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
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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)
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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
FOLEY, 'A Postcolonial Fiction', Irish Review 36-37 (2007) 3
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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
4 FOLEY, 'A Postcolonial Fiction', Irish Review 36-37 (2007)
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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
FOLEY, 'A Postcolonial Fiction', Irish Review 36-37 (2007) 5
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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
6 FOLEY, 'A Postcolonial Fiction', Irish Review 36-37 (2007)
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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
FOLEY, 'A Postcolonial Fiction', Irish Review 36-37 (2007) 7
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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
8 FOLEY, 'A Postcolonial Fiction', Irish Review 36-37 (2007)
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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
FOLEY, 'A Postcolonial Fiction', Irish Review 36-37 (2007) 9
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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
10 FOLEY, 'A Postcolonial Fiction', Irish Review 36-37 (2007)
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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.
FOLEY, 'A Postcolonial Fiction', Irish Review 36-37 (2007) 11
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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.
12 FOLEY, 'A Postcolonial Fiction', Irish Review 36-37 (2007)
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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.
FOLEY, 'A Postcolonial Fiction', Irish Review 36-37 (2007) 13
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