In short, in addition to being the source of a bodily sensibility and a metaphysical vision, Camus’s North African origin was the source of his European horizon with profound political, social, and cultural implications, whose full significance neither he nor most of his Western literary and political admirers have adequately appreciated. No doubt this is because his myopia so easily merges with theirs—that is, ours. This cultural myopia, like its sociological variant, emerges out of the most profound existential roots of his being, which grounded his metaphysical vision. Thus the theoretical as well as personal anguish he felt when confronted by the Algerian war. He was deeply moved by the suffering of the Arabs under French rule, and he championed their cause long before it became fashionable in left-wing European circles to do so. Yet he could never sanction their demands for self-determination or for independence. Their outrage generated a revolt that defined the felt conditions of their dignity, which he was not able to appreciate. Western dignity he understood, but not Arab dignity as defined by and for Arabs. Hemmed in by a vision whose horizon was framed by its cultural moorings, he is all too often reduced, in spite of himself, to benign paternalism in the service of Western colonialism. While speaking a left-wing and often radical idiom, he found himself at times supporting right-wing positions and being a bit uncomfortable with his bedfellows.
Not only does his politics reach a dead end here—and this was a matter of the deepest personal anguish for him as well as a profound challenge to the very source of his creativity—but at a deeper level, so does his imagination and its sustaining metaphysic. And it is at the point of confronting this tragic metaphysical—political field of vision that my study of Camus’s work must close. Incapable of adequately and creatively grasping the Western vision that offers the opportunity of transcending its “ownmost” metaphysical limitations—that is, the Hegelian-Marxian conception of humanity’s collective self-creation by labor through time—Camus is left with a tragic vision at a practical dead end. Western dualisms remain his limiting horizon, even though his experience of the body offers the promise of a way beyond. Nature and history, individual and society, fact and value, European and barbarian, ends and means. He sensed the inadequacy of these dualisms, and he found in theater, sports, and journalism experiences that pointed toward a concrete, embodied, dialogic community that offered the promise of that earthly kingdom. But he was unable to envisage a way beyond their tragic confrontation. These competing forces are balanced, they are weighed, they remain in tragic tension—but tftey offer no creative future. His radicalism ends in a political-personal dead end, incapable of concretely pointing the way toward the renaissance that was his deepest wish. Here we encounter the limits of the bourgeois imagination in the shipwreck of the “conscience of the West”: offering a propaedeutic to any radical politics that may propose itself as a just response to human suffering, but incapable of historically instantiating any creative praxis. We are left with Nemesis, in the name of Sisyphus, challenging Prometheus not to become Caesar, but incapable of concretely determining how dialogically to produce that communally rooted “first man” that would ground the renaissance for which he so deeply longed.
Notes
Bibliography
NOTES
PREFACE
1. All citations are referenced in the body of the text. The key to the abbreviations is in the bibliography, which includes only works actually used in researching this study. In the interest of space, references to and commentaries on other works about Albert Camus have been kept to a minimum. For an extensive consideration of the literature on his thought, see my unpublished dissertation, Revolt, Dialogue and Community, Penn State University, 1968.
2. Cf. his essay “On the Future of Tragedy,” in LCE, 295-310. In that essay, in which he sets forth his belief that ours may be an age ripe for tragic drama, his description of the contours of the modern world echoes The Rebel’s presentation of the conditions that nurture rebellion.
3. “But one must regret the tragic after having looked at it, not before” (AJ, 43).
4. Throughout this work, two titles have been retranslated in order to clarify their meaning. The Rightside and the Wrongside (L’Envers et L’Endroit) is retranslated as Two Sides of the Coin, and “The Just Assassins” (“Les Justes”) is retranslated as “The Just.”
5. In the late 1930s he had already set forth the frame of his work. A series on the absurd, a second on revolt, each to include a philosophical essay, a play, and a novel. The design for the following series is less clear, though in 1946 he is envisioning two more on we-are and on love. Cf. Lottman, 194, 393-4. At other times, community and judgment appear as possible themes.
6. Roger Quilliot reports a revealing conversation with Camus in 1954 in which Camus envisaged an essay that would “begin with the values established by revolt, and, after having brought forth their logical consequences, confront them with concrete experience, merging them with the sensual richness of daily life” (TRN, 2029-30).
Beyond this projected development of the theme of revolt, his continuing concerns can be gauged by his political involvements, pursuant to the publication of The Rebel. Philip Thody observes that these “can be divided into four main sections: his support for Pierre Mendes-France in 1955, his protests against the repression of the Hungarian revolt in 1956, his attack on the death penalty in 1957, and his numerous articles on Algeria. The guiding theme in everything he did and wrote is his intense concern for human suffering” (Thody, 198).
More generally, his activities in the 1950s might be seen as efforts to contribute to a cultural rebirth—what might be called strides toward concrete reconciliation —in two directions. Artistically he was engaged in, and writing for, the theater, where he found that living community “which had been one of the joys of my life.” (Throughout this period he tried to obtain his own theater where he could produce the kind of works he felt were appropriate At the time of his death he was on the verge of achieving his objective, thanks to De Gaulle’s Minister of Culture, Andre Malraux.) Theoretically, he developed the themes to which this essay has been primarily devoted. Occasional pieces on art, politics, and the events of the day addressed these concerns practically. They appeared in journals or newspapers or as letters or public speeches, some of which were collected in Actuelles 77, Chroniques Algeriennes, and Resistance, Rebellion, and Death.
CHAPTER 1
1. On occasion, I have retranslated passages in order to better capture the original meaning. Whenever this occurs, I cite both the popular English translation and the French original.
2. In bis American Journals Camus wrote: “Remake and recreate Greek diought as a revolt against the sacred. But not the revolt against the sacred of the romantic— which is in itself a form of the sacred—but revolt as putting the sacred in its place” (AJ, 49).
3. While overstated, the point is clear. Parker continues, “The Algerian Man, like all barbarians, possessed a kind of wild innocence. This innocence, as Jean Bloch-Michel points out . . . ‘reigns over happy bodies that are pre-occupied onlv with themselves. It is situated outside of history, since it suspends the passage of time and restores to the world the freshness of its first moorings.’ . . . The bronzed youths on the Algerian beaches [concludes Parker) had grasped a fundamental truth of human existence, and Camus would not, like the jurv that condemns Meursault, judge them guilty. But he did recognize that this truth was only a point of departure, not an end in itself. If one did not go beyond that truth, one ran the risk of annihilation by one of the many manifestations of the absurd” (Parker, 41-2).
4. This is precisely the conclusion Camus comes to in his unfinished first novel, A Happy Death, which he was working on at about the same time.
5. Drawing upon Camus’s remarks in his preface to the essays of Jean Grenier, Philip Thody outlines the stages in Camus’s development to this point.
The first, which goes up to the age of twenty and rather curiously includes both his first attack of tuberculosis and his recovery from it, is one of instinctive, animal enjoyment of the life of the senses. . . . Then comes the shock of discovery when he read Grenier’s Les Isles, understood the reason for his “sudden melancholies” and ceased to live “in sensation, on the surface of the world, among colors, waves and the fine scent of the earth.” This awakening produced L’Envers et L’Endroit, with its reaction in favor of an insistence upon the darker side of experience and on the value of intellectual awareness. Then . . . comes the triumphant reaffirmation of the life of the body in Noces, the song of the nuptials between man and the earth which contrasts so sharply with the detached irony of the mood of the first essay (Thodv, 20).