Existentialism and Absurdism - Thou Art Albert Camus - Nobel Laureate

Existentialism and Absurdism – Thou Art Albert Camus – Nobel Laureate

Albert Camus (7 November 1913 – 4 January 1960) was a French author, journalist and key philosopher of the 20th century. 

When we discuss about Albert Camus, his contemporaries like Jean-Paul Sartre and Franz Kafka make a spark through our memory chords.  The trio was the most influential writers of the twentieth century.   Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre are known for existentialism.  Albert Camus’ views contributed to the rise of the philosophy known as absurdism. He wrote in his essay The Rebel that his whole life was devoted to opposing the philosophy of nihilism while still delving deeply into individual freedom.  They together find a prominent place in modern literature and philosophy.

Camus was awarded the 1957 Nobel Prize for Literature "for his important literary production, which with clear-sighted earnestness illuminates the problems of the human conscience in our times".  He was the second-youngest recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, after Rudyard Kipling, and the first African-born writer to receive the award. He is the shortest-lived of any Nobel literature laureate to date, having died in an automobile accident just over two years after receiving the award.

Albert Camus philosophy, quotes and sayings find a prominent place in world history and his doctrines are internationally renowned.

Throughout his life, Camus spoke out against and actively opposed totalitarianism in its many forms.   Early on, Camus was active within the French Resistance to the German occupation of France during World War II, even directing the famous Resistance journal, Combat. On the French collaboration with Nazi occupiers he wrote: "Now the only moral value is courage, which is useful here for judging the puppets and chatterboxes who pretend to speak in the name of the people."  After liberation, Camus remarked, "This country does not need a Talleyrand, but a Saint-Just."   The reality of the bloody postwar tribunals soon changed his mind: Camus publicly reversed himself and became a lifelong opponent of capital punishment.

Biography  -

                                        

Albert Camus was born in Mondovi, Algeria in 1913. His father died one year later, and Camus' mother raised him alone. His mother was impoverished and nearly deaf, so the two of them moved to Camus' grandmother's apartment in the Belcourt section of Algiers, near the Arab Quarter of the city. Camus occupied himself with school and sports, proving to be an excellent student and an admirable competitor. He was tutored by an instructor named Louis Germain at the local school, and in 1923 he passed the lycée entrance exams. He was accepted to the school of philosophy at the University of Algiers, but had to take leave due to a bout with tuberculosis. He recommenced his education in 1930, and financed his time at the university through various odd jobs like working for the Meteorological Institute, selling spare car parts, and private tutoring. He received his diplôme d'études supérieures in 1936, and took his first trip to Europe in the same year under the auspices of improving his health. In 1937 he published his first book, a collection of essays entitled L'Envers et L'endroit.

From 1934 to their divorce in 1936, Camus maintained a short marriage to Simone Hié, the daughter of a wealthy Opthalmologist. Camus joined the Communist Party in 1934, but his relationship with the party was not an easy one, and would remain ambivalent throughout his life. Also during his time at university, from 1935-39 Camus, with a group of young left-wing intellectuals, founded the Théâtre de l'Equipe, or the Workers' Theatre. This group wrote a collective play called Révolte dans les Asturies, which would constitute Camus' first experience of writing for theatre. They also produced plays by Malraux, Synge, Gide and Dostoevski. The theatre company was intended to produce socialist plays specifically for the audience of Algerian workers.

In 1938 Camus became a journalist for an anti-colonialist newspaper called the Alger-Republicain. He reported specifically on the state of the Muslims of the Kabylie region, attracting public notice and finally rousing the Algerian government to take action. Abridged versions of these articles were published again much later in Actuelles III (1958).

Camus left Algiers in 1940 for Paris, hoping to work as a reporter for the leftist press. This same year the German army invaded France, so he returned to North Africa. He found a teaching position in Oran, and was married for his second time to Francine Faure, a mathematics instructor. Camus was a self-proclaimed pacifist, writing openly against war in Europe, and this put him in danger at this time due to the political right's rise in power in both France and Algeria. His stay in Oran was short-lived, as he was "advised" to leave Algeria in March 1940, having been declared a "threat to national security".

Camus' exile began when he traveled back to Paris. He arrived just before the German army had taken Paris and most of Northern France. What was left of the French army had become demoralized and was in a poor position to be able to defend the city. In 1943 Camus joined "Combat," a clandestine resistance cell and newspaper that had been founded in 1942 for underground intelligence and sabotage. Camus carried false papers for traveling in occupied territory and adopted the false identity "Beauchard". He helped by smuggling news of the war to the Parisian public via copies of the Combat paper. He became its editor in 1943, and held this position for four years. His articles often called for action in accordance to strong moral principals, and it was during this period of his life that he formalized his philosophy: that no matter how inexplicable existence might be, human life remains sacred. During the occupation the paper was printed in Lyon, and it moved to Paris after the Liberation in the summer of 1944. The first Paris edition editorial was written by Camus.

During the war, Camus published a number of works which have become associated with his doctrine of the absurd: his idea it is impossible to make rational sense of one's experience, and human life is made meaningless by mortality. He writes: "This heart within me I can feel, and I judge that it exists. This world I can touch, and I likewise judge that it exists. There ends all my knowledge, and the rest is construction." The novel, The Stranger (1942; Eng. trans., 1946), has become the quintessential work of fiction of the 20th century on the theme of the alienated outsider. The Myth of Sysiphysus (1942; Eng. trans., 1955) is an essay dedicated to the absurd. He also published two plays consistent with this theme: Cross Purpose (1944, Eng. trans., 1948) and Caligula (1944, Eng. trans., 1948). Although Camus is attracted to contemporary nihilism in these works, he became increasingly more ambivalent in his philosophy towards absurdism. He was not comfortable with the moral indifference necessarily implied by philosophical absurdism, and his political history and experiences in occupied France led him to search for a way to address moral responsibility. He exercised these thoughts in works like Letters to a German Friend (1945), which is published with a number of other political essays, in Resistance, Rebellion, and Death (1960). Part of what makes Camus different from other existentialists and modern philosophers is his fascination for and acceptance of contradiction. Life may be meaningless for the individual, he writes, "but mankind and its societies are larger than one person."

In 1944 Camus' wife gave birth to twins, Catherine and Jean. By this time Camus had become a leading voice for the French working class and social change, even attempting to form his own socialist party (a project that was never actualized). He had finally rejected Marxism, and had to endure criticism from many communist factions.

In 1949 Camus had a relapse of his tuberculosis, and he locked himself in seclusion to write. When he recovered in 1951 he published L'Homme Révolté (The Rebel), a text on artistic, historical, and metaphysical rebellion, in which he lays out the difference between revolution and revolt. Camus sees revolt as a peaceful, evolutionary process that requires leadership but not violence. He criticizes Hegel's work, accusing it of glorifying power and the state over social morality and ethics, and he accuses Marx of co-opting Hegelian philosophy to allow "any means to an end". Camus prefers Mediterranean humanism, a philosophy grounded in nature and moderation, to the violence and historicism he sees as part and parcel to what he calls the "Absolutist" philosophies. The attacks on Hegel, Marxism and nihilism in The Rebel had a profound effect on Camus' peers. The book was described as intellectual treason by leftist critics, and a review by Francis Jeanson in Les Temps Modernes accused Camus of being a traitor to the left. After Camus attempted to defend himself in a letter to the publication, Jean-Paul Sartre, the editor of Les Temps Modernes at the time, published an open letter in response that tallied 19 pages. The letter included personal attacks, and marked the end of the two philosophers' friendship.

Despite his isolation from the French intellectual elite, Camus remained an active advocate for human right, increasing his political activities throughout the 1950s. He began to write for l'Express daily newspaper in 1955, covering the Algerian war. The violence was escalating in Algeria with the arrival of French troops, and Camus saw no hope in ending it. He pleaded, however, for a "civil" truce, which would spare the civilian population from violence and limit it to fighting between troops and rebels. He managed to organize a debate between Muslims and the Front Français, in a public setting, which went without incident, an achievement that earned him the nick-name in Algiers of "Le Colonisateur de Bonne Volonté" or the Well-Meaning Colonialist. He came back into favor with intellectual circles in 1956 with the publication of his novel The Fall. In 1957 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for his essay Réflexions Sur la Guillotine as an influential work on behalf of human rights.

Throughout his life, Camus continued to work for the theatre, taking on the various roles of actor, director, playwright and translator. The themes of his theatrical work primarily wrest with the human desire for understanding and its conflict with the absurd nature of existence. State of Siege (1948; Eng. trans., 1958) and The Just Assassins (1950; Eng. trans., 1958) are two of his distinctly political plays. He also gained acclaim for his stage adaptations of novels such as William Faulkner's Requiem for a Nun (1956) and Dostoyevsky's The Possessed (1957).

 Throughout the 193-0s, Camus broadened his interests. He read the French classics as well as the writers of the day—among them André Gide, Henry de Montherlant, André Malraux—and was a prominent figure among the young left-wing intellectuals of Algiers. For a short period in 1934–35 he was also a member of the Algerian Communist Party. In addition, he wrote, produced, adapted, and acted for the Théâtre du Travail (Workers’ Theatre, later named the Théâtre de l’Équipe), which aimed to bring outstanding plays to working-class audiences. He maintained a deep love of the theatre until his death. Ironically, his plays are the least-admired part of his literary output, although Le Malentendu (Cross Purpose) and Caligula, first produced in 1944 and 1945, respectively, remain landmarks in the Theatre of the Absurd. Two of his most enduring contributions to the theatre may well be his stage adaptations of William Faulkner’s Requiem for a Nun (Requiem pour une nonne; 1956) and Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed (Les Possédés; 1959).

In the two years before the outbreak of World War II, Camus served his apprenticeship as a journalist with Alger-Républicain in many capacities, including those of leader- (editorial-) writer, subeditor, political reporter, and book reviewer. He reviewed some of Jean-Paul Sartre’s early literary works and wrote an important series of articles analyzing social conditions among the Muslims of the Kabylie region. These articles, reprinted in abridged form in Actuelles III (1958), drew attention (15 years in advance) to many of the injustices that led to the outbreak of the Algerian War in 1954. Camus took his stand on humanitarian rather than ideological grounds and continued to see a future role for France in Algeria while not ignoring colonialist injustices.

He enjoyed the most influence as a journalist during the final years of the occupation of France and the immediate post-Liberation period. As editor of the Parisian daily Combat, the successor of a Resistance newssheet run largely by Camus, he held an independent left-wing position based on the ideals of justice and truth and the belief that all political action must have a solid moral basis. Later, the old-style expediency of both Left and Right brought increasing disillusion, and in 1947 he severed his connection with Combat.

By now Camus had become a leading literary figure. L’Étranger (U.S. title, The Stranger; British title, The Outsider), a brilliant first novel begun before the war and published in 1942, is a study of 20th-century alienation with a portrait of an “outsider” condemned to death less for shooting an Arab than for the fact that he never says more than he genuinely feels and refuses to conform to society’s demands. The same year saw the publication of an influential philosophical essay, Le Mythe de Sisyphe (The Myth of Sisyphus), in which Camus, with considerable sympathy, analyzed contemporary nihilism and a sense of the “absurd.” He was already seeking a way of overcoming nihilism, and his second novel, La Peste (1947; The Plague), is a symbolical account of the fight against an epidemic in Oran by characters whose importance lies less in the (doubtful) success with which they oppose the epidemic than in their determined assertion of human dignity and fraternity. Camus had now moved from his first main concept of the absurd to his other major idea of moral and metaphysical “rebellion.” He contrasted this latter ideal with politico-historical revolution in a second long essay, L’Homme révolté (1951; The Rebel), which provoked bitter antagonism among Marxist critics and such near-Marxist theoreticians as Jean-Paul Sartre. His other major literary works are the technically brilliant novel La Chute (1956) and a collection of short stories, L’Exil et le royaume (1957; Exile and the Kingdom). La Chute reveals a preoccupation with Christian symbolism and contains an ironical and witty exposure of the more complacent forms of secular humanist morality.

In 1957, at the early age of 44, Camus received the Nobel Prize for Literature. With characteristic modesty he declared that had he been a member of the awarding committee his vote would certainly have gone to André Malraux. Less than three years later he was killed in an automobile accident.

Assessment

As novelist and playwright, moralist and political theorist, Albert Camus after World War II became the spokesman of his own generation and the mentor of the next, not only in France but also in Europe and eventually the world. His writings, which addressed themselves mainly to the isolation of man in an alien universe, the estrangement of the individual from himself, the problem of evil, and the pressing finality of death, accurately reflected the alienation and disillusionment of the postwar intellectual. He is remembered, with Sartre, as a leading practitioner of the existential novel. Though he understood the nihilism of many of his contemporaries, Camus also argued the necessity of defending such values as truth, moderation, and justice. In his last works he sketched the outlines of a liberal humanism that rejected the dogmatic aspects of both Christianity and Marxism.

I would like to give below some titles of his famous works  -

a. Fiction

The Stranger (1942) – From its cold opening lines, “Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday; I can’t be sure,” to its bleak concluding image of a public execution set to take place beneath the “benign indifference of the universe,” Camus’ first and most famous novel takes the form of a terse, flat, first-person narrative by its main character Meursault, a very ordinary young man of unremarkable habits and unemotional affect who, inexplicably and in an almost absent-minded way, kills an Arab and then is arrested, tried, convicted, and sentenced to death. The neutral style of the novel – typical of what the critic Roland Barthes called “writing degree zero” – serves as a perfect vehicle for the descriptions and commentary of its anti-hero narrator, the ultimate “outsider” and a person who seems to observe everything, including his own life, with almost pathological detachment.

The Plague (1947) – Set in the coastal town of Oran, Camus’ second novel is the story of an outbreak of plague, traced from its subtle, insidious, unheeded beginnings through its horrible, all-encompassing, and seemingly inescapable dominion to its eventual climax and decline, all told from the viewpoint of one of the survivors. Camus made no effort to conceal the fact that his novel was partly based on and could be interpreted as an allegory or parable of the rise of Nazism and the nightmare of the Occupation. However, the plague metaphor is both more complicated and more flexible than that, extending to signify the Absurd in general as well as any calamity or disaster that tests the mettle of human beings, their endurance, solidarity, sense of responsibility, compassion, and will.  At the end of the novel, the plague finally retreats, and the narrator reflects that a time of pestilence teaches “that there is more to admire in men than to despise.” But he also knows “that the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good,” that “the day would come when, for the bane and the enlightening of men, it would rouse up its rats again” and send them forth yet once more to spread death and contagion into a happy and unsuspecting city.

The Fall (1956) – Camus’ third novel, and the last to be published during his lifetime, is, in effect, an extended dramatic monologue spoken by M. Jean-Baptiste Clamence, a dissipated, cynical, former Parisian attorney (who now calls himself a “judge-penitent”) to an unnamed auditor (and thus indirectly to the reader). Set in a seedy bar amid the night-life of Amsterdam, the work is a small masterpiece of compression and style: a confessional (and semi-autobiographical) novel, an arresting character study and psychological portrait, and at the same time a wide-ranging philosophical discourse on guilt and innocence, expiation and punishment, good and evil.

b. Drama

Caligula (1938, first produced 1945). “Men die and are not happy” – such is the complaint against the universe pronounced by the young emperor Caligula, who in Camus’ play is less the murderous lunatic, slave to incest, narcissist and megalomaniac of Roman history than a theatrical martyr-hero of the Absurd, a man who carries his philosophical quarrel with the meaninglessness of human existence to a kind of fanatical but logical extreme. Camus himself described his hero as a man “obsessed with the impossible” and willing to pervert all values and if necessary destroy himself and all those around him in the pursuit of absolute liberty. Caligula was Camus’ first attempt at portraying a figure in absolute defiance of the Absurd, and through three revisions of the play over a period of several years he eventually achieved a remarkable composite by adding touches of Sade, of revolutionary nihilism, of the Nietzschean Superman, of his own version of Sisyphus, and even of Mussolini and Hitler, to his original portrait.

c. Essays, Letters, Prose Collections, Articles, and Reviews

Betwixt and Between (1937) – This short collection of semi-autobiographical, semi-fictional, philosophical pieces might be dismissed as juvenilia and largely ignored if it were not for the fact that it represents Camus’ first attempt to formulate a coherent life-outlook and world-view. The collection, which in a way serves as a germ or starting point for the author’s later philosophy, consists of five lyrical essays. In “L’Ironie” (“Irony”), a reflection on youth and age, Camus asserts, in the manner of a young disciple of Pascal, our essential solitariness in life and death. In “Entre Oui et Non” (“Between yes and no”) he suggests that to hope is as empty and as pointless as to despair. Yet he goes beyond nihilism by positing a fundamental value to existence-in-the-world. In “La Mort dans l’ame” (Death in the soul”) he supplies a sort of existential travel review, contrasting his impressions of central and eastern Europe (which he views as purgatorial and morgue-like) with the more spontaneous life of Italy and Mediterranean culture. The piece thus affirms the author’s lifelong preference for the color and vitality of the Mediterranean world, and especially North Africa, as opposed to what he perceives as the soulless cold-heartedness of modern Europe. In “Amour de vivre” (“Love of life”) he claims there can be no love of life without despair of life and thus largely re-asserts the essentially tragic, ancient Greek view that the very beauty of human existence is largely contingent upon its brevity and fragility. The concluding essay, “L’Envers et l’endroit” (“Betwixt and between”), summarizes and re-emphasizes the basically Romantic themes of the collection as a whole: our fundamental “aloneness,” the importance of imagination and openness to experience, the imperative to “live as if . . . .”

Noces (Nuptials) (1938) – This collection of four rhapsodic narratives supplements and amplifies the youthful philosophy expressed in Betwixt and Between. That joy is necessarily intertwined with despair, that the shortness of life confers a premium on intense experience, and that the world is both beautiful and violent – these are once again Camus’ principal themes. “Summer in Algiers,” which is probably the best (and best-known) of the essays in the collection, is a lyrical, at times almost ecstatic, celebration of sea, sun, and the North African landscape. Affirming a defiantly atheistic creed, Camus concludes with one of the core ideas of his philosophy: “if there is a sin against life, it consists not so much in despairing as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this one.”

The Myth of Sisyphus (1943) – If there is a single non-fiction work that can be considered an essential or fundamental statement of Camus’ philosophy, it is this extended essay on the ethics of suicide (eventually translated and repackaged for American publication in 1955). For it is here that Camus formally introduces and fully articulates his most famous idea, the concept of the Absurd, and his equally famous image of life as a Sisyphean struggle. From its provocative opening sentence (“There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide”) to its stirring, paradoxical conclusion (“The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy”), the book has something interesting and challenging on nearly every page and is shot through with brilliant aphorisms and insights. In the end, Camus rejects suicide: the Absurd must not be evaded either by religion (“philosophical suicide”) or by annihilation (“physical suicide”); the task of living should not merely be accepted, it must be embraced.

The Rebel (1951) – Camus considered this work a continuation of the critical and philosophical investigation of the Absurd that he began with The Myth of Sisyphus. Only this time his concern is not the ethics of suicide, but the problem of murder. After introducing the view that an authentic life inevitably involves some form of conscientious moral revolt, he ends up arguing that only in rare, and in very narrowly defined, instances can political violence be morally justified. Camus’ critique of revolutionary violence and terror in this work, and particularly his caustic assessment of Marxism-Leninism (which he accused of sacrificing innocent lives on the altar of History), touched nerves throughout Europe and led to his celebrated feud with Sartre and other French leftists.

Resistance, Rebellion, and Death (1957) – This posthumous collection is of interest to students of Camus mainly because it brings together an unusual assortment of his non-fiction writings on a wide range of topics, from art and politics to the advantages of pessimism and the virtues (from a non-believer’s standpoint) of Christianity. Of special interest are two pieces that helped secure Camus’ worldwide reputation as a voice of liberty: “Letters to a German Friend” (a set of four letters originally written during the Nazi Occupation) and “Reflections on the Guillotine” (a denunciation of the death penalty cited for special mention by the Nobel committee and eventually revised and re-published as a companion essay to go with fellow death-penalty opponent Arthur Koestler’s “Reflections on Hanging”).

Philosophy

“More a writer than a philosopher.”

(Assessment penciled on Camus’ dissertation by his dissertation adviser.)

To re-emphasize a point made earlier, Camus considered himself first and foremost a writer (un ecrivain). And at various times in his career he also accepted the labels journalist, humanist, novelist, and even moralist. However, he apparently never felt comfortable identifying himself as a philosopher – a term he seems to have associated with rigorous academic training, systematic thinking, logical consistency, and a coherent, carefully defined doctrine or body of ideas.

This is not to suggest that Camus lacked ideas or to say that his thought cannot be considered a personal philosophy. It is simply to point out that he was not a systematic, or even a notably disciplined, thinker and that, unlike Heidegger and Sartre, for example, he showed very little interest in metaphysics and ontology (which seems to be one of the reasons he consistently denied that he was an existentialist). In short, he was not much given to speculative philosophy or any kind of abstract theorizing. His thought is instead nearly always related to current events (e.g., the Spanish War, revolt in Algeria) and is consistently grounded in down-to-earth moral and political reality.

 

 

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. These recurrent topoi constitute the key components of his thought. They include themes like the Absurd, alienation, suicide, and rebellion that almost automatically come to mind whenever his name is mentioned. Hence any summary of his place in modern philosophy would be incomplete without at least a brief discussion of these ideas and how they fit together to form a distinctive and original world-view. 

 

                                       

                         

The Absurd -

Even readers not closely acquainted with Camus’ works are aware of his reputation as the philosophical expositor, anatomist, and poet-apostle of the absurd. Indeed as even sit-com writers and stand-up comics apparently understand (odd fact: Camus has been used to explain episodes of Seinfeld and The Simpsons), it is largely through the thought and writings of the French-Algerian author that the concept of absurdity has become a part not only of world literature and twentieth-century philosophy, but of modern popular culture as well.

What then is meant by the notion of the absurd? Contrary to the view conveyed by popular culture, the absurd, (at least in Camus’ terms) does not simply refer to some vague perception that modern life is fraught with paradoxes, incongruities, and intellectual confusion. Instead, as he himself emphasizes and tries to make clear, the absurd expresses a fundamental disharmony, a tragic incompatibility, in our existence. In effect, he argues that the absurd is the product of a collision or confrontation between our human desire for order, meaning, and purpose in life and the blank, indifferent “silence of the universe.” (“The absurd is not in man nor in the world,” Camus explains, “but in their presence together it is the only bond uniting them.”)

So here we are: poor creatures desperately seeking hope and meaning in a hopeless, meaningless world. Sartre, in his essay-review of The Stranger provides an additional gloss on the idea: “The absurd, to be sure, resides neither in man nor in the world, if you consider each separately. But since man’s dominant characteristic is ‘being in the world,’ the absurd is, in the end, an inseparable part of the human condition.” The absurd, then, presents itself in the form of an existential opposition. It arises from the human demand for clarity and transcendence on the one hand and a cosmos that offers nothing of the kind on the other. Such is our fate: we inhabit a world that is indifferent to our sufferings and deaf to our protests.

In Camus’ view there are three possible philosophical responses to this predicament. Two of these he condemns as evasions; the other he puts forward as a proper solution.

Our first choice is blunt and simple: physical suicide. If we decide that a life without some essential purpose or meaning is not worth living, we can simply choose to kill ourselves. Camus rejects this choice as cowardly. In his terms it is a repudiation or renunciation of life, not a true revolt.

Choice two is the religious solution of positing a transcendent world of solace and meaning beyond the Absurd. Camus calls this solution “philosophical suicide” and rejects it as transparently evasive and fraudulent. To adopt a supernatural solution to the problem of the absurd (for example, through some type of mysticism or leap of faith) is to annihilate reason, which in Camus’ view is as fatal and self-destructive as physical suicide. In effect, instead of removing himself from the absurd confrontation of self and world like the physical suicide, the religious believer simply removes the offending world, replacing it, via a kind of metaphysical abracadabra, with a more agreeable alternative.

Choice three (in Camus’ view the only authentic and valid solution) is simply to accept absurdity, or better yet to embrace it, and to continue living. Since the absurd in his view is an unavoidable, indeed defining, characteristic of the human condition, the only proper response to it is full, unflinching, courageous acceptance. Life, he says, can “be lived all the better if it has no meaning.”

The example par excellence of this option of spiritual courage and metaphysical revolt is the mythical Sisyphus of Camus’ philosophical essay. Doomed to eternal labor at his rock, fully conscious of the essential hopelessness of his plight, Sisyphus nevertheless pushes on. In doing so he becomes for Camus a superb icon of the spirit of revolt and of the human condition. To rise each day to fight a battle you know you cannot win, and to do this with wit, grace, compassion for others, and even a sense of mission, is to face the Absurd in a spirit of true heroism.

Over the course of his career, Camus examines the Absurd from multiple perspectives and through the eyes of many different characters – from the mad Caligula, who is obsessed with the problem, to the strangely aloof and yet simultaneously self-absorbed Mersault, who seems indifferent to it even as he exemplifies and is finally victimized by it. In The Myth of Sisyphus Camus traces it in specific characters of legend and literature (Don Juan, Ivan Karamazov) and also in certain character types (the Actor, the Conqueror), all of whom may be understood as in some way a version or manifestation of Sisyphus, the archetypal absurd hero.

Guilt and Innocence

Throughout his writing career, Camus showed a deep interest in questions of guilt and innocence. Once again Mersault in The Stranger provides a striking example. Is he legally innocent of the murder he is charged with? Or is he technically guilty? On the one hand, there seems to have been no conscious intention behind his action. Indeed the killing takes place almost as if by accident, with Mersault in a kind of absent-minded daze, distracted by the sun. From this point of view, his crime seems surreal and his trial and subsequent conviction a travesty. On the other hand, it is hard for the reader not to share the view of other characters in the novel, especially Mersault’s accusers, witnesses, and jury, in whose eyes he seems to be a seriously defective human being – a kind of hollow man at best; at worst a monster of self-centeredness and insularity. That the character has evoked such a wide range of responses from critics and readers – from sympathy to horror – is a tribute to the psychological complexity and subtlety of Camus’ portrait.

Camus’ brilliantly crafted final novel, The Fall, continues his keen interest in the theme of guilt, this time via a narrator who is virtually obsessed with it. The significantly named Jean-Baptiste Clamence (a voice in the wilderness calling for universal clemency and forgiveness) is tortured by guilt in the wake of a seemingly casual incident. While strolling home one drizzly November evening, he shows little concern and almost no emotional reaction at all to the suicidal plunge of a young woman into the Seine. But afterwards the incident begins to gnaw at him, and eventually he comes to view his inaction as typical of a long pattern of personal vanity and as a colossal failure of human sympathy on his part. Wracked by remorse and self-loathing, he gradually descends into a figurative hell. Formerly an attorney, he is now a self-described “judge-penitent” (a combination sinner, tempter, prosecutor, and father-confessor), who shows up each night at his local haunt, a sailor’s bar near Amsterdam’s red light district, where, somewhat in the manner of Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, he recounts his story to whoever will hear it. In the final sections of the novel, amid distinctly Christian imagery and symbolism, he declares his crucial insight that, despite our pretensions to righteousness, everyone is guilty. Hence no human being has the right to pass final moral judgment on another.

In a final twist, Clamence asserts that his acid self-portrait is also a mirror for his contemporaries. Hence his confession is also an accusation – not only of his nameless companion (who serves as the mute auditor for his monologue) but ultimately of the hypocrite lecteur as well.

 

Existentialism

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) a 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.

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. For one thing, it is noteworthy that he never showed much interest in (indeed he largely avoided) metaphysical and ontological questions (the philosophical raison d’etre and bread and butter of Heidegger and Sartre). Of course there is no rule that says an existentialist must be a metaphysician. However, Camus’ seeming aversion to technical philosophical discussion does suggest one way in which he distanced himself from contemporary existentialist thought.

Works

Novels

* The Stranger (L'Étranger, often translated as The Outsider) (1942) 

* The Plague (La Peste) (1947) 

* The Fall (La Chute) (1956) 

* A Happy Death (La Mort heureuse) (written 1936–1938, published posthumously 1971) 

* The First Man (Le premier homme) (incomplete, published posthumously 1995)

Short stories

* Exile and the Kingdom (L'exil et le royaume) (collection) (1957) 

"The Adulterous Woman" ("La Femme adultère")  

"The Renegade or a Confused Spirit" ("Le Renégat ou un esprit confus") 

"The Silent Men" ("Les Muets") 

"The Guest" ("L'Hôte") 

"Jonas or the Artist at Work" ("Jonas ou l’artiste au travail") 

"The Growing Stone" ("La Pierre qui pousse")

Non-fiction books

* Christian Metaphysics and Neoplatonism (1935) 

* Betwixt and Between (L'envers et l'endroit, also translated as The Wrong Side and the Right Side) (Collection, 1937) * Nuptials (Noces) (1938) 

* The Myth of Sisyphus (Le Mythe de Sisyphe) (1942) 

* The Rebel (L'Homme révolté) (1951) 

* Notebooks 1935–1942 (Carnets, mai 1935 — fevrier 1942) (1962) 

* Notebooks 1943–1951 (1965) * Notebooks 1951–1959 (2008) Published as "Carnets Tome III : Mars 1951 – December 1959" (1989)

Plays

* Caligula (performed 1945, written 1938) 

* Requiem for a Nun (Requiem pour une nonne, adapted from William Faulkner's novel by the same name) (1956) 

* The Misunderstanding (Le Malentendu) (1944) 

* The State of Siege (L' Etat de Siege) (1948) 

* The Just Assassins (Les Justes) (1949) 

* The Possessed (Les Possédés, adapted from Fyodor Dostoyevsky's novel by the same name) (1959)

Essays

* Create Dangerously (Essay on Realism and Artistic Creation) (1957) 

* The Ancient Greek Tragedy (Parnassos lecture in Greece) (1956) 

* The Crisis of Man (Lecture at Columbia University) (1946) 

* Why Spain? (Essay for the theatrical play L' Etat de Siege) (1948) 

* Reflections on the Guillotine (Réflexions sur la guillotine) (Extended essay, 1957) 

* Neither Victims Nor Executioners (Combat) (1946)

Collected essays

* Resistance, Rebellion, and Death (1961) – a collection of essays selected by the author. 

* Lyrical and Critical Essays (1970) 

* Youthful Writings (1976) 

* Between Hell and Reason: Essays from the Resistance Newspaper "Combat", 1944–1947 (1991) 

* Camus at "Combat": Writing 1944–1947 (2005)

Albert Camus one of the most influential writers of twentieth century stands tall like a skyscraper touching the sky.  The Nobel Prize winning author, playwright and philosopher was considered one of the prime pillars of modern literature.  From adolescent years I was exposed to Jean-Paul Sartre, Franz Kafka and of course Albert Camus through the universal literary analysis in my mother tongue. The essays which merits critical acclaim was always a sumptuous dish on a silver platter.

Let us live our life full throttle and not just exist in this world.

It gives me immense satisfaction having found a place for Albert Camus in JOHNNY’S BLOG.