world of unity and values in view of his own condemnation to die along with his values (Hanna [I], 187).
Hanna correctly notes the continuity of Camus’s conception of human nature and the world insofar as a fundamental theoretical relationship is concerned. Then he misjudges the significance of the disparity in views by forgetting the limitations placed on the possible answers to the absurd that the posing of the ultimate questions there imposed. Remember that only three alternatives are open within the framework prescribed by The Myth:
(1) hope for a total and transcendent meaning, beyond rational inquiry;
(2) rejection of any meaning (which as the nihilist conclusion from the fact of disbelief in option one posed the immediate problem with which the essay sought to deal); and (3) commitment to the possibility of immanent meaning. The last is the only total alternative that remains, in view of the feeling of the absurd and the nihilist inference. In seeking to show mat it is a
“genuine option,” Camus has not taken an explicit position for or against the possibility of relative guidelines: That would have no meaning within the framework of that inquiry. First the possibility must be shown, then the constructions may follow. That his concerns shifted is to be expected; what that involved was not a refutation of the earlier position but a clarification and theoretical development under the press of historical circumstances.
The “compulsion of man to create a world of unity” is already implicit, though not adequately spelled out, both in the presentation of the distinct worlds of philosopher and novelist, and in the notion of discipline and styli-zation, which is what sets the work of art off from ordinary experience. The “nothing added” that Hanna refers to does not concern the stylization and articulation of unity, but the content and answers that the absurd work presents. The absurd creation “must remain aware of its gratuitousness”; it must “illustrate divorce and revolt” (MS, 75). Only then will creation offer “the staggering evidence of man’s sole dignity: the dogged revolt against his condition, perseverance in an effort considered sterile” (MS, 85). The presentation of such a work requires control, discipline, stylization—the production of an artistic unity that adds no content, offers no answers, in short, does not seek to resolve the absurd. Hanna has, in short, confused two dimensions of the problem. In Camus’s later thought, the fundamental boundaries of the human condition revealed in the absurdist experiment remain intractable; but granting this, only if one has opted for meaning as a function of immanent presence—the third of the aforementioned three alternatives—can the question of the transformation of that present have meaning. Within the boundaries presented by the absurd everything still remains to be done. We must give a style to our life and art. We are free, responsible, finite beings whose future is open. The questions of revolt take their start from this point.
A THEATER WITHOUT STARS
“Every writer tries to give a form to the passions of his time. . . . Art wants to save from death a living image of our passions and sufferings” (RRD, 181—2). The work of art ideally aspires toward structural perfection or unity, thus testifying to the continual possibility of attaining concrete unities. This is ultimately accomplished by the way the work incorporates the flow of time. But experience must return ever again to its basis in flesh and movement. The work of art can offer but a temporary respite from the onrush of events. Experience can enter into the world of the work only briefly. If art is to have more than simply formal import, taking us beyond momentary fulfillment— if, in short, it is to offer a substantial glimpse of that living transcendence of which Camus spoke—then it must be drawn from, and point back toward, the experiential flow in which we are fated to live. The work of art as a self-enclosed whole may constitute an aesthete’s delight, but it is gratuitous in the most precise sense of the term if it does not point beyond itself and make common cause with our struggle to shape our destiny.
And this view is not a plea for a literature that is engage; that would be simply propaganda.11
In fact, of course, the very activity of creativity points beyond itself in the sense that it already bears witness to the artist’s freedom with respect to the materials. The activity of stylization is a testament to the fertility of such freedom and, as such, implicitly constitutes a challenge to all social orders seeking to restrict that freedom.
The implicit call of art to remake our lives in accord with its stylistic unity must confront therefore the dramatic variations that are the substance of political struggles. Artistic and political rebellions differ in at least two fundamental aspects: production and encounter. In the historical rebel’s struggle to create an artistic politics the problem of the subject of the creative act, like that of the participant’s experience, must be raised anew. Camus demands that political rebels strive toward the condition in which all people will be the artistic creators of their world. The idealized world that is the content of the political program, however, since it presents itself not as an offering but as a total historical transformation, must take into account the factual diversity of ideals that are vitally significant for concrete individuals. The call for partial rebellious strategies directed toward the dialogic creation of democratic communities rooted in self-management is simply the expression of the demand that historical realities place upon the attempt to make our collective life approach the conditions of art.
If the artist for Camus is the temoin de la liberte, it is no wonder that at the center of Camus’s political vision lies the reconstitution of work. This means that workers must recapture in their daily lives the dignified self-respect that human beings demand. The artist’s commitment to beauty must in the last analysis be a commitment to human ennoblement. It is and must self
consciously become a political commitment at the deepest existential levels. Beauty must be wedded to truth and to dialogue, and it must be rooted in the concrete details of daily life if a renaissance is to become possible. “By himself, [the artist] doubtless will not be able to bring about the renaissance which presupposes justice and liberty. But without him this renaissance will be without form, and hence, will be nothing” (A/II, 82).
A dialogue between beauty and truth, between artist and worker, must stand at the center of any effort aimed at the reconstitution of social living. Such a dialogue has to merge the demands of freedom and justice so as mutually to limit their claims one with the other. And it must seek to ennoble the daily life of working people, which requires the pluralistic reconstitution of that life in and through worker-managed cooperatives and communities. If a civilisation du dialogue is to be a concrete reality rather than a pious wish, it cannot be other than a social organization that transforms personal liberty into self-directed team efforts.
Small wonder that the central action of The Plague is the formation of work-teams to combat the plague, or that at the center of The Rebel rests the vision of a rebellion vitalized by an implicitly communitarian ideal and seeking to articulate a vision and a practice that will create those natural communities advocated by that future communard Tolain to which Camus makes reference (R, 298). Nor should it be surprising that Camus felt he learned his ethics from his participation in such team activities as sports, theater, and journalism. Or that Emmanuel Robles, Camus’s friend and coworker in his Algerian youth, should say of Camus: “He loved to belong to a group, to integrate himself into a team. . . . He accepted its discipline, yielding to the most obscure obligations with good humor, even seeming to find apparent satisfactions in them. . . . He loved to be ‘the comrade merged with the anonymous team'” (Camus, 69). u Artist as worker, worker as artist—people struggling collectively to come to grips with their destiny.
The contradictions of history and of art do not resolve themselves in a purely logical synthesis, but in a living creation. When the labor of the worker like that of the artist will have obtained an opportunity for fruitfulness, only then will nihilism have been outlived and the renaissance take on meaning. It is not certain that we will arrive at this goal, but it is die only task which is worth undertaking and persevering in (A/II, 10).
TO BEAR THE PAIN AND HOPE WE SHARED
In being grounded in human freedom, as well as expressing its highest potentials, the artist carries the burden of speaking for those who cannot speak, in the name of a value they all, at least potentially, share. “We [artists] must
know that we can never escape the common misery, and that our only justification, if indeed there is a justification, is to speak up insofar as we can, for those who cannot do so” (RRD, 204).