Francine reunited with her husband in Paris after the German defeat. The Plague was published, to great acclaim, in , two years after the birth of the Camus twins, Jean and Catherine, in Paris.
It was only after his death that she began to understand his significance to the world. The bronze statue of an Algerian freedom fighter stands at the base of each giant frond. This colossus commemorates the conflict that erupted here on November 1, , when National Liberation Front FLN guerrillas carried out attacks on gendarmeries. Nearby I visit the Military Museum, which traces the conflict through blood-curdling dioramas of ambushes by mujahedin and torture chambers run by the French military.
As the war escalated, he looked on with horror at attacks against civilians by French ultranationalists and the army. The visit was a humiliating failure. The two sides had passed the point of reconciliation, and even supposedly neutral Algerian leaders who escorted Camus to meetings were working secretly for the FLN. Camus continued to seek a middle path. He intervened with French authorities to save the lives of dozens of condemned mujahedin, but refused to support the armed struggle.
If that is justice, then I prefer my mother. Eventually, Camus stopped commenting altogether on the war, a retreat that some equated with cowardice, but that Camus justified, saying that any comment he made would inflame one side or the other. A million pieds-noirs fled to France; others were massacred in Oran and other Algerian cities, while still others disappeared.
Outside the former Barberousse prison, next to the Casbah, I studied a stone tablet that listed, in Arabic, the names of hundreds of fighters executed on the guillotine by the French occupiers. Kaplan says that Camus was simply a product of his time, and the deeply segregated society from which he came.
Yet it took Todd decades to warm up to him. Who does he think he is? His clothes were much too loud, and he was aggressive with me. He defended the pieds-noirs too much. For Kaplan and other admirers, Camus was, above all, a humanist, who believed in the sanctity of life, the folly of killing for an ideology and the urgency of peaceful coexistence.
It is angry, acrimonious, confronting the worst things you know about yourself. Clad in a gaudy military uniform bedecked with ribbons and decorations, the character Plague a satirical portrait of Generalissimo Francisco Franco—or El Caudillo as he liked to style himself is closely attended by his personal Secretary and loyal assistant Death, depicted as a prim, officious female bureaucrat who also favors military garb and who carries an ever-present clipboard and notebook.
So Plague is a fascist dictator, and Death a solicitous commissar. Together these figures represent a system of pervasive control and micro-management that threatens the future of mass society. In his reflections on this theme of post-industrial dehumanization, Camus differs from most other European writers and especially from those on the Left in viewing mass reform and revolutionary movements, including Marxism, as representing at least as great a threat to individual freedom as late-stage capitalism.
Throughout his career he continued to cherish and defend old-fashioned virtues like personal courage and honor that other Left-wing intellectuals tended to view as reactionary or bourgeois. In Caligula the mad title character, in a fit of horror and revulsion at the meaninglessness of life, would rather die—and bring the world down with him—than accept a cosmos that is indifferent to human fate or that will not submit to his individual will. Like Wittgenstein who had a family history of suicide and suffered from bouts of depression , Camus considered suicide the fundamental issue for moral philosophy.
However, unlike other philosophers who have written on the subject from Cicero and Seneca to Montaigne and Schopenhauer , Camus seems uninterested in assessing the traditional motives and justifications for suicide for instance, to avoid a long, painful, and debilitating illness or as a response to personal tragedy or scandal.
Indeed, he seems interested in the problem only to the extent that it represents one possible response to the Absurd. Executions by guillotine were a common public spectacle in Algeria during his lifetime, but he refused to attend them and recoiled bitterly at their very mention.
Condemnation of capital punishment is both explicit and implicit in his writings. The grim rationality of this process of legalized murder contrasts markedly with the sudden, irrational, almost accidental nature of his actual crime. Similarly, in The Myth of Sisyphus , the would-be suicide is contrasted with his fatal opposite, the man condemned to death, and we are continually reminded that a sentence of death is our common fate in an absurd universe.
Like Victor Hugo, his great predecessor on this issue, he views the death penalty as an egregious barbarism—an act of blood riot and vengeance covered over with a thin veneer of law and civility to make it acceptable to modern sensibilities. That it is also an act of vengeance aimed primarily at the poor and oppressed, and that it is given religious sanction, makes it even more hideous and indefensible in his view. To all who argue that murder must be punished in kind, Camus replies:.
For there to be an equivalency, the death penalty would have to punish a criminal who had warned his victim of the date on which he would inflict a horrible death on him and who, from that moment onward, had confined him at his mercy for months. Such a monster is not to be encountered in private life. Camus concludes his essay by arguing that, at the very least, France should abolish the savage spectacle of the guillotine and replace it with a more humane procedure such as lethal injection.
Camus is often classified as an existentialist writer, and it is easy to see why. Affinities with Kierkegaard and Sartre are patent. He shares with these philosophers and with the other major writers in the existentialist tradition, from Augustine and Pascal to Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche an habitual and intense interest in the active human psyche, in the life of conscience or spirit as it is actually experienced and lived.
Like these writers, he aims at nothing less than a thorough, candid exegesis of the human condition, and like them he exhibits not just a philosophical attraction but also a personal commitment to such values as individualism, free choice, inner strength, authenticity, personal responsibility, and self-determination. However, one troublesome fact remains: throughout his career Camus repeatedly denied that he was an existentialist. Was this an accurate and honest self-assessment? In their view, Camus qualifies as, at minimum, a closet existentialist, and in certain respects e.
On the other hand, besides his personal rejection of the label, there appear to be solid reasons for challenging the claim that Camus is an existentialist.
Of course there is no rule that says an existentialist must be a metaphysician. Another point of divergence is that Camus seems to have regarded existentialism as a complete and systematic world-view, that is, a fully articulated doctrine.
In his view, to be a true existentialist one had to commit to the entire doctrine and not merely to bits and pieces of it , and this was apparently something he was unwilling to do. A further point of separation, and possibly a decisive one, is that Camus actively challenged and set himself apart from the existentialist motto that being precedes essence.
Ultimately, against Sartre in particular and existentialists in general, he clings to his instinctive belief in a common human nature. In his view human existence necessarily includes an essential core element of dignity and value, and in this respect he seems surprisingly closer to the humanist tradition from Aristotle to Kant than to the modern tradition of skepticism and relativism from Nietzsche to Derrida the latter his fellow-countryman and, at least in his commitment to human rights and opposition to the death penalty, his spiritual successor and descendant.
The first thing that can be noted in this respect is that, unlike Sartre and many other European intellectuals, Camus never delivered a formal critique of colonialism.
Nor did he sign any of the frequent manifestos and declarations deploring the practice — a sin for which he was sharply criticized and even accused of moral cowardice.
In addition to his perceived silence on the issue of colonialism a silence, as Algerian Chronicles reveals, motivated by his fear that speaking out aggressively would be more likely to heighten tensions than secure the united and independent post-colonial Algeria he hoped for , Camus has also been criticized for the virtual erasure of Arab characters and culture from his fiction.
Moreover, the few Arab characters who do appear, these critics point out, are inevitably mute and anonymous. They are either shadow figures, including the nameless murder victim at the climactic center of The Stranger , or mere bodies, like the uncounted and unidentified native Algerians who presumably make up the major part of the death toll in The Plague but who otherwise have no speaking role or even visible presence in the novel.
Along this same line of criticism, The Meursault Investigation is a fictional and metafictional riposte to Camus by the Algerian writer Kamel Daoud. A reimagining of the characters and events of The Stranger , told from the point of view of the brother of the murdered Arab, the novel represents both a corrective rebuke and a literary tribute to it famous original.
He truly lived his philosophy; thus it is in his personal political stands and public statements as well as in his books that his views are clearly articulated. In short, he bequeathed not just his words but also his actions. The result is something like a cross between Hemingway a Camus favorite and Melville another favorite or between Diderot and Hugo.
For the most part when we read Camus we encounter the plain syntax, simple vocabulary, and biting aphorism typical of modern theatre or noir detective fiction. This muted, laconic style frequently becomes a counterpoint or springboard for extended musings and lavish descriptions almost in the manner of Proust. Moreover, this base style frequently becomes a counterpoint or springboard for extended musings and lavish descriptions almost in the manner of Proust. It says, in effect, that the life of reason and the life of feeling need not be opposed; that intellect and passion can, and should, operate together.
Perhaps the greatest inspiration and example that Camus provides for contemporary readers is the lesson that it is still possible for a serious thinker to face the modern world with a full understanding of its contradictions, injustices, brutal flaws, and absurdities with hardly a grain of hope, yet utterly without cynicism. To read Camus is to find words like justice, freedom, humanity, and dignity used plainly and openly, without apology or embarrassment, and without the pained or derisive facial expressions or invisible quotation marks that almost automatically accompany those terms in public discourse today.
David Simpson Email: dsimpson depaul. Albert Camus — Albert Camus was a French-Algerian journalist, playwright, novelist, philosophical essayist, and Nobel laureate. Yet, as he indicated in his acceptance speech at Stockholm, he considered his own career as still in mid-flight, with much yet to accomplish and even greater writing challenges ahead: Every person, and assuredly every artist, wants to be recognized.
Camus, Philosophical Literature, and the Novel of Ideas To pin down exactly why and in what distinctive sense Camus may be termed a philosophical writer, we can begin by comparing him with other authors who have merited the designation. Drama Camus began his literary career as a playwright and theatre director and was planning new dramatic works for film, stage, and television at the time of his death.
Philosophy To re-emphasize a point made earlier, Camus considered himself first and foremost a writer un ecrivain. Background and Influences Though he was baptized, raised, and educated as a Catholic and invariably respectful towards the Church, Camus seems to have been a natural-born pagan who showed almost no instinct whatsoever for belief in the supernatural.
Themes and Ideas Regardless of whether he is producing drama, fiction, or non-fiction, Camus in his mature writings nearly always takes up and re-explores the same basic philosophical issues. Guilt and Innocence Throughout his writing career, Camus showed a deep interest in questions of guilt and innocence. Christianity vs. Individual vs. History and Mass Culture A primary theme of early twentieth-century European literature and critical thought is the rise of modern mass civilization and its suffocating effects of alienation and dehumanization.
Existentialism Camus is often classified as an existentialist writer, and it is easy to see why. References and Further Reading a. Works by Albert Camus The Stranger.
Stuart Gilbert. New York: Vintage-Random House, The Plague. New York: Vintage-International, The Fall. The Myth of Sisyphus and other Essays. A philosophical meditation on suicide originally published as Le Mythe de Sisyphe by Librairie Gallimard in The Rebel. Anthony Bower. Exile and the Kingdom. Lyrical and Critical Essays. Philip Thody. Ellen Conroy Kennedy.
A selection of critical writings, including essays on Melville, Faulkner, and Sartre, plus all the early essays from Betwixt and Between and Nuptials. Resistance, Rebellion, and Death. New York: Vintage International, A collection of essays on a wide variety of political topics ranging from the death penalty to the Cold War. Caligula and Three Other Plays. The First Man. David Hapgood. If we see to it that that voice remains one of vigor, rather than hatred, of proud objectivity and not rhetoric, of humanity rather than mediocrity, then much will be saved from ruin.
Responsibility, care, gradualness, humanity—even at a time of jubilation, these are the typical words of Camus, and they were not the usual words of French political rhetoric. The enemy was not this side or that one; it was the abstraction of rhetoric itself. Intoxication and joy were the last things that Camus thought freedom should bring. His watchwords were anxiety and responsibility. It was in the forties that Camus became intimate with Sartre.
For the next decade, French intellectual life was dominated by their double act. They were performers with vision, who played on the stage of history. The Resistance actually had a theatre committee. Camus came into the theatre and found Sartre asleep in an orchestra seat.
The wisecrack bugged Sartre more than he first let on, as such jokes will among writers. To some, this may seem like not much of an accomplishment—they may feel rather as a parent feels when a child has, over breakfast, reconciled Lucky Charms and Froot Loops in one bowl—but at the time it seemed life-giving. He did. Sartre was a straight-out fellow-traveller with the P.
It turned out that, like a good Frenchman, he was merely planning a squab casserole. He who dedicates himself to the duration of his life, to the house he builds, to the dignity of mankind, dedicates himself to the earth and reaps from it the harvest that sows its seed and sustains the world again and again.
Finally, it is those who know how to rebel, at the appropriate moment, against history who really advance its interests. In English, this can come across as merely sonorous. In France in , the real meaning was barbed and apparent: only a moral idiot would give his allegiance to the Communist Party in the name of the coming revolution. There is no difference between dying in a Soviet camp and dying in a Nazi camp.
We should be neither executioners nor victims; it is madness to sacrifice human lives today in the pursuit of a utopian future. This position was rightly praised for its truth and oddly praised for its courage. After all, opposition to both Fascism and Stalinism was exactly the position of every democratic government in North America and Western Europe. Well, it was courageous, we say, because, though common people and politicians were wiser, intellectuals in France believed the opposite.
This is not false, but there is a subtler point at play. It is in the nature of intellectual life—and part of its value—to gravitate toward the extreme alternative position, since that is usually the one most in need of articulation.
Harvard and Yale pay some of their professors to tell the students that everything they believe is a bourgeois illusion, as the Koch brothers pay their foundation staff to say that all bourgeois illusions are real, and the fact that neither is entirely true does not alter the need to pay people to say it. It was later edited and republished in Nobel Lectures. To cite this document, always state the source as shown above. Albert Camus died on January 4,
0コメント