(Hi)story and Fiction in the Algerian Novel: Particular Reference to Amin Zaoui’s Le Miel de la Sieste and Kamel Daoud’s Meursault Contre-enquête

Abstract

From Lyotard’s metanarrative to personal biography, in his quest for “truth,” how does an Algerian author express his will to literary self-assertion, identity and pure (hi)story—if not a farce—to use Baudrillard’s concept from his Carnival and Cannibal? Instead of hegemony, Bhabha suggests hybridity that he extends to include the phase of political change. In this very context, both Zaoui’s novel Le Miel de la Sieste and Daoud’s Meursault Contre-enquête sit comfortably in this phase of linguistic and cultural independence and dependence, intellectual quest, and Cultural alienation. The narrators in both novels suffer from identity disorder in a post-independent Algeria because of their alienation, absence of father, and/or loss of mother. Anzar, the protagonist in Zaoui's novel, invents a world of his and takes refuge in writing and metafiction in order to establish his own “philosophy” of difference, hybridity, memory, and nostalgia. Haroun, the protagonist in Daoud’s novel, does not eschew to enquire personal memory in front of the father’s influence and point of historical perspective. Thus, avoiding the claim to any metanarrative history, both narrators substitute it with fictional and metafictional elements to discard the legitimacy to any hegemonic claim to narrative objectivity using such techniques as metamorphosis and historical ambiguities but above all western influences.