU), Cruise O'Brien

published an article in the Listener in which he considers the then burgeon?

ing civil rights movement in Northern Ireland. Curiously, while in New

York he had warned his audience against the dangers of 'counter?

revolutionary subordination'; in the Listener article he argued, in rather stark

contrast, that 'peace depends on the acceptance of civil subordination'.30 He

imagines the civil rights movement as a version of the Antigone myth, with

Bernadette Devlin cast in the lead role. But his sympathies do not lie with

her. In fact he suggests that while the decision of the king, Creon (here pre?

sumably representing the British government), to forbid the burial of

Antigone's rebellious brother, Polynices, was 'rash [...] it was also rash to dis?

obey his decision'. Cr?ons authority,'after all, was legitimate, even if he had

abused it, and the life of the city would become intolerable if citizens should

disobey any law that irked their conscience'.31 He concludes with a clear

indication that, at least with regard to Northern Ireland, his sympathies lie

firmly with quietistic Ismene, rather than with unruly Antigone:

The disabilities of Catholics in Northern Ireland are real, but not over?

whelmingly oppressive: is their removal really worth attaining at the risk

of precipitating riots, explosions, pogroms, murder? Thus Ismene. But

Antigone will not heed such calculations: she is an ethical and religious force, an uncompromising element in our being, as

dangerous in her way

as Creon, who she perpetually challenges and provokes [. .

.] Without

Antigone, we could attain a quieter, more realistic world. The Cr?ons

might respect one another's spheres of influence if the instability of ide?

alism were to cease to present, inside their own dominions, a threat to

law and order.32

It seems that, for Paulin, such contradictory declarations indicate that it

was his inability to respond in a meaningful way to the developing crisis in

Northern Ireland ('an abiding affection for Creon and a mistaken identifica?

tion of civilisation with the status quo') that subverted and ultimately undermined the 'sweet rigour' displayed in Cruise O'Brien's earlier writings,

notably in Camus.33 However, as strong as this argument may be, I think that

it underestimates the degree to which Cruise O'Brien's experiences in the

Congo (in 1961, as Dag Hammarskjold's representative in secessionist

Katanga) and Ghana (from 1962?65, asVice-Chancellor of Nkrumah's Uni?

versity of Ghana) informed his particular anti-imperialist politics.

Furthermore, if Paulin is correct in arguing that by 1980 Cruise O'Brien's

attitude to Northern Ireland was identical with that of Camus to Algeria, then one might expect Cruise O'Brien to have indicated his belated solidar?

ity with Camus.34 However, as I have argued, this is demonstrably not the




case, and as late as 1995 (that is, just a few months before he joined the UK

Unionists) Cruise O'Brien maintained a view of Camus' relation to Algeria

entirely consistent with that expressed in Camus.

Each of these interpretations of Cruise O'Brien's intellectual trajectory

give a central place to his Camus book, but none offers a wholly satisfying account either of the book itself or of its relation to Cruise O'Brien's other

political interventions. Kiberd asserts that Cruise O'Brien disavowed his

earlier views of Camus, which simply isn't true; McCormack suggests Cruise

O'Brien had a certain sympathy for the atavistic tendencies he diagnosed in

Camus, which seems equally untrue (Seamus Deane was more astute in

rebuking Cruise O'Brien specifically for renouncing atavism35); Paulin sug?

gests that the developing crisis in Northern Ireland prompted a precipitate transformation in Cruise O'Brien's politics: an argument that, although per?

suasive, seems to underestimate the complexities (or peculiarities) of Cruise

O'Brien's anti-imperialism, and fails to explain his stubbornly consistent crit?

ical view of Camus.

If we are to avoid the conclusion ? a conclusion I imagine at which many would willingly arrive ? that Cruise O'Brien simply contradicts himself, we

should perhaps at least consider his own explanation for his paradoxical

political views, which has to do with what he terms his opposition to impe?

rialism, noting all the while that what he terms imperialism is not

universally so-ascribed. Speaking, for example, of his transformation from

nationalist to unionist in his Memoirs (1998), he says:

Yet I claim an underlying consistency. I was

brought up to detest imperial?

ism, epitomized in the manic and haunting figure of Captain

Bowen-Colthurst, who murdered my uncle Frank Sheehy-Skeffington

during the Easter Rising. As a servant of the United Nations, I combated a

British imperialist enterprise in Central Africa in 1961 [. . .] From 1965 to

1969 in America I took part in the protest against what I saw as an Amer?

ican imperialist enterprise: the war in Vietnam. And from 1971 until now I

have been combating an Irish Catholic imperialist enterprise: the effort to

force the Protestants of Northern Ireland, by a combination of paramili?

tary terror and political pressure, into a United Ireland they don't want.36

As unreliable and self-congratulatory as this claim may be, it does at least

provide an explanation for the consistency of his views on Camus.

Notes and References

1 Conor Cruise O'Brien Camus (Fontana/ Collins, 1970).The book was published simul?

taneously in the US by Viking, under the title Albert Camus of Europe and Africa. All

references in the text will be to the Fontana/ Collins edition.




2 Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (Chatto & Windus, 1993), p. 209.

3 Albert Camus,'Algeria 1958', Resistance, Rebellion, and Death (Knopf, 1960), p. 148; Essais

(Gallimard/ Pl?iade, 1965), p. 1015.

4 Conor Cruise O'Brien, 'Thoughts on Commitment', The Listener (16 Dec. 1971), pp.

834, 836.

5 Ibid. 6 The Outsider, (Tr. J. Laredo, Penguin, 1983) p. 118; Theatre, r?cits, nouvelles, (Gallimard/

Pl?iade, 1962), p. 1920.

7 Ibid., pp. 63,1171.

8 Ibid. 9 Ibid., pp. 93,1194.

10 'La Contagion', Combat, 10 May 1947, rpt. Essais, p. 322. He repeats the comparison in

UHomme R?volt? (Essais, p. 590). Cruise O'Brien notes the comparison made by Camus,

but he relegates this to the book's footnotes: Camus, p. 89, n. 10, p. 90, n. 4.

11 Albert Camus, 'M. Camus replies', Encounter (Vol. 8, No. 6, June 1957), p. 68.

12 Essais, pp. 1881-2.

13 Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland (Cape, 1995), p. 559.

14 See for example Cruise O'Brien's review of Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth ('The Neu?

rosis of Colonialism', The Nation, 21 June 1965, pp. 674-76, rpt. in D.H. Akenson (ed.)

Conor: A Biography of Conor Cruise O'Brien: An Anthology [Cornell UP, 1994, pp. 90-94]).

15 'The Mystery of the Clarity of Conor Cruise O'Brien', Battle of the Books (Lilliput, 1986),

pp. 19-30.

16 Ibid., p. 27.

17 Ibid., p. 24.

18 Camus, p. 51. Qtd. by McCormack, pp. 24-5.

19 McCormack, p. 25.

20 Camus, 89-90, n. 14.

21 'The Making of a Unionist', Times Literary Supplement, 14 Nov. 1980, rpt. in Tom Paulin,

Writing to the Moment, (Faber, 1996), pp. 1-17.

22 Ibid., p. 9.

23 Ibid. Paulin is referring specifically to Cruise O'Brien's Herod: Reflections on Political Vio?

lence (Hutchinson, 1978).

24 John Coombes, Letter to the Editor, London Review of Books (11 Dec. 1997).

25 Paulin, 'Making of a Unionist'.

26 Lecture published as 'Politics and the Morality of Scholarship', in Max Black (ed.) The

Morality of Scholarship (Cornell UP, 1967), pp. 59-74, 71-72. Chomsky used the phrase in

his essay 'The Menace of Liberal Scholarship', NewYork Review of Books (2 Jan. 1969), later

published in expanded form as 'Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship', which appeared in

Conor Cruise O'Brien and William DeanVanech (eds.) Power and Consciousness (New

York UP, 1969), pp. 43-136.

27 In discussion with Noam Chomsky, Hannah Arendt, Susan Sontag and others: 'The

Legitimacy ofViolence as a Political Act?', NewYork, 15 Dec. 1967 <http://www.chom

sky.info/debates/19671215. htm>.

28 Referring to the statement in 1978, he claimed 'I had quoted that statement, against the

"fence-sitters", with a degree of approbation I find unjustifiable and repugnant in retro?

spect' (Herod, p. 9).

29 'Introduction' in O'Brien andVanech (eds.) Power and Consciousness p. 6. Qtd. in Paulin,

Writing to the Moment, p. 10.

30 'Views', The Listener (24 Oct. 1968), p. 526.




31 Ibid. 32 Ibid. While the last two lines quoted here were silently dropped when the article was

reprinted in Cruise O'Brien's States of Ireland (Hutchinson, 1972, pp. 156-58), his

preference for Ismene remained undiminished: 'after four years of Antigone and her

under-studies and all those funerals [...] you begin to feel that Ismene's commonsense

and feeling for the living may make her the more needful, if less spectacular element in

human dignity' (Ibid., p. 159).

33 Paulin, Writing to the Moment, pp. 17, 9.

34 According to Paulin, in Neighbours (Faber, 1980) Cruise O'Brien firmly and publicly identifies himself as a defender of'the Union of Great Britain and Northern Ireland',

expressing, Paulin says, the same view about Northern Ireland that Camus expressed about Algeria:'Just as Camus believed that Algeria was actually part of France, so O'Brien

believes that the North of Ireland is permanently wedded to Britain' (Paulin, Writing to

the Moment, p. 13). In fact, Cruise O'Brien considered the 'apparent parallel' between

Algeria and Ireland'dangerously misleading' ('Violence in Ireland: Another Algeria?', New

York Review of Books, 23 Sept. 1971).

35 Interview with Seamus Heaney by Seamus Deane, 'Unhappy and at Home', The Crane

Bag (Vol. 1, No. 2, Spring 1977), pp. 61-67, p. 64.

36 Memoir: My Life and Themes (Poolbeg, 1999), p. 110. There is a particular significance to

the locution 'united Ireland they don't want' here, because later in the same memoir (p.

439) Cruise O'Brien appears to recommend that unionists work to negotiate with the

government in the South a united Ireland they do want.




a postcolonial fiction: conor cruise o'brien's camus

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