It is through stylization that revolt offers an answer to the absurd that time reveals. A comparison of the role of style in The Rebel as the instrument of a nostalgic or rebellious sensitivity with its suppressed role in The Myth as revealed in the following quote will prove instructive.
To think is first of all to create a world (or to limit one’s own world, which comes to the same thing). It is starting out from the basic disagreement that separates man from his experience in order to find a common ground according to one’s nostalgia, a universe hedged with reasons or lighted up with analogies but which, in any case, gives an opportunity to rescind the unbearable divorce (MS, 74).
Here again The Rebel reveals a continuity with, and a development from, The Myth. The search continues for a unifying common ground, but the lines and limits of its concrete possibility have become much clearer. With The Rebel, style need no longer be simply a nostalgic activity, it can be positively constructive. Within this developed perspective, the future and hope once again become viable though clearly circumscribed possibilities. The import of the above answer to the absurd carries us beyond the work of art to the experience of which it is a part.
“Man . . . tries in vain,” writes Camus, “to find the form that will impose certain limits between which he can be king. If only one single thing had definite form, he would be reconciled” (R, 252). While this view is meant to cover art in all its forms—as is clear from Camus’s remarks concerning painting, sculpture, and music—his major involvement was with literature and drama.
In these forms the media of expression are words and actions. Literature and drama are, therefore, the most directly theoretical in import, the most able to bear explicitly and reveal philosophical intent. They arc thus obvious candidates for concrete, noncate-gorical, philosophical expression.
From the perspective of the absurd, and within the framework it prescribes, novelists and dramatists create their worlds exactly as do philosophers. Where no ultimate explanations are possible, it makes no essential difference whether worlds are presented in concepts or images; it comes to the same thing. Camus writes: The greatest novels carry with them their universe. [Each] has its logic, its reasonings, its intuition, its postulates. It also has its requirements of clarity. . . . The philosopher, even if he is Kant, is a creator. He has his characters, his symbols, and his secret action. He has his plot endings (MS, 74).
Philosopher and novelist are equally presenters of worlds. Aesthetically, the worlds may be judged on the basis of internal structure, though strictly speaking, from the perspective of the absurd this is irrelevant. The important factor is whether the wholes presented illustrate divorce and absurdity. Since the absurd offers no answers, all explanations are ultimately gratuitous.
The greatest novelists, for Camus, are ones who recognize this.
Writing in images rather than in reasoned arguments, [they are] convinced of the uselessness of any principle of explanation and sure of the educative message of perceptual appearance. . ..
The work of art… is the outcome of an often unexpressed philosophy, its illustration and consummation. But it is complete only through the implications of that philosophy (MS, 75).
“The work of art is born of the intelligence’s refusal to reason the concrete” (MS, 72). It testifies to the fact that all explanation is ultimately useless, and that living in this case is just as much experiencing as reflecting. The work then embodies an intellectual drama. The absurd work illustrates thought’s renouncing of its prestige and its resignation to being no more than the intelligence that works up appearances and covers with images what has no reasons. If the world were clear, art would not exist (MS, 73).
In the world revealed by the absurd, creation is a gratuitous effort. Lacking an ultimate scale of values, art can have no precedence over ditch-digging. The salient question is this: Does a specific work of art assist in bringing into awareness a lucid consciousness that—in an attitude of complete indifference to ultimate questions—can exhaust the qualities of the present? All of Camus’s heroes of the absurd were such because they were aware that their endeavors lacked any ultimate justification. The exemplary role of the creator arises solely from the fact that new things are brought into an existence without justification, In a task in which the temptation toward justification is perhaps strongest, the absurd creator refuses to give in. Knowing these works are gratuitous, the artist embodies this knowledge in them.
The value of creation and of the works that flow from it resides, therefore, simply in their offering a reduplication and a diversification of an existence that can be the only value. An absurd creation can make no claim to a higher value, to a saving insight, to a final explanation. It simply presents. It offers itself as yet another experience: a quality without justification. For the absurdist, the absurd work differs from the nonabsurd simply in the degree to which a recognition of the ultimate uselessness of the endeavor of creation is embodied in the work itself. “To know that one’s creation has no future . . . is the difficult wisdom that absurd thought sanctions” (MS, 84).
It is a wisdom as applicable to the world of philosophy as to that of the novel. Both worlds present an experiential content chosen as worthy of study, presuppositions that direct the study, and a logic and development that provide coherence. And both worlds have equally gratuitous conclusions. While witnessing to the exigence ontologique, from the perspective of the absurd, both end up as no more than expressions of the diverse and equally unjustifiable partial unities to which experience can give rise. The only priority results from lucidity, the recognition of the limits of our endeavors and the clarity that such recognition brings to the perception of the qualities of immediacy.
TO JUSTIFY EVERYTHING
If each work of art presents itself as a self-contained perfect unity, the multiplication of such unities is bound to place them in theoretical opposition with one another. But if, viewed internally, each stands in opposition to all others as ultimate perspectives, viewed externally each is but one more perspective witnessing to a diversity of vision and a potential experiential richness. What more powerful response to nihilism than human creativity? This seems to have been the view of Camus when he wrote The Myth; to prove this was the aim of its section on
“Absurd Creation.” The import of that section, and its continuity with Camus’s later thought in The Rebel, can be adequately grasped only when placed in the perspective of the problems it
sought to deal with. The general concerns of The Myth having been addressed in a previous chapter, it will suffice here to show that the notion of art as a witness to diversity, as developed in The Myth, is not in contradiction with the later emphasis on unity.
The Myth teaches that creation frees while judgment encloses. “The Artist ‘is not a judge but a justifier'” (Bree, 251). From the perspective of the transcendent, experience is found wanting.
Such a verdict has long since been rendered by Christianity. That is the meaning of original sin, one doctrine
that Camus admits he “could never understand.” It is an experience quite alien to him. Absolute judgment, however, which logically depends upon a commitment to an objective or transcendent standard of valuation, has been continually challenged by Camus: from Meursault, “the only Christ we deserve today,” to Clamence, our “false prophet, crying in the wilderness.” The study of St. Just, for whom the law is innocent and the people guilty, to take only one example from The Rebel, is yet another chapter in the exploration of this problem. The Myth is essentially a response to the disappearance of such standards. In opposing the nihilistic conclusion, Camus sought to offer an alternative to absolute moral standards by showing that experience could be meaningful on its own relative terms. “I want to know,” he wrote in The Myth, “whether, accepting a life without appeal, one can also agree to work and create without appeal and what is the way leading to these liberties” (MS, 75).
Since values seemed to involve a scale, a hierarchy, and a principle that would ground that hierarchy, and since all such principles were discredited, Camus felt compelled to have recourse to an ethics of quantity, and an aesthetics of pure presentation, without explanation: an art of pure gratuity. The only possible standard of evaluation was life, more life, a heightening of life of all kinds.
The continuing importance of this point for Camus is attested to by the introduction he wrote to the French translation of Oscar Wilde’s The Ballad of Reading Gaol entitled “The Artist in Prison.” Composed in 1952, after publication of The Rebel, it maintained that “the supreme aim of art is to confound all judges, to abolish all accusations, and to justify everything, life and mankind, in a light which is the light of beauty only because it is the light of truth” (E, 1126).