9. The English translation botches this subtle distinction by, for example, translating a l’origine as “by nature” instead of “at first” or “in the beginning.”
10. “An affirmation which appears to me, moreover, remarkably faithful to the dialectical reasoning which today all quite vocally demand” (E, 1708 9) CHAPTER 11
1. Marcel Cerdan was middleweight champion of the world and a French celebrity in the late 1940s.
2. We must not confuse this portrait of the professional, the lawyer, the intellectual, the member of “society,” the professional humanist, with that of all members of bourgeois society, for Camus has a very different sense of the character of the average working person. While many on the left, and Sartre above all, taxed him with having an inadequate appreciation of class conflict (in The Rebel and in The Plague, for instance), it was they, not he, who could easily include practically all members of bourgeois society in their critiques of a decadent capitalism. Camus, on the other hand, has a more precise sense of the differences of character and motivation between the true bourgeoisie, and petit-bourgeois compatriots, on the one hand, and working people on the other. His portrait of the latter may be somewhat idealized, as in “The Silent Ones,” “Summer in Algiers,” or “The State of Siege,” but he never simply identifies them with the middle or upper classes. In fact, his analyses of contemporary European society always place in the forefront the need to recapture for the workingman his appropriate dignity and self-respect: to dignify labor, which, along with intelligence, is one of the only two aristocracies he recognizes. His references to Simone Weil in The Rebel and his agreement with her portrait of the character of decadent bourgeois and pseudo-revolutionary societies have no other significance.
3. This comment, like much else in The Fall, may be read as Camus’s evaluation of Sartre and company’s perception of him.
4. Warren Tucker, “La Chute: voie du salut terrestre,” French Review, April 1970, 737-44.
5. I have long been of the opinion that Sartre’s critique of Camus is really an attack on the being that Sartre had been, which he now projects onto Camus. A careful reading of Sartre’s critique of Camus in Les Temps Modernes shows that he did not pay careful attention at all to what Camus actually said. He rather imputes to Camus precisely those positions that he, Sartre, once held but has since come to repudiate.
6. Cf. Thomas Hanna, The Thought and Art of Albert Camus, 213-37.
7. Relevant here is Nietzsche’s analysis of the character and strategy of the priest who must create sin and guilt in order to obtain the subservience of others, which is essential if he is to lord it over them. Cf.
The Antichrist in PN, for example.
8. The malady by which guilt is transformed into the defense of a saving brotherhood was nowhere more clearly revealed than in Sartre’s diatribe on behalf of the Communist party as the legitimate defender of the objective interests of an idealized working class in Communists and the Peace. Appropriately, the first installment appeared in the July issue of Temps Modernes, between the May issue in which Jeanson’s critique of The Rebel appeared and the August issue containing the replies of Camus, Sartre, and Jeanson.
9. For an excellent brief analysis of the procedure of modern totalitarianism in using self-criticism and self-recrimination to stifle any stirrings of revolt, see M. Natan-son’s essay on the Moscow trials in his collected essays. Those observations might be compared with the comments of Diego, The Plague, and The Secretary in “The State of Siege.”
CHAPTER 12
1. The dramatist Copeau, whom Camus called the only master, maintained, according to Camus, that “a dramatic work has to bring the audience together in a single emotion or laugh, and not divide them” (TRN, 1697).
2. We have said nothing of an art that gave up all concern for unity and was simply the pure play of the moment—a happening, for instance. Camus would be unlikely to consider that art.
3. The similarities with his political discussions of the dialectic of freedom-justice should not be missed.
4. Even a break in experience may be meaningful here—often tragically so—but only insofar as it is experienced as a “break-from.” Consider William James’s discussion in The Principles of Psychology (PP, 240): “What we hear when thunder crashes is not thunder pure, but thunder-breaking-in-on-silence-and-contrasting-with-it. . . . The feeling of thunder is the feeling of the silence just gone.”
5. Cf. Camus’s discussion of Piero della Francesca, whose “subjects give the impression that, by some miracle of art, thev continue to live, while ceasing to be mortal” (R,257).
6. The italics are used to suggest: (1) The limited scope of the analysis and (2) the role of style and the exigence toward unity, still underplayed and to be developed, which are seen by the absurd mind.
7. In order to counter nihilism, Camus quotes Dostoevsky as saying, “One must love life before loving its meaning. Yes, and when the love of life disappears, no meaning consoles us for it” (Notebooks/II, 218).
8. Consider Thomas Hanna’s work for a typical expression of this point of view.
9. Check Bower’s translation for a particularly egregious rendering of this passage.
10. Cf. especially “The Desert” in Nuptials. The continuity of Camus’s thought is evident in his notion of art as an ordering within a disunited world. At the same time, these early essays reveal an almost religious attachment to the concrete and sensual. In Nuptials he writes that painters, “the novelists of the body, . . . work in that magnificent and trivial matter called the present. And the present always shows itself in a gesture” (LCE, 94).
11. For an ironic statement on the engage artist, cf. “Jonas” in EK.
12. Robles continues: “At the time of his first theatrical efforts, he recommended … ‘A theater without stars, where the actors do not take bows, where the performers are also machinists, painters, electricians, stage hands, costume makers.'”
13. “Art,” Germaine Bree observes, “is the contrary of silence; it is rooted in reality, therefore it is communicable to all men; it is an invitation to dialogue and therefore freedom. Because it requires the artist to create his own order, it is in itself a manifestation of freedom and cannot submit to anv other order; in fact it is a challenge to any other order” (Bree, 250).
CHAPTBS 13
l. Hegel is the classical exponent of this conception of human relations, for Camus Cf. R, 133 48
2. As Camus was not a “philosopher,” so he was not a “politician.” He seemed ill at ease in the give-and-take of politics, feeling more at home with the clarity of moral judgment. His aim was “by a simple objective criticism to introduce the language of morals into the exercise of politics” (A/I, 51). This caused him to be criticized, sometimes rightly, theoretically as too manichean, practically as too naive. Yet these critics almost invariably missed the point. For Camus was actually seeking to introduce a new language and a new approach into the sociopolitical world. Often he was ill at ease in politics because competing intellectuals insisted upon seeing that sociopolitical world in essentially manichean terms—of which the dominant European ideology of Marxism, primarily in its Marxist-Leninist version was but one clear expression. And when he was too naive, it was often the result of a judgment upon his activities passed by those whose thought was essentially ideological.
His understanding of the human condition took him directly into the realm of political discussion as that of Marx had taken him into economics. Being a European intellectual of the World War II period, Camus had to come to terms with Marxist thought; and, from one point of view, the major burden of his attack on ideology, explicitly in The Rebel and implicitly elsewhere, was directed at Marxism, in what he called its prophetic dimension. Critical Marxism remained for him a positive and liberating critique whose usefulness in furthering preciselv that concrete freedom that Marx sought was greatly hampered by being attached to the ideology and dogmatism involved in the prophetic Marxism of one such as Lenin. The difference between the critical and the prophetic is generalized into that between the “ideologue of the absolute” who seeks totality and the artist working with resistant materials who seeks unity. Camus’s thought, like that of Marx, was motivated by the desire for freedom and reconciliation, but was essentially general and directional rather than specific and programmatic. Unlike Marx, however, he never attempted to develop a systematic methodology or claimed definitive understanding of the political world. His aim was to suggest the attitudes and values that must be maintained if the political world is to become truly liberating.
3. Parker suggests that the attitudes criticized here are similar to ones Camus held during the resistance, but then began to reconsider. He had even signed some editorials “St. Just,” and had written that the country ” ‘does not need a Talleyrand…. It needs a St. Just'” (Parker, 67). Also, in speaking of dealing with the collaborators after the war, he said, ” ‘It is not a question of purging much, but of purging well'” (Parker, 182).