The Intertextual Poetics and Politics of the Dramatic Monologue: From Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Kamel Daoud’s Meursault, contre-enquête to Albert Camus’ La Chute (and Back)

In Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Changez, a Pakistani returnee from the US in a post 9/11 context, notes that “the confession that implicates its audience is […] a devilishingly difficult ball to play. Reject it and you slight the confessor; accept it and you admit your own guilt.” Although Changez’s remark foregrounds his past uneasiness at the confessional tone regularly used by his Anglo-American boss, it also extends to the reader, who now occupies the “devilishingly difficult” position of the one who is being force-fed Changez’s confession – namely his “failed love-story” (Hamid) with the US. Both a confession of growing hatred towards the US and a dramatic monologue addressed to an unnamed American ‘you’, Hamid’s novel is highly influenced by the ‘I/you’ confessional dialectics wielded by Albert Camus in La Chute – a dialectics which is also taken up by Kamel Daoud in Meursault, contre-enquête, a rewriting of Camus’ L’Etranger that grants Meursaut’s victim a name and a story in today’s Algeria. Through a discussion of the intertextual genealogies between Hamid’s text and La Chute on the one hand, and between Daoud’s text, La Chute, and L’Etranger on the other, I wish to examine how Daoud’s and Hamid’s novels leave readers no choice but to negotiate conflicted identifications with the roles of ‘the confessor’ and ‘the listener’ in a context of growing Islamophobia, thus begging the question that Camus’ ‘existentialist’ texts have eluded, that is, to what extent empathy is framed by politics