In speaking of the Algerian Man, I am formalizing a type that emerges from Camus’s earliest writings—especially Two Sides of the Coin, Nuptials, and The Stranger—remaining in the background of his thought throughout. In Nuptials he writes of Algeria,
Intelligence does not occupy the place here that it does in Italy. This race is indifferent to the mind. It worships and admires the body. From this comes its strength, its naive cynicism, and a puerile vanity that leads it to be severely criticized. … It is true that a certain intensity of living involves some injustice. Yet here are a people with no past, with no traditions, though not without poetry. . . . These people, wholly engaged in the present, live with neither myths nor consolation. Investing all their assets on this earth, they are left defenseless against death. The gifts of physical beauty have been heaped upon them. And, also the strange greediness that always goes along with the wealth that has no future. Everything people do in Algiers reveals a distaste for stability and a lack of regard for the future. People are in a hurry to live … and still,. . . one can find a certain moderation as well as a constant excess in the strained and violent faces of these people, in this summer sky emptied of tenderness, beneath which all truths can be told and on which no deceitful divinity has traced the signs of hope or of redemption.
Between this sky and the faces turned toward it there is nothing on which to hang a mythology, a literature, an ethic, or a religion—only stones, flesh, stars, and those truths the hand can touch (“Summer in Algiers,” LCE, 89-90).
Here is the human animal practically at one with nature. “I certainly have no illusions,” writes Camus. “There is not much love in the lives I am describing. I should say rather that there is no longer very much. But at least they have eluded nothing” (LCE, 91). Their life is of the present; it can only end in death. “They wagered on the flesh, knowing they would lose” (LCE, 81).
They seek no consolation; they accept without question the physical conditions of their lives, and seek simply to drain its possibilities to the utmost. “There is nothing here for people seeking knowledge, education, or self-improvement. The land contains no lessons. It neither promises nor reveals anything. It is content to give, but does so profusely” (LCE, 81).
Doubtless such a life has its limits. It also has its advantages. The pristine quality, the freshness and virility, with which the Algerian Man encounters and exhausts his physical condition stands in quite vivid and powerful contrast to the insipid and sterile life of a somewhat decadent Western civilization. In discussing the Algerians’ attitude toward swimming, Camus notes: These are healthy pleasures. They certainly seem ideal to the young men, since most of them continue this life during the winter, stripping down for a frugal lunch in the sun at noontime every day. Not that they have read the boring sermons of our nudists, those protestants of the body (there is a way of systematizing the body that is as exasperating as systems for the soul). They just “like being in the sun.” It would be hard to exaggerate the significance of this custom in our day (LCE, 82).
Camus’s comrade Vincent exemplifies this direct and unself-conscious union of the physical being with his natural environment. In an illuminating footnote, his “naturalistic morality” is compared with a certain variety of that “systematique du corps” just mentioned:
May 1 be foolish enough to say that I don’t like the way Gide exalts the body? He asks it to hold back desire in order to make it more intense. This brings him close to those who, in the slang of brothels, are termed “weirdies” and “oddballs.” Christianity also seeks to suspend desire. But, more naturally, sees in this a mortification. My friend Vincent, who is a cooper and junior breast-stroke champion, has an even clearer view of things. He drinks when he is thirsty, if he wants a woman tries to sleep with her, and would marry her if he loved her (this hasn’t happened yet). Then he always says: “That feels better!”—an energetic summary of the apology one could write for satiety (LCE, 83).
Innocent with respect to social codes or “original sins,” Vincent fulfills his desires as he experiences them and does not think twice about them. He bears no guilt and harbors no regret. He is what he is, and that’s all. His is a portrait of a being totally at one with an essentially ahistorical society, in relatively direct contact with an encompassing natural environment. He does have a “morality,”
which is very well defined. You “don’t let your mother down.” You see to it that your wife is respected in the street. You show consideration to pregnant women. You don’t attack an enemy two to one, because “that’s dirty.” If anyone fails to observe these elementary rules “he’s not a man,” and that’s all there is to it (LCE, 87).
Vincent may well be a stranger to “polite society”; but he is clearly a man, with his own qualities and limitations, upon whom Camus is somewhat reluctant, if not unwilling, to pass judgment. His is a portrait that we would do well to keep in mind if we seek to understand “the stranger.” While, no doubt, involving a certain barbarism, this natural vitality expresses, for Camus, an aspect of human existence without a respect for which it must wither and die. The importance of this “pagan” experience becomes even clearer as Camus contrasts civilization with culture:
At a time when doctrinaire attitudes would separate us from the world, it is well for young men in a young land to proclaim their attachment to those few essential and perishable possessions that give meaning to our lives: the sun, the sea and women in the sunlight. They are the riches of the living culture, everything else being the dead civilization that we repudiate. If it is true that true culture is inseparable from a certain barbarism, nothing that is barbaric can be alien to us (Preface to Rivages, quoted in Parker, 40—l).3
Sensitive individuals—from the simplicity of a Vincent to the sophistication of a Gide—may encounter, in many ways, “manifestations of the absurd,” of which the recognition of eventual death may be only the most common and most definitive. Some perhaps never do. There is certainly no necessity, either factual or ethical, for this encounter, which tends to occasion a break in our habitual patterns of activity and assumed meaningfulness, forcing us to stop, reflect, and struggle to come to terms with the awareness of no longer being at one with our world.
We are thus propelled forth in the search for an intellectual reconstruction of meaning that will return some peace to our conscious life. Those to whom such a project is alien may continue to live their lives on essentially the same qualitative level of felt experience with which they began—though occasionally they kill people unintentionally. With others, it is different. And so with Camus’s Algerian Man. No doubt he has a distinctive sensibility and awareness, which makes its distinctive contribution to the illumination of consciousness. But his spe-cial significance emerges from reflection upon the ahistorical nature of his encounter with Western civilization.
With Camus this awareness of a break between the individual and his habitually accepted and instinctively unified natural environment seems to have been triggered by three crucial types of destructive experience: a sensitivity to the overwhelming power of nature (cf. esp. “The Wind at Djemila”); a poignant awareness of the tragedy of solitude and eventual death (cf. esp. “Irony” and “The Desert”), including a life-threatening encounter with illness at the age of seventeen; and the experience of travel, which effectively cuts one off from familiar scenes and places one face to face with the potential strangeness of existence (cf. esp. “Death in the Soul”).
The melancholy that is likely to follow such a realization is well embodied in Camus’s first work, Two Sides of the Coin: And what other advantage does one seek to draw from travel? Here I am without adornment. A city in which I cannot read the signs, strange features with nothing familiar to cling to, without friends to whom to speak, without entertainment. . . . Strange faces will appear. Churches, gold and incense, everything rejects me in a daily life in which my anguish gives to each thing its price. And it is here that the curtain of habits, the comfortable weaving of gestures and words in which the heart becomes drowsy, slowly raises itself again and finally unveils the pale face of apprehension. Man is face-to-face with himself: I defy him to be happy. . . It is thus . . . that travel enlightens. . . . That which gives to travel its worth is fear. It breaks a sort of internal decor in us. It is no longer possible to cheat—to hide oneself behind the hours at the office and at the shipyard (these hours against which we protest so strongly and which protect us as surely from the suffering of being alone) (L’Envers, LCE, 87-9, 108-9).