While the import of these texts is somewhat more nuanced than Thodv suggests, and insufficient attention may have been paid to his earlier experiences as well as to his reading of La Douleur, these remarks do offer a fair outline of the movement of Camus’s thought.
CHAPTER 2
1. A. J. Ayer is perhaps the best-known philosopher who was guilty of that error. Cf. “Albert Camus,” Horizon, March 1946, pp. 155-68.
2. Critics of the left and of the right tended to agree in this mistaken portrait. On the left, for example, were Jeanson, Barth, and the representatives of the Communist party. On the right were Hanna, Parker, and Bree, among others. These issues are treated at greater length in the chapters on The Rebel, The Tall, and the analysis of political thought. Concerning the Marxist misreading, of special interest are Camus’s responses to Jeanson and Herve in A/II, 69-76, 85-124. These misreadings were systematic and possibly willful. Camus is presenting a logical analysis of modes of thought, not primarily a historical analysis of specific events. The extent to which such reasonings are themselves historical causes certainly concerned Camus. But the logical analyses must not be confused with an explanation of historical causation, as all too often they were.
CHAPTER 3
1. All references to the English edition of The Stranger are to the excellent translation by Kate Griffith, published by the University Press of America in 1982. This version is far better than the more popular one by Stuart Gilbert.
2. Recall the discussion of Vincent in Chapter 1.
3. Quoting from Camus’s essay “Between Yes and No,” Barrier comments perceptively, “A philosophical Meursault: ‘yes, everything is simple. It is men who complicate things. Let no one tell us stories. Let no one say to us of a man condemned to death: “He is going to pay his debt to Society” but “He is going to have his neck cut.”‘” Barrier goes on to say, “What the author refuses are the abstract ideas with which one discreetly covers the concrete, palpable horror of the existent fact” (Barrier, 77).
4. We might consider the similar situation confronted by Kaliayev in “The Just,” which is dealt with further on. The explicit effort of the police chief, Skouratov, and the Grand Duchess to extract Kaliayev’s complicity in their values is an effort to undermine the base of his opposition and thus to destroy his rebellion. The rebel must feel the Tightness of his cause. He must experience both indignation and justification. The most effective counter by which society can incapacitate rebellion involves its delegitimation. With respect to an individual insurgent, a potent strategy consists in reducing social protest to the status of a personality disorder, thus inducing guilt. This counterrevolutionary effort is explicitly presented in the dialogue between Nada and The Fisherman in “The State of Siege,” while its logic is explored more fully in The Tall. That work probes the existential foundation of the personal effort to destroy rebellion’s roots in autonomous self-expression by inducing pervasive guilt.
5. “In the last chapter of the book,” writes Barrier, “before the arrival of the chaplain, it clearly seems as if the narrator is struggling to reconcile two incompatible attitudes in the face of death, and everything takes place as if he were repeating to
himself: ‘In a sense it is too horrible to think about. But in another sense, since it must be thought about, let’s be reasonable'” (Barrier, 76).
6. While a bit unclear about the meaning of “l’absurde,” Mlle. Germaine Bree goes to the heart of the matter when she observes: “The very essence of l’absurde in his case is that out of indifference he linked forces with violence and death, not widt love and life. . . . He fails to ask any questions and thereby gravely errs. In L’Etranger Camus thus suggests that in the face of the absurd no man can afford passively just to exist. To fail to question the meaning of the spectacle of life is to condemn both ourselves, as individuals, and the whole world to nothingness” (Bree, 117). There is reason to question the use of the word “indifference” here. Furthermore, it is an overstatement to suggest that human beings must question the spectacle of life, lest life be rendered meaningless. Many people lead rather normal and not unrewarding lives without engaging in a great deal of philosophical reflection, while objective circumstances seem to have much to say about when and to what extent inquiry is initiated. We are not dealing with an all or nothing here, nor with an intellectualist bias about the importance of reflection. More to the point is the consideration that the significance of an individual life and the degree to which it can be given meaning depend in large part upon one’s ability to break through the tedium of encrusted habit. The call for lucidity in the face of death is only an invitation to make the most of that which is given to us.
7. Actually, the initial complicity of Oran’s citizens with the rule of plague is not at all unlike the collaboration of the people of Cadiz with The Plague in “The State of Siege.” In both of these encounters with the plague, however, there are significant differences from the situation of Meursault, and the resolutions differ accordingly. In response to the natural evil in The Plague the citizens establish community action teams that take us beyond the essentially individual level of response to the absurd studied in The Stranger. In the play, on the other hand, the evil has become social, and the response thus takes us to a more complicated political level in considering the nature of revolt.
8. We might think of The Stranger as Camus’s literary portrayal in cameo of Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Spirit.
9. Camus’s review of “The Wall” appeared in “Alger Republicain” on March 12, 1939. It criticized Sartre precisely for taking the absurd as a conclusion, not as a starting point (cf. LCE, 203—6).
10. The Stranger depicts the process by which an individual may come to consciousness of his condition; Nuptials explores this perspective as an attitude. While the world may be the home within whose bosom we are born, Nuptials poignantly expresses our emerging realization of the tenuousness of our occupancy. The power of nature, the inexorable flow of time, the experiential distance that inevitably separates human lives from each other, these shatter illusions as to the permanence of our residence. “There are two convictions about which the prose of Nuptials winds all of its themes,” writes Thomas Hanna.
The first is that nature of the world is distinct from and foreign Co the understanding and
desires of man, but is at the same time his home where lie is fascinated, surpassed, and finally
conquered. This conviction is developed in the Tipasa and Djemila sections. The second conviction is that death is the final and inescapable destiny of all men, and that man must adjust his life and actions to this inescapable destiny. The second conviction is the core of the last two sections entitled “Summer in Algiers” and “The Desert” (Hanna [I], 8).
By dwelling upon these “inescapable facts” of which Meursault had become conscious, Nuptials takes in hand “the geography of a certain desert” (Noces, 99; LCE, 105), outlining the boundaries of human action. It seems like the stranger reflecting upon his life and finding it good, when Camus writes:
There is a feeling actors have when they know . . . they have made their own gestures coincide with those of the ideal character they embody. . . . That was exactly what I felt: I had played my part well. I had performed my task as a man, and the fact that I had known joy for one entire day seemed to me . . . the intense fulfillment of a condition which, in certain circumstances, makes it our duty to be happy. Then we are alone again, but satisfied (LCE, 71).
In responding to the priest, Meursault had said that he had no use for, nor could he conceive of, another life unless it was filled with the qualities of this one. In this he was echoing an attitude already expressed in Two Sides of the Coin (cf. LCE, 50).
Nuptials depicts the terrain within which the stranger is condemned to live, inviting us to take up residence in the only home that can be truly ours.
“This clearly involves undertaking the survey of a certain desert . . . accessible only to those who can live there in the full anguish of their thirst. . . . Only then is it peopled with the living waters of happiness” (Noces, 99-100; LCE, 105, slightly modified).
CHAPTER 4
1. Italicized part was deleted from final manuscript.
2. The personal quality of The Myth is subtly evident throughout. For example, Camus’s involvement with his characters is suggested, in earlier versions by his initial identification with the conqueror. He had written, “There is but one luxury for us— that of human relations”: only to replace us with them in the published version (MS, 88; E, 167, 1446).