Albert Camus: A Pure Rebel

On 4 January 1960, Albert Camus was killed when the car in which he had been travelling left the road. In his pocket was a train ticket for the journey he had been intending to take. In the boot of the car was the unfinished manuscript of The First Man, his autobiography.

“I was born halfway between sunlight and poverty”, wrote Camus in his first collection of essays, entitled Betwixt and Between. Everything he went on to write was influenced by this ever-present conflict. Born in Algeria, Camus grew up in a family of modest means, without a father, and began to study philosophy until his studies were interrupted for health reasons. He was briefly (1935-36) a member of the communist party, and set up two theatre companies, running them with a view to putting classical and contemporary theatre before underprivileged audiences. In 1937 he published his first work, Betwixt and Between, a series of literary essays in which one can already discern the major themes of his mature work: death, sunlight, the Mediterranean, isolation, the destiny of man, the link between despair and happiness....

From 1938, Camus worked as a journalist, first in Algiers (on the “Alger républicain” and the “Soir républicain”), then in Paris (for “Paris Soir”), where he moved permanently in 1942. It was in Paris that his novel The Stranger and his essay The Myth of Sisyphus were published simultaneously and undercover. Both works were acclaimed, and both developed Camus’ philosophy, forming part of what he himself called the “Absurd Cycle”, which was completed by his plays The Misunderstanding (1944) and Caligula (1945).

The Stranger, perhaps Camus’ most famous work, is characterised above all by its extremely neutral, distant and uniquely descriptive style. The narrator, Meursault, seems as much a stranger to himself as he is empty of feelings towards others and towards situations around him. After a fight on a beach he kills a man with five shots from a revolver without being able to offer a convincing reason for his action. He is condemned to death: but it is not so much for the murder that he is punished as for his reaction to the death of his mother: he does not weep for her. This leads the judges to conclude that he has “a murderer’s heart”. The novel is much more than a simple denunciation of social conventions: it displays the human need to find an automatic explanation for everything, to establish a “natural order” in an incoherent world.

The absurd as a basic reality of the human condition is the central theme of the philosophy which Camus develops from the outset. The Myth of Sysiphus, published in the same year as The Stranger, approaches this same idea from a theoretical and philosophical standpoint: like Sisyphus, condemned forever to push a rock up and down a mountain, man is destined to undergo an automatic sequence of absurd experiences. Reason attempts to understand, to establish a unified world and the knowledge of it in order to make that world comprehensible, but the world offers in return only a multitude of apparently meaningless experiences. Reason is therefore incapable of unifying them, and the world remains distant. “The absurd is a divorce”: a divorce between the aspirations of reason and what the world has to offer. However, it is – paradoxically – in his awareness of this situation that man finds his liberty, because, freed from all illusions, from all ideological and dogmatic principles which claim to unify, and as a result, define, reality, he can begin to seek happiness by enjoying the present moment and life, far from what Nietzsche called “the backward world”. Not knowing what love means, unable even to define the concept of love, he can taste, he can experience the warmth of a body against his own body, the goodness of the heart that welcomes him. This leads him to Pindar’s idea, which Camus places as an introductory quotation to The Myth of Sysiphus: “Oh, my soul, do not aspire to eternal life, but exhausts the limits of what is possible !” If no moral value is superior to any other, the only criterion of life is the variety of experience. Thus, at the end of The Stranger, finding himself in prison the night before his execution, Meursault, by now conscious and free, makes the most of the last, intense moments of his life.

It is within the movement of the absurd itself that another dimension of Camus’ thought appears: revolt. If we accept that the absurd is the confrontation between man’s profound desires and what the world offers him, it would be pointless to deny that one of the consequences of that confrontation is frustration. The only way, then, to live and to overcome this situation is revolt. We do not want a child to suffer: the child suffers nonetheless: and our first instinct is revolt against this situation. To abdicate our need for revolt is to accept that the child’s suffering is legitimate: it is to recreate a dogmatic explanation for the world: it is to attribute to the world a coherence that it does not possess – or if it does, it is a coherence not accessible to us. To admit the absurd, “to remain consistent to the end”, is therefore to revolt. But – and this is what makes Camus’ position different – revolt, not revolution. Man as a political animal is not, for Camus, the marxist revolutionary that Jean-Paul Sartre wrote about at the same time. He is the person who, faced with injustice – be it the injustice suffered by the Arabs in Algeria, by the Jews during the Second World War, or by Soviet dissidents – says “no”. He is the man who refuses to kill or to torture, for whatever reason: he is Camus’ révolté.

This, then, is the second literary “cycle” of Camus: the cycle of revolt. It was set in motion by The Plague. In Oran, in the 1940s, rats carrying the plague virus are discovered, and, after the death of the first victims, the inhabitants placed in quarantine and confronted by their fate display many different reactions: panic, indifference, mysticism or resignation. Dr Rieux, who is soon joined by other volunteers, decides to resist: the group becomes organised to relieve suffering and combat the epidemic. In this symbolic allegory, the plague represents evil and death, and quarantine symbolises the limits of existence (“we are on our way”). But this situation, which is in reality the dilemma of every human being, the absurd, acts as an acid test which pits man against himself, pushing him either towards renunciation (suicide, as referred to in The Myth of Sysiphus) or towards revolt – the solution offered by the narrator, and by Camus himself. Things become even clearer: “To live is to keep the absurd alive” (The Myth of Sysiphus): the absurd creates revolt: “I revolt, therefore we are” (The Renbel, 1951).

This revolt, undertaken in the name of man and not on behalf of abstract principles, was a philosophical position which brought Camus into disagreement not only with Jean-Paul Sartre but, thourgh Les temps modernes (Sartre´s review), with all the French literary intelligentsia of the times – a disagreement which has lasted to this day. Rejecting communist revolution which was the essential structure of the western left, Camus was one of the first people to denounce the communist system and Soviet dictatorship. The most grievous blow to his position was, however, the one which originated in his home country, Algeria. With the outbreak of civil war in 1954, Camus was torn between the legitimate aspirations of the Arab and Moslem peoples (whom he had defended in his first newspaper articles for the “Alger Républicain”) and his desire to retain French Algeria. For Albert Camus, the Arabs’ demands were equivocal: however legitimate the denunciations of colonialism, of the contemptuous attitudes of the French, of the unjust land settlement and of the proposed (but never implemented) assimilation, there was as much illegitimacy in the concept of an Algerian nation: Algeria had been the result of successive waves of immigration (Jews, Turks, Greeks, Italians, Berbers, Arabs, and French) and the Arabs were driven by Egyptian-led – and Soviet-backed – imperialism, not by the feeling of belonging to an Algerian nation. Camus refused to choose between the OAS and the FLN, and chose to be on the side of man. Questioned in Stockholm by an Algerian Moslem student about the just nature of the fight for independence despite the terrorist attacks, he replied without hesitation: “I have always condemned terrorism. I must also condemn the terrorism being implemented indiscriminately in the streets of Algiers, for example, and which might one day strike at my mother or at my family. I believe in justice, but I will defend my mother before I defend justice”. He launched an appeal for a civil truce, hoping above all that innocent people might be spared: he was disgusted by the terrorism and gratuitous violence. He only met with insults. From 1958 onwards he chose not to speak about these matters again.

His book The Fall, published in 1956, is a pessimistic and disturbing work in which he breaks definitively with existentialism. The tone is bitter and displays an ironic sceptisism: “Let me tell you a secret. Don’t wait for the Last Judgment. It happens every day.” Camus obtained the Nobel Prize the following year, at the age of 44 – the youngest ever winner apart from Kipling – for “a body of work which sheds light on the problems presented in our times to the conscience of men”.

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