This reduction ends by destroying the intimate bond tying art to experience from which art draws its sustenance. The extreme example here is pure formalism.
For Camus, both temptations are dimensions of art’s vital task. Art must be at once communication and stylization: reconciliative with respect to the persons involved; unifying with respect to the content and meanings expressed. Great art thrives in this tension; lesser art bends under the burden. Yet one might argue that socialist realism is stylization in the service of total communication, while formalism involves a dimension of the communicable world as well as its stylization. Camus would no doubt insist that these facts point to the impossibility of holding to either principle without the other. Pure stylization would be silence; pure communication unending repetition.
Basic to Camus’s critique of socialist realism is the claim that it finds its ordering principle outside the human content it orders. The meaning of such a work lies not in the movement of the work itself, but in what it points to, as a road sign points to a city. By so doing it gives up on the ennobling of the human spirit through a stylization that is the perfection of its intrinsic artistic content. It is reduced rather to pure propaganda: the work of art as but the container, diversely fillable, into which the ideology pours its message.
Formalism, on the other hand, draws on experience for its lines and colors (cf. Mondrian) or sounds (cf. Webern), but has denuded art of its human content in the name of an order and a unity that no longer speak for human experience.
These two dimensions of art are represented by Camus as ideal types and criticized as such. They serve to delimit the scope of artistic activity, presenting in concrete shape those limits as applicable to art, of which Camus so often speaks.2 They result from the extreme logical development of one side of a situation whose essential constitution is that of a duality in tension.3
One last word as to the scope of Camus’s presentation. He offers what he considers to be the most basic dimensions of artistic activity. While drawing upon various works to support his position, he offers his presentation not as a scientific explanation of what in fact art has been but as a statement as to what he thinks the most vital concerns of art are. Thus conceived, we have a statement as to how he viewed his art and a suggestion as to how art may be most significantly approached and created.
UNITY IN DIVERSITY
“Art lives only on the constraints it imposes on itself,” said Camus; “it dies of all others” (RRD, 208). Grounded in the spontaneity of freedom, it is one of the clearest expressions of the human need to impose order on the chaos with which experience immediately confronts us. Thus art symbolizes at a heightened intensity the tension between the need for order, justice, security, and familiarity, on the one hand, and for novelty, spontaneity, and freedom on the other.
In the work of art, as noted, the chaotic or amorphous passions with which the natural creature is endowed are given an ideal form by the creator who, by correcting the creation as it is immediately experienced, raises the experience to a new pitch of intensity, yielding a new height of spiritual fulfillment. By entering into the world of such a work the human being can, even if but momentarily, come to rest in a world in which the flow of time has been grasped in an eternal moment within which meaning is felt to be complete.
If form is the essential bearer of the meaning of art, art is destroyed by orders and forms imposed upon it from without. And if art is grounded in a free experience, any insistence that experience take a definite form prior to the encounters that constitute it can only mean the destruction of art. It is true that human experience is never amorphous: it always comes with certain shapes, forms, and lines of movement. But it comes also and always as a mass of unformulated possibilities, fringes unfocused, and ideals unexpressed, not to say unrealized.
Prefabricated forms, like prefabricated thoughts, lie upon individuals like a straitjacket. Art, grounded as it is in spontaneity, speaks for the open horizon of forms into which individual experience may develop. The role of the creator is to free experience from artificially imposed, outlived, or sterile forms, thus testifying to the potential richness and diversity of human experience.
While the needs for unity and diversity clearly stand in opposition one with the other, they need not constitute unbridgeable poles but rather can offer a creative tension. Basically, they are complementary. For while experience craves an ordering that will yield a sense of fulfillment, the achievement of any final and definitive order would constitute the completion of experience as we know it—a destiny that remains but to be played out rather than lived. Thus achieved, such an ordering would incapacitate humans for experience or, at least, render the very notion of experience meaningless—simply a habit or instinct. While totality would thus constitute the destruction of experience by resolving novelty into habit and freedom into destiny, the absence of lived unities would render experience chaotic, formless; and, as the Greeks knew, this too would constitute utter meaninglessness.
Insofar as meaning can be seen on the reflective level to consist in relations perceived, so on the level of immediacy it will consist in felt dramatic continuity. In the latter, experiences are felt to lead with a modicum of fluency from one to another. Thus an experience diversely qualified at any moment
or series of moments may be felt as a unity in its movement. In fact, if it is not, we would seem to have a form of psychic pathology.4
Reflectively considered, this same experience may be taken from diverse perspectives, in terms of which it will be seen as yielding more or less unity. From a categorical or static point of view, the unity-in-diversity that art and life so exemplify seems to pose dichotomous alternatives. Yet in the actual movement of experience they simply represent tensions, alternative
directions with first the one predominating, then the other.
Within the bounds of the work of art, structure gives the shape of destiny to the passions there unfolded; but from the perspective of experience, each work of art presents itself as a potential experiential unity. Thus works of art, while taken distributively are alternative unities in conflict with one another, taken collectively they bear witness to the vitality and diversity of the human spirit. Art is thus both a commitment to the infinite qualitative diversity of human experience and a formulation and suggestion of the ideal possibilities inherent in the concrete movement of that experience.
GIVING STYLE TO ONE’S LIFE
“In every rebellion is to be found the metaphysical demand for unity, the impossibility of capturing it, and the construction of a substitute universe. Rebellion, from this point of view, is a fabricator of universes. This also defines art. The demands of rebellion are really, in part, aesthetic demands” (R, 255). Art is revolt’s always provisional answer to the absurd: the construction of a limited, perfect, complete whole in a world marked by discontinuity, rupture, and partiality. Sculpture, for example, the greatest and most ambitious of the arts, is bent on capturing, in three dimensions, the fugitive figure of man, and on restoring the unity of great style to the general disorder of gestures.
… It erects, on the pediments of teeming cities, the model, the type, the motionless perfection that will cool, for one moment, the fevered brow of man (R, 256).
As, perhaps, the purest expression of revolt—as it had been the purest expression of absurd activity—art “is a revolt against everything fleeting and unfinished in the world. Consequently its only aim is to give another form to a reality that it is nevertheless forced to preserve as the source of its emotion” (RRD, 202).
Style—”this presence imposed on that which is always becoming”—is the crucible through which this transfiguration of time takes place. Through stylization the artist creates a world, setting it off from a daily experience not significantly different in content. All art is the product of such stylization; and Camus’s long attack against realism simply clarifies the misconceptions involved with that term: an unquestioned assumption as to the nature of the real, and a stylization consequent to that assumption.
Style is the form of the work—which, in great art, “will vary with the subjects.” It is the medium through which creation is corrected. “The aim of great literature seems to be to create a closed universe or a perfect type” (R, 259).5
CONTRASTING MYTH AND REBEL
Stylization is an activity with metaphysical significance. “Far from being moral or even purely formal, [the novelist’s] alteration [of reality] aims, primarily, at unity and thereby expresses a metaphysical need. The novel, on this level, is primarily an exercise of the intelligence in the service of nostalgic or rebellious sensibilities” (R, 264).