Emmanuelle Anne Vanborre (Eds.) - The Originality and Complexity of Albert Camus's Writings

The Originality and Complexity
of Albert Camus’s Writings

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The Originality and Complexity
of Albert Camus’s Writings
Edited by Emmanuelle Anne Vanborre

the originality and complexity of albert camus’s writings
Copyright © Emmanuelle Anne Vanborre, 2012.
Reprint of the original edition 2012
All rights reserved.
First published in 2012 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—

a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe, and the rest of the world, this
is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered
in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire
RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and
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Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the
United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.
ISBN 978-1-349-44669-8 ISBN 978-1-137-30947-1
DOI 10.1057/9781137309471
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of Congress.
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
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First edition: October 2012
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Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Editor’s Introduction 1
Part 1: Literary Considerations
1 Camus, the Nouveau Roman, and the Postmodern 7
Edmund J. Smyth
2 The Complexity and Modernity of The Plague 19
Aurélie Palud
3 Albert Camus’s The Fall: The Vertiginous Fall into Language,
Representation, and Reality 35
Emmanuelle Anne Vanborre
Part 2: Philosophical and Political Reflections
4 Camus’s Unbeknownst Legacy: Or, “I’m Having an
Existential Crisis!” Don’t You Really Mean a Camusian Crisis? 53
Michael Y. Bennett
5 Sisyphean (Out)rage and the Refusal to Mourn 63
Matthew H. Bowker
6 Albert Camus’s Warring Twentieth Century:
From His Ancestral Spain to His Mediterranean Utopias 79
Araceli Hernández-Laroche
Part 3: Evolution and Influences
7 Prison, Plague, and Piety: Medieval Dystopia in
Albert Camus’s The Plague 95
Jennifer Stafford Brown
8 Summer by Albert Camus: The Essay in the Mirror of Fiction 111
Mamadou Abdoulaye Ly
Translated by Emmanuelle Anne Vanborre
vi
9 Affliction, Revolt, and Love: A Conversation between

Camus and Weil 125
Sophie Bourgault
10 Tormented Shade: Camus’s Dostoevsky 143
Thomas Epstein
Bibliography 161
Notes on Contributors 169
Index 173
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Gordon College, the Faculty Development Committee

and the administration for granting me a sabbatical semester that allowed me to
finish working on this volume in a timely manner. I thank my colleagues and
friends at Gordon College and elsewhere for their support and kindness, and I
am grateful to my research assistant Rebecca Wolseley. I thank all the contribu-
tors to this volume for the rich exchanges we had, as well as other colleagues
who could not participate but expressed interest and support for this project.
Finally, I would like to thank my loved ones who encourage me as I pursue my
passion for literature.
Editor’s Introduction
T
his volume was thought of as a sort of homage to Albert Camus after
chairing a very interesting panel on the topic. Much has been said and
written about Camus. Some criticized his writings, philosophy, or polit-
ical choices, and others admired his works and contributions to literature and
intellectual debates. We find immense value in Camus’s legacy. The beauty and
interest of Camus’s work lies for us in its complexity and originality. It still fas-
cinates some of us today with its richness and the questions it raises. Instead of
giving lessons and expressing pessimism about human existence, Camus always
valued human liberty and justice, and offered us in many of his articles, dis-
courses, and fictions a deep and tolerant way of analyzing issues, making deci-
sions, and reading the world.
Camus’s profile is atypical. He was born and raised in Algeria, was consid-
ered one of France’s most important intellectuals, and although he took part
in Parisian literary circles as well as in the political debates of the time, he
felt excluded and misunderstood. Camus was born in Mondovi, Algeria on
November 17, 1913. Albert Camus only lived with his father, an agricultural
worker, for eight months before he died in 1914 during World War I. His
mother was illiterate and poor, and Camus grew up in modest conditions. He
obtained a scholarship and went to the public high school in Algiers. He then
studied philosophy at the University of Algiers. He contracted tuberculosis in
1930 and was forced to stop playing soccer and study less. After he obtained his
degree from the university and held several jobs in Algiers, he moved to France
in 1938. His literary reputation had already started and was growing when
he left Algeria. During World War II, Camus was very active in the resistance
movement. He cofounded and edited the newspaper Combat.1
Camus sometimes felt excluded because of his background: he did not
belong to the social elite and did not go to the famous Parisian schools. He also
felt misunderstood when he took a stance against communism and when he
later expressed his opinions on the issue that was dividing French thinkers: the
independence of Algeria. Camus criticized and left the communist party he had
joined earlier, which lead to a growing disagreement with some intellectuals he
2 ● The Originality and Complexity of Albert Camus’s Writings
had been working with. He felt that he could not accept a party or ideology that
produced the gulags; for him Marxism and totalitarianism were not possible
solutions. His relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre was tainted when he left the
party and the drift became obvious and public when Francis Jeanson’s review
of Camus’s The Rebel came out. Correspondence followed between Camus and
Sartre and their disagreement created a distance between them. Sartre did not
want to compromise and could not envision any other ideology than com-
munism. He criticized anyone who was not in agreement with him. Later, he
defended the drastic actions of the FLN (Front de Libération Nationale) in Alge-
ria while Camus was more cautious and did not condone violence and terror-
ism. Camus also felt divided between his homeland, Algeria, and his family
and French origins. After trying to find middle-ground solutions, he decided
to remain silent. Camus belonged to both worlds in a way, which contributed
to his feelings of not entirely belonging to one community. We may agree or
disagree with Camus’s political positions, but we have to admit that he always
showed or at least tried to show respect and tolerance for the opposite side,
unlike other thinkers, extremist or not.
Camus’s career was cut short when he died on January 4, 1960, in a car
accident, but his production was rich. Many tried to label Camus as an exis-
tentialist, philosopher, moralist, and so on, but none of these labels fit. Either
he was not a part of these movements or he was more than what a label could
contain. He was not engaged in the literary Sartrian sense of the word, but he
was definitely engaged in his art and in the world he lived in. His literary legacy
has an immense value today as it offers us reflections on the other, on death,
existence, human respect, justice, freedom, and other values without giving us
any lessons. He is famous for several essays and fictional works, such as The
Two Sides of the Coin (1937), Caligula (1938), Nuptials (1939), The Myth of
Sisyphus (1942), The Misunderstanding (1942), The Rebel (1951), The Stranger
(1942), The Plague (1947), The Fall (1956), and Exile and the Kingdom (1957).
He also left several notebooks, which were published after his death, as well as
an unfinished manuscript that contains biographical information, which was
posthumously published as The First Man in 1994. Camus was called a moral-
ist, a label that he disliked, but was never moralizing; he always transmitted
some of his reflections modestly without pretending to know the absolute truth.
The discourses he pronounced when he received the Nobel Prize are clear testi-
monies to his modest ideas of what his role, the role of art, and the role of the
writer in general is or should be. Camus was in a constant state of search, in
a constant tension between revolt and freedom. This is part of the reason why
we can apply some of his reflections to our analysis of the world today. Camus
seems to guide us without directing us strictly; his fictions do not offer clear-cut
solutions or doctrines to follow. They offer us coexisting ideas and principles by
Editor’s Introduction ● 3
which we can read and understand the other and ourselves. This is why Camus
is still fascinating for us today. We can and should read, and again reread, his
writings to think and rethink our values, principles, and also our ways of look-
ing at literature, life and people.
The different essays in this volume shed light on some of Camus’s works;
their richness, originality, and complexity; and their relevance today. The
first part is devoted to “literary considerations.” In his essay, Edmund Smyth
explores the relationship between Albert Camus and the nouveau roman and the
postmodern enterprise. It is proposed that Camus was influential in changing
the intellectual and cultural landscape, thus leading to the new aesthetics and
poetics of late twentieth-century French literature. In the second essay, Aurélie
Palud offers a postmodern reading of The Plague to reveal that its meaning can-
not be reduced to the allegory of Nazism and that the narrative is characterized
by hybridity, polysemy, and ambiguity. The article concludes in showing that
the novel depicts, in a visionary manner, our contemporary way of life, and
tackles philosophical and literary questions that have mostly been raised in the
1980s. The last article in this part deals with The Fall, the last book Camus fin-
ished and published before his death, and demonstrates how this text bequeaths
the reader with essential comments and raises crucial questions on how to read
a text, a literary text, and how to read others and reality. This essay argues that
at that point in his career, Camus wrote a text that does not allow us to stop
the reading and the meaning in an absolute way, but that rather opens literary
possibilities staging the literary act itself and the double aspect of individuals
and reality.
The second part, “Philosophical and Political Reflections,” offers new per-
spectives on the philosophical aspects of Camus’s work. The first essay, written
by Michael Bennett, brings Sartre’s nihilistic existentialism and Camus’s phi-
losophy (mostly of the absurd) into greater relief, thereby more clearly defining
the contributions each philosopher made to twentieth-century philosophy, arts,
and letters. In the second essay, Matthew Bowker suggests that Camus’s thought
contributes substantially to our understanding of grieving processes on both
cultural and individual levels while offering us an interpretive key not only to
Camus’s oeuvre, but to the broader tradition of absurd philosophy, literature,
and drama. In the third essay, Araceli Hernández-Laroche analyzes the inter-
sections of world wars and their empires on the southern shores of the Medi-
terranean Sea as well as Camus’s fertile relationships with writers of different
religions and of non-European mother tongues who poetically expanded the
contours of the Ecole d’Alger.
The third and last part, “Evolution and Influences” focuses on the evolu-
tion of Camus’s thought and writing as well as the influence other thinkers and
writers had on his work. In her essay, Jennifer Brown argues that The Plague—a
return to modern life and an inscription into memory—testifies to the system-

atic use of medieval imagery on the part of the Vichy government and articu-
lates Camus’s rebellion against the medieval and his commitment to the future.
The second essay, written by Mamadou Abdoulaye Ly, concentrates on Sum-
mer and shows how Camus resorts to ancient myths and manages to give to
the genre of the essay, which lends itself to philosophical reflection, a literary
dimension through imagination and introspection. In the third essay, Sophie
Bourgault explores a series of substantive and tantalizing affinities between
Simone Weil and Albert Camus. By bringing them in conversation, Bourgault
shows the remarkable timeliness of their work for us today, and underscores
the fact that both thinkers defy labeling. In the fourth and final essay, Thomas
Epstein argues that Dostoevsky was something of a touchstone for Camus, as
Camus’s changing attitude to the Russian master provides an image of Camus’s
own intellectual journey. This article explains Camus’s overall engagement with
Dostoevsky and suggests that what was left unsaid or repressed may reveal as
much to us about Camus as what he articulated, which differentiates this read-
ing from other studies devoted to Dostoevsky’s influence on Camus.
Note
1. For biographies of Camus, see, among others, Olivier Todd, Albert Camus: une
vie (Paris: Gallimard, 1996); and Herbert R. Lottman, Albert Camus: A Biography
(New York: Gingko, 1979).
PART 1
Literary Considerations
CHAPTER 1
Camus, the Nouveau Roman,

and the Postmodern
Edmund J. Smyth
I
n focusing on the complexity and originality of Albert Camus’s writing
some fifty years after his death, a unique opportunity is presented to con-
duct a reappraisal of the significance of Camus’s fiction for the nouveau
roman and more generally for contemporary literary aesthetics and poetics.
Although existentialist writing was to some degree rejected by the emerging
generation of writers and critics in the late 1950s and 1960s as being associated
with an outmoded aesthetic and philosophical/political position, Camus was
in fact influential in changing the intellectual, literary, and cultural landscape,
and was hailed as an initiator of minimalist écriture blanche by Roland Barthes
and Alain Robbe-Grillet. In the light of Robbe-Grillet’s comments in his three-
volume pseudoautobiography or autofiction titled Romanesques, and in the
essays collected in Le Voyageur and Préface à une vie d’écrivain (2005),1 it is now
possible to reexamine the ways in which Camus’s narrative experimentation
has been instrumental in the formation of a new mode of writing, and whose
impact on twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature has been considerable.
To posit that Camus had any influence at all on the postmodern may ini-
tially seem unsustainable, as it is most frequently Jean-Paul Sartre’s name that
figures when charting the intellectual and cultural history of the period. During
the 1950s, as a result of the quarrel between Sartre and Camus initiated by the
debates surrounding The Rebel, Sartrean existential Marxism was deemed to
have heralded the collapse of the liberal humanist tradition that Camus seemed
to articulate and embody, thus in many respects anticipating the structuralist
and poststructuralist enterprise that would come to predominate from the late
1960s. Camus’s espousal of the values of democratic socialism and rejection
of totalitarianism in any form situated him, in the eyes of his detractors, as

a “liberal reactionary,” especially for the marxisant French Left of the period,
who disliked Camus’s introduction of morality into political choices. This can
be largely explained by the historical context: politically, Camus’s refusal to
endorse revolutionary violence during the period of the Algerian War of Inde-
pendence (and of the other anticolonialist conflicts of this time), fostered this
perception of a prominent writer whose engagement to radical change was in a
state of doubt. Indeed, from the 1960s through to the 1980s, Camus’s name is
rarely cited by the New Left or by the contiguous poststructuralist movement
in cultural and political theory. During the events of May 1968, it was Sartre
who would become a point de repère (point of reference). As postmodern theory
develops, Camus is largely absent from the evolving cultural agenda: in consid-
ering Camus and the postmodern condition, his profound humanism distances
him from the critique that would emerge from the late 1960s onward. Indeed,
it can be argued that in the fertile interface of poststructuralism, postmodern-
ism, and postcolonial theory, and the multifarious debates generated by these
modes of thinking over the past three decades or so, Camus has never really
been fully rehabilitated; instead, he has been regarded as somewhat tainted by
his prominent anti-Marxist political position during the 1950s. However, this is
to neglect his lifelong anticolonialism and indeed respect for cultural difference,
rather than the French republican universalist and assimilationist policy widely
shared by much of the Left and Right, which can be evidenced from the 1930s
onward. Indeed, it is not uncommon for some postcolonial theorists to use The
Stranger itself as providing a demonstration of Camus’s supposedly reactionary
attitudes, frequently citing both the absence of Arab characters and the crucial
fatal shooting performed by Meursault. Of course, this misreading arises from
an ignorance of the novel: The Stranger is not Camus’s autobiography, but a
first-person narrative conducted by a Pied-Noir2 petit bourgeois. Thus it is evi-
dent that Camus has been out of favor, a fact that the growth in Francophone
studies has to some extent accentuated and perpetuated as a consequence of the
key postcolonial theoretical reference points: Camus emerges as something of
an embarrassment in the sense that he is frequently posited as an inauthentic
voice. Although it is outside the scope of this article to reinscribe Camus in
postcolonialist Francophone discourse, it is contended that this misreading is
symptomatic of a wider distrust of Camus in postmodern, poststructuralist, and
postcolonial theory. The publication of the new Pléiade Œuvres Complètes of
Camus goes some way to restoring his reputation; in particular Jacqueline Lévi-
Valensi’s preface in volume 1 and André Abbu’s critical introduction to The
Stranger provide well-informed accounts of the importance of Camus’s writing.3
All Camus’s fiction in fact reveals a heightened concentration on the renewal
of narrative technique, which the nouveaux romanciers will all of course go on
Camus, the Nouveau Roman, and the Postmodern ● 9
to develop in even more significant ways: in The Stranger the use of the passé
composé and the refusal of an interiorized discourse; in The Plague the adoption
of the chronicle format and of the ambiguous status of the narrator; in The Fall
the challenging interrogative voice of the juge-pénitent (judge-penitent), whose
implication of the reader anticipates the nouveau roman’s explicit condemna-
tion of both linear narrative and omniscience.
In the trajectory of literary and cultural history, it tends to be overlooked
that it is Roland Barthes who espoused the modernity of Camus’s writing. In
his landmark essay for the new aesthetics Writing Degree Zero (1953),4 which in
many respects heralds the whole adventure of the nouveau roman, Barthes talks
about the creation by Camus of an écriture blanche: “Create a blank writing,
freed from the necessity of the conventional order of language.”5 Barthes pro-
poses a program for the radical conception of a new poetics based on a revised
function for literary language: “It is a matter of moving beyond Literature by
trusting to a kind of fundamental language, equally distant from living lan-
guages and literary language. The transparent utterance, initiated by The Stranger,
achieves a style of absence which is almost an ideal absence of style.”6 Barthes
is suggesting that the writing style of The Stranger initiated a “nonliterary” lan-
guage from which stylized metaphorics would be abandoned, very much in the
fashion of Hemingway and the American roman noir, which had been receiv-
ing much acclaim since the launch of the Gallimard series during the postwar
period. He goes on to refer to an écriture that is neutral. This description of a
“style de l’absence” could hardly be bettered as a prescient definition of a post-
modern poetics, thus anticipating the nouveau roman, Marguerite Duras, and
indeed much of the contemporary writing in French and English.
Alain Robbe-Grillet was able to adapt and recruit Barthes’s propositions in
his critical essays in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when he was attempting
to both justify his own radical fictions and to delineate the endeavors of the
nouveau roman in general. The notion of an écriture blanche seemed particularly
appropriate in explaining his novels The Erasers (1953), The Voyeur (1955), and
Jealousy (1957), in which the “neutral” and flat writing—a so-called chosiste
writing, as it came to be known as a consequence of Roland Barthes’s interest
in these works, which considered concepts as things—seems to be devoid of
the metaphors and anthropomorphic adjectives that were deemed to denote a
discredited or outmoded literary aesthetic. Although Robbe-Grillet would later
go on to endorse the contrary view that psychological readings of these nov-
els were also possible (Robbe-Grillet would always be shifting his “theoretical”
positions), Camus’s influence is unmistakable at this stage. In Robbe-Grillet’s
early fiction, there seems to be a narrative preoccupation with an apparently
purely phenomenological reality, conveyed by the focus on the surface of
objects and above all by the absence of traditional psychological analysis and
characterization: in these works, we are not given explicit explanations of an

inner life à la Marcel Proust in the great tradition of the French roman d’analyse
(novel that analyzes), but instead we find a disconnection between the world
and the perceiving consciousness of the central character or narrator.
It is instructive to examine the reading of Camus, however, which is under-
taken by Robbe-Grillet. It is clear from the essays collected in For a New Novel
(1963) that, to a great degree, Robbe-Grillet is seeking to differentiate the nou-
veau roman from the prevailing dominance of existentialism on the French liter-
ary landscape.7 The principal object of Robbe-Grillet’s critique in these essays
is of course the demolition of the norms of Balzacian realism (linearity, omni-
science, plot, and character), in favor of a modernist aesthetic deriving from
Proust, Faulkner, Joyce, and Kafka. However, although The Stranger and Nausea
are accorded special status in the literary history being elaborated and promoted
by Robbe-Grillet, it is also very much the case—in a clear example of the “anxi-
ety of influence”—that in these polemical essays, Robbe-Grillet will also move
on from his assault on traditional realism to criticize existentialism. Robbe-
Grillet is particularly scathing in his rejection of Sartrean engagement (on the
basis that in the nouveau romancier’s view a writer’s responsibility is to language
and not to political activism or consciousness raising); but, more important
for our purposes, Camus in The Stranger “betrays” his own objectives, in the
sense that at the key point in the novel (the killing on the beach at the end of
part one) the supposedly “purified” language becomes subject to metaphor and
anthropomorphism, and thus the tragic nature of the absurd world is exposed:
as Robbe-Grillet states, “The world is neither significant nor absurd. It is, quite
simply.”8 In Robbe-Grillet’s reading of the novel, the sun is being blamed for
the murder. In the lengthy essay “Nature, Humanisme, Tragédie” (1958, then
1963), in which both Sartre and Camus are discussed at some length, Robbe-
Grillet excoriates Camus for not being consistent to the language used in part
one of the novel. Nathalie Sarraute too in her critical essay “De Dostoïevski à
Kafka”9 would also criticize Camus for what she felt was the implicit psycho-
logical content of The Stranger, despite the apparent lack of an interiorized
narration: “By virtue of the psychological explanations that, right up to the last
moment, Albert Camus had been at such pains to avoid, the contradictions and
inconsistencies of his book are explained and the emotion to which we have
been unreservedly giving ourselves up is justified.”10 Sarraute here is stating that
Camus has in fact written a fiction that ends up being another psychological
novel despite seeming initially to be eschewing the valorization of a rich psy-
chological consciousness, which is a prominent feature of first-person narration
in the French novel.
It is in his early essays that Robbe-Grillet aligns himself most closely with a
phenomenological philosophical position, using specifically The Stranger as an
example of how a new kind of writing can emerge, and from which his own
fiction can be said to originate. For example, the prevalence of description in
these early novels by Robbe-Grillet can be considered as a kind of redemption
of language from metaphor, thus objects are devoid of human significance,
and complicity between man and the world is eliminated (Roland Barthes had
used the expression “littérature objective” in one essay to designate the nouveau
roman). In the Balzacian realist novel, objects are made to signify, as Robbe-
Grillet and Barthes emphasized. It is undeniable that Robbe-Grillet at this
period had been profoundly influenced by existential phenomenology, evident
from the philosophical reference points of Martin Heidegger and Edmund
Husserl, as explicated and mediated (and indeed popularized) by Jean-Paul
Sartre in his key essays at this time, and with which the nouveau romancier
would have been familiar. Robbe-Grillet’s theoretical positions then are perme-
ated with the language of existential phenomenology: the world is there and any
attempt to attach meaning to it on human terms is inadequate and deceitful.
It is from this philosophical argument that Robbe-Grillet is able to contend
that the use of metaphor in literature is of special significance. Robbe-Grillet’s
condemnation of Camus must therefore be seen in the context not merely of
the intellectual assumptions of the intellectual and cultural hegemony of exis-
tential phenomenology at this time but also of an intergenerational repudiation
of the prevailing aesthetic dominant. Sartre will also be criticized for failing to
follow through the innovation of Nausea with the overtly engaged The Roads to
Freedom (1945–49), which is deemed by Robbe-Grillet to depart from the rep-
resentation of the contingent, on which the whole premise of Nausea is based,
in both its form and its philosophical subject matter.11
Robbe-Grillet would later concede that he had indeed been mobilizing a
particular reading of existentialism in general and Albert Camus in particular in
order to replace existentialism with the nouveau roman as the new literary and
cultural ascendancy. His attempt at a more nuanced reading and revision can
be seen in a number of key statements made in the 1980s in conference papers
and in his autofictional trilogy Romanesques. In a key essay “Monde trop plein,
conscience vide” (based on a contribution to a major international conference
on Camus at Cerisy in 1982 significantly titled “Albert Camus: Œuvre fermée,
œuvre ouverte” [Albert Camus: Closed work, open work]), Camus is described
in literary oedipal terms as “le père à détruire” (the father to be destroyed).12 Thus
Robbe-Grillet is recognizing the degree to which his earlier critique had been to
a large extent motivated by a desire to contest the intellectual and cultural dom-
inance of existentialism. Importantly, however, in restating the phenomenologi-
cal proposition that there is nothing within consciousness, Robbe-Grillet again
invokes the concepts of Husserlian intentionality (“Within consciousness, there
is nothing”13): “When we read L’Etranger, we have the impression, throughout
the first half of the volume, that we are discovering a Husserlian universe, that
is to say, that Camus has had the genius to present us with the empty interior
of a Husserlian consciousness.”14 Robbe-Grillet contrasts this with the “con-
science pleine” (full consciousness) we find in realist fiction, thus emphasizing
the fundamental modernity of Camus’s text: the reader experiences the strange-
ness of the world directly along with his “empty narrator” Meursault. Accord-
ing to the nouveau romancier, the text provides “the discourse of a Husserlian
consciousness, or at least one which claims to be one, and which experiences
constantly on the one hand his own emptiness and on the other hand the pleni-
tude of the world.”15 Nevertheless, while praising the novel’s modernity in this
respect, Robbe-Grillet still persists in his view that the rest of the novel deviates
from this representation and mise en scène of a “conscience vide” (empty con-
sciousness): “As the novel progresses, we become aware that there is something
within consciousness.”16 Referring to The Fall (a novel that Robbe-Grillet had
even gone so far as to call “deplorable”17), there is a “humanist consciousness, a
full consciousness”18 and “a reintegration of the good old consciousness.”19 He
insists again that although The Stranger constitutes “a fundamental moment in
the history of literature,”20 Camus’s subsequent development as a writer was
less noteworthy: “Having written a book as fundamental as L’Etranger, Camus
would seem to be regressing and pulling back.”21
What is clear is that Robbe-Grillet is in fact once again polemically justifying
his own fictions, which from In the Labyrinth onward are increasingly devoid
of an identifiable voice and narrative center (in this respect his texts are similar
to the works of Claude Simon, Marguerite Duras, and Nathalie Sarraute at this
time, as the nouveau roman merges into the nouveau nouveau roman), corre-
sponding to “l’éclatement de sujet,” in harmony with the poststructuralist view
of the fragmented self (“As the individual subject is fragmented, it is now the text
itself that is speaking.”).22 In the postmodern text, narrative discourse becomes
increasingly decentered, discontinuous, and fragmentary. Camus’s works in this
perspective are wrongly represented as being formally conservative. However, a
text like The Fall is in fact highly complex and experimental and is very far from
classic realism, as a consequence of not only an abandonment of linearity and
omniscience but also the adoption of an interrogative voice and the allocation
of a heightened role for the reader, which brings it in many ways more into
line with the “texte de jouissance” (text of bliss) as described by Barthes in The
Pleasure of the Text (1973). Camus’s fiction after The Stranger (including The
Plague and the short stories collected in Exile and the Kingdom) are in fact much
more radical in form than the nouveau roman gives them credit for. Indeed it
may even be maintained that the posthumous The First Man anticipates auto-
fiction in its creation of a persona located between fiction and autobiographical
self-disclosure.
In Ghosts in the Mirror, the first volume of Romanesques, the autobiographi-

cal/autofictional trilogy published in the 1980s, Robbe-Grillet suggests that his
first novel A Regicide owes a great deal to The Stranger in its struggle between
“neutrality” and metaphor: Meursault is cited by Robbe-Grillet as an ancestor of
the character Boris (Meursault is his “parrain” [godfather]23), sharing a sense of a
“coupure” (disconnect) between himself and the world, similar of course to that
experienced by Roquentin in Nausea. In this first novel, the “existentialist” and
“behaviorist” Boris narrative is undercut by a quasi-symbolist counternarrative
set in a different temporal and spatial location: in this novel, these two narratives
interpenetrate and compete for diegetic control. It may even be argued that the
deconstruction of the Boris narrative conveys at a certain level the disintegration
of the master narrative of existentialism. In Ghosts in the Mirror, over five pages,
Robbe-Grillet pursues an extremely nuanced reading of The Stranger suggesting
that the novel in many ways should be seen as struggling against “l’adjectivité du
monde” (the adjectivity of the world), and that from the very start of the text “we
can feel the humanizing metaphors lying in wait for the blank narrative voice.”24
This notion of a narrative struggle is an extremely forceful one, and arguably
opens up a new reading of The Stranger itself, which can be considered as an
“open” postmodern text in the sense that the competing narratives resist totaliza-
tion. Robbe-Grillet insists on his debt to The Stranger: “Each time I reread it . . .
it retains its power.”25 In Préface à une vie d’écrivain, based on 25 interviews con-
ducted on France-Culture, Robbe-Grillet returns to Camus several times, again
stressing the Husserlian intentionality of the narrative: The narrative uncertainty
of the first paragraph of The Stranger puts it firmly outside a realist tradition,
because of its emphasis on incomprehension and ignorance, insisting on the
“étrangeté” of the world, a universe in which everything is subject to change—
“The reader of L’Etranger, like the reader of all literature from the second half of
the twentieth century, is confused by the presence of the world.”26 It therefore
becomes a pivotal text in the evolution of a new aesthetics (however “flawed”
in strictly phenomenological terms), and comes to be linked with Kafka and
Faulkner, “writers who are constructing a new world.”27 As Robbe-Grillet states,
writers are “constructing a world, and do so in a state of constant movement:
because the world . . . will always be to be reconstructed and remade.”28
In the literary history of postmodern fiction, Camus is however largely
absent. In critic Jean Ricardou’s accounts of the evolution of the nouveau roman,
we do not find any serious appreciation of the contribution made by Camus to
the contestation of the conventions and assumptions of realist narration.29 For
Ricardou, as well as the critics within the Tel Quel group, Camus is ideologically
contaminated both by his humanism and by what they considered an insuffi-
cient attention to narrative experimentation. Tel Quel replaced Les Temps Mod-
ernes as the most influential cultural journal after 1968 and in many respects set
the agenda for the growth of poststructuralism and postmodernism in French

cultural and intellectual life by bringing together semiotics, psychoanalysis, and
political radicalism. In specifically literary terms, they tended to foster the idea
of an “approved list” of precursors to the new aesthetics whose work can be
read as ideologically subversive (thus, for example, Sade, Bataille, Artaud, Joyce,
Roussell, Genet, and Blanchot are favored). In rejecting representation and
focusing on textuality, these critics privileged work in and on language as that
which distinguishes a truly progressive writing, which would also be politically
transforming. In this version, it is evident that Camus’s writing did not seem
to meet the criteria that were being elaborated. Their dismissal of Camus was
largely motivated by their dislike for the manner in which existentialism had
become appropriated by the establishment and the academy, thus neutralizing
any revolutionary force it may once have possessed: Camus in particular was
felt to have become institutionalized and recruited into the literary mainstream,
and whose works had been co-opted by the dominant ideology. In the context
of the specific political landscape of the late 1960s and 1970s, therefore, Camus
is not a figure in many of the debates that were occurring at this time; in philo-
sophical terms, a preoccupation with the metaphysical and the absurd was not
seen as relevant to the intellectual ferment of this period, and a work like The
Rebel (which opts for revolt rather than revolution) becomes something of an
irrelevance and a lightweight period piece when set beside the key texts of the
poststructuralists: Foucault, Althusser, Lacan, Derrida, and Barthes are by this
time the commanding voices in French intellectual life.
In specifically literary terms, Camus’s fiction does not of course seem to meet
the requirements of the postmodern novel. We do not find the heightened con-
cern with reflexivity, self-consciousness, fragmentation, and discontinuity that
prevail in playful metafictional experimental fiction.30 However, it is a mistake
to read Camus’s fiction as formally conservative, let alone as attached to a real-
ist or psychological tradition. All his fiction in fact reveals a modernist concern
with formal innovation, which should be recognized as anticipating the endeav-
ors of his successors in the nouveau roman. In each of his novels (and in the short
stories), Camus eschews the conventions of traditional plot- and character-based
fiction, related in a strict linear and causal pattern, and subject to omniscient
narration. In fact, it can be contended that Camus’s narrative techniques mirror
and anticipate the nouveau roman’s critique of realism: thus the depsychologized
“empty narrator” of The Stranger anticipates the decentered subject of post-
modern fiction. The way in which the self-consciously problematic chronicle
of The Plague forces the reader to consider the status of the narrator and of the
text that is being elaborated, evokes the manner in which the postmodern text
invites a consideration of the nature of textuality itself. In The Fall, the play-
fully digressive structure of the dramatic monologue and direct interpellation
of the reader brings the novel into line with some of the most formally radical
contemporary novels. Each of the six stories in Exile and the Kingdom formally
and stylistically present narrational complexities and are resistant to immediate
“readerly” appropriation along traditional lines. In considering The First Man
as an autofiction, it is apparent that Camus’s formal innovation brings this text
into a modernist or even postmodernist aesthetic: “A new kind of sentence is
apparent in Camus, very different from the kind we find in L’Etranger and La
Chute: one that is closer to the kind of discourse we find in Samuel Beckett and
Claude Simon—long, tentative, hesitant and often illuminating.”31 Jean Ricar-
dou’s definition of the modernist text as applied to his fellow nouveau romanciers
can just as well be illustrated by the fiction of Albert Camus: “Hence the novel is
for us less the writing of an adventure than the adventure of writing.”32
Thus going beyond the earlier misreadings by the nouveaux romanciers and
the nouvelle critique, Camus now requires to be acknowledged for his narrative
experimentation, which has heralded new directions in modern fiction. Robbe-
Grillet’s comments should open the way for a reappraisal of Camus’s influence
in the contemporary postmodern literary landscape, a presence that we can find
in minimalist fiction (such as in Duras, the new Minuit writers, and English
language fiction—for example, Paul Auster’s novels). It is also hoped that Fran-
cophone postcolonial studies will begin a reappraisal of Camus’s contribution to
this emerging area of cultural theory and activity: the more recent emphasis on
liminality and hybridity providing a supple analytical concept, rather than the
earlier dogmatic assertions excluding Camus from serious consideration. The
continued critical interest in Camus’s fiction demonstrates that these are open
and plural texts, which can continue to be reread in the light of new critical and
theoretical approaches—these are texts that show a primordial concern with the
problematics of narrative form.
Notes
1. Alain Robbe-Grillet, Le Voyageur (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 2001); and Alain
Robbe-Grillet, Préface à une vie d’écrivain (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 2005).
2. This term is used to describe a French person who used to live in French-ruled
Algeria during the colonization.
3. Albert Camus, Œuvres Complètes, ed. Raymond Gay-Crosier and Jacqueline Lévi-
Valensi, vol. 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 2006).
4. Roland Barthes, Le Degré zéro de l’écriture (1953; repr., Paris: Seuil, 1972).
5. “Créer une écriture blanche, libérée de toute servitude à un ordre marqué du lan-
gage”; Ibid., 55; all translations are mine.
6. “Il s’agit de dépasser ici la Littérature en se confiant à une sorte de langue basique,
également éloignée des langages vivants et du langage littéraire proprement dit.
Cette parole transparente, inaugurée par L’Etranger de Camus, accomplit un style
de l’absence qui est presque une absence idéale du style”; Ibid., 56.
7. Alain Robbe-Grillet, Pour un nouveau roman (Paris: Minuit, 1963).

8. “Le monde n’est ni signifiant ni absurde. Il est tout simplement”; Ibid., 7.
9. Published originally in Les Temps Modernes in 1947, then republished in her own
collection of polemical essays The Age of Suspicion in 1956.
10. “Par la vertu de ces explications psychologiques qu’Albert Camus avait pris, jusqu’au
dernier moment, tant soin d’éviter, les contradictions et les invraisemblances de
son livre s’expliquaient et l’émotion à laquelle nous nous abandonnons enfin sans
réserve se trouve justifié”; Quoted by Robbe-Grillet in Le Voyageur, 45.
11. This argument is elaborated in Alain Robbe-Grillet, Le Miroir qui revient, Roman-
esques 1 (Paris: Minuit, 1984), 163–71.
12. Robbe-Grillet, Le Voyageur, 215 (“Monde trop plein, conscience vide”).
13. “A l’intérieur de la conscience, il n’y a rien”; Ibid., 217.
14. “Quand on lit L’Etranger on a l’impression, dans la première partie du volume, de
découvrir un univers typiquement husserlien, c’est-à-dire que Camus a eu le génie
de nous présenter l’intérieur vide d’une conscience husserlienne”; Ibid.
15. “le discours d’une conscience husserlienne ou, en tout cas, qui prétend l’être, et qui
ressent constamment d’une part son propre vide et d’autre part le trop-plein du
monde”; Ibid., 219
16. “Au fur et à mesure que le roman progresse, on s’aperçoit qu’il y a quelque chose
dans la conscience”; Ibid.
17. “deplorable”; Ibid., 217.
18. “conscience humaniste, une conscience pleine”; Ibid., 221.
19. “une réintegration de la bonne vieille conscience d’autrefois”; Ibid., 222.
20. “un moment fondamental de l’histoire de la littérature”; Ibid., 224.
21. “Ayant écrit un livre aussi fondamental que L’Etranger, Camus [a] aussitôt amorcé
un mouvement de régression, de repli”; Ibid., 222.
22. “la personne elle-même se trouve fragmentée, c’est le texte qui se parle”; Ibid., 500.
23. Robbe-Grillet, Le Miroir qui revient, 165.
24. “on sent bien les métaphores humanisantes qui guettent la voix narratrice blanche”;
Ibid., 164.
25. “Chaque fois que j’en reprends la lecture . . . son pouvoir intact opère à nouveau”;
Ibid., 167.
26. “Le lecteur de L’Etranger comme le lecteur de toute la littérature de la seconde
moitié du XXe siècle, va être constamment dans l’embarras face au monde”; Robbe-
Grillet, Préface à une vie d’écrivain, 23.
27. “écrivains en train de construire un monde nouveau”; Ibid., 37.
28. L’écrivain “construit un monde, et il le fait dans une perpétuelle mouvance: car le
monde . . . sera toujours à reconstruire, à refaire”; Ibid.
29. See Jean Ricardou, Problèmes du nouveau roman (Paris: Seuil, 1967); and Jean
Ricardou, Le Nouveau Roman (Paris: Seuil, 1978).
30. For an account of the major criteria of postmodern fiction, see Linda Hutcheon,
Narcissistic Narrative (London: Methuen, 1980); Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fic-
tion (London: Methuen, 1987); and for an account of the relationship between the
nouveau roman and postmodernism, see Edmund Smyth, ed., Postmodernism and
Contemporary Fiction (London: Batsford, 1991), 54–74.
31. “Une nouvelle phrase [naît] chez Camus, très différente de celle de L’Etranger ou de
La Chute, assez proche de celle de Samuel Beckett ou de Claude Simon, longue,
tâtonnante, trébuchante, souvent illuminante”; Jacques Lecarme and Eliane
Lecarme, L’Autobiographie (Paris: Armand Colin, 1997), 234–35.
32. “Ainsi le roman est-il pour nous moins l’écriture d’une aventure que l’aventure d’une
écriture”; Ricardou, Problèmes du nouveau roman, 111.
CHAPTER 2
The Complexity and

Modernity of The Plague
Aurélie Palud
I
n his article “La réception critique immédiate de La Peste en 1947,” Paul-
F. Smets explains that The Plague has suffered critiques from Jean-Paul
Sartre, Roland Barthes, or even Georges Bataille. Nowadays, some French
intellectuals still have a slighting judgment on the novel.1 For instance, Jean
d’Ormesson—member of the French Academy—wrote, “The moralism, the
nobility of the ideas, the will to defend a thesis and to make reflections on life,
death, the human condition have something laborious and heavy.”2 As for the
philosopher Alain Finkielkraut, he explains in Le Magazine littéraire in May
2006, “I think this novel is sententious and heavy even if I was touched,” and
“I have never been convinced by the metaphor.”3
For fifty years, critics have insisted on two aspects of the novel that can be
either praised or blamed: indeed, while some critics admire this novel for its
moral significance, others reproach Camus for developing a message they judge
as being too explicit and naive. Moreover, Camus’s style has been fully analyzed:
If some critics compared him to Racine for the classical aspect of his writing,
others consider that Camus’s style is sharp and linear. Some talked about a nar-
ration “extremely sober,” “an air of sharpness,” or a “prosaic way.”4
Whereas certain critics had doubts about the possibility for The Plague to
become part of the cultural heritage, since 1980, some authors found their
inspiration in this novel: André Brink (The Wall of the Plague), Gabriel García
Marquéz (Love in the Time of Cholera), Stewart O’Nan (A Prayer for the Dying),
and José Saramago (Blindness). Indeed, these contemporary authors use the
motif of epidemic to depict history and the human condition. Some of them
clearly recognize Camus as a master: André Brink, who translated Camus’s
writings, affirms that the concept of “l’homme révolté” (the rebel) allowed him
to understand the necessity of being responsible and fighting against Apartheid.
As for Gabriel García Márquez, he liked The Plague so much that he wanted
to make a cinematographic adaptation of the novel. José Saramago, even if he
doesn’t mention Camus in his references, is clearly an heir to Camus; we could
even say that Blindness is a rewriting of The Plague combined with the influence
of “magical realism.”
Actually, by comparing these contemporary fictions with The Plague, I real-
ized that Camus’s novel presents numerous aspects of “postmodern” fiction, as it
is defined by Linda Hutcheon. First, I will show that The Plague presents some
aesthetic characteristics in common with contemporary novels. Then I would
like to prove that The Plague is not a pure illustration of Camus’s philosophy. Of
course, there are common elements between the novel and the essay The Rebel,
but the signification of the novel is not so easy to determine. In other words, the
novel is ambivalent and some questions remain unanswered. Finally, The Plague
is still relevant for us today because Camus was a visionary: In a way, he had
anticipated what the occidental world would be like in the 1980s.
Hybridity and Polysemy: A (Post)Modern Aesthetic

By reading The Plague in a postmodern perspective, it appears that Camus’s
novel presents some aesthetic characteristics common in contemporary fictions.
In her essay A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction, Linda Hutcheon
explains that postmodernity is characterized by hybridity, metareflection, and
polysemy.5 Even if Camus is compared to seventeenth-century authors, The
Plague is far from being a classical novel. As a matter of fact, because of the
specificity of the narration and the hybridity of genres, the novel seems poly-
phonic, ambivalent, and unclassifiable.
First, The Plague’s genre is hard to define. Many critics have proposed a clas-
sification: The Plague would be apologue, allegory, historical romantic fiction,
morality story, mixture of essay and novel, or parable. Some insist on the five
parts of the text as the five acts of a tragedy. As a matter of fact, if the symbolic
dimension is recognized, the functioning of the narrative and its stakes still raise
questions, to the point that Jean-Jacques Rinieri said, “We would be wrong to
judge The Plague according to standards which do not suit it.”6 Camus himself
refused the naming of “novel” and preferred the term “narrative.” This resis-
tance to classification can be perceived as a sign of modernity, as confirmed
by the current reflections on the validity of the genres. For instance, the same
question arises for Saramago’s novel Blindness. Indeed, the title (“essay on blind-
ness”) suggests the confluence of two genres: fiction and the presentation of a
theory. As for Camus, critics made every effort to define the genre of Saramago’s
The Complexity and Modernity of The Plague ● 21
work: “In the review Camões (no. 3 of October–December 1998), they consider
it as a parable (Albrecht Buschmann), a fable on the alienation and the individ-
ual (Miguel García-Posada), or even an antitotalitarian fable (Rafael Conte).”7
But if The Plague acquires certain aspects of modernity, it is also because
of its style. Indeed, numerous critics have talked about a monotonous, linear,
dull style. As Paul-F. Smets reminds us in his article, Francis Jeanson defined
Camus’s style as “a very sophisticated absence of style.”8 This search for the
neutral has often been considered as a purity of language, in the tradition of
the seventeenth century. But at the risk of extrapolating, I prefer to consider
this neutral style as a mark of modernity used, for instance, by Annie Ernaux.
Indeed, in a colloquium dedicated to the “White Writings” (in 2001), Annie
Ernaux defined her writing as “the ethnological writing, which delivers the facts
in their nudity, which offers no sign of subjectivity nor of emotion, even if they
are naturally at the origin of the memories.”9 In her novel The Possession, she also
wrote, “The best I seemed to have acquired so far was lucidity: a new vision—
suddenly simple and de-sentimentalized—of the world.”10 Like Annie Ernaux,
Camus tries, in The Plague. to deliver the facts in their nakedness, offering no
sign of subjectivity. Through the objective chronicle of the epidemic, the reader
discovers an anthropological lesson about the various facets of humanity. But
we also perceive an emotion—the emotion of those who suffer from separation
and exile, and the emotion of a narrator who wants to testify for the victims of
the plague. The contemporary novels—marked by this flat, white, or neutral
writing, between objectivity and subjectivity—reveal a posteriori the modernity
of Camus. Moreover, as explained by Dominique Rabaté in his article “Simplic-
ity and Simplification in The Plague,” Camus wanted to express the simplicity
of the world: “The writing has to find, conquer and make happen this transpar-
ency of the world, which is its deep meaning.”11 Reaching the simplicity of the
world requires a simple and uncluttered language: In Camus’s writing, aesthet-
ics is in agreement with ethics.
Finally, the narrator can also be considered as a sign of modernity in The
Plague. This narrator refuses to reveal his identity in order to remain as objec-
tive as an historian: “playing the part of an historian.”12 However, the objective
tone is wrongly viewed as neutral because the narrator inserts ironic remarks,
in particular about the administration, the journalists, and the priest Paneloux.
Kamel Feki concludes that the narrator oscillates between “a statement of dis-
appearance” and a “statement of mockery.”13 Besides, to make his chronicle
more complete, the narrator quotes the comments made by Tarrou in his note-
book. He incorporates the point of view of an eccentric character because Tar-
rou is above all else interested in the trivial, in the insignificant. In this way,
Camus creates a polyphonic novel where reality is described through a plu-
rality of voices, oscillating between tragedy and derision. This process is also
present in Saramago’s novel where the narrator, apparently objective, makes

digressions, satiric points, and moralizing comments. In both narratives, the
narrator’s status is complex: present and erased, anonymous and individualized.
This ambivalence is strengthened by the indefinable position of the narrator,
who is at the same time inside and outside the narrative. In The Plague and
Blindness, after the quarantining, the pronoun “we” appears in the middle of a
third-person narrative. In Camus’s novel, the narrator affirms that “the plague
was the concern of all of us” and when Saramago describes the asylum where the
blind persons are quarantined, the narrator talks about “this madhouse in which
we live.”14 Thus these novels create a complex relation between the reader and
the narrative because the narrator is a paradoxical entity who keeps the events at
a distance as much as he endures them.
The narrative complexity in The Plague probably reaches its paroxysm with
the enigma of the narrator’s identity. When the reader discovers that the narra-
tor is Dr. Rieux, he or she realizes the narrator confused the issue by describing
himself as different from his character. In contemporary narratives of epidemic,
we find the same narrative complexity, with a multiplicity of narrators (Sara-
mago) or a final revelation about the narrator’s identity (as in A Prayer for the
Dying by Stewart O’Nan).15 In short, behind the apparent linearity of The
Plague, the narrative complexity and the mixing of genres confer an undeniable
modernity to the narrative.
A Complex and Ambiguous Signification: An “Open Work”

Even if Camus asserted the allegorical dimension of his work, a close reading
proves that his philosophy is more complex and ambiguous than it seems. As
an “open work,” The Plague presents “an ambiguous message, a plurality of
meanings which coexist in one signifier.”16 Indeed, Camus had understood the
interest of a novel that can be “read on several levels” and invites the reader to
discover the numerous hidden meanings.17 From the outset, the epigraph sug-
gests the two levels of comprehension: “It is as reasonable to represent one kind
of imprisonment by another, as it is to represent anything that really exists by
that which exists not.”18 Through this quote by Daniel de Foe, Camus justifies
the use of fiction in the representation of history. He also suggests the possibil-
ity to understand the novel in an anecdotic and a symbolic way. From then on,
Camus invites us to an active reading, conferring to his novel a certain complex-
ity that makes it modern.
Camus clarified the allegorical dimension of his work in a letter to Roland
Barthes (January 11, 1955): “The Plague, which I wanted people to read on
several levels, obviously contains the fight of European resistance against
Nazism.”19 However, it remains relevant to wonder how the work guides the
reader to an allegorical interpretation; in other words, from the anecdotic to the

general, and from fiction to history. Within the text, we can interpret some ele-
ments as references to the Second World War: the rationing, the black market,
the trains full of corpses, and the crematoria. However, it is necessary to under-
line the fact that these are the realities of an epidemic (as Daniel Defoe shows in
A Journal of the Plague Year, which depicts the plague of London in 1665) just
as much as they are of World War II. Moreover, while the allusion to crematoria
inevitably reminds us of the Shoah, these ovens are used as a preventive measure
by the volunteers of the sanitary services. So the main indication of a reference
to the Second World War turns out to be an ambiguous sign. As a matter of
fact, the allusions to the context remain subtle, which makes the text’s meaning
more complex and more open.
Thus according to Camus’s definition of the novel as “an illustrated phi-
losophy,” the text establishes a link between fiction and reality. In this way, The
Plague gives the impression that it can be read as an illustration of the theory
presented in the essay The Rebel. Of course, the plague symbolizes evil and, in
a larger way, the absurdity of the human condition against which men have
to fight in a unified movement.20 But I would like to show that if the sym-
bolic dimension of the narrative is clear, the meaning is not necessarily obvious.
Indeed, it is not so easy to define Camus’s position about evil, love, or solidarity.
In the twentieth century, the epidemic is not a divine punishment any more,
since “God is dead,” as Friedrich Nietzsche announced. Even if Camus and
contemporary writers continue to represent people who believe in divine wrath,
these characters are mocked or criticized. Indeed, how are we to accept the exis-
tence of God in a world where children die?21 But this absence of God also raises
the question of responsibility. If evil cannot be explained by divine wrath, we
must consider that men become responsible for evil. However, in The Plague,
the epidemic declares itself without reason and disappears independently of
human action. That is why some thinkers criticized Camus for correlating
plague and Nazism, as if men were not responsible for the establishment of this
regime; this might be the limit of the metaphorical equivalence. But we can
also suppose that Camus is not really interested in the origin of evil, but only
in the reaction of a community faced with evil. So on one hand, men would be
vulnerable victims confronted with a situation they don’t deserve, but on the
other hand, are men really innocent? Indeed, the first pages of The Plague insist
on individualism and on the impossibility to love in a society whose values are
business and money. Oran is depicted as a city where people spend their time
working, earning money, and having time for little else: “Certainly nothing is
commoner nowadays than to see people working from morn till night and then
proceeding to fritter away at card-tables, in cafes and in small-talk what time
is left for living.”22 In other words, there is no time for real love, no time for
philosophy in a city “without a soul.” So the plague might be a way to upset

this modern world and to make people aware of their blindness. This situation
of crisis appears as an occasion to reveal the truth—the real personality of each
individual, the real basis of society—and to analyze the way a community can
act to survive. Finally, it seems quite difficult to clearly define Camus’s vision of
humanity: is he optimist or disillusioned?
Like God sending the plague on Earth, Camus subjects his characters to
the trial of the plague as a way to value whether men are good or not. Beyond
human madness and egoism, he concludes that “what we learn in a time of
pestilence” is “that there are more things to admire in men than to despise.”23
Among the characters who reveal their great kindness and their commitment to
the community, we can find Dr. Rieux. Rieux really tries to carry out his duty,
being righteous and generous. Although Camus refuses the notion of heroism,
Rieux appears as a hero, humble and lucid, who acts for the community so
that he almost acquires the status of saint in a world without God. Through
this character, we could conclude that Camus expresses faith in the individual
capable of giving up his personal interest. However, if Camus seems optimistic
during the novel, the end of The Plague questions the possibility of a long-
lasting community. As expected, his characters get organized to fight against
the epidemic; some put aside their individualistic tendency—for instance, even
though Rambert wanted to go back to France to live with his fiancée, he sud-
denly realizes that “it may be shameful to be happy by oneself.”24 But even if
Camus advocates the fight and revolt, his faith in the collective action does
not seem complete. Evoked in the last sentence, the possible resurgence of the
plague suggests the return of individualism and the dissolution of the com-
munity: “And indeed, as he listened to the cries of joy rising from the town,
Rieux remembered that such joy is always imperiled. He knew what those jubi-
lant crowds did not know but could have learned from books: that the plague
bacillus never dies or disappears for good; that it can lie dormant for years and
years . . . and that perhaps the day would come when, for the bane and the
enlightening of men, it would rouse up its rats again and send them forth to die
in a happy city.”25 In other words, if Camus lauds the creation of a community,
it seems difficult to determine what that ideal community could be. From then
on, it might lie in friendship, as suggested by the sea swimming between Tarrou
and Rieux, the only lyrical moment of the text. In Blindness, we find a similar
bathing scene but between three women. Under the falling rain, the commu-
nion between beings is coupled with osmosis with nature, in a lyrical passage
that contrasts with the crudeness of the previous scenes. Similar and dissimilar,
these episodes of a purifying bath reveal a profound difference between Camus
and Saramago, thus raising the question of women in Camus’s novel. Indeed,
critics often said that the world of Camus was a man’s world. And yet, if love
is important in The Plague (“a loveless world is a dead world”),26 it also appears
as a source of sadness because we cannot really understand and communicate
with the person we love: We often do not speak about the same thing. Everyone
internalizes and remains prisoner to their pain. Moreover, while it is true that
women are a rare occurrence in Camus’s novel, we mustn’t forget the friendly
figure of Rieux’s mother and Dr. Castel’s wife, who doesn’t hesitate to go back
to Oran to face the quarantine with her husband.27
Finally, it seems difficult to find a philosophical system or a model in The
Plague. In times of crisis, the question of happiness becomes important: Which
values must be saved? Who can we rely on? What can we do to give meaning to
our lives? To be happy, one can privilege nature, or friendship, or love. Actually,
The Plague does not give a recipe for happiness but only suggestions. In the
same way, no character plays the role of a model. Even the narrator Rieux—
whom we often consider as a spokesman for Camus—is not perfect. After all,
he neglects his wife and lets her die alone: “Now and then thoughts of his
wife waylaid him, but he brushed them aside each time.”28 When she dies, he
does not cry—contrary to his mother—and affirms that his wife’s death is not
surprising. Even if he saves some of his fellow citizens, Rieux—so laconic and
introverted—does not seem completely happy. He is certainly lucid, but can
we consider his stoicism as a model? Maybe Tarrou—as lucid and humanist as
Rieux—could be an interesting model with the attention he gives to singular
details and marginal people. In brief, the novel refuses to have a definitive con-
clusion and offers every reader the possibility to choose his or her model and his
or her own way to happiness.
Camus, A Visionary Writer

Finally, The Plague is still relevant for us today because it seems that Camus had
anticipated the actual evolution of Western societies. I will focus here on three
points he tackles in his narrative: the consumer society, the conception of his-
tory, and the powers (and limits) of literature. The description of Oran presents
the characteristics of our current consumer society. The narrator insists on the
lacking that haunts this “town without pigeons, without any trees or gardens.”29
The space seems empty, or rather emptied of nature and humanity. Actually,
nature is reduced to the state of a consumer product: “It’s a spring cried in the
marketplaces.”30 Subjected to the necessities of trade, people only live for the
lure of gain and do not imagine the possibility of a different way of life. But
Camus is clear; through Oran, he depicts the Western lifestyle: “Really all our
contemporaries are much the same.”31 When love exists, it is often reduced to a
sexual activity or to a routine: “And you work so hard that it makes you forget
to love.”32 Actually, in a world defined by individualism, a relationship only
permits to satisfy a desire. But a link between two subjects does not necessarily
engender a fusion “in a world where sorrow is so often lonely.”33 Besides, con-
fessing one’s feelings is perceived as a weakness, as a waste of time compared to
other priorities, such as money and business. Grand, a sentimental and naive
character, dares to assert his attachment and his sorrow after his parents’ death.
However, expressing his feelings is becoming hard because language proves
unable to express the vagaries of the heart. The novel reminds us the necessity
of finding a language in accord with the feelings: “Man is an idea, and a pre-
cious small idea, once he turns back on love. And that’s my point; we, mankind,
have lost the capacity for love.”34 If the epidemic reveals in certain characters the
will to fight and commit, the majority of the inhabitants of Oran first appear
indifferent or frantic before accepting the presence of evil: “None of us was
capable any longer of an exalted emotion.”35 In reality, love—in the broad sense
of friendship, passion and altruism—might be a good way for men to get out of
their torpor, their conformity and their condition. This analysis is reminiscent
of Gilles Lipovetsky in his essay The Era of Emptiness: Essay on Contemporary
Individualism. Lipovetsky underlines the disappearance of causes for which life
deserves to be sacrificed. Only personal interest matters, which engenders a
feeling of emptiness. As a matter of fact, since 1942, Camus had anticipated
the evolution of society and defined the problems of the postmodern era, as
Michel Houellebecq does nowadays, noting the cult of consumption, money at
the foundation of human relations, complex relations between the individual
and the community, the lack of action and passion in a gregarious society, and
the way we consider nature.
Furthermore, The Plague shapes a cyclic conception of history, marked by
repetition and nonsense, which corresponds to “the presentism” analyzed by
François Hartog.36 This historian highlights the institution of a new order of
time at the end of the 1980s, which questions the future as a synonym for
progress. This new conception of time would be characterized by the domin-
ion of a perpetual present accompanied by an omnipresent memory and a
sense of responsibility increased toward future generations. It appears that The
Plague presents all the characteristics of this postmodern conception of history.
Indeed, the references to history haunt the novel, as the echoes of past epidem-
ics (Jaffa, Athens, Provence, London, and Milan) alternate with allusions to the
Nazi Occupation. The analogy between the natural disaster and human evil
created by the allegorical dimension of the novel, suggests the idea of a cyclic
history, which would be nothing but a series of crises and peaceful moments.
Thus according to Camus, history would correspond to a cyclic conception, as
opposed to the philosophies of progress. The last sentence also confirms this
vision of history threatened by the possible resurgence of the plague, which
makes the victory against evil a temporary relief. This idea is strengthened by
the image of a stagnant humanity, from the Middle Ages to the twentieth cen-
tury, because of extreme behaviors engendered by the epidemic: panic, debauch-
ery, and violence, or faith and superstition. Beyond the progress of science and
technique, humanity tends to sink into madness when it is confronted with the
crises of history. This vision gets closer to the postmodern conception of his-
tory as it refuses the idea of human progress as developed by the Enlightenment
philosophers. Due to its cyclic dimension, history, according to Camus, has
no meaning and no finality; it is an answer to no teleology and the fruit of no
ideology. On this point, Camus appears to be ahead of his time, despite Sartre’s
criticism, and influenced by communism when considering Camus’s thoughts
as unrealistic humanitarianism to escape history. But this would be a misread-
ing of Camus’s words; indeed, he was aware that we could not escape history
because we are “embarked in the mess of our time.”37 What Camus rejects is not
history in itself (which we cannot escape) but the philosophies of history that
claim to give an orientation to the events, to give a meaning to the world and to
man, even if it means justifying what is indefensible. As a matter of fact, while
Sartre later understood the dangers of communism, Camus had already under-
stood one of the foundations of the postmodern era: the vanity of ideologies.
If the philosophers of history privilege the future, Camus values above all
the present, the time of revolt that is for him the only human time. Indeed,
in The Plague, the dominant time of the narrative is not the progressive and
dynamic time of the fight but an almost static time. The human time of the
calendar fades little by little to the benefit of the time of the plague, as Rieux
talks about “the weeks of the plague.” The inhabitants of Oran are “prisoners”
of the plague; not only is the city closed, but the inhabitants are dispossessed
little by little of their past and their future: “In short, at these moments memory
played its part, but their imagination failed them. During the second phase of
the plague, their memory failed them, too.”38 So without memory, or imagina-
tion, they live in an eternal present. But this present is also a way to face the
truth, to accept life as it comes. In other words, in Camus’s philosophy, the
present becomes ambivalent: It is at the same time the lack of hope and the
choice of lucidity.
Finally, the postmodern era is characterized by “the memorial moment”
(Pierre Nora), or the memorial “stream” (François Hartog), which means “the
sudden predominance of the notion of memory in contemporary histori-
cal consciousness” (R. Ankersmit).39 The importance of memory was already
underlined in The Plague. First of all, Rieux notices the loss of memory that
assails the inhabitants of Oran, which is swamped by evil. Oblivion cancels any
project, any will to fight, and makes people complicit in the evil. Indeed, “they
had adapted themselves to the very condition of the plague” even if “the habit
of despair is worse than despair itself.”40 But what especially worries Rieux is
the oblivion at the time of the liberation: “Cottard, Tarrou, the men and the
woman Rieux had loved and lost—all alike, dead or guilty, were forgotten. Yes,
the old fellow had been right; these people were ‘just the same as ever.’”41 Not
only is it necessary to remember the past in order to learn from it and to avoid
repeating it, but it is also necessary to respect the duty of memory. This explains
the testimonial function of Rieux’s narrative, which wants above all else to speak
in the name of those who can’t: “Dr Rieux resolved to compile this chronicle, so
that he should not be one of those who hold their peace but should bear witness
in favor of those plague-stricken people; so that some memorial of the injustice
and outrage done them might endure.”42 In fact, Rieux wants to pay tribute to
victims and their families because he knows that there can be no “armistice for a
mother bereaved of her son or for a man who buries his friend.”43 This duty of
memory can be provided by literature (as is suggested by the expression “what
this crowd in jubilation ignored and what we can read in books”)44 but it is
obvious that this duty can only exist in reading. This statement is the source of
the theory of the active participation of the reader, which seems as essential to
Camus as to Umberto Eco and current critics.
A modern conception of literature emerges from this opening of significa-
tion. Indeed, against Sartre’s propositions in What Is Literature?, Camus opts
for a veiled representation of history, inviting the reader to build the signifi-
cation of a work that becomes polysemous. Thus literature of commitment
does not force the reader to decode the intentions of the author, but it offers
the freedom—as alarming as it is enjoyable—to define the meaning of the
novel. Furthermore, in The Plague, Camus questions realism in literature and
objectivity in history to underline the specificity of literature against histori-
ography. Including traces of historical events in his writing, the author seems
to play the role of a historian. But at the same time, the testimony cannot be
objective and always denotes a certain vision of reality. Besides, through the
choice of a narrator who pretends to be neutral, Camus’s text asks the follow-
ing question: Can we write about events without judging, without betraying?
The reliability of the witness is a crucial problem, especially after the events
that occurred in the twentieth century. Even if the witness tries to be subtle,
to let the facts speak for themselves, the clues of subjectivity remind us that
the narrative is led by an observer who cannot be impartial. Finally, through
the narrator’s game of hide-and-seek, the reader understands that a narrative is
always a construction sustained by a certain vision of the world. This truth—
always unstable and multiple—is obviously in agreement with the postmodern
conception of history perceived as a possible version of events, but not neces-
sarily the only one.
Finally, what can literature do with history and evil? For Camus, the problem
of evil is linked to the problem of language. Indeed, as Tarrou says, “I’d come
to realize that all our troubles spring from our failure to use plain, clean-cut
language.”45 In Silence and Language, George Steiner confirms this interaction
between language and evil, explaining that evil is based on a corrupted use of
language, and language always tries to name evil in order to control it. In their
novels, both Camus and Saramago question the possibility of a new language.
Indeed, thinking about language becomes an ethical and political gesture. Sara-
mago’s position seems quite obvious: The Portuguese writer lauds the return to
a simplified and uncluttered word. In Blindness, a blind writer confides to the
doctor’s wife the necessity of abandoning adjectives because “you know that
adjectives are of no use, if a person kills the other one, it is better to say it
simply.”46 Thus this clarity of language could be obtained by the refusal of the
adjectives. That is what Camus seems to suggest when the sentence that Grand
rewrites ceaselessly becomes “perfect” once it is deprived of its adjectives. But
even if Grand is meticulous, we can have doubts about his talents as a writer.
Nevertheless, the simplicity of language—not as impoverished, but as a less
pompous and more precise language—might be a way to improve communi-
cation between men. We can notice that the main character, Dr. Rieux, is not
talkative even with his mother. Could it be the sign that real love cannot—and
should not—be expressed by common words? As Dominique Rabaté reminds
us, Camus looks for the simplicity of language to find symbiosis with the sim-
plicity of the world.47 It pushes him to wonder about the choice of words.
That is why Rieux “had already noticed Grand’s trick of professing to quote
some turn of speech from ‘his part of the world’ (he hailed from Montélimar),
and following up with some such hackneyed expression as ‘lost in dreams,’
or ‘pretty as a picture.’”48 When discussing with the manager of a hotel who
dreads misfortune, Tarrou underlines the incongruity of the proverb “When
rats are leaving the sinking ship” because “it was true in the case of boats, but
we had never verified it for cities.” Besides, the plague empties language of its
signification to the point that the words “Am well. Thinking of you. Tender-
ness.” become mechanic expressions, more than sincere expressions of feelings.
In other words, Camus raises the problem of a pompous and deceitful rhetoric,
of a language emptied of its meaning. He questions clichés and proverbs, which
have lost their signification or acquired a dangerous ambiguity. The aim is to
unmask the manipulation present in any rhetoric—political, legal, or religious.
This new uncluttered language would offer the possibility of creating a new
way of communicating. But this revival is only possible thanks to the reader
who, committed in his or her reading, finds a reflection of the world. Camus
offers a new role to the reader who agrees to receive Rieux’s testimony, but goes
further: By constructing the meaning, the reader exceeds the intentions of the
author, transforms the novel into an experience of history, and a base for a new
experience of the world.
To conclude, this study confirms that what we call the “postmodern novel”
is not in opposition but in continuity with modern literature. Through this
comparison, The Plague reveals its complexity, both in its aesthetics and in its
interpretation. The multiple connections between The Plague and Blindness
show the unsuspected modernity of Camus’s novel. Proposing a singular vision
of the world, Camus depicts man in his historicity while extending beyond his
time. Maybe, after so much criticism, the time has come for Camus to be fully
understood and appreciated.
Notes
1. Paul F. Smets, “La réception critique immédiate de La Peste en 1947,” Cahiers de
Malagar 13 (Bordeaux: Cahiers de Malagar, 1999): 175–210.
2. “Le moralisme, la noblesse des idées, la volonté de défendre une thèse et de faire des
réflexions sur la vie, la mort, la condition humaine ont quelque chose de laborieux
et de pesant.” Ibid., 208.
3. “Je trouvais ce roman sentencieux et lourd et en même temps, très émouvant,” “je
n’ai jamais été convaincu par la métaphore.” Alain Finkielkraut “Albert Camus:
penser la révolte,” Le Magazine Littéraire 453 (May 2006): 30, 31.
4. “dépouillé à l’extrême,” “un air de sécheresse,” “mode prosaïque.” Smets, “Récep-
tion critique,” 188.
5. Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (New York:
Routledge, 1988).
6. “On aurait tort de juger La Peste selon des normes qui ne lui conviennent pas.”
Smets, “Réception critique,” 185.
7. Note 6 in Rosa Maria Fréjaville’s article “The Appearances of the Horror in Ensaio
Sobre a Cegueira by José Saramago,” Cahiers du CELEC 1 (December 2010): “Si
l’on en croit les différents témoignages inclus dans la Revue Camões , no. 3 de
Oct-Déc 1998. Il s’agit d’une parabole (Albrecht Buschmann), un genre à mi-
chemin entre une parabole et le cauchemar du chaos et de la prédation (Juan Man-
uel Prada), une fable sur l’aliénation et l’individualisme (Miguel García-Posada) et
même une fable anti-totalitaire (Rafael Conte).”
8. “Absence de style très travaillée.” Smets, “Réception critique,” 188.
9. Annie Ernaux, text from conference Ecritures blanches, quoted in Bruno Blanckeman,
Aline Mura-Brunel and Marc Dambre, eds., Le roman français au tournant du XXIe
siècle (Paris: Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2004), 37. “C’est l’écriture ethnologique,
livrant les faits dans leur nudité, n’offrant aucun signe de la subjectivité, de l’émotion
qui pourtant—comment en serait-il autrement—les a suscités à la mémoire.”
10. Camus, The Possession, trans. Anna Moschovakis (New York: Seven Stories Press,
2008), 51. “Ce qu’il me semble avoir obtenu de mieux jusqu’ici, c’est la lucidité,
une espèce de vision subitement simple et désentimentalisée du monde”; Annie
Ernaux, L’Occupation (Paris: Gallimard, 2002), 59.
11. Dominique Rabaté, “Simplicité et simplification dans La Peste,” Il y a 50 ans, La
Peste de Camus, Cahiers de Malagar (Bordeaux: Cahiers de Malagar, 1999), 58
(“L’écriture doit retrouver, conquérir et faire advenir cette transparence du monde,
qui est son sens profond”).
12. Albert Camus, The Plague, trans. Gilbert, Stuart (New York: Thinking Ink, 2011),
6 (“faire œuvre d’historien” Albert Camus, La peste [Paris: Gallimard, 1947], 14).
13. “une énonciation de l’effacement,” “une énonciation de la dérision.” Kamel Feki,
“Effacement et dérision dans La Peste de Camus,” Cause commune 4 (2008): 169.
14. Camus, Plague, 46 (“La peste fut notre affaire à tous”; Camus, Peste, 67).
15. Stewart O’Nan, A Prayer for the Dying (New York: Picador, 2000). In this novel,
the narrator doesn’t reveal his identity but he reveals his “dark side.” Indeed, he
implicitly confesses that he committed an act of cannibalism during the American
Civil War. This revelation is all the more moving as it appears in a second-person
narrative.
16. Umberto Eco, The Open Work (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 6.
17. “j’ai voulu qu’elle se lise sur plusieurs portées”; Camus in letter to Barthes from
January 11, 1955. In Camus, Théâtres, récits, nouvelles (Paris: Gallimard, 1962).
18. Camus, Plague, 1 (“Il est aussi raisonnable de représenter une espèce d’emprisonnement
par une autre que de représenter n’importe quelle chose qui existe réellement par
quelque chose qui n’existe pas”; Camus, Peste, 9).
19. Letter to Roland Barthes, note 9. “La Peste, dont j’ai voulu qu’elle se lise sur plu-
sieurs portées, a cependant comme contenu évident la lutte de la résistance euro-
péenne contre le nazisme.”
20. Finally, the plague is the evil inherent to life. As one of the characters says, “After
all, what does it mean, the plague? It is life, that’s all” ; Camus, Plague, 215 (“Mais
qu’est-ce que ça veut dire, la peste ? C’est la vie, voilà tout”; Camus, Peste, 278).
21. Yet the question of religion isn’t completely solved. Through the debates between
Rieux, Tarrou, and Paneloux, we understand that faith remained problematic for
Camus, as if he felt the need to believe in the sacred.
22. Camus, Plague, 2 (“Sans doute, rien n’est plus naturel, aujourd’hui, que de voir des
gens travailler du matin au soir et choisir ensuite de perdre aux cartes, au café, et en
bavardages, le temps qui leur reste pour vivre”; Camus, Peste, 12).
23. Camus, Plague, 215 (“Ce qu’on apprend au milieu des fléaux, c’est qu’il y a dans les
hommes plus de choses à admirer que de choses à mépriser”; Camus, Peste, 279).
24. Camus, Plague, 146 (“Il peut y avoir de la honte à être heureux seul”; Camus, Peste,
190).
25. Camus, Plague, 216 (“Ecoutant, en effet, les cris d’allégresse qui montaient de la
ville, Rieux se souvenait que cette allégresse était toujours menacée. Car il savait
ce que cette foule en joie ignorait et qu’on peut lire dans les livres, que le bacille
de la peste ne meurt ni ne disparaît jamais, qu’il peut rester pendant des dizaines
d’années endormi . . . et que, peut-être, le jour viendrait où, pour le malheur et
l’enseignement des hommes, la peste réveillerait ses rats et les enverrait mourir dans
une cité heureuse”; Camus, Peste, 279).
26. Camus, Plague, 183 (“Ce monde sans amour était comme un monde mort”;
Camus, Peste, 236).
27. We find the same scene in Blindness, when the ophthalmologist’s wife lies to
authorities by pretending to be blind in order to follow her husband in the asylum.
28. Camus, Plague, 202 (“La pensée de sa femme lui venait, mais il la rejetait chaque
fois”; Camus, Peste, 262).
29. Camus, Plague, 1 (“une ville sans pigeons, sans arbres et sans jardins”; Camus,
Peste, 11).
30. Camus, Plague, 1 (“Le printemps se vend sur les marchés”; Camus, Peste, 13). This
sentence reminds us of a verse by Verlaine in his poem “Monsieur Prudhomme”:
“Et le printemps en fleurs brille sur ses pantoufles” (“Spring shines on his slippers”).
This poem denounces the bourgeoisie who is unable to appreciate poetry because
it is considered unproductive and useless.
31. Camus, Plague, 2 (“Tous nos contemporains sont ainsi”; Camus, Peste, 13).
32. Camus, Plague, 57 (“On travaille tant qu’on en oublie d’aimer”; Camus, Peste, 80).
33. Camus, Plague, 211 (“dans un monde où la douleur est si souvent solitaire”; Camus,
Peste, 274).
34. Camus, Plague, 115 (“L’homme, c’est une idée, et une idée courte, à partir du
moment où il se détourne de l’amour. Et justement, nous ne sommes plus capables
d’amour”; Camus, Peste, 151).
35. Camus, Plague, 127 (“Personne chez nous n’avait plus de grands sentiments”;
Camus, Peste, 167).
36. François Hartog, Régimes d’Historicité. Présentisme et expériences du Temps (Paris:
Seuil, 2003).
37. “Tout artiste est embarqué dans la galère de son temps” Camus, Le Discours de Suède
(Paris: Gallimard, 1958), 13, presented at conference given a little after accepting
Nobel Prize in Stockholm, December 14, 1957.
38. Camus, Plague, 127 (“En somme, à ce moment-là, ils avaient de la mémoire, mais
une imagination insuffisante. Au deuxième stade de la peste, ils perdirent aussi
la mémoire. Sans mémoire, ni imagination, ils vivent dans un présent éternel”;
Camus, Peste, 166).
39. “moment-mémoriel,” “flot mémoriel.” Cited in Mélissa S.-Morin and Patrick-
Michel Noël. “Les représentations du passé,” Conserveries mémorielles 9 (2011),
http://cm.revues.org/846.
40. Camus, Plague, 127 (“Ils étaient entrés dans l’ordre même de la peste . . . L’habitude
du désespoir est pire que le désespoir lui-même”; Camus, Peste, 167).
41. Camus, Plague, 215 (“Cottard, Tarrou, ceux et celle que Rieux avait aimés et per-
dus, tous, morts ou coupables, étaient oubliés. Le vieux avait raison, les hommes
étaient toujours les mêmes”; Camus, Peste, 279).
42. Camus, Plague, 215 (“Le Dr Rieux décida alors de rédiger le récit qui s’achève ici,
pour ne pas être de ceux qui se taisent, pour témoigner en faveur des pestiférés,
pour laisser au moins un souvenir de l’injustice et de la violence qui leur avaient été
faites”; Camus, Peste, 279).
43. Camus, Plague, 202 (“il n’y a d’armistice pour la mère amputée de son fils ou pour
l’homme qui ensevelit son ami”; Camus, Peste, 262).
44. Camus, Plague, 215 (“ce que cette foule en joie ignorait, et qu’on peut lire dans les
livres”; Camus, Peste, 279).
45. Camus, Plague, 178 (“Tout le malheur des hommes venait de ce qu’ils ne tenaient
pas un langage clair”; Camus, Peste, 229).
46. José Saramago, Blindness, trans. Giovanni Pontiero (London: Harvest Book, 1999),
327.
47. Dominique Rabaté. “Simplicité et simplification dans La Peste.” Il y a 50 ans, La
Peste de Camus, Cahiers de Malagar 13 (Bordeaux: Cahiers de Malagar, 1999):
57–76.
48. Camus, Plague, 29 (“Rieux avait déjà noté cette manie qu’avait Grand, né à Mon-
télimar, d’invoquer les locutions de son pays et d’ajouter des formules banales
qui n’étaient de nulle part comme ‘un temps de rêve’ ou ‘un éclairage féérique’”;
Camus, Peste, 46).
CHAPTER 3
Albert Camus’s The Fall

The Vertiginous Fall into Language,
Representation, and Reality
Emmanuelle Anne Vanborre
T
he Fall, the last book Camus finished and published before his death,
contains many reflections and valuable questions for the reader. Its
importance has been minimized but we still view it as one of his most
important works as it seems to bequeath the reader with essential comments and
raises crucial questions on how to read a text, a literary text, and how to read
others and reality. Numerous analyses of Camus’s The Fall consider that the text
is symbolic and offers commentaries on justice, culpability, responsibility, and
so on.1 We will take into account some of these concepts, adding to them an
analysis of writing itself, of the status and role of language and thus, of a work of
fiction. We will start with the relationship of the self with the other, then tackle
the idea of witnessing, and conclude with the role of irony in this text.
The text can be characterized as a dialogue monologue: dialogue, since Cla-
mence, the character narrating the story, seems to talk with another person and
relates indirectly some of his remarks or questions, but also monologue, since
the other person’s words are never directly transcribed. From the beginning,
the double characteristic of the text is highlighted, as well as the coexistence of
opposites—dialogue and monologue in this case.2 In the first pages of the text,
we can find an example of this strange relationship between the person who is
talking and the person he is supposedly talking to. The other person’s words are
not related, they are only guessed according to what the narrator says or does:
“Now I shall withdraw, monsieur, happy to have been of help to you. Thank
you; I’d accept if I were sure of not being a nuisance. You are too kind. Then I
shall bring my glass over beside yours. You are right. His silence is deafening.”3
The reader guesses what the other person may have told Clamence according to
his reactions.4 Clamence stays in the bar and puts his glass next to his interlocu-
tor since he certainly asked Clamence to join him for a drink. Clamence’s com-
mentaries of his interlocutor’s remarks are another way of knowing what the
other person may have said. Clamence’s comment on the silence of the owner
of the bar echoes a comment of the other person as Clamence indicates that he
is right and that they agree. Thus the interlocutor’s role is reduced considering
we never directly know what he said, but at the same time his role is central as
Clamence takes his comments into account and even repeats in his own dis-
course some of the words the interlocutor spoke. Besides, Clamence’s discourse
would certainly be impossible if the other person was not present to listen to it,
hear it, and construct it.
Evelyn Zepp comments on the way discourse functions in The Fall and
she confirms that the presence of the interlocutor indeed shapes the form and
content of Clamence’s discourse: “He anticipates the other’s reactions, qualifies
what he says because of them, incorporates the other’s words into his own dis-
course.”5 She also indicates that Clamence’s discourse is in fact composed of two
voices: he talks for himself in a quest of identity and for the other in a game of
power. She quotes Myrna-Shardt, who relates this discourse functioning to the
literary genre named skaz that Camus could have known through Dostoevsky.
Skaz allows for the coexistence of the oral aspect of the text as well as its narrative
and theatrical aspect. Zepp justifies the importance of this literary genre, skaz,
with the fact that it allows us to understand that the essential questions raised
in The Fall are related to language itself and the nature of the process of com-
munication. Zepp also indicates that The Fall is at the border of various genres
and incorporates in its text several different genres. Zepp quotes Julia Kristeva’s
analyses to show that opposite aspects indeed coexist in this text: “Julia Kristeva
speaks of a form of logic in which the binary structure of Aristotelian logic is
replaced by the dialogical structure of the dyad. A text structured on this logic
is formed not by the opposition of mutually exclusive poles (e.g., either mono-
logue or dialogue), but from the constant movement, or interplay, between
non-exclusive oppositional members of couples, which form a ‘non-synthetic
reunion.’”6 Unity is thus characterized by difference and plurality. In another
essay, Zepp focuses on the double aspect of the voice and language used. She
resorts to Mikhail Bakhtin’s analyses and refers again to Kristeva’s. Bakhtin states
that discourse is constructed in relation to the other and uses the term “dialo-
gism” to characterize it. Dialectical thought and functioning are thus replaced
with dialogical thought and functioning: “In dialectic thought, things are either/
or; there is only absolute opposition between poles. In dialogic thought, such as
proposed by Mikhail Bakhtin and Julia Kristeva, there is a movement between
Albert Camus’s The Fall ● 37
couples; they are one continuous system in which each ‘pole’ is a complement
to the other. There is no absolute opposition or separation; rather, the dialogical
couple, or dyad, is in a relationship of ‘non-synthetic reunion.’”7 Kristeva and
Bakhtin’s analyses thus prove that dialogical thought, which appears in The Fall,
allows for the meeting of opposite aspects and a constant exchange between
them, unlike dialectical thought, which functions with exclusion.
Clamence wants to annihilate the other—that is, to reduce his discourse—to
reduce language to monologue, and to take the other’s place in and through
language. Clamence’s comment on the use of language by society reveals his
personal take on language: “We have become lucid. For the dialogue we have
substituted the communiqué.”8 To eliminate dialogue equals to eliminating dis-
cursive exchange with the other and thus to reducing the other’s linguistic exis-
tence. According to Clamence, for the self to exist and be meaningful, the other
must be eliminated, the other must literally disappear. However, Clamence’s
quest is reversed as his attempt at reducing the other to silence, to nothingness,
is unsuccessful to the point of making him dependent on that same other. He
repeats the other person’s words, and they become an integral part of his own
discourse. Clamence indeed constructs his discourse around the other person
and as a consequence his identity as a speaking subject is also defined in rela-
tion to the other. Clamence’s dialectic vision in his quest for constructing the
self that excludes the other does not function any longer. The text by its form
shows that dialogism is the form of discourse the most adapted to the question
of the construction of the self and of the meaning it can have. The relationship
to the other is thus fundamental and the various and opposed aspects that make
discourse and identity must exist together for meaning to be possible. The nar-
ration’s double or hybrid characteristic is in the image of the character who is
himself double. The relation to the other is what determines him, what allows
him to construct his identity. Clamence indeed constructs himself in relation
to the other; he is never one but always at the same time self and other. In fact,
Clamence is the other simultaneously different and similar. Clamence wants to
reduce the existence of the other, but this attempt fails and the text shows how
the subject, by identifying with the other, reveals the double aspect of his person
that cannot be reduced to uniqueness. At a certain point in the story, Clamence
reveals this double aspect of his person, without indicating that it is the other’s
presence that makes him double. It is however through the other that Clamence
realizes this aspect of his person: “From the evening when I was called—for I
was really called—I had to answer or at least seek an answer. It wasn’t easy; for
some time I floundered. To begin with, that perpetual laugh and the laughers
had to teach me to see clearly within me and to discover at last that I was not
simple. Don’t smile; that truth is not so basic as it seems. What we call basic
truths are simply the ones we discover after all the others.”9
The laughs that Clamence hears several times during the story contain the
voice of the other and the other’s call.10 Clamence tries to avoid answering this
call and does everything he can to stop hearing it. His refusal to cross bridges,
to go toward the other and toward the possibility of giving him or her meaning
and to give himself meaning, does not succeed as the other and his unavoidable
relationship with him or her remains present until the end of the story where it
reaches its climax. The other does not disappear and ends up being determining
in the construction of the self. Clamence’s self is indeed the other to whom he
gives the mirror. He creates his own portrait with pretenses and false-true decla-
rations and confessions. Once this portrait is completed, he turns it around and
presents it to the other. The notion of double appears again here with the mask
that conceals the true existence of the subject. The mask carries double meaning
with its description as both “lifelike and stylized.”11 It contains the identity of the
one it hides but cannot totally contain the definition and meaning of the sub-
ject who constructs himself with the other. The portrait that the narrator gives
to the other is also double as it is the mask he takes off, revealing himself in a
way. The mask seems to hide the narrator but it can also unveil his identity. The
intrinsically double aspect of the object emphasizes the double aspect of the sub-
ject whose existence comes to life in his relation to the other. The portrait that
becomes a mirror reminds the mirror in which Clamence saw himself split in
two after he heard the laugh on the Pont des Arts. The mirror given to the other
is eventually only a means of revealing the inherent duplicity of the subject.
The other person is defined similarly to Clamence: he has the same profes-
sion, and the central event of the story—the fall of the woman in the Seine,
which appears again in the last lines of the text—concerns both characters, who
seem to constitute an entity made of their united double aspects:
Then please tell me what happened to you one night on the quays of the Seine
and how you managed never to risk your life. You yourself utter the words that
for years have never ceased echoing through my nights and that I shall at last say
through your mouth: “O young woman, throw yourself into the water again so
that I may a second time have the chance of saving both of us!” A second time,
eh, what a risky suggestion! Just suppose, cher maître, that we should be taken
literally? We’d have to go through with it. Brr . . . ! The water’s so cold! But let’s
not worry! It’s too late now. It will always be too late. Fortunately!12
The narrator uses the pronoun “we,” which, despite its plural form, seems to
encompass the unity of the subjects and of the subject. The double now appears
in the unity of the subject and the story seems to lead to this discovery, this
revelation, which is made possible because of the late revelation of the fall of
the woman in the Seine, which sheds light on the functioning of the subject.
The subject is double and even if he likes to think that it is too late to again
have the opportunity to save the other, to not let the other disappear and die,
the other will always be present and the self will not freely control his relation-
ship with him or her. Indeed, the subject is neither free to recreate the scene of
the fall nor free to escape it totally since it always calls out again. The subject’s
quest for meaning is thus unfinished and infinite as the quest for the missing
other and for the lost meaning will be inevitable and endless. The hybrid aspect
of the subject and his or her meaning can only be expressed with dialogism
and hybrid language, which both contain the possibility of the coexistence of
opposite elements. Literary language, by the way it functions, is the best form
for the expression of this possibility. The text contains opposite elements and
appears as a hybrid text that blends genres and discourses in order to unravel the
functioning of the construction of the meaning of the subject and of the text.
This construction and the search that characterizes it seem to have to do here
with the question of representation and witnessing. Literature and History have
a peculiar relationship as we are going to see when analyzing the possibility-
impossibility of witnessing.
****
The most obvious themes of the book are the notions of culpability and judg-
ment. The narrator states that he is a penitent judge. The way the events unfold
is important since several detours are used to finally arrive at the central scene
of the woman’s fall into the Seine, a scene that is itself wrapped in mystery,
silence, and denial. To recount, to remember is problematic, and representing
the events is just as difficult. The notion of witnessing emerges as the pos-
sibility of witnessing or keeping silent is posed. Silence and unspoken words
contribute to the indetermination that characterizes the events and it seems
possible to affirm that this witnessing-nonwitnessing act also refers to the geno-
cide of Jewish people during the Second World War. This event is not referred
to directly and explicitly, but several clues point to it and a few ironic refer-
ences are expressed by the narrator: “I live in the Jewish quarter or what was
called so until our Hitlerian brethren made room. What a cleanup! Seventy-five
thousand Jews deported or assassinated; that’s real vacuum-cleaning. I admire
that diligence, that methodical patience! When one has no character one has to
apply a method. Here it did wonders incontrovertibly, and I am living on the
site of one of the greatest crimes in history.”13
The disappearance of the victims and the intended erasing are found in the
text, which presents the Jewish quarter as gone. Clamence lives there, but he
advises his interlocutor to avoid this area to get to the harbor and the “fine
avenues.”14 Irony is again present here, and the complex nature of language
and its referent must be noted. The place itself is problematic because it can-
not represent the whole event; it represents the place where Jews used to live
but not where their extermination happened. The area eventually lost its name
as its population disappeared. This area is a site without a place for an event
without a referent. The direct and indirect references to the death of the Jews as
well as the symbolic event of the fall of the woman into the Seine both indicate
that the death of the other is central to the text. The city perfectly lends itself
to the narrator’s concerns and comments on absence and disappearance. Jews
apparently inhabited one part of the city and, because of its shape it reminds
the narrator of the circles of hell described by Dante. The most important and
deepest circle is the one in which the Jewish quarter used to be. The name of
this circle is not pronounced because the narrator’s story seems interrupted by
the person he is with. However, he often repeats his interlocutor’s words either
to comment on them or to establish the coherence of the narration. Nothing
like this occurs here and the absence of the name indicates the absence of the
victims, the absence of their voices, and the absence of the event in people’s con-
sciousness. This last circle remains unnamed here, but it is named in Dante, and
it is called the circle of “traitors.” The absence of this term here also underlines
the lack of reaction from most witnesses who did not do anything to prevent
the genocide. The scene of the fall of the woman into the Seine is symbolic of
this ability to ignore certain events. Clamence is walking in Paris and seems to
witness a suicide, but he does not do anything to prevent it. As he is crossing the
bridge, he walks behind a woman leaning forward looking at the water; even if
he says he notices this shape, he does not try to approach the woman, and after
the fall, he freezes. The disappearing of the other happens anonymously and
without the intervention of the narrator. The silence that surrounds the scene is
parallel to Clamence’s silence as he does not say or do anything. The person he
is talking to seems to wonder if he tried to have more information on this event,
but Clamence replies, “What? That woman? Oh, I don’t know. Really I don’t
know. The next day, and the days following, I didn’t read the papers.”15 His will
to avoid being implicated and to avoid knowing anything about this woman,
about the event he more or less directly witnessed, conveys the will to flee and to
remain uninvolved. To not hear the call of the other and to not name the event
both amount to minimizing and erasing.16 The other, instead of becoming the
witness who recounts what he has seen or heard, becomes an accomplice, a “trai-
tor” who implicitly allows the event to happen and does not do anything to stop
it or to keep it alive through memory and remembrance once it has happened.
Silence thus characterizes the act of witnessing-nonwitnessing. Representa-
tion does not function any longer since the witness decides to keep silent and
consequently does not represent the event that remains unsaid. However, the
text stages this silence, and the narrator who tried to flee certain events cannot
escape them. The bridge, the stage of this event, is also the place of laughter that
haunts Clamence. It is loaded with meaning, and Clamence himself explains
why: “On the bridges of Paris I, too, learned that I was afraid of freedom.”17
The freedom of the individual is linked to death, to his relation with the other,
and to the death of the other. It is also the freedom that is felt in facing the
meaning to give to the self, which is constructed in relation to the other. After
the event of the fall of the woman into the Seine, the narrator indicates that he
avoids bridges: “I never cross a bridge at night. It’s the result of a vow. Suppose,
after all, that someone should jump in the water. One of two things—either you
do likewise to fish him out and, in cold weather, you run a great risk! Or you
forsake him there and suppressed dives sometimes leave one strangely aching.”18
He does not want to witness again a similar kind of event. He refuses to have to
choose again and to be determined by his relation to the other, even if he cannot
avoid it. He does not want to be the witness of the other’s history, but despite
his refusal, his discourse is imbued with the other, be it by his or her silence or
his or her words, and by the unavoidable consequences of ignoring the other.
In her analysis of The Fall, Shoshana Felman notes that the text shows how
narration contains the impossibility to remember and to write History. The
witness either sometimes refuses to see the real event (he avoids the other and
does not cross bridges for fear of meeting him or her) or cannot find words to
recount the event.19 Paradoxically, narration becomes the writing of the impos-
sibility to write History. Felman quotes Maurice Blanchot—–French writer,
critic, theorist, and philosopher—in her analysis of the effects of the genocide
on writing. The absolute of Auschwitz suspends time and History and forces
writing to find a new form. Felman concludes her essay by stating, “I would sug-
gest, now, that, the cryptic forms of modern narrative and modern art always—
whether consciously or not—partake of that historical impossibility of writing
a historical narration of the Holocaust, by bearing testimony, through their
very cryptic form, to the radical historical crisis in witnessing the Holocaust has
opened up.”20 The impossibility of writing History is thus represented in the
texts that, with new shapes, tackle this impossibility. This impossibility is linked
to the impossibility of witnessing, which is itself linked to the impossibility for
the subject to meet the other.21 The relation to the other is one of the central
points of The Fall, which by its form stages this relation and the consequences
it can have. It seems that we can broaden Felman’s vision and consider the text
of The Fall as a hybrid text that does not exclude any possibility and that stages
the difficulty of representing reality. From and beyond a precise unsaid event,
this text seems to witness the disappearing and absence that constitute the heart
of writing. Fiction becomes the locus where absence and silence are expressed
without being expressed. Even if it is impossible to know and remember, this
impossibility contains absence that leaves a trace. Literary writing alone con-
tains absence and the experience-nonexperience of the subject: “Granted, to
write is to renounce being in command of oneself or having any proper name,
and at the same time it is not to renounce, but to announce, welcoming with-
out recognition the absent. Or, it is to be in relation, through words in their
absence, with what one cannot remember—a witness to the unencountered,
answerable not only for the void in the subject, but for the subject as a void, its
disappearance in the imminence of a death which has already taken place, out
of place, any place at all.”22
The language of fiction allows bearing witness to the absence and disap-
pearance of the subject. Fragmentary writing seems to contain the interruption
created by certain events in History, and the writing of impossibility seems the
only possible way of carrying silence, oblivion, and absence; notions that are
impossible to express but that must be expressed. The Fall contains absence
and the witnessing of disappearance and thus a reflection on History and the
possibility of writing.
****
The irony present within the lines is a first hint to the problematic character
of the text and the fact that writing eventually refers to something different
than what it is trying to represent. Clamence’s discourse is filled with satiri-
cal or ironic comments on exterior things and on himself. His discourse and
attitude toward other people are filled with irony. This is made evident in the
way he talks about the Shoah and despises the people he pretends to be polite
and friendly with. His profession is also made up of two opposite sides: he is at
the same time judge and penitent. Clamence himself very clearly indicates the
double aspect of his personality: “A double face, a charming Janus, and above
it the motto of the house: ‘Don’t rely on it.’ On my cards: ‘Jean-Baptiste Cla-
mence, play actor.’”23 He also explains that he likes the Netherlands, the coun-
try where he decided to live, for his double aspect.24 Distance operates at all
levels throughout the discourse of this character and throughout the text itself.
The form of the text can indeed be defined as ironic. At first, it does not
reveal itself as it really is, but instead divides itself to contain opposing ele-
ments. Distance is the essential feature of irony. The narrator distances himself
from everything he is telling, from himself, and from the other whom he tries
to avoid radically. Several critics note the ironical aspects of The Fall: Paul Vial-
laneix interprets this irony as a comment on nihilism and on the bad conscience
of people, indicating that everything is a ruse, bad and good conscience.25 Gen-
eviève Quillard takes into account the extralinguistic phenomena that play a
role in the functioning of irony and links the comments created through irony
to the human condition.26 It seems to us that the distance effect created by
irony particularly relates to the character, the language, and the text itself. In
his essay on the role of writing in The Fall, Roland Simon wonders about writ-
ing and concludes his analysis noting that it can only refer back to itself.27 He
states that Camus is, in relation to this, forewarning the reflections on writing
that will follow his work.28 Parallel to the reading of Camus’s work as reflections
on society, history, politics, and so on, we also see in his fictions an important
commentary on writing itself. Simon quotes Michel Butor to express the idea of
questioning that exists in literature: “Real confession and autobiography highly
risk, like their fictional analogs, to end up in failure, if they insist in wanting
to conclude. If the literary act must change men, as Michel Butor would say a
while ago already, it is not because it offers answers, but because it poses ques-
tions and asks itself questions.”29 The literary act poses questions and we could
also say questions itself.
The critic David Ellison devotes an essay to The Fall and quotes Blanchot’s
analyses. He shows that with irony the text designates itself and stages the dif-
ferent aspects of the linguistic act, of the act of reading, and the act of writing.
Ellison quotes Paul de Man in the epigraph to his essay to prove that Camus
moves away from short-lived literary movements and particularly from existen-
tialism. Ellison develops this idea in his analysis:
There is a self-reflexive dimension in La Chute that is not merely autobiographi-
cal, but textual. La Chute is, among other things, a mise en abyme of the act
of reading, a meditation on the potential and limitations of the written word.
In this sense, Camus is much closer to the modern experimentation of écriture
than he is to “humanistic existentialism” . . . —a term by which Paul de Man
implies the subservience of form to content and a certain lack of deep literary
self-consciousness in the avowed literary-humanistic enterprise of both Sartre and
Camus. The possibility exists that La Chute is not merely a text we have difficulty
reading, but a text that stages the difficulty, or even the impossibility of a con-
trolled and masterful reading, and that it represents a turn away from the rigorous
aesthetic sobriety of moralisme.30
Camus indeed distances himself from existentialism and explores the possibil-
ity of the literary text and of writing. It seems that Camus, especially with The
Fall, gives precedence to literary questions. This text contains some aspects of
autoreflexivity and poses questions that refer to its possibility or impossibil-
ity, by ceaselessly questioning itself and exploring its own functioning. In the
quoted passage, Ellison also notes the difficulty this text presents the reader
with, and he speaks of “dizziness” as the reader is puzzled reading such a text.
Ellison uses the very term “dizziness” in the title of his essay and he bases his
reading on the rhetoric used by Camus, which is the source of this feeling in the
reader. The difficulty the reader experiences with the text is paralleled with the
difficulty experienced by the narrator and the writer himself. Ellison analyzes
the idea of imprisonment as a metaphor and explains that without trying to
minimize the importance of what is expressed by Clamence, it is indeed the
act of writing that is eventually staged.31 Just like the text and language that are
deceiving, the author himself only gives us the illusion of offering a conclusion
to the possibility of analysis and interpretation. The result of reading the text
remains open and prevents us from fixing meaning in a definite and definitive
way. The movement of displacement thus allows the text to exist. Disappropria-
tion and fall are central to writing. The attempt to keep control of the narration
and of the literary act is staged by Clamence, but its failure is also revealed in
the text. The void could be the locus of infinite and diverse interpretations, and
Clamence himself seems to want to fix meaning. In relation to culpability, his
wish to be discovered for the theft of the painting equals his wish to be accused
for a real and tangible fault as Blanchot remarks in his essay. However, the text
does not allow us to stop the reading and the meaning in an absolute way;
rather, it opens literary possibilities staging the literary act itself and the double
aspect of individuals and reality.
Ellison’s essay ends on an essential question, which is whether culpability is
the base of Clamence’s story or whether a story of the origin of this culpability
exists, which, by developing itself from the center, would take the narrator (the
reader and the text) into dizziness. Ellison turns to the scene of the fall itself to
answer this question and to expose the rhetoric of rupture that is at the center
of the text:
But what is the textual origin of this “death”? A literal reading of the passage that
respects the evidence of Camus’s wording reveals only a series of juxtaposed per-
ceptions: the protagonist sees a woman who appeals to him sensually, hears the
sound of a body falling, followed by a cry. The rhetoric of Clamence and the logic
of representation cause us to combine these elements in a coherent picture: we
conclude quickly that it is the woman seen on the bridge who falls, and that her
death is Clamence’s crime of passivity. The text is persuasive enough to render all
this believable and pathetic. On the purely literal level of discourse’s immediate
significance, however, the dramatic center is nothing more than the enigma of
an invisible absence which, through a subject’s erroneous interpretation, becomes
clothed in the language of guilt.32
The reader literally falls into the abyss of interpretation that is opened up by the
text and assumes that there are links between all the elements presented, thus
leading to the discovery of an exegesis and a meaning that seem adequate. How-
ever, Ellison reveals the deceiving aspect of such interpretations and underlines
again the dizziness this text inflicts on its reader. Representation and hermeneu-
tics are reversed and questioned; their functioning seems jammed and the cen-
ter of the text ends up being absence. The text seems to comprise a self-reflexive
dimension as its center is the absence of origin, and the quest for this origin,
as well as the meaning that stems from it. Ellison concludes his article on the
irony of the narration by indicating that “Camus’s enigmatic récit, although it

may have been consciously (authorially) conceived as a text about our modern
imprisonment in guilt, became, in the actual writing, the dérobade by which
narration reveals its ironic relationship to the subject-matter or message it con-
veys.”33 The act of writing stages itself and reveals the ironic, double relation it
has with the subject and the message it is supposed to convey. It seems to free
itself from interpretative and narrative constraints to be an independent creative
act. Ellison notes again precisely the freedom of this language to create from
nothing, repeating Clamence’s words explaining that the fall is finally behind
him.34 For Ellison, the fall is a movement of decentralization that separates the
text from possible interpretations and explanations and refers back to itself and
its freedom. This text creates itself from nothingness, from absence, from the
absence of origin and meaning that it works at recreating. The title and the cen-
tral event of this text are “the fall,” as it is this very movement that is crucial for
the possibility of the linguistic act and of literary writing.35 Clamence precisely
disappears in the linguistic act that stages itself in a questioning and a quest of
writing by writing.
Blanchot tackles the idea of the literary act and the questioning that accom-
panies it in his essay. He indicates how irony is present in this text: “And here,
in La Chute, where the one who speaks, speaks only of himself—not without
detours, but apparently without reticence, with all of the resources of marvelous
rhetoric, as the distinguished lawyer that he is—we soon perceive that he is not
speaking of his own life but of everyone’s life, that this life is without content,
that his confidences do not confide anything, just as the interlocutor toward
whom he is turned is a wall of fog into which his words sink without having
been heard and as if they had not been uttered. What is left? Irony.”36
The text is made of appearances that have to be overcome, delved into, and
emptied of their initial referent. The whole content of the text is deceiving
because it does not refer to what it seems it refers to. The text is double and this
irony is problematic because, as Blanchot indicates, “it gives us only what it takes
from us.”37 The content of the text eventually disappears as it is undermined by
the irony that wraps it. What remains is void, absence, and questioning. And it
seems that these very notions are central to a reflection on the act of writing, on
what literary fiction really is. This reading differs from the existentialist reading
and the reading of this text as self-reflexive, the text does not accept any of these
interpretations and maybe also accepts both at the same time.
The text of The Fall contains numerous reflections on the possibility of read-
ing and writing a literary text and on the possibility of representing certain
(historical) events. It seems to us that the reflections on the linguistic act are
paired with questions on communication and the relation of the self with the
other. Our reading does not fix meaning in an absolute and unique exegesis but
instead is aware of the constant questioning the text implies. Without falling
into the traps of engaged literature, we can think that this text involves us, read-
ers, and invites us today to question our relationship with language, representa-
tion, with the text, the other, and reality.
Notes
1. This text is also often viewed as a fictional reflection on the quarrel between Sartre
and Camus over Jeanson’s review of The Rebel. Our study endeavors to stay in the
realm of the literary to analyze its functioning and the questioning it brings about.
2. Brian Fitch analyzes this strange monologue in the following way: “One may con-
sider The Fall as a monologue which wants to be seen as a dialogue or as a dialogue
reduced to a monologue by the talkative Clamence, but the result is the same: this
text, in a final analysis, only mimes dialogue, that is to say, it only pretends to be
one. Thus, it suggests and confirms the futility and unavoidable frustration of the
natural longings of all language as soon as it is frozen as a text. In this sense, its
mimetic gesture is not without a parodic impact.” Fitch, “Le paradigme herméneu-
tique chez Camus,” in Albert Camus 1980, ed. Raymond Gay-Crosier (Gainesville:
University Press of Florida, 1980), 42–43. (Unless otherwise stated, all translations
are mine.) Fitch concludes his analysis by showing that “the hermeneutical circle
falls in the vicious circle of textual autorepresentation.” (“Et qu’on considère La
Chute comme un monologue qui veut se faire prendre pour un dialogue ou comme
un dialogue réduit à un monologue par le bavard qu’est Clamence, le résultat est
le même: ce texte ne fait, en dernière analyse, que mimer le dialogue, c’est-à-dire
qu’il ne fait que faire comme s’il en était un. Ainsi, il suggère et confirme la futilité
et l’inévitable frustration des aspirations naturelles de tout langage dès que celui-ci
s’est figé en texte. En ce sens, son geste mimétique n’est pas sans jouir d’une por-
tée parodique.” “Le cercle herméneutique se trouve pris dans le cercle vicieux de
l’autoreprésentation textuelle”).
3. Albert Camus, The Fall, trans. Justin O’Brien (New York: Vintage Books, 1991),
3 (“Mais je me retire, monsieur, heureux de vous avoir obligé. Je vous remercie et
j’accepterais si j’étais sûr de ne pas jouer les fâcheux. Vous êtes trop bon. J’installerai
donc mon verre auprès du vôtre. Vous avez raison, son mutisme est assourdissant”;
Albert Camus, La chute [Paris: Gallimard, 1956], 7–8).
4. Allen Whartenby interprets The Fall by proposing a real dialogue between Cla-
mence and his interlocutor. He imagines his possible interventions and concludes
his analysis by stressing the role of the reader and creator: “By reasserting his own
values as a reaction to the fictional character, the reader proves his superiority and
emerges as a true existentialist hero. He is made aware of his limitations, of bound-
ary situations, but also of the intellectual powers to meet them. In this manner,
too, Camus has again contributed to his ideal of a society in which the creator will
reign instead of the judge.” Whartenby, “The Interlocutor in La Chute: A Key to Its
Meaning,” PMLA 83, no. 5 (Fall 1968): 1333.
5. Evelyn Zepp, “The Generic Ambiguity of Albert Camus’s La Chute,” French Forum
7, no. 3 (September 1982): 252–60.
6. Ibid., 258.
7. Mikhail Bakhtin and Julia Kristeva, “Self and Other: Identity as Dialogical Con-
frontation in La Chute” Perspectives on Contemporary Literature 12 (1986): 52.
8. Camus, Fall, 45 (“Nous sommes devenus lucides. Nous avons remplacé le dialogue
par le communiqué”; Camus, Chute, 50).
9. Camus, Fall, 84 (“A partir du soir où j’ai été appelé, car j’ai été appelé réellement,
j’ai dû répondre ou du moins chercher la réponse. Ce n’était pas facile; j’ai long-
temps erré. Il a fallu d’abord que ce rire perpétuel, et les rieurs, m’apprissent à voir
plus clair en moi, à découvrir enfin que je n’étais pas simple. Ne souriez pas, cette
vérité n’est pas aussi première qu’elle paraît. On appelle vérités premières celles
qu’on découvre après toutes les autres, voilà tout”; Camus, Chute, 89–90).
10. “A laugh burst out behind me . . . The sound of the laughter was decreasing, but I
could still hear it distinctly behind me, come from nowhere unless from the water”;
“The laughter continued to drift my way, without my random efforts succeeding
in diverting it of its benevolent, almost tender quality that hurt me.” Camus, Fall,
39, 96 (“Un rire éclata derrière moi . . . Le rire décroissait, mais je l’entendais encore
distinctement derrière moi, venu de nulle part, sinon des eaux”; “Le rire a continué
de flotter autour de moi, sans que mes efforts désordonnés réussissent à lui ôter ce
qu’il avait de bienveillant, de presque tendre, et qui me faisait mal”; Camus, Chute,
42–43, 101).
11. Camus, Fall, 139 (“fidèles et simplifiés”; Camus, Chute, 145).
12. Camus, Fall, 147 (“Alors, racontez-moi, je vous prie, ce qui vous est arrivé un soir
sur les quais de la Seine et comment vous avez réussi à ne jamais risquer votre vie.
Prononcez vous-même les mots qui, depuis des années, n’ont cessé de retentir dans
mes nuits, et que je dirai enfin par votre bouche: ‘O jeune fille, jette-toi encore dans
l’eau pour que j’aie une seconde fois la chance de nous sauver tous les deux!’ Une
seconde fois, hein, quelle imprudence! Supposez, cher maître, qu’on nous prenne au
mot? Il faudrait s’exécuter. Brr . . . ! L’eau est si froide! Mais rassurons-nous! Il est trop
tard, maintenant, il sera toujours trop tard. Heureusement!”; Camus, Chute, 153).
13. Camus, Fall, 11 (“Moi, j’habite le quartier juif, ou ce qui s’appelait ainsi jusqu’au
moment où nos frères hitlériens y ont fait de la place. Quel lessivage! Soixante-
quinze mille juifs déportés ou assassinés, c’est le nettoyage par le vide. J’admire cette
application, cette méthodique patience! Quand on n’a pas de caractère, il faut bien
se donner une méthode. Ici, elle a fait merveille, sans contredit, et j’habite sur les
lieux d’un des plus grands crimes de l’histoire”; Camus, Chute, 15).
14. Camus, Fall, 10 (“belles avenues”; Camus, Chute, 15).
15. Camus, Fall, 71 (“Quoi? Cette femme? Ah! je ne sais pas vraiment, je ne sais pas. Ni
le lendemain, ni les jours qui suivirent, je n’ai lu les journaux”; Camus, Chute, 76).
16. Shoshana Felman indicates, “The suicide scene becomes a figure for historical occa-
sions in which silence reasserts itself, a metaphor for history as the assertion and
the reassertion—as the displacement and the repetition—of a silence.” Shoshana
Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis,
and History (New York: Routledge, 1992), 192.
17. Camus, Fall, 136 (“Sur les ponts de Paris, j’ai appris moi aussi que j’avais peur de
la liberté”; Camus, Chute, 141).
18. Camus, Fall, 15 (“Je ne passe jamais sur un pont, la nuit. C’est la conséquence d’un
vœu. Supposez, après tout, que quelqu’un se jette à l’eau. De deux choses l’une, ou
vous l’y suivez pour le repêcher et, dans la saison froide, vous risquez le pire! Ou
vous l’y abandonnez et les plongeons rentrés laissent parfois d’étranges courba-
tures”; Camus, Chute, 19).
19. “In bearing witness to the witness’s inability to witness—to the narrating subject’s
inability to cross the bridge towards the Other’s death or life—The Fall inscribes
the Holocaust as the impossible historical narrative of an event without a witness,
an event eliminating its own witness. Narrative has thus become the very writing of
the impossibility of writing history.” Felman and Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witness-
ing, 201.
20. Ibid.
21. The desire to know exists but seems impossible to satisfy: “The wish of all, in the
camps, the last wish: know what has happened, do not forget, and at the same time
never will you know.” Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann
Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 82 (“Le vœu de tous, là-bas,
le dernier vœu: sachez ce qui s’est passé, n’oubliez pas, et en même temps jamais
vous ne saurez”; Maurice Blanchot, L’écriture du désastre [Paris: Gallimard, 1980],
131). Witnessing seems impossible; witnesses are no longer here to witness and
survivors cannot express the horror of Auschwitz and the void created.
22. Blanchot, Writing of the Disaster, 121 (“Écrire, certes, c’est renoncer à se tenir par la
main ou à s’appeler par noms propres, et en même temps ce n’est pas renoncer, c’est
annoncer, accueillant sans le reconnaître l’absent—ou, par les mots en leur absence,
être en rapport avec ce dont on ne peut se souvenir, témoin du non-éprouvé, répon-
dant non seulement au vide dans le sujet, mais au sujet comme vide, sa disparition
dans l’imminence d’une mort qui a déjà eu lieu hors de tout lieu”; Blanchot, Ecri-
ture du désastre, 186).
23. Camus, Fall, 47 (“Une face double, un charmant Janus, et, au-dessus, la devise de la
maison: ‘Ne vous y fiez pas.’ Sur mes cartes: ‘Jean-Baptiste Clamence, comédien’”;
Camus, Chute, 52).
24. “I like them, for they are double. They are here and elsewhere”; Camus, Fall, 13
(“Je l’aime, car il est double. Il est ici et il est ailleurs”; Camus, Chute, 17).
25. Paul Viallaneix, “Jeux et enjeux de l’ironie dans La Chute,” in Albert Camus: Œuvre
fermée, œuvre ouverte, ed. Raymond Gay-Crosier and Jacqueline Lévi-Valensi (Paris:
Gallimard, 1985), 188.
26. Geneviève Quillard, “Mécanismes ironiques et code socioculturel dans La Chute,”
Revue des Lettres Modernes: Histoire des Idées et des Littératures 985–92 (1991): 91.
27. In “Langage du pouvoir, pouvoir du langage ou la narration à la première per-
sonne dans La Chute d’Albert Camus,” Elaine Cliche also notes the autoreferential
aspect of speech and describes it as “autoreferential speech, which made the psy-
chologic and cognitive bases explode, and which allows the person enunciating it
to be multiplied in it” (“Parole autoréférentielle, donc, qui fait éclater les assises
psychologiques et cognitives et qui permet à celui qui l’énonce de se multiplier en
elle”; Revue de l’Université d’Ottawa/University of Ottawa Quarterly 54, no. 4 [Fall
1984]: 20). Cliche also affirms that language in The Fall has the power to reveal the
duplicity of the individual, and she concludes her article with remarks on the power
of the writer.
28. “In The Fall, “Camus was already giving a foretaste of suspicion, which, going
further than that of Nathalie Sarraute, was going to spread . . . to all reflection
of man on man in literature” (“Dans La Chute, Camus donnait déjà un avant-
goût du soupçon qui, allant plus loin encore que celui de Nathalie Sarraute, allait
s’étendre . . . à toute réflexion de l’homme sur l’homme en littérature”; Roland
Simon, “Le Rôle de l’écriture dans La Chute de Camus et Quelqu’un de Pinget,”
French Review 47, no. 3 [February 1974]: 556).
29. Ibid. (“La confession et l’autobiographie réelles risquent fort, comme leurs ana-
logues fictifs, d’aboutir à un échec, s’ils obstinent à vouloir conclure. Si l’acte lit-
téraire doit changer les hommes, comme le disait Michel Butor il y a quelque temps
déjà, ce n’est pas parce qu’il apporte des réponses, mais parce qu’il pose des ques-
tions et s’en pose.”)
30. David R. Ellison, “Camus and the Rhetoric of Dizziness: La Chute,” Contemporary
Literature 24, no. 3 (Fall 1983): 325–26.
31. Ibid., 336–37.
32. Ibid., 247.
33. Ibid., 348.
34. “‘Trop tard, trop loin’. His exclamation, which adds to the pathos of represented
events—the woman is gone, perhaps already drowned—is simultaneously an expres-
sion of his language’s freedom to create, quite literally, from nothing.” Ibid., 347.
35. The initial title Camus chose was not “The Fall,” but the event and movement of
the fall are central to the text.
36. Maurice Blanchot, “The Fall: The Flight,” in Friendship, trans. Elizabeth Rotten-
berg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 202.
37. Ibid., 203.
PART 2
Philosophical and Political Reflections

CHAPTER 4
Camus’s Unbeknownst Legacy:

Or, “I’m Having an Existential Crisis!”
Don’t You Really Mean a Camusian Crisis?
Michael Y. Bennett
A
ll good academics should refer to the same two dictionaries: the Oxford
English Dictionary, to see what a word technically means, and the Urban
Dictionary, to see how the word is actually used. First consulting the
scholarly Oxford English Dictionary, I discovered that the OED does not contain
an entry for “existential crisis.” Instead, I piecemealed together a definition out
of “existentialism”: “A doctrine that concentrates on the existence of the individ-
ual, who, being free and responsible, is held to be what he makes himself by the
self-development of his essence through acts of the will.”1 An existential crisis, in
turn, should, in keeping with the OED’s definition of “crisis,” refer to, “a vitally
important or decisive stage in the progress of ”2 the existence of the individual.
When I consulted the Urban Dictionary’s website and searched for “exis-
tential crisis,” I found a very reliable (in the eyes of reviewers) definition of
“e-crisis,” as 14 reviewers gave the definition “thumbs up” and only one reviewer
gave it “thumbs down” (i.e., this is what “existential crisis” represents/means to
the vast majority of people and is, in other words, a good definition according
to common usage):
e-crisis
Existential crisis.
Existential crisis is a stage of development at which an individual questions
the very foundations of their life: whether their life has any meaning, purpose
or value; whether their parents, teachers, and loved ones truly act in their best
interest; whether the values they have been taught have any merit; and whether
their religious upbringing may or may not be founded in reality.
An existential crisis may result from
• the sense of being alone and isolated in the world,

• a newfound grasp or appreciation of one’s mortality,
• believing that one’s life has no purpose or external meaning, or
• an awareness of one’s freedom and the consequences of accepting or
rejecting that freedom.3
At first glance, the gist of the two definitions appears to be identical. How-
ever, first, the idea found at the end of the OED definition—“self-development
of his essence through acts of the will”—is nowhere to be found in the Urban
Dictionary definition. The ideas of development, essence, and acts are key to
deconstructing this definition. And second, the idea of meaning found in the
Urban Dictionary definition—questioning whether life has “meaning, pur-
pose, or value”—is not fully implied in the OED’s idea of, “being free and
responsible.”
This essay will try to unravel the meaning of the phrase “existential cri-
sis” by examining both definitions just mentioned and by examining the ideas
expressed in Jean-Paul Sartre‘s nihilistic existentialism (existentialism proper, if
you will) and Albert Camus’s philosophy (often still mistaken as existentialism).
What this essay will try to demonstrate is that what the average person means
by “existential crisis” is really a point of contemplation of Camus’s philoso-
phy (which, rather, revolted against nihilistic existentialism). The significance
of this is that when most people think of existentialism, they think of Camus’s
philosophy (of the absurd). Ultimately, this essay aims to bring Sartre‘s nihil-
istic existentialism and Camus’s philosophy (mostly of the absurd) into greater
relief, thereby more clearly defining the contributions each philosopher made
to twentieth-century philosophy, arts, and letters.
Alasdair Macintyre’s “Epistemological Crisis”

It may be fruitful to start our examination of “existential crisis” with Alasdair
Macintyre’s famous idea of “epistemological crisis” (from his book The Tasks of
Philosophy), for, after all, existentialism is a branch of epistemology.4 Macintyre
suggests that the relationship of seems to is is at the heart of the epistemological
crisis.5 What comes into conflict for the person experiencing an epistemological
crisis is the juxtaposition of the “rational justification of inferences from prem-
ises about the behavior of other people to conclusions about their thoughts,
Camus’s Unbeknownst Legacy ● 55
feelings, and attitudes” (3). In short, past experiences that inform our reason,
in an epistemological crisis, are rendered nullified by what we understand and
experience in this peculiar situation.
The notion of culture is extremely important to Macintyre. He believes that
each culture shares a particular “schema” of how to act, why act, and how to
interpret those actions (4). It is the schema of a society that allows members in
that society to infer things based on premises about past behavior. Macintyre
stresses that these schemata are not empirical generalizations but are instead
“prescriptions for interpretation” (4). In other words, the schemata provide a
coherent narrative in which to read reality. It is only when this coherent narra-
tive is shaken to the core—that is, the situation exposes either the schema itself
or the narrative present destroys the possibility that the other narratives at his
or her disposal can provide the truth—that one experiences an epistemologi-
cal crisis (4). The resolution of the epistemological crisis, on the other hand,
enables the creation of a new narrative that allows the person to understand
both how this person held the beliefs that they did prior to their epistemological
crisis and how this person was misled by their past beliefs (5). Ultimately, the
person who underwent an epistemological crisis now can see how the criteria
for truth and understanding has to be reformulated: this leads to an under-
standing that understanding may be put into question at any time and a person
can never possess the truth or can be fully rational (5). The idea of narrative
that Macintyre initiates in his study of epistemological crises is quite important
when we consider what an existential crisis is.
However, in order to define an existential crisis and then see how its defini-
tion weighs against its usage, we must first define existentialism. Sartre, who
was one of the only philosophers associated with the movement to actually call
himself an existentialist, sums up existentialism best in his most coherent essay,
“Existentialism is a Humanism.” The very thing that ties together a thinker like
Sartre to Jaspers, Marcel, and Heidegger is their insistence upon empiricism:
“that existence comes before essence.”6 What Sartre means by this is that humans
begin as nothing, and as such, “man is nothing else but that which he makes
of himself ” (349). Sartre’s doctrine states that a human is “nothing else but the
sum of his actions, nothing else but what his life is” (358). It is action and action
alone that defines the self. Hence we get the idea of “self-development of his
essence through acts of the will” in existentialism.
Existential Crisis
What would a Sartrean existential crisis be, then (as opposed to a Camusian
crisis, which we will get to shortly)? I want to return to Macintyre’s idea of
a narrative to help explain. Sartre’s notion of existence stems from a person’s
total body of action. In one sense, at any one point in a person’s life, a person
is defined by their past actions. In another sense, a person can only be defined
once they die, so that they are a sum total of their actions. Hence we get Sartre’s
play, No Exit.
And if we think of this play in light of Macintyre’s epistemological crisis,
we being to see that No Exit explores not just existentialism but the existential
crisis; the conflict of the play is that the characters are each confronted with
a “true” existential crisis. Each character is unclear as to why they are in hell.
Each character thinks of himself or herself one way (i.e., envision themselves
in a coherent schema), but by the end of the play, their personal schema of
their life is shaken by the realization that they are a sum total of their actions,
and that they are someone else, someone they did not realize they were. This
is what an “existential crisis” would be: Who am I? (i.e., What am I through
my existence? What am I through my actions?) is the primary question in an
“existential crisis.”
Camusian Crisis
First published in 1942, the American printing of the The Myth of Sisyphus
(1955) contains a special preface to the essays.7 In the preface, Camus looks
back at the book written in 1940, during what Camus calls the “French and
European disaster.” Camus calls this book “the most personal of those I have
published,” in large part because The Myth of Sisyphus prompted an “exigency”
of thought for Camus.8 It seemed to be all the more personal, according to
David Carroll, who recently wrote a reassessment of The Myth of Sisyphus, since
Camus was suffering from tuberculosis during the period in which the text was
written, and Camus himself at times expressed doubts that he would survive.9
Shortly after the time of publication, a long intellectual quarrel sprung up
with Sartre that distanced the two from each other but brought each of their
respective philosophies into greater relief. As Charles Forsdick suggests, the two
shared little in common: Sartre had a prestigious Parisian education and was
born into a bourgeois family, while Camus was brought up in colonial Algeria
and was born into a working-class family in Mondovi.10 Philosophically, their
divergence started to become apparent when each reviewed the other’s book. In
1938, Camus wrote of Sartre’s Nausea that it was a philosophical abstraction
in which Sartre was unable to attach purpose to the freedom achieved by his
characters. In 1943, Sartre wrote of Camus’s The Stranger that it was a philo-
sophical novel in the Voltairean tradition.11 Their philosophies and upbringing
also affected their divergent politics that mainly defined their debate. With the
political climate of the Cold War and the unlikely prospects of social revolution
in France, Sartre drifted toward the French Communist Party, while Camus,
who struggled to transcend politics, was increasingly unwilling to commit to

any orthodoxy or common cause.12
The legacy of Martin Esslin’s book, The Theatre of the Absurd (1961), aided
in the continued old assumptions of Camus’s view of absurdity. It is certainly
true what Esslin says in his introduction: that, in 1942, Camus poses the ques-
tion, why not commit suicide? However, the entire point of Camus’s book-
length essay, The Myth of Sisyphus, is that Camus explicitly argues why one
should not commit suicide. If we accept our situation as absurd, Camus argues,
and do not try to believe that there is meaning and purpose where there is
none, then we can revolt against the absurd and create meaning and purpose
for ourselves.
Esslin was entirely correct in quoting the passage the he did from The Myth
of Sisyphus in defining the absurd. It is really the “divorce” between “the actor
and his setting” that constitutes the absurd for Camus. Man is not absurd, and
neither is the world: the absurd is their union.13 The absurd derives from the
fact that the world cannot offer man what he wants: “I know what man wants, I
know what the world offers him.”14 The problem is that the two do not comple-
ment one another. In an early 1960 assessment of Camus’s conception of the
absurd, H. Gaston Hall puts it simply: “More precisely [the Absurd] depends
upon the contradiction between man’s will and the world.”15 Hall elaborates on
this contradiction by suggesting the problem lies in “limitless desire destined to
limited satisfaction.”16 This is the essential contradiction of life, or as Hall puts
it, “By absurd Camus means primarily the whole scandalous paradox of the
human condition.”17
In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus does indeed contemplate why we should not
commit suicide. Though a human’s situation may be absurd and full of contra-
dictions, suicide is the wrong answer for Camus because suicide is giving up. One
should not ignore the absurd, but should confront it head on. If we are dead, we
cannot do this. It is in our power to be free, to understand the world, and to feel
passion, as Philip Hallie suggests.18 If man gives up his liberty, lucidity, and pas-
sion, perhaps through suicide, then he “surrenders his existence and becomes a
mere thing. Camus calls the movement from thinghood to full existence revolt.”19
It is in our conscious rational revolt, for Camus, that life has value.20
Camus argues that we should live fully aware of the absurd in order to make
sure that life does have meaning. Whereas the question used to be, does life have
meaning, Camus suggests that life would be lived better “if it has no mean-
ing.”21 If no false or illusionistic meaning is imposed upon life, then a human
can find his or her own purpose. In his foreword to Camus’s The Rebel, Sir
Herbert Read discusses the positive value of personal existence despite “the illu-
sionistic trick played by religion or by philosophy”: “If we decide to live, it must
be because we have decided that our personal existence has some positive value;
if we decide to rebel, it must be because we have decided that a human society

has some positive value. But in each case the values are not ‘given’—that is the
illusionistic trick played by religion or by philosophy. They have to be deduced
from the conditions of living, and are to be accepted along with the suffering
entailed by the limits of the possible.”22 As Camus states, “He can then decide
to accept such a universe and draw from it his strength, his refusal to hope, and
the unyielding evidence of a life without consolation.”23 In doing so, man now
possesses freedom and the power of defiance.
To explain his philosophy, Camus turns to the myth of Sisyphus, from
which he gets the title of his entire essay. As punishment for angering the gods,
Sisyphus is condemned to continually roll a rock up a hill, which will always
return to the bottom the next morning. This is an absurd punishment in that
his desire to roll the rock up to the top is always contradicted by the reality of
the situation as it always returns to the bottom. David Carroll, in his essay in
The Cambridge Companion to Camus,24 suggests that Camus’s persistence in the
face of absurdity helped find purpose and meaning in his life. In contemplating
his torment—in “keeping the absurd alive”—Camus understands that “his fate
belongs to him” and that he is the “master of his days.”25 As Camus concludes,
“The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One
must imagine Sisyphus happy.”26 Thus Camus not only suggests that Sisyphus
is happy, but he subtly implicates the reader, by making him or her active in
making meaning even for Sisyphus, not just for the reader.
One of the reasons why contemporary scholars have argued that Camus is
not an existentialist was for the very reason that Camus concluded that Sisy-
phus was happy with his situation. In a famous exchange of essays discussed
by Ramona Fotiade, the intellectual, Benjamin Fondane raised serious doubts
about the aims of a revolt whose absurd hero is ultimately happy with his lot.”27
Jeffrey Gordon, in “The Triumph of Sisyphus,” argues that the difference
between Sisyphus representing the emptiness of our labors and a conception of
a meaningful life is simply a little alteration that would give an everyday point
to his labors.28
Jacques Ehrmann recognized early in 1960 that Camus “has become a mor-
alist,” at least with his publication of The Rebel.29 According to Lawrence D.
Kritzman, in his article “Camus’ Curious Humanism or the Intellectual in
Exile,” Camus is an “intuitive moralist” because, in confronting the irratio-
nality of Marxist revolt, Camus confronts the absurdity of murder and ter-
ror.30 In The Rebel, Camus espoused the inherent goodness of humans and life.
Kritzman explains this point: Camus’s politics of love and his ethos of reflective
action and understanding create a moral imperative where human choices have
a moral dimension.31 With this understanding of goodness, as Ehrmann says,
Camus’s sense of “an absolute virtue, an absolute justice and an absolute truth
were decried as angelism by the existentialists.”32 Camus believed in an inherent

human nature that contrasted with the basic existentialist tenant that existence
precedes essence.33
Where existentialism works against reason (and thus the Enlightenment),
Camus couched his philosophy within reason. For all these reasons, it is very
problematic to conflate Camus with Sartre and existentialism and their ideas of
“nothingness” and the problems of reason. Discussing the Sartre-Camus con-
troversy, Peter Royle states it thus: Sartre is an “existential phenomenologist in
the grand European philosophical tradition” and Camus is a “disabused heir of
the Enlightenment.”34 Debarati Sanyal, in “Broken Engagements,” argues that
“Camus is the idealist esthete whose luminous landscapes and classical forms
so sharply contrast with the viscosity of Sartrean phenomenology,”35 while
Blanchard states that “Camus was not an existentialist.”36 The reason that it is
so important to differentiate Camus from the existentialists is that, like Des-
cartes, the world can be understood through reason by, and only by, individu-
als. Therefore, meaning is drawn out from our own observations. And when
we encounter contradictions, when we encounter absurdity, we must make a
rational revolt and contemplate our situation. Camus’s understanding of absur-
dity as essentially paradox—or more specifically, the contradiction between our
desires and what the world has to offer—forces us to understand the paradox.
Only when we contemplate the paradox can we create meaning for our lives.
For Sartre, since God does not exist, humans are the only thing whose exis-
tence comes before its essence.37 As Sartre bluntly states in “Existentialism is a
Humanism,” “Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself.”38 On
the other hand, in recognizing that “man is the only creature who refuses to be
what he is,” Camus’s rebellion, unlike that of the nihilistic existentialists, does
not justify universal murder, but rebellion “can discover the principle of reason-
able culpability.”39 In fact, rebellion finds its justification in human solidarity
in that suffering (which in absurdism is an individual suffering) is a collective
experience in rebellion, for one must realize that he or she, in suffering, suffers
like the rest of humanity: from the distance that separates human reality from
the universe.40 Camus, like the existentialists, may argue that life has no inher-
ent meaning, but unlike the existentialists, life is not made meaningful through
experience/actions that affirm and define existence (the central tenet of the exis-
tentialists where existence precedes essence), but through the use of human reason
(where reason justifies the statement, essence precedes experience). Camus liter-
ally plays off of the rationalist par excellence, Descartes, in forming the creed
of rebellion and ethical revolt: “I rebel—therefore we exist.”41 In other words,
my suffering proves that we are all human, for we all suffer. In short, Camus is
primarily concerned with the meaning of existence, as opposed to Sartre who
focuses on the philosophical sense of being and the existentiality of existence.42
In short, The Myth of Sisyphus concludes that Sisyphus is happy because he

has become the “master of his days.”43 Sisyphus, through absurd reasoning, has
“made the rock his thing.”44 This is because Sisyphus has “contemplated his
torments” and has reasoned that the rock and his continual defiance of the gods
is his purpose in life.45 Purpose is the foundational question of Camus’s philoso-
phy, not of Sartre’s philosophy. How do I make life meaningful in a world that is
absurd, where my desires are contradicted by the realities of the world? is the central
question that Camus asks us to ponder.
Conclusion
If we return to the two definitions, we clearly see that there is a fundamental
divide between what Maurice Merleau-Ponty said was the great debate of his
time, “being versus doing.”46 Camus’s philosophy suggests that being is first and
foremost, while Sartre’s existentialism focuses on doing, on “acts of the will,” to
define the self. The very notion of action as determinate of the self is nowhere
to be found in the definition of existential crisis in the Urban Dictionary. The
Urban Dictionary’s definition foregrounds “whether their life has any meaning,
purpose or value,” which is of primary concern to Camus. Furthermore, it takes
“an individual [to question] the very foundations of their life.” This “question-
ing” is not suggested to be a phenomenological search, but the question some-
what assumes the use of reason.
So next time you hear someone say, “I’m having an existential crisis,” make
sure to ask them, “Don’t you really mean a Camusian crisis?”
Notes
1. Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., s.v. “existentialism.”
2. Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., s.v. “crisis.”
3. Urban Dictionary, s.v. “existential crisis,” accessed July 13, 2010, http://www
.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=e-crisis&defid=4157 052.
4. The following two paragraphs are an extended version of two paragraphs from
Michael Y. Bennett, “Epistemological Crises in O’Neill’s SS [Glencairn] Plays,”
Eugene O’Neill’s One-Act Plays: New Critical Perspectives, ed. Bennett and Benjamin
D. Carson (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012): 100–101.
5. Alasdair Macintyre, The Tasks of Philosophy: Volume 1; Selected Essays (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2006), 3.
6. Jean-Paul Sartre, “Existentialism is a Humanism,” in Existentialism: From Dos-
toevsky to Sartre, ed. Walter Kaufman (New York: Plume, 1975), 347–48.
7. The following ten paragraphs come from a slightly altered version of my discussion
of Camus’s absurd in Bennett, Reassessing the Theatre of the Absurd: Camus, Beckett,
Ionesco, Genet, and Pinter (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 10–14.
8. Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, trans. Justin O’Brien (New
York: Vintage Books, 1955), v–vi.
9. David Carroll, “Rethinking the Absurd: le mythe de Sisyphe,” The Cambridge Com-
panion to Camus, ed. Edward J. Hughes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2007), 53.
10. Charles Forsdick, “Camus and Sartre: The Great Quarrel,” The Cambridge Com-
panion to Camus, ed. Edward J. Hughes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2007), 119.
11. Ibid., 120.
12. Ibid., 121.
13. Camus, Myth of Sisyphus, 23.
14. Ibid.
15. H. Gaston Hall, “Aspects of the Absurd,” Yale French Studies 25 (1960): 27.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid., 26.
18. Philip Hallie, “Camus and the Literature of Revolt,” College English 16, no. 1
(October 1954): 26.
19. Ibid.
21. Ibid. As Justin O’Brien translates the line from the French—“Il apparaît ici au con-
traire qu’elle sera d’autant mieux vécue qu’elle n’aura pas de sens” (Albert Camus,
Le mythe de Sisyphe: Essai sur l’absurde, [Paris: Gallimard, 1942], 78)—he uses the
conditional “if ” for the word “qu’elle.” Though the word “if ” does not actually
exist in the sentence, O’Brien captures the essence of the sentence by using it. This
sentence is dependent on the sentence before it, as it stands to contradict it, and the
conditional is, thus, necessary to make sense of the sentence.
22. Sir Herbert Read, foreword to Albert Camus, The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt,
trans. Anthony Bower (New York: Vintage Books, 1956), vii. For the purposes of
this article, it is not necessary to show where The Myth of Sisyphus and The Rebel
diverge from the philosophy of Camus. For an excellent discussion of this, however,
see the chapter “The Transition from The Myth of Sisyphus to The Rebel,” in Avi
Sagi, Albert Camus and the Philosophy of the Absurd, trans. Batya Stein (Amsterdam:
Rodopi, 2002), 107–116.
24. Carroll, “Rethinking the Absurd,” 54.
26. Ibid.
27. Ramona Fotiade, Conceptions of the Absurd: From Surrealism to the Existential
Thought of Chestov and Fondane (Oxford: Legenda, 2001), 226.
28. Jeffrey Gordon, “The Triumph of Sisyphus,” Philosophy and Literature 32, no. 1
(2008): 184.
29. Jacques Ehrmann, “Camus and the Existential Adventure,” Yale French Studies 25
(1960): 94.
30. Lawrence D. Kritzman, “Camus’ Curious Humanism or the Intellectual in Exile,”
MLN 112, no. 4 (September 1997): 552.
31. Ibid., 550.
32. Ehrmann, “Camus and the Existential Adventure,” 94.
33. Ibid., 93.
34. Peter Royle, The Sartre-Camus Controversy: A Literary and Philosophical Critique
(Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1982), 87. This characterization helps
strengthen Beckett’s interest in Descartes with Camus’s philosophy: see my review-
essay, Bennett, “Away from the Absurd?: The Critical Response to Beckett at 100,”
Kritikon Litterarum 36 nos. 3–4 (December 2009): 230–38.
35. Debarati Sanyal, “Broken Engagements,” Yale French Studies 98 (2000): 29.
36. Marc Blanchard, “Before Ethics: Camus’s Pudeur,” MLN 112, no. 4 (1997): 667.
37. The following paragraph comes from Bennett, Words, Space, and the Audience: The
Theatrical Tension Between Empiricism and Rationalism (New York: Palgrave Mac-
millan, 2011): 86–87.
38. Sartre, “Existentialism is a Humanism,” 349.
40. Ibid., 22.
41. Ibid.
42. Leo Pollmann, Sartre and Camus: Literature of Existence, trans. Helen Sebba and
Gregor Sebba (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1970), 116.
44. Ibid.
45. Ibid.
46. Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (New York: Penguin Books,
2005), 210.
CHAPTER 5
Sisyphean (Out)rage and

the Refusal to Mourn
Matthew H. Bowker
Introduction
John Cruickshank noted that Albert Camus “always convinces us more when
speaking as a moralist than when speaking as a logician.”1 Indeed, the combina-
tion of emotional persuasiveness and logical perplexity in Camus’s philosophical
work presents contemporary readers with something of a roadblock. Attracted
by the tenor and timbre of Camus’s message, many scholars have either ignored
or mistaken serious philosophical problems at its core. This article argues that
contemporary readers should interpret Camus’s central concept, absurdity, in its
appropriate context: as a metaphor for psychological resistance to traumatic loss
and deprivation. In what follows, I describe the nature and aim of such resis-
tance and demonstrate that the absurd rebellion Camus depicts in his major
works entails an obfuscation of understanding and a sacrifice of the ability to
make loss meaningful. Approaching Camus’s absurd philosophy in this way,
however, does not diminish the significance of his endeavor. On the contrary,
the analytical tack pursued here suggests that Camus’s thought contributes sub-
stantially to our understanding of grieving processes on both cultural and indi-
vidual levels, while offering us an interpretive key to the broader tradition of
absurd philosophy, literature, and drama.
In order to read Camus’s absurd thought as a metaphor for resisting loss, we
must be willing to imagine absurdity not as an essential characteristic of human
experience but as a psychological position or stance, an orientation to the world.
This notion finds ample support in Camus’s philosophical and ethical works,
yet it remains controversial. The most popular interpretation of the construct of
absurdity holds that Camus “discovered” absurdity as a sort of “fact” of human
existence resulting from the inexorable discrepancy between human conscious-

ness and the “silence déraisonnable du monde.”2 While this understanding has
been espoused for decades by many of the most insightful and celebrated critics
of Camus’s work, it is worth examining.
What does it mean to contend that absurdity is an objective property of
our relationships to objects, institutions, or events, a property “not in man (if
such a metaphor could have meaning) nor in the world, but in their presence
together.”3 We learn in The Myth of Sisyphus that absurdity is found in “neither
of the elements compared” but is “born of their confrontation,” the offspring,
as it were, of an inexorable conflict.4 Indeed, we often use the term “absurd”
colloquially to describe events that contrast starkly with our desires and expecta-
tions (e.g., “What an absurd proposal!”).5 In Camus’s philosophy, and to some
degree in everyday usage of the term, absurdity seems to result when objects,
situations, or events are out of tune with us, when they are dissonant with what
we need, want, or expect.
If by “absurdity” we mean dissonance with our expectations, we learn little
about an object, event, or relationship when we describe it as “absurd.” We learn
even less than when we describe a food as delicious or a color as cheerful. Surely,
no one would say that deliciousness results from foods and cheerfulness from
colors, or that deliciousness or cheerfulness are properties discovered in our relat-
ing to foods and colors. Rather, like absurdity, these terms describe our response
to objects, events, and conditions before us. Might not a declaration of absurdity,
then, be more reasonably construed as a subjective posture taken up before an
object or event that disappoints or surprises? May we not imagine absurdity as
a way of being in the world, rather than a discovery or description of the world?
Absurdity and (Out)rage

To read Camus’s œuvre in this light suggests that the term, “absurd,” functions
in his work much like the term “outrage,” which derives from the Old French
outrage, and the Latin ultra + agium, meaning that which is outré, beyond or out-
side.6 Although, etymologically speaking, the term “outrage” has nothing to do
with “rage,” there is a kind of rage involved in designating something an outrage.
When an offending person or thing is declared an “outrage,” it is designated
outside of the bounds of acceptability, as if by means of an intellectual exile we
protected ourselves from its affront. When something has scandalized our sensi-
bilities and expectations, we find it outrageous (outré-geous) and, in doing so, we
relegate it to a separate, exogenous category. We make it foreign, alien, or other.
Declarations of absurdity, be they offhand remarks about the absurdity of
a shortsighted decision or elaborate philosophical treatises about the absurdity
of the human condition, seem to perform a function similar to declarations
Sisyphean (Out)rage and the Refusal to Mourn ● 65
of outrage. Indeed, invocations of absurdity define a posture of revolt against

objects whose loss, diminution, or betrayal has wounded us deeply.7 When we
declare conditions or events, or even life itself, to be absurd, we refuse to accept
the losses associated with offending objects by indignantly casting them outside
of the realm of sensibility and comprehension. We thereby sacrifice our ability
to make meaning from our losses in order to take up a position of permanent
rebellion against them. And, as I hope to show in this article, this absurd pos-
ture against loss readily becomes a permanent revolt and a perpetual grieving
that may even involve the imposition of grief and absurdity upon others.
For Camus, the experience of absurdity is one where “the stage sets col-
lapse,” a moment in which our symbolic environment is devastated, when our
actions seem nonsensical because the settings and props have been destroyed.
In such moments, absurdity “strike[s] [us] in the face” a seemingly inhuman
“strangeness creeps in” and a “horde of irrationals [springs] up and surrounds”
us.8 Camus’s anthropomorphized “strangeness” and “irrationals” appear almost
like ghosts or Furies, haunting reminders of the symbolic and intellectual losses
suffered when our hopes and fantasies were crushed. In Camus’s language, the
most typical “absurd” losses are the realization of our inevitable mortality, the
frustration of intellectual effort aimed at discovering perfect “clarity,” the wit-
nessing of wanton human cruelty, the dashing of our hope for progress and
revolutionary change, the loss of God and a spiritual home, and the “divorce”
between human consciousness and the natural world.9
For Camus, the emotional scars left by these experiences of loss and sym-
bolic destruction serve as a kind of “evidence” disproving the philosophies of
existentialists like Karl Jaspers, Leon Chestov, and Søren Kierkegaard, whom
Camus would critique throughout his career.10 Rather than neutralize or sub-
sume the outlying evidence into a compensatory system of total reason or faith,
a process Camus associates with intellectual violence, “philosophical suicide”
and escape, Camus declares his dedication to preserving the reality of these
defeats, even calling them our “fate.”11 Indeed, Camus’s absurd doctrine insists
that we remain faithful to our absurd fate, which means faith to the devastation,
rage, and terror experienced in traumatic loss. Lest we forget our losses, Camus
exhorts us to hold on to what he describes as “our profound truth . . . to be
enchained” within the “unintelligible and limited universe” these losses define.12
In revolt against the “sin” of “wanting to know,” a sin that is associated
with “masking the evidence” of loss and thus “suppressing the absurd,” Camus’s
absurd rebel “persist[s]” in his refusal to rationalize his “crushing fate,” instead
striving to “[keep] the absurd alive” by “contemplating it.”13 The responsible
person, according to Camus, “through constant awareness, ever revived, ever
alert,” keeps the agonies of loss before his eyes in order to “preserve the very
thing that crushes him.”14 Camus “must sacrifice everything to these [absurd]
certainties and . . . must see them squarely to be able to maintain them . . . must
adapt [his] behavior to them and pursue them in all their consequences.”15
In his insistence upon absurdity, Camus asks that we continually reopen our
wounds of loss, that we never heal or recover from them but instead remain
afflicted by absurdity. We must “become thoroughly imbued with the [absurd]
sentiment that seizes [us] in the face of the world’s scenes” because, once again,
“the important thing . . . is not to be cured, but to live with one’s ailments.”16
A fair summary of Camus’s project in The Myth of Sisyphus, therefore, would
be the setting out of a plan of resistance against all that consoles and compen-
sates for loss. Just as Sisyphus ostensibly scorns the gods by refusing to escape
his eternal torment as he climbs and descends with his rock, Camus instructs
us to refuse the temptations of reason, faith, hope, meaning, mourning, and
reconciliation in order to preserve and prolong our absurd suffering. We are not
to be delivered from absurdity and loss but rather must reach the “waterless des-
erts” of the most barren and “distant regions” of absurdity, then “stay there . . .
to examine closely the odd vegetation.”17
But refusing to accept loss appears to be no easy task. In fact, according to
Camus, intellectual and spiritual recompense for our losses is all we seek; it is
“the essential impulse of the human drama.”18 Our desire to be contained and
made meaningful in a system governed by reason, truth, or God, expresses our
“desire for unity,” “the mind’s deepest desire,” our “wild longing for clarity,”
our “appetite for the absolute,” our “longing for happiness and reason,” and
our “nostalgia for unity.”19 In ways that continue to inspire comparisons to
Blaise Pascal, Camus persuades us that the knowledge of eternal or absolute
principles would provide us with a kind of intellectual beatitude we can hardly
imagine. “All would be saved,” Camus writes, “if one could only say just once:
‘This is clear.’”20
Against the overwhelming temptations of reason and faith, Camus’s absur-
dity appears as a way to refuse to make loss meaningful, since designating
events as “absurd” exiles them to the barren deserts of consciousness, beyond
the consolations of understanding, reason, and explanation. Even in Kierkeg-
aard’s complex and more favorable use of the term absurdity described the high-
est spiritual faith because such faith was intellectually barren, unfounded, and
incomprehensible. For Kierkegaard, as for Camus, what is feared is that the pro-
cess of rationalization, symbolic compensation, or even habituation will deradi-
calize what must remain radical; although for Kierkegaard, the special, radical
something is faith, while for Camus it is the experience and memory of loss.
In spite of this difference, Camus praises Kierkegaard as one who awakens and
sustains his own absurdity, who “refuses consolations, ethics, reliable principles.
As for that thorn he feels in his heart, he is careful not to quiet its pain. On the
contrary, he awakens it and, in the desperate joy of a man crucified and happy
to be so, he builds up piece by piece . . . a category of the man possessed.”21

This desperate and agonizing experience of being crucified and possessed by
absurdity is the true subject of Camus’s work.
Why Be Absurd?
Jean-Paul Sartre once wrote that it was essential to be absurd, but not to be
a dupe—“Il faut être absurde, il ne faut pas être dupe.”22 Which are we, if we
insist upon sustaining the agony of loss in the name of authenticity, revolt, and
freedom? Since Camus clearly recognized the desirability of reason, clarity, and
meaning, why would he advocate permanent rebellion against them for the
sake of living with the most dramatic moral, intellectual, and spiritual ailments
of the twentieth century? Part of the answer results from the temptation to say,
along with Camus, that the death of an innocent child is simply absurd, that
there is no satisfactory explanation for certain kinds of suffering that human
beings needlessly encounter. Perhaps we feel there is no more appropriate term
than “absurd” to describe our (out)rage at the senseless atrocity of Auschwitz,
or at the Nazi soldier who famously told Primo Levi that “hier gibt es kein
warum”—“Here, there is no why.”23 We may be reluctant to give up our dis-
covery of absurdity in these events, because declaring them to be absurd both
contains and distances us from our extreme indignation at their injustice, inhu-
manity, and horror.
What Camus seems to say of such events is that they force us to contend with
losses so great we have no recourse but to find them absurd, lest we lose some
important part of what makes us human. We fear that to mourn, to heal, and
to move on from these tragedies, insofar as that is possible, would be to accept
them, which seems intolerable, for doing so would normalize them, assimilate
them into the background of everyday life. We are terrified of assimilating such
losses because we are terrified of ever taking our eyes off of them, in no small
part because we fear that to do so would invite their repetition.
Since declaring an innocent’s death, a war, or a genocide “absurd” reveals
much less about the event than about our desire to reject and remain distant
from it, absurdity defines a psychological posture in which we must perma-
nently misunderstand and obfuscate the losses these events imply. The posture
of absurdity permits such losses never to be fully understood, and therefore never
to be fully mourned, while it also permits us to experience ourselves as being
involved in rebellious combat against the people or forces that instigated them.
Camus, himself, recognized that the fight against absurdity is itself absurd; to
be precise, it is Sisyphean because the loss that is combatted has already hap-
pened. In a sense, we declare Auschwitz “absurd” today in order to prevent
Auschwitz from happening yesterday, which is quixotic but understandable as a
psychological stance that will not tolerate assimilating the losses of life, human-
ity, faith, and moral limits that Auschwitz implies.
Read in this light, absurdity becomes a kind of intellectual protest not only
against violence but against a type of symbolic violence: the invisible violence
perpetrated through totalization, rationalization, or habituation that covers up
and glosses over loss and suffering, often by declaring it necessary for the sake
of a higher ideal or cause. Of course, in rebelling against symbolic violence,
Camus’s absurd rebel ends up rebelling against other forms of accepting loss,
including what we might want to call the more healthy and normal completion
of mourning, to be discussed shortly. Completed mourning, too, covers up
the wounds of loss and violence, for it allows us to dull the pain and memory
of loss, so that we can move on and find new things to love. But completed
mourning also makes loss meaningful because it accepts loss as a part of life,
integrating loss into our understanding of reality. The person who has mourned
has found a place for loss in his or her life and accepts that similar inevitable
losses will likely occupy similar places.
The question asked by absurd philosophy and literature is whether we should
accept symbolic and intellectual consolations for tragic losses or whether we can
find an absurd value in rejecting them, even if rejecting them means refusing to
make them meaningful and understandable. Camus’s answer, and the answer of
most interpreters of absurdity to date, has been that we must engage in absurd
revolt, even if doing so requires us to sacrifice our ability to make loss meaning-
ful. Indeed, we may understand the broader absurd philosophical project as one
of the deliberate destruction of meaning because it refuses to assign meaning
to offending losses and traumas and because, at its center, it holds up an intel-
lectual protest against meaning as the highest ethical value.
Mourning the Philosopher

Understanding absurdity as an ethical and psychological posture dedicated to
the preservation of absurdity and loss makes Camus’s œuvre something rather
different from what Camus, himself, and the majority of his scholarly interpret-
ers have thought.24 But it by no means lessens the value of Camus’s project.
While Camus was not a precise or systematic philosopher, a fact he himself
admitted on several occasions,25 he was an incredibly sensitive (if often unwit-
ting) psychoanalyst of the experience of absurdity, and his philosophical writings
give voice to this experience perhaps even more clearly than his fiction. In order
to access this value in his work, we merely have to give up absurdity’s philo-
sophical and metaphysical pretensions.
It is ironic, of course, that in order to make use of absurdity we should have
to accept the loss of its philosophical aspirations, since I have argued here that
absurdity is, itself, a refusal to accept loss. Just as the absurd rebel refuses to accept
an impoverished world of deprivation and loss, Camus’s most faithful interpret-
ers have so far been unwilling to adjust to a world in which Camus’s absurd
philosophy is reduced to a productive metaphor for psychological experience.
But how could it be otherwise? Is it really possible to read Camus philo-
sophically? At the very least, it is difficult to imagine why reading Camus as a
metaphysician is a helpful or illuminating way to read him. Take, for example,
Camus’s numerous descriptions of absurdity in the first essay of The Myth of
Sisyphus: “a feeling that deprives the mind of sleep,” a deprivation of “the mem-
ory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land,” a “divorce between man
and his life,” a “divorce between the mind that desires and the world that disap-
points,” something that one “believes to be true” that must “determine [one’s]
action,” an “odd state of soul in which the void becomes eloquent,” “the meta-
physical state of the conscious man,” a moment when “the stage sets collapse,”
a “definitive awakening,” a “revolt of the flesh,” “the denseness and strangeness
of the world,” “the familiar and yet alarming brother we encounter in our own
photograph,” “the elementary and definitive aspect of the [mortal] adventure,”
“the confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of
the world,” “lucid reason noting its limits,” a “climate,” a “universe,” a “con-
tradiction,” a “gap,” a “condition,” a “confrontation,” a “passion,” a “revolt,” a
“comparison,” a “datum,” an “equation,” an “awareness,” and a “wager.”26
Clearly, no cogent philosophical arguments can be constructed on the basis
of such definitions. And this criticism of Camus is not new. Cruickshank and
many other thoughtful readers have criticized Camus’s tendency to blur lyri-
cism with philosophy, his “failure to separate clear thinking from an emotional
attitude.”27 But where some critics have gone wrong is in assuming that it is
necessary for Camus to be a systematic philosopher in order for his insights
about absurdity to have theoretical and explanatory value. After all, in spite of
his own insistence upon the absurd “method” of reasoning, Camus’s stated goal
in The Myth of Sisyphus was not to present the reader with a systematic philoso-
phy, but to describe the sensibility of absurdity, and to explore the influence of
that sensibility on the choices of individuals and groups: “The pages that follow
deal with an absurd sensitivity [sensibilité] that can be found widespread in the
age—and not with an absurd philosophy which our time, properly speaking,
has not known . . . There will be found here merely the description, in the pure
state, of an intellectual malady [mal de l’esprit].”28
Likewise, in The Rebel, Camus wrote that the purpose of taking the “absurdist
sensibility into account” was not to draw abstruse metaphysical conclusions
about the world, but “to make a diagnosis of a malady to be found in ourselves
and in others.”29 And even Sartre, Camus’s one-time friend then bitter enemy,
understood that Camus’s absurd thought was not metaphysical speculation but
an account of a harrowing emotional experience, not “the object of a mere idea”

but something revealed to us in a “doleful illumination.”30 If Camus’s absurd
œuvre can be read not as philosophy but as a set of rich, intimate, and often
mysterious accounts of the experience of suffering loss, then Camus’s work is
illuminating indeed.
Melancholy and Absurd Revolt

Camus refers to absurdity most often as a “divorce” or “confrontation” between
l’appel humain and the silence of the world.31 Unfortunately, Justin O’Brian’s
English translation of the French word “appel” (in l’appel humain) as “need”
obscures something important: what is absurd, for Camus, is that the human
appeal, the human call, the human cry is met with silence. Absurdity is born
(naît) in the chasm between expectant cry and a disappointing and frightening
silence, much as the subjective, creative world of the child is both made possible
and made vulnerable when cries for the parent are unheeded.
When the word “appel” is encountered again in The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus
argues that the project of the absurd person is to find out if it is possible to live
sans appel, “without appeal.”32 In this case, appel plays on the juridical meaning
of appealing to a higher court or authority, and Camus seems to say that if the
absurd person cries out expectantly but finds that the object of his attention is
gone, or is radically diminished, then declaring this terrible silence “absurd” and
refusing to make further appeals is necessary to maintain our dignity.
At times, Camus’s project seems more or less in line with the “normal” work
of mourning Freud described in his famous essay, “Mourning and Melancho-
lia,” in which reality testing helps the individual to see “that the loved object no
longer exists, and [to proceed] to demand that all libido should be withdrawn
from its attachments to that object.”33 But what Camus means by living “with-
out appeal” is quite distinct from gradual detachment from a lost object. On the
contrary, living without appeal, for Camus, signifies “defiance” and conscious
“revolt,”34 not unlike the “mental constellation of revolt” against loss by which
Freud defines melancholia, or the refusal to mourn.35 As opposed to the pro-
cess of mourning, in melancholia assimilation of loss and reattachment to new
objects are refused or rejected. The loss, itself, is left unmourned and remains
largely unconscious and meaningless to the bereaved person who, instead, rages
violently against himself and against the lost object.
For Freud and many of his followers, both mourning and melancholia may
be occasioned not only by the loss of a loved person but by “the loss of some
abstraction which has taken the place of one, such as one’s country, liberty, [or]
an ideal.”36 Thus losses, abuses, tragedies, and traumas of all varieties, large and
small, individual and collective, may generate our need to mourn or to become
melancholy, to either adjust to loss or revolt against it. Since the losses for which
Camus recommends the absurd stance are indeed of a broader, more abstract,
and more political order, we may understand absurdity as both a psychological
and a political posture of revolt. If declarations of absurdity announce disap-
pointment over loss, then naming the absurd and being absurd are connected
by their posture of revolt. Just as naming a tragic event “absurd” implies a resis-
tance, even a refusal to accept it, being absurd is a manner of refusing to assimi-
late to (a manner of negating the negation of ) loss.
When we refuse to mourn, or to complete mourning, we are haunted by
loss, depleted by it, and made meaningless by it. In melancholia, the love for
something lost is often transformed into a regressive object-identification with
the lost object, such that what was once a loving connection is replaced by an
ambivalent and often excruciatingly painful identification.37 Freud famously
described this process as one in which “the shadow of the object [falls] upon the
ego,” and it is not entirely different from holding on to the memory of a lost
loved one by making him or her a part of the self.38 But when this “shadow of
the object” falls upon the ego and the loss is left unmourned, the ego is dark-
ened by it. In melancholia, the loss of someone or something beloved creates an
“open wound,” an emptiness that acts as a sort of black hole for healthy attach-
ments to new objects.39
For Camus’s Caligula, the loss of his beloved Drusilla means that his “world
goes black.”40 Caligula is then transformed from a young and impressionable
leader to a horrifying tyrant and state terrorist. He closes the granaries and
imposes famine, robs and murders citizens at random, holds humiliating stop-
whistle poetry readings, honors brothel patrons with national badges of merit,
impersonates the goddess Venus, and strives to sap traditionally valued objects,
symbols, and ideals of their meaning and value. His motive for being absurd
becomes clear if we consider the targets Caligula chooses for his assaults: the
patricians, the poets, the gods and religious traditions, and the norms of family
life and sexual propriety. Caligula is consumed by his all-out attack on soci-
ety’s most significant meaning-making institutions. It is as if Caligula were
insisting that nothing shall be meaningful after Drusilla’s death, as if making
sense of her loss would be a sacrilege to her loss. This sentiment is not atypical
after traumatic loss on individual or collective scales. Perhaps the most famous
expressions of it in recent years have been Theodor Adorno’s famous claim that
writing poetry after Auschwitz would be barbaric and Claude Lanzmann’s dec-
laration that “the very project of understanding” the Holocaust is obscene.41
Lost objects are not mourned in melancholia because the object’s disappear-
ance and, more important, the loss of attachment that connected it to the self
are too difficult to bear. Freud calls this attachment “a love that cannot be given
up though the object itself is given up.”42 Indeed, what Freud refers to as a
“special,” “critical agency” (what eventually becomes the superego) often takes
revenge on the lost object by condemning and abusing the ego, the part of the
self or self-system now identified with the lost object.43 “Then the hate comes
into operation on this substitutive object, abusing it, debasing it, making it suf-
fer and deriving sadistic satisfaction from its suffering. The self-tormenting in
melancholia, which is without a doubt enjoyable, signifies . . . a satisfaction of
trends of sadism and hate which relate to an object, and which have been turned
round upon the subject’s own self.”44 By derogating an absent or deficient per-
son, God, condition, or event as “absurd,” one vengefully depletes the object
whose loss or depletion has wounded the self. One also exacts a type of revenge
by derogating the self, or part of the self ’s system for making meaning, value,
and new connections to others.
The absurd posture seems to be motivated by the threat of the self ’s anni-
hilation faced with the loss of an important object-relationship, as the refusal
to “appeal” and mourn this loss protects the self against experiencing its most
devastating effects. Instead, a specious freedom and innocence from the lost
object are asserted as the absurd person attempts to “establish [his] lucidity in
the midst of what negates it . . . [and] exalt man before what crushes him.”45
Now, rather than being mourned, the lost object may be scrutinized for its
inadequacies, put on trial for its departure, or “repudiat[ed],” and “scorn[ed]”
for its injustice and inhumanity.46
Yet absurd revolt does not seek only to disrupt or destroy the mechanisms
for making meaning from loss; it also seeks, by a circuitous route, to reconnect
with the lost object in its revolt. The absurd “divorce between the mind that
desires and the world that disappoints” is also the “contradiction that binds
them together.”47 As in the experience of grieving a lost object or a broken
relationship, disappointment, resentment, and rage come to constitute the
most powerful link between the fractured pair.48 Indeed, absurd agony seems to
bind the bereaved and the lost beloved “as only hatred can weld two creatures
together.”49 Since the object of affection is lost but not the need for the feelings
of attachment, love, purpose, and meaning that are built into the self through
the object, love for the object is transformed into a kind of hostile revolt whose
aim is to resuscitate the lost object by doing violence to all that would permit
the object’s loss to be assimilated. Seemingly severing ties with the object, the
absurd posture actually fortifies a profound connection between self and lost
object, “bind[ing] them one to the other” in an ultimately morbid revolt.50
Even the most destructive absurd revolt may be understood as an attempt
to conjure up the lost object. In absurd literature and philosophy, rage against
the object for its departure, along with rage against the self for its yearning to
recover it, becomes a hostile and desperate protest in which the initial loss may
be experienced over and over again, perhaps with the hope each time that the
result will be different. For Camus, “through constant awareness, ever revived,
ever alert,” the absurdity of the object is kept forever “alive” before conscious-
ness, leaving the absurd person on the “dizzying crest” of absurd revolt in a “per-
petual state of tension.”51 Indeed, for Camus, “The absurd man can only drain
everything to the bitter end, and deplete himself. The absurd is his extreme
tension, which he maintains constantly by solitary effort, for he knows that in
that consciousness and in that day-to-day revolt he gives proof of his only truth,
which is defiance.”52
Absurd rebellion is an ambivalent rebellion, a complex, integrative activity
that “expresses an aspiration to order” while at the same time denying and refus-
ing order by living “without appeal.”53 The absurd rebel “attacks a shattered
world in order to demand unity from it” while simultaneously insisting that
the world remain shattered by living “solely with what he knows.”54 Camus’s
absurdity must be “preserved” even though it “crushes” us. It must be struggled
against, but never ruined. We must be “faithful to the absurd commandments”
while, at the same time, “the absurd requires not to be consented to.”55 Even-
tually, we are asked to grow accustomed to living in “extreme tension” and to
undertake the “discipline the mind imposes upon itself, that will conjured up
out of nothing, that face-to-face struggle,” a struggle against the temptations of
mourning and meaning.56
Conclusion
When faced with the loss or deprivation of an object to which we cried out
for connection, love, or understanding, Camus believes we have two choices:
We can either console ourselves by trying to make sense of the loss, or we can
refuse to make good on our losses by living sans appel. Camus presents his
absurd method as if it were an adherence to the “facts” and data suggested by
the reality of loss, but it is better explained as a rejection of the reality principle
(which argues that a person must adjust his or her demands given the nature
of reality) in favor of a position of idealistic yet melancholy revolt, which nev-
ertheless has the aim of resurrecting what has been lost. Consider how Henri
Bergson differentiated the tragicomic absurd character who “follows his idea,
who always returns to it, even while it is constantly interrupted”57 from the one
who possesses common sense or “le bon sens,” which consists of “knowing how
to remember . . . but moreover and especially it consists of knowing how to for-
get. Good sense is the endeavor of a mind that adapts itself and re-adapts itself
without ceasing, changing its ideas when it changes objects. It is a mobility of
intelligence that regulates itself exactly by the mobility of things. It is the mov-
ing continuity of our attention to life.”58 The person of common sense is here
described as the one who is willing to adjust his or her ideas, expectations, and
wishes to fit with changing reality, while the absurd person possesses “an obsti-
nacy of mind or character” and runs into trouble because of his or her automa-
tism or tendency to “fit the thing to the idea instead of fitting his thought to
the thing.”59
Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote, perhaps the quintessential absurd char-
acter, is absurd in precisely this sense because he refuses to adapt himself to what
those around him experience as “reality.” Rather, he insists, sometimes madly,
sometimes lucidly, upon behaving as if it were the age of chivalry. When Don
Quixote returns to his “bon sens” in the end, he may be said then to begin to
mourn the losses he has kept alive throughout his adventure. Of course, by then
it is too late, and the full weight and consequence of his absurd revolt against
reason and good sense are now too much for him to bear.
To insist on absurdity is, in this sense, a valediction forbidding mourning,
to echo the title of the famous sonnet by John Donne. Rarely are refusals to
mourn associated with the absurd posture, yet in Dylan Thomas’s “Refusal to
Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London,” the poet vows to refuse to
mourn “the majesty and burning of the child’s death” because “after the first
death, there is no other.”60 For Thomas, as for Camus, to mourn an innocent
child’s death is to symbolically murder her, to participate in her death after the
fact by making sense of it: “I shall not murder / The mankind of her going with
a grave truth” (lines 14–15).
This notion of symbolic participation in loss is not entirely dissimilar to
what Julia Kristeva means when she writes that mourning the loss of the mother
is symbolic matricide.61 But the poem, while refusing to elegize innocence and
youth, ends up elegizing grief and melancholy instead. Thomas’s poem is indul-
gent in its depiction of the poet’s grief, but it does not describe the girl, the
children, or the people who have died in the War; it does not even mention the
victims’ lives, their suffering, or their memory. Indeed, Thomas never “suffers
imaginatively the experience of the child, does not share in it in the least; he sees
the pain and the horror from without.”62 This inattention to the child is inten-
tional on Thomas’s part, for to remember her would seem to be to mourn her,
to dishonor her by beginning to recover from her loss. Paradoxically, Thomas
strives to honor her death by claiming that her death does not count, for it was
not “the first death,” by which perhaps he means the first deaths in the War
or an even earlier death of innocence. Like Camus’s absurd posture, Thomas’s
poem makes the refusal of mourning a sacred thing, valorizing indignation,
(out)rage, and perpetual grief. Only absurd grief, grief that cannot be settled,
mourned, or made meaningful can express our (out)rage at the loss of a child,
much less at entire nations of children.
Thomas ends the poem by telling us that London’s daughter now lies with
“the first dead,” that her death is a reinsertion into the womb of nature and
a communion with the “long friends” of ancestry and the “dark veins” of her
mother.63 It is not surprising that his chosen imagery is that of a return to the
womb and veins of the mother, a return to a state of merger with the mother
that every human being necessarily loses. Yet if there is no mournable death
“after the first death,” then there must be no life after the first death either,
which seems to suggest that, for Thomas, we cannot mourn the loss of a child
in London because we are already in perpetual grief and revolt over the first
loss, the loss that eclipses all others. It is as if to say, “We do not lose because all
is already lost.”
In Thomas’s poem we find an unlikely but useful depiction of the paradoxi-
cal action of absurd protest, in which a loss and its symbolic environment is
depleted in order to preserve a sacred connection to the lost object. Although
Thomas refuses to mourn this child ostensibly so that she will not vanish, vanish
she does; the girl is erased in the poem. Refusing to mourn the object in this
case seems only to forge a regressive connection between the absurd rebel and
his own grief, which comes to substitute for the object. Thus the risk in adopt-
ing the absurd posture, displayed here by Thomas and explored quite thor-
oughly by Camus, is that our perpetual rebellion against loss and meaning will
leave us empty and isolated, for “after the first death there is no other,” no other
person, only an attachment to our own rebellious grief and melancholy protest.
Notes
1. John Cruickshank, Albert Camus and the Literature of Revolt (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1960), 64.
2. “unreasonable silence of the world” Camus, Le mythe de Sisyphe: Essai sur l’absurde.
(Paris: Gallimard, 1942), 45.
York: Vintage Books, 1955), 30.
4. Ibid.
5. The word absurd derives from the Latin absurdus, which means “out of harmony,”
or what is unharmonious to the ear (see Martin Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd,
3rd ed. [New York: Vintage Books, 2001], 23), but its likely root is not surd, mean-
ing “deaf,” but svar, meaning “tune” or “sound” (see Charles Halsey, An Etymology
of Latin and Greek [Boston: Ginn, Heath, 1882], 151).
6. Lyle Campbell, Historical Linguistics: An Introduction, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 1998), 116.
7. Here, the term object refers to other subjects, persons, and internal representations
of persons with whom one may relate: “People react to and interact with not only
an actual other but also an internal other, a psychic representation of a person
which in itself has the power to influence both the individual’s affective states and
his overt behavioral reactions” (Jay Greenberg and Stephen Mitchell, Object Rela-
tions in Psychoanalytic Theory [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983],
10). For Freud, objects of loss can even include abstractions, symbols, and ideals
(see Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” in On the History of the Psy-
choanalytic Movement: Papers on Metapsychology, and Other Works, trans. and ed.
James Strachey, Standard Edition, 243–58, vol. 14 of Complete Psychological Works
of Sigmund Freud [London: Hogarth, 1957], 243).
8. Camus, Myth of Sisyphus, 10–11, 14, 21.
9. Ibid., 21, 50.
10. Ibid., 6, 9.
11. Ibid., 28, 41, 53, 54.
12. Ibid., 21.
13. Ibid., 49, 50, 52, 54, 54.
14. Ibid., 31.
15. Ibid., 21–22.
16. Ibid., 21, 38.
17. Ibid., 9, 10, 10.
18. Ibid., 17.
19. Ibid., 51, 17, 21, 17, 51, 28, 17, 50.
20. Ibid., 27 (emphasis added).
21. Ibid., 26.
22. Sartre quoted by Camus, Mythe de Sisyphe, 96.
23. Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz: The Nazi Assault on Humanity, trans. Stuart
Woolf (New York: Touchstone Books, 1996), 29.
24. See Matthew Bowker, Albert Camus and the Political Philosophy of the Absurd (PhD
diss., University of Maryland, 2008); Matthew Bowker, “The Meaning of Absurd
Protest: The Book of Job, Albert Camus, and C. Fred Alford’s After the Holocaust,”
Journal of Psycho-Social Studies 4, no. 2 (2001): 1–21; and Matthew Bowker, “Albert
Camus’s Critical Reception: From Celebration to Controversy” in Critical Insights
on Albert Camus, ed. S. G. Kellman (Hackensack, NJ: Salem Press, 2011).
25. Fred Willhoite Jr., Beyond Nihilism: Albert Camus’s Contribution to Political Thought
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1968), 6.
26. Camus, Myth of Sisyphus, 6, 6, 6, 50, 6, 12, 40, 12, 13, 14, 14, 15, 15, 28, 49, 12,
12, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 25, 30, 31, 50, 52, 52.
27. Cruickshank, Albert Camus and the Literature of Revolt, 47.
29. Albert Camus, The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt, trans. Anthony Bower (New
York: Vintage Books, 1956), 9–10.
30. Jean-Paul Sartre, “An Explication of The Stranger” in Camus: A Collection of Critical
Essays, ed. Germaine Brée (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1962), 110.
31. Camus, Myth of Sisyphus, 6, 50, 21, 28.
32. Ibid., 53.
33. Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” 244.
34. Camus, Myth of Sisyphus, 54–55.
36. Ibid., 243.
37. Ibid., 249.
38. Ibid.
39. Ibid., 253.
40. Albert Camus, Caligula and Three Other Plays, trans. Stuart Gilbert. (1938; repr.,
New York: Vintage Books, 1958), 15.
41. Claude Lanzmann, “The Obscenity of Understanding: An Evening with Claude
Lanzmann,” in Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 204.
43. Ibid., 249, 247.
44. Ibid., 251.
45. Camus, Myth of Sisyphus, 87–88.
46. Camus, Rebel, 23; and Camus, Myth of Sisyphus, 121.
50. Ibid., 21.
51. Ibid., 52, 54, 50; Camus, Rebel, 22.
53. Camus, Rebel, 23; and Camus, Myth of Sisyphus, 53.
54. Camus, Rebel, 23–24; and Camus, Myth of Sisyphus, 53.
55. Camus, Myth of Sisyphus, 34, 35.
56. Ibid., 55.
57. Henri Bergson, Le rire: Essai sur la signification du comique (Paris: Quadrige, Presses
Universitaires de France, 1940), 142.
58. Ibid., 140, my translation.
59. Ibid., 141, 142.
60. Dylan Thomas, The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas: 1934–1952, ed. Daniel
Jones (New York: New Directions, 1971), 112, lines 13, 24.
61. Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, trans. Leon S. Roudiez,
European Perspectives Series (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989).
62. Elder Olson, The Poetry of Dylan Thomas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1954), 23.
63. Thomas, The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas, lines 19, 20–21.
CHAPTER 6
Albert Camus’s Warring

Twentieth Century
From His Ancestral Spain to His
Mediterranean Utopias
Araceli Hernández-Laroche
And pity on us, most of all, who are forsaken and must endure year after year
this world in which men in their pride are ever aspiring to transform! Surely,
since everything may not be saved, we should learn at least to safeguard the home
where love is. Then, come war, come pestilence, we should bravely see them
through with you besides us . . . men go whoring after ideas, a man runs away
from his mother, forsakes his love, and starts rushing up on adventures, . . . makes
his way from solitude to solitude, a death in the desert.
—Chorus of Women, The Stage of Siege by Camus
A
lbert Camus’s identity was colored by his father’s death in the battle
of Marne, during the first year of World War I. His absence served
to reinforce on the young Camus his father’s sacrifice to the glory
of France, the abstract motherland to the north of the Mediterranean Sea.
Camus may have criticized the French army’s insistence on the traditional
North African troops’ red hats, which rendered men like his father (as much
as the indigenous soldiers sent to fight on behalf of France) vulnerable prey or
easy targets for German snipers along enemy trench lines. However, Camus
did not go as far as to question the war itself—the savagery of World War I
trench warfare that made it the most deadly at that point in history. How crit-
ically aware or concerned was Camus of the Great War’s legacy? For instance,
the innovative militaristic technology was one of the culprits of the Lost Gen-
eration (one in four European men between the ages of 18 and 35 perished);
the millions of men brought from distant empires and not necessarily by
their own volition were maimed or died in foreign hostile Northern climates,
and the masterful propaganda of the Allies and Central Powers coupled with
their infringement on civil liberties guaranteed a steady supply of men to the
battlefields.
Nevertheless, the effects of war influenced his fatherless childhood and
global, civil, and nationalist wars riddled his existence. His premature death
during the “savage war” kept him from witnessing the ultimate unraveling of
his beloved French Algeria. As a Nobel Prize recipient for literature in 1957,
his writings promote peace as he ponders the threats to democracy in Europe
from the Spanish Civil War, the two World Wars, and on to the Cold War; he
exposes the toll that war imposes on civilian populations, most notably in The
Plague but also in plays such as The State of Siege, both respectively employing
(and not without controversy) a plague as an allegory of the Nazi occupation of
France and the Spanish fascist dictatorship. “The plague,” he asserted, “is not
treated with the same formula as a head cold. A crisis that is tearing apart the
entire world must be repaired on an international level.”1
Even though Camus belongs to the generation after the Great War, as
he was born in 1913 in the French Algerian Department of Constantine
and came of age during the interwar years, Camus seems to have internal-
ized some of the anxiety with communism and revolution that the warring
empires (Britain, France, Russia, Germany, and Austria-Hungary) shared as
they experimented with ground-breaking scientific advances to annihilate in
unprecedented numbers each other’s armies. As the war raged on, the empires
increasingly feared pacifism and social unrest directed at capitalism. Along the
same vein, the empires correctly anticipated that such activism could unleash
anticolonialist, imperialist movements among their civilian populations and
in the colonial soldiers whose unorthodox encounters with civic and military
assistance personnel outside of the rigid hierarchies of their colonial settings
had given them a taste of equality, especially as they were tended after by
European medical personnel.
The 1917 Bolshevik revolution appears to have spooked Camus (or rather
its specter in leftist politics and thought) while it galvanized numerous war-
weary Europeans who at the time had hoped the eruption of this civil war
in Russia, a country at war with Germany, would bring an end in sight to
World War I. Just as the Bolshevik revolution proved to be utopian since it
erected a powerful totalitarian state, Camus was inspired by some utopias of his
own making. Due to all the wars that pervaded his existence, we find Camus’s
need for utopian communities—all of which relate to his motherlands, France
Albert Camus’s Warring Twentieth Century ● 81
and French Algeria, and Spain, the spiritually adopted country from where his
maternal family immigrated to North Africa.
Camus had good reason to worry about Europe’s future, especially France’s,
with the advent of totalitarian threats to France from its neighbors: Nazism in
Germany, fascism in Italy, Stalinism in the Soviet Union, and examples of repub-
lics under assault by former decorated colonial generals. In Spain, Generalísimo
Francisco Franco exploited his invaluable experiences in the French-Spanish
coalition against Moroccan nationalists during the Rif War to successfully
assault the Second Spanish Republic. Our moralist writer used his pen prolifi-
cally to warn and challenge his contemporaries about false gods; fascism seemed
a less formidable foe for Camus than communism’s lure on the intelligentsia
and the working classes around the world. Outside of these aforementioned
countries, it was easier to attack Nazism and fascism as a writer; audiences out-
side their borders (and even those living within them) did not have to go to
great lengths to imagine why these two authoritarian ideologies taking root in
Europe threatened democracy. Communism, on the other hand, was a tougher
target and it remained so years after World War II. As the Cold War polarized
Europe, Camus unambiguously inserted himself in the anticommunist debate.
In his response to catholic writer Gabriel Marcel’s criticism of his play The
State of Siege, with a defiant tone Camus explains why he chose Andalusia as
a setting to attack not only Franco’s bureaucratic despotic state but also the
church’s role. As uncomfortable as it may be to criticize institutions or ideolo-
gies espoused by citizens, complicity with any form of state crime must stop:
“Why Spain? Because there are some of us who will never wash their hands
of that blood. Anti-communism, whatever reasons there may be for embrac-
ing it . . . will never gain acceptance among us if it forgets the injustice that is
going on with the complicity of our governments. I have stated as vigorously as
I could what I thought of the Russian concentration camps. But they will not
make me forget Dachau, Buchenwald, and the nameless agony of millions, nor
the dreadful repression that decimated the Spanish Republic.”2 Frustrated with
his contemporaries’ selective blind spots, Camus urges for totalitarianisms to be
called out regardless of a Right or Left divide. As an anticommunist, he did not
hold back from alluding to countries such as the United States that maintained
commercial interests and military bases in Franco’s Spain as they simultaneously
waged a sphere-of-influence war against communism.
In 1949 one of Camus’s friends, Arthur Koestler, along with Arthur Cross-
man, published The God That Failed, which created an uproar and thus
exemplified the extent to which it was taboo to criticize Stalinism as a non-
conservative intellectual. This book was a watershed moment in intellectual
history and not only because of its inclusion of leftist anticommunists or anti-
Stalinists. Rather, its innovative and provocative intervention is due to the very
intimate testimony of the diverse international writers who recount their initial
excitement with communism and their disturbing fall from what they all con-
sidered to be its dangerous falsehoods. In the uniquely offered testimonials of
some of the most prominent intellectuals known for their humanitarian ideals
(Hungarian Arthur Koestler, Italian Ignazio Silone, Americans Richard Wright
and Louis Fischer, French André Gide, and English Stephen Spender); they
all recount their devastation and then alarm as they witness the Soviet Union’s
undeserving adulation by millions around the world. Crossman asks, “Were
Gide and Koestler so obviously wrong, at the time when they became Com-
munists, in feeling that German and French democracy were corrupt and would
surrender to Fascism? Part of the value of this book is that it jogs our memories
so uncomfortably; and reminds us of the terrible loneliness experienced by the
‘premature anti-Fascists.’”3
We forget that in Europe, especially, these testimonies were courageous in a
time where it was not politically viable in leftist circles to denounce Stalinism.
In the United States, the environment was very different. But in Europe, these
writers faced backlash from the leftist intelligentsia who wanted at all costs to
see communism, as adopted by the USSR, as the seductive alternative to fas-
cism, Nazism, and capitalism, particularly as the Cold War progressed.
October 1917 to September 1939, when the Nazi-Soviet Pact of Non-
Aggression shattered the faith of communist sympathizers around the world,
figure as prominent dates for those initially enamored by revolutionary ideals.
We must not lose sight of the fact that the Bolshevik revolution broke out in
the midst of a warring Europe that eventually engulfed millions of people from
distant colonial territories and allied countries. For war-weary Europeans who
did not see an end to the butchery of trench warfare, the Bolshevik revolution
was quite a feat. The empires at war, such as France, England, and Germany,
were more afraid of a revolution at home. Tellingly, the victorious allies allowed
Germany to keep some of its war tanks to squash civil unrest at home. Once the
Bolshevists were in power, poorly clad and starved German soldiers defected,
as did many soldiers in other armies. Why fight for an empire when social
inequalities at home will remain intact?
What does this fear of revolution entail? For some, Bolshevism or commu-
nism must be avoided at all costs. For others, a revolution can ultimately pro-
duce a totalitarian government. In Camus’s case, revolution meant potentially
undesirable consequences in both France and French Algeria—that is, a fascist
dictatorship or communism. As a well-known underground resistant during
the Nazi occupation of France, he also wrote in the clandestine paper Combat.
And like other Pieds-Noirs, the French government and intelligence, he misread
the Algerian uprising as a communist-inspired revolt in which “Russia merely
takes advantage of such dreams of [Arab] empire to serve her own designs.”4 But
quite simply, a revolution in Algeria—communist or not—meant the reorder-

ing of a society that would no longer privilege the settlers, those impoverished
and semiliterate (like his mother) or wealthy alike. Camus did not live to see
the civil war that almost spilled over to France itself as the Organisation Armée
Secrète (OAS, or Organization of the Secret Army), the extreme right-wing pro-
settler terrorists, found refuge in Franco’s Spain to plan a desperate terrorist sab-
otage campaign against de Gaulle’s secret peace negotiations with the Algerian
Front de Libération Nationale (FLN, or National Liberation Front) as the end
drew near. History almost repeated itself. In 1960, inspired by Franco’s assault
on the Spanish Republic from Spanish Morocco, the OAS planned a (failed)
coup from North Africa against Charles de Gaulle and the French Republic.
Alas for Camus, his early death spared him from the heartache of witnessing an
independent Algeria.
For his part, Camus briefly belonged to the Algerian Communist Party and
it was not long before he fell from its graces prior to his early trips to France in
1939. Unlike fellow contemporary writers such as Koestler or Gide, he never
really espoused communism. For these writers who had genuinely believed
in communism’s promised proletarian revolution, it proved more difficult to
walk away and admit their mistaken assumptions about a criminal state. Their
cynicism about Stalinism could be well summarized by the exploitive judge in
Camus’s The State of Siege: “I do not serve the law because of what it says but
because it is the law . . . If crimes become the law, it ceases being crime.”5
Camus’s fallen god, whether he recognized it or not, was more French Alge-
ria than communism, even if he dedicated much ink to turning his genera-
tion against this ideology. Camus knew of French Algeria’s authoritarianism in
regards to the majority of its non-European inhabitants; the term “citizens”
cannot be used since French laws did not protect colonial subjects. Yet he pre-
ferred to turn a blind eye to the impossibility of a fair and equal society when a
foreign culture or occupier claims to civilize other native ones. Once signs of an
organized insurrection became increasingly difficult to ignore in the early fif-
ties, Camus still dismissed the idea of an independent Algeria; in the late fifties,
shortly before his death, he proposed a federation modeled after Switzerland in
that it was the only form of government that could “do justice for all parts of
the population . . . for different nationalities to live in peace.”6
When some contemporary Algerian scholars state that for Camus the “world
is a Mediterranean ghetto, where the Arab has no place. A sun-bathed ghetto,
established on the basis of race,”7 we are reminded that we need to underscore
the ways in which these world wars intersected with colonial subjects—those
same subjects that appear marginally in Camus’s fiction, which he mostly set in
French Algeria. In his 1946 novel, The Stranger, the existentialist hero acts like
a Hollywoodian individualist cowboy making his own law on a scorching-heat,
desert-like virgin terrain where he claims to have inadvertently and pointlessly

eliminated a native inhabitant who was deemed suspicious for his silence and
“otherness.” Callously, Meursault kills a nameless, anonymous “Arab” simply
because he blames his own lack of agency on the consuming Mediterranean
sun that, in blinding him, was the source of his absurd act of gratuitous vio-
lence. How can he claim innocence when Meursault murders execution style by
shooting five bullets at close range?
As a settler, Meursault reveals that while he enjoys the paradisiacal North
African sun, he lives in unease when encountering in open, free, nonurbanized
settings, such as in this majestic beach, the overwhelming majority of indig-
enous inhabitants whose mother tongues are as foreign to him as their cultures.
Not only did Meursault hunt down the “Arab” since he had already seen him
resting on the beach, but he describes his crime as the result of a metaphysical
aggression of sorts. Meursault narrates what his voiceless victim does when he
approached him for no reason: “Without getting up, the Arab drew his knife
and held it up to me in the sun. The light shot off the steel and it was like a
long flashing blade cutting at my forehead . . . The scorching blade slashed at
my eyelashes and stabbed at my stinging eyes. That’s when everything began to
reel. The sea carried up a thick, fiery breath. It seemed to me as if the sky split
open from one end to the other to rain down fire. My whole being tensed and
I squeezed my hand around the revolver. The trigger gave.”8 The blade Meur-
sault refers to is the reflection of light given off by the knife, the man’s ineffec-
tive deterrent of harassment. The “Arab” serves as a stock character that reveals
the settlers’ unconscious will to render French Algeria a European setting in
which other “Arabs” are simply part of the landscape, albeit as the roughly eight
to one “invisible” majority. The other characters in the novel have Christian
names (Thomas Pérez, Raymond, Masson, Salamano, and Marie) that derive
from French or Spanish, thus representing the diverse European community.
Ultimately, the rare and marginal “Arabs” populating this novel reveal two dis-
connected worlds uneasily coexisting or, rather, struggling for survival. Such
tension at play in the novel is far from the peaceful coexistence that Camus
celebrates in a 1937 speech he made on Mediterranean culture: “And there is, at
this junction, little difference between the way a Spaniard or Italian lives on the
quays of Algiers, and the way Arabs live around them. The most basic aspect of
the Mediterranean genius springs perhaps from this historically and geographi-
cally unique encounter between East and West.”9
The question of the double vulnerability posed by fascist occupations in
France and North Africa, as in the 1942 Nazi invasion of Tunisia, lies at the
heart of the literary movement, Ecole d’Alger (School of Algiers), in which
Camus played a pivotal role in promoting on both sides of the Mediterranean.
As Nazism and Italian and Spanish fascism haunt the Mediterranean humanist
works of Ecole d’Alger writers, especially of Arab, Berber, and Jewish descent
such as Albert Memmi (The Pillar of Salt) and Mohammed Dib (Who Remem-
bers the Sea), Camus and Emmanuel Roblès romanticized their relationship to
their ancestral Spain as volatile racial tensions increasingly threatened their very
own French Algeria. Non-European writers from this literary movement admire
Camus but also question his ahistorical idea of a pluralistic Spain, of a mythical
Al-Andalus and its attributed convivencia (coexistence), and how that model
could be adopted in French Algeria.
Ironically, while totalitarian threats in Europe increasingly worried Camus,
as he declared that “man is the force that cancels all tyrants and gods,”10 he
failed to see that for the indigenous population, authoritarian rule or colonial-
ism did not amount to a better form of governance than the types of rogue
states he decried in his editorial pieces or in his fiction. In his exchanges with
a German friend who defends his country, Camus asserts, “We had formed
an idea of our country that put her in her proper place, amidst other great
concepts—friendship, mankind, happiness, our desire for justice. This led us to
be severe with her. But, in the long run, we were the ones who were right. We
didn’t bring her any slaves, and we debased nothing for her sake . . . You, on
the other hand, are fighting against everything in man that does not belong to
the mother country.”11 Peoples living under French domination would disagree
with Camus who neglects the colonial history and reality of the French empire
in his defense of France and condemnation of Germany. Olivier Todd con-
curs that for Camus, the authoritarian peril, even if he adamantly criticized the
Spanish dictatorship, came from the East. Todd states, “To avoid wars, which
had become too costly in the atomic era, international and national democra-
cies were needed. Camus’s ideas of utopia included a world parliament with
elections. He believed in the United Nations and in a national order.”12
Camus fervently warned his European contemporaries against these forms of
dictatorship that impede freedom and democracy. Yet his admonitions got lost
at sea, or more specifically drowned before reaching the North African Mediter-
ranean shores. Unlike other Ecole d’Alger writers, such as Memmi who also grew
up in French North Africa, Camus fails to consider two important phenomena.
First, the insidious ways in which totalitarianism (such as the Nazi work camps
in Tunisia) and warring empires rendered even more precarious the livelihood
and survival of the millions of people under colonial subjugation. Second, he
neglected to take seriously the aspirations that colonial subjects harbored for
freedom amid the Axis’s onslaught on the same government that denied them
equal rights. These same empires at war with each other found themselves in
the unprecedented predicament of exterminating each other with their sophis-
ticated war machinery normally utilized to pacify rebellious populations and
contain colonial uprisings. In World War II, as in World War I, empires were on
the receiving end of such magnificent fire and, at times, nuclear power.
On May 8, 1945, the same day that France celebrated Victory Day with the
decorated General de Gaulle who had recently returned to a free, unoccupied
country, the French army turned its World War II war planes and machinery
against Algerian violent strikes in Sétif and its neighboring indigenous dwell-
ings, killing thousands in the process. Protestors demanded more equitable con-
ditions, especially as their families had made tremendous sacrifices for France’s
liberation. De Gaulle’s triumphant return to France foreshadowed his victorious
march to the presidency in 1958, primarily on the promise that his strong lead-
ership would finally pacify the smoldering French Algeria. Camus laments that
the French failed to heed the legitimate thirst for justice that Arabs expressed
in 1945: “The pitiless repression of the area around Constantine, on the con-
trary, emphasized the anti-French movement. The French authorities judged
that such repression put an end to the rebellion. In fact, it gave the rebelling a
starting signal.”13
France was a utopia of sorts for the Pieds-Noirs. Even though Albert Camus
advocated on behalf of the indigenous communities (especially in the Kabylie
region) for better living conditions in his early days of journalism with Alger
républicain prior to World War II, he, like many of his fellow European French
citizens in North Africa maintained an idealized fiction of both France and
French Algeria.
Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, France, the mother
country, a democracy, imposed itself onto the North African landscape and its
diverse peoples to introduce Western civilization as a means to enlighten its des-
titute inhabitants. Yet the civilizing mission that France attributed to itself in its
militaristic expansion around the globe did not bring equality and freedom to
its colonial subjects; rather, France needed to guarantee the opposite in order to
thrive as an empire. As far as the indigenous population was concerned, democ-
racy and empire were mutually exclusive. While Europeans enjoyed the civil lib-
erties guaranteed by the rule of law in French Algeria, the vast majority subsisted
under arbitrary colonial rule. The Jews, for example, could apply for French
citizenship under the Crémieux laws initially passed in 1870, but were repealed
and reinstated according to the anti-Semitic whims of the rotating politicians.
Having been schooled under the Third Republic’s civilizing mission ideol-
ogy that “constructed itself on the premises of separate and unequal political
and judicial apparatuses for colons and indigènes,”14 Camus reads the Algerian
revolution through a prism of clashing empires, an Arab and a Christian one;
moreover, he projects his anticommunist fears and through the Eurocentric
Cold War binary he fails to recognize the nationalist nature of the armed strug-
gle. He speaks of the autonomist insurrection as a will for an Arab empire that
“does not exist except in the writings of Colonel Nasser” and “in part as one of
the manifestations of this new Arab imperialism in which Egypt . . . aims to take
the lead.”15 Russia, he erroneously predicts, will appropriate the new nation as a
satellite state. After all, what can be expected, according to Camus, when “there
has never been an Algerian nation. The Jews, the Turks, the Greeks, the Italians,
the Berbers would have just as much right to claim the direction of that virtual
nation.”16 Characters from these ethnic and religious backgrounds he mentions
are conspicuously absent in his novels set in French Algeria.
****
In 1972, ten years after the birth of the new Algerian nation and the death of
French Algeria, a French literary television program dedicated an hour to an
extraordinary group of writers who considered themselves Algerian and who
had assembled to debate the status of Algerian literature of French expression.
Their reunion was indeed historic. They represented the rich diversity of cul-
tures that coexisted in Algeria in the twentieth century: Berber, Arab, Jewish
(Memmi was actually Tunisian but belonged to Ecole d’Alger), and French of
European descent. Their love for Algeria—whether the one of their youth
(French Algeria) or the nascent one—was strongly palpable. For some, French
colonialism was a difficult wound to heal but one that had inevitably nourished
their writing. For others, their wound and yearning for what no longer could
be resulted from what Alistorne Horne refers to as the “savage war of peace”
and their subsequent exile to France, along with one million others of mostly
European but also of Jewish descent.
The notable absence in this historic roundtable discussion was the late
Camus who had been killed in a car accident at the height of the Algerian war,
in 1960. To an extent, the debate on Algerian literature “d’expression française”
(written in French) paid tribute to the legacy of Camus—for his influence, sup-
port, and inspiration in the literary careers of these imminent writers. As one of
the founders of the Ecole d’Alger, Camus used his name and dedication to this
project to bring attention to the artistic and literary talent on the North African
side of the Mediterranean Sea.
Camus’s 1937 Nuptials had resonated as a manifesto for these French Alge-
rian young writers seeking new models of fraternity along the Mediterranean
coast. Camus wrote, “But Algiers . . . open[s] into the sky like a mouth or a
wound. What one can fall in love with in Algiers is what everybody lives with:
the sea, visible from every corner, a certain heaviness of the sunlight, the beauty
of the people.”17 The sensuality of his prose captured the imagination of his
generation who believed that for too long French Algerian writers had turned
to the Parisian literary center for inspiration and recognition. Unlike Robert
Landau’s Algérianistes who had attempted to Latinize French Algeria’s history,

Camus’s contemporaries accentuated the paradisiacal warmth of a North Afri-
can landscape that embraced the richness of its African and European (Italian,
Spanish, and Maltese) cultures.
One of the authors invited to discuss Algerian literature on this televised
panel was Albert Memmi, whose existentialist novel depicts a dystopic Medi-
terranean society stemming from the double alienation of colonialism and
Nazism; it differs drastically from Camus’s brilliantly poetic Mediterranean
utopia in Nuptials.
Author of the famous Portrait of a Colonizer and Colonized (prefaced by
Jean-Paul Sartre), Memmi greatly contributed to theorizations on race, religion,
and class under a segregated French Tunisian protectorate. Memmi published
this seminal anticolonial work in 1957, while the Algerian War was engulfing
French society in one of its most unpopular and costly decolonization wars.
Tunisia was spared a long and bloody war of decolonization because it was a
French Protectorate and not part of France itself—it gained its independence
in 1956, when the French were too preoccupied in saving French Algeria.
Morocco, too, another North African French Protectorate, benefitted from the
Algerian conflict by declaring its independence one month after Tunisia.
As the son of an Italian Jew and a Berber mother, Memmi powerfully articu-
lated in his theoretical work and fiction his painful, contradictory positioning
in a dominant catholic, colonial society that rejected him as a Jew but that at the
same time made him complicit with a colonial system; French colonial law stra-
tegically afforded more rights to Jews than to Muslims. In his groundbreaking
work, Memmi explores the psychologically damaging effects of belonging to a
comprador, or buffer, community and analyzes the psychology in the dialectical
relationship between colonizer and colonized.
While Memmi was not Algerian, his work is associated with the Mediterra-
nean humanist works of Ecole d’Alger writers of Spanish, Italian, French, Jewish,
Berber, and Arab descent such as of course Camus, Emmanuel Roblès, Gabriel
Audisio, Mohammed Dib, and Kateb Yacine. These works praised the novel
idea of a Mediterranean and not Latin aesthetic previously celebrated by the
Algérianistes, a movement that vindicated the Latin roots of North Africa; after
all, St. Augustine, whose writings in Latin are the bedrock of Western theol-
ogy, came from Algeria. These newer generation writers mobilized conflicting
visions of Algeria as one of France’s most prized colonies, as a Mediterranean
utopia, and as a nascent revolutionary Muslim state.
What were the political and historical conditions that allowed for these
writers to forge not only a different literary aesthetic but also a national con-
science for Algeria’s future independence—as well as for Tunisia’s and Morocco’s
new nations? Memmi’s highly critical The Pillar of Salt exposes how France’s
humanist, 1789 revolutionary ideals did not match his reality as a subaltern.
The Pillar of Salt is an existential bildungsroman in which the young protago-
nist, Alexandre Mordekhai Benillouche, comes of age between the two world
wars as he internalizes the scorn of French society for his Jewish community
during a critical moment in Tunisian history.
When German Nazis arrive in Tunisia in 1941, his pillars turn to salt. His
teacher, who represented France’s “civilizing mission,” cowardly allows him to
be taken away to a work camp. Our protagonist recounts in his journal the
existential anguish of trying to distinguish colonialism from fascism as well of
his consuming guilt of having betrayed his persecuted family. Once he escapes
the work camp, he befriends a young, brilliant Muslim student who invites him
to join a brotherhood of Muslims and Jews who will fight for an independent
Tunisia. Can our protagonist believe in an egalitarian post-French society as
their subaltern communities grapple with racial and religious tensions when
France created hierarchies that separated Muslims and Jews? Will there be a
place for Jews in a postrevolutionary Islamic state? How will the creation of the
State of Israel affect Muslims and Jews in a North Africa bracing for indepen-
dence from France?
Alexander solemnly articulates his sense of abandonment in his own city, the
bad mother that denies him a home:
A man may travel, marvel at the world, change, become a stranger to his relatives
and friends, but he will always retain within him the hard kernel of his aware-
ness of belonging to some nameless village. Defeated, blind, his imagination will
bring him back to that landmark, for his hands and feet know its contours and
his nerves are wonderfully attuned to it. And I—well, I am my city’s illegitimate
son, the child of a whore of a city whose heart has been divided among all those
to whom she has been a slave. And the list of her masters, when I came to know
some history, made me giddy: Phoenicians, Romans, Vandals, byzantine Greeks,
Berbers, Arabs, Spaniards, Turks, Italians, French—but I must be forgetting some
and confusing others.18
Memmi and other Ecole d’Alger writers of non-European mother tongues

found themselves at odds with Albert Camus’s most cherished idea of a French
Algerian Mediterranean utopia. But as Memmi aptly confesses, Camus’s The
Stranger has been misread by its European audience: it is not a metaphysical
novel exploring existential anguish; it is the story of Camus’s foreignness to his
own soil since he too is a stranger.
In tracing this literary movement and the capital role Camus played, we
discover how the Spanish Civil War galvanized the French intelligentsia as
Spaniards sought refuge in French Algeria, we learn of other layers of France’s
vulnerability during World War II on this Mediterranean front and how
clandestine resistance writing began here, and we learn of the tortuous uncom-
promising paths that led to the horrors of a sale guerre (dirty war) and the tragic
expatriation of more than one million people.
We tend to compare Camus’s and Sartre’s similar and eventually incompat-
ible journeys in our search to understand the formidable debates and challenges
traversing French society in the twentieth century, from the Resistance to the
postwar communist/capitalist polarization, to the Algerian War’s threatening of
France’s own democracy. However, we should compare Camus’s fertile relation-
ships with those writers of different religions, of non-European mother tongues
who poetically expanded the contours of the Ecole d’Alger but whose painful
positioning in this colonial world put them at odds with Camus’s most cher-
ished idea of Algeria. Both Camus’s optimism and Sisyphean cynicism could
not be more relevant today as we prefer to see difference, supposed existentialist
East-West clashes, and unshared values in the rich pluralisms of our global and
local communities. Let us heed the Andalusian hero’s charge against perpetual
war, from one of Camus’s plays that he was most proud of: “Neither fear—nor
hatred—therein lies our victory.”19
Notes
1. Olivier Todd, Albert Camus: A Life, trans. Benjamin Ivry (New York: Knopf, 1997),
236.
2. Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion, and Death: Essays, trans. Justin O’Brien (New
3. Richard Crossman, ed., The God That Failed: A Confession (New York: Harper &
Brothers, 1949), 5.
4. Camus, “Algeria 1958,” in Resistance, 146.
5. Albert Camus, Caligula and Three Other Plays, trans. Stuart Gilbert (1938; repr.,
6. Camus, “Algeria 1958,” 148.
7. Aicha Kassoul and Mohamed-Lakhdar Maougal, The Algerian Destiny of Albert
Camus, trans. Philip Beitchman (Bethesda, MD: Academica Press, 2006), 7.
8. Albert Camus, The Stranger, trans. Mathew Ward (New York: Vintage Books,
1988), 59.
9. Albert Camus, “The New Mediterranean Culture,” in Lyrical and Critical Essays,
ed. Philip Thody, trans. Ellen Conroy Kennedy (New York: Vintage Books, 1970),
194.
10. Camus, “Letters to a German Friend,” in Resistance, 14.
11. Ibid.
12. Todd, A Life, 236.
13. Camus, “Algeria 1958,” 144.
14. Nicolas Bancel, Pascal Blanchard, and Françoise Vergès, La République Coloniale
(Paris: Albin Michel, 2003), 31.
15. Camus, “Algeria 1958,” 146.
16. Ibid., 145.

17. Camus, Lyrical and Critical Essays, ed. Phillip Thody, trans. Ellen Conroy Kennedy
(New York: Vintage Books, 1970), 80. (“Mais Alger . . . s’ouvre dans le ciel comme
une bouche ou une blessure. Ce qu’on peut aimer à Alger, c’est ce dont tout le
monde vit: la mer au tournant de chaque rue, un certain poids de soleil, la beauté
de la race”; Albert Camus, Noces [Paris: Gallimard, 2010], 47).
18. Albert Memmi, The Pillar of Salt, trans. Edouard Roditi (Boston: Beacon Press,
2001), 90–91.
19. Camus, Caligula, 216.
PART 3
Evolution and Influences

CHAPTER 7
Prison, Plague, and Piety

Medieval Dystopia in Albert Camus’s The Plague
Jennifer Stafford Brown
T
he creation of myth is one of the most complex processes of modern
literature. Mythography is, and has always been, a way of shaping
the vocabulary of ideological conflict. Poets, essayists, novelists, and
playwrights take hold of the past and give it the context and meaning of their
own day; they create stories in which past and present merge to prescribe
a future for the country. These stories, rich in metaphor and imagery, and
steeped in history, last much longer in the minds and hearts of a nation than
the political speeches that try to accomplish the same goals. Myth has a qual-
ity of mystery and of hiddenness that fires a national imagination much more
effectively than mere statements of fact. It appears most often in times of
national crisis: war, conflict, and questions of national identity tend to bring
out the mythographer in authors and artists whose work might previously
have been apolitical. Albert Camus, in his wartime novel The Plague, observed
the myths—images of an idealized neomedieval France—being inscribed in
the medieval trope by the Vichy government, and twisted them to his own
ideological use.
In June of 1940, Camus had been working as a layout editor for Paris-Soir
and was evacuated along with the rest of Paris on the eve of the German inva-
sion. The staff of Paris-Soir followed Maréchal Philippe Pétain, the temporary
leader of the nation, to Clermont-Ferrand (they would choose Vichy as govern-
ment headquarters a few weeks later.) In this way, Camus was present almost
by accident at the inauguration of the Etat français (French state). His firsthand
observation of the emergence of the Vichy government following the occupa-

tion gave him a new perspective on the war. He was able to watch the rise of
the personal cult of Pétain, as well as the dangerous increase of anti-Semitic
and anticommunist rhetoric in Pétain’s government. His own newspaper, like
so many other media sources in Vichy, was not slow to follow Pétain’s lead, so
Camus and his wife returned to Oran, where he found work teaching Jewish
children who had been removed from Algerian schools.
In April 1941, Camus was forced to return to France to be treated for
tuberculosis in Le Panelier, a mountain resort near the town of Le Chambon-
sur-Lignon. It was there that he began work on The Plague. Before his doc-
tors considered him well enough to return home, the Allies landed in North
Africa, trapping Camus in France. Camus’s journal entry for November 11,
1942, reads only, “Like rats!”1 It is difficult to say whether Camus intended the
expression in the proverbial sense of “We were trapped like rats”—the sense
of entrapment—or in the more literal sense of the vermin that populate the
streets of Oran in The Plague. In either case, he spent the rest of the war, and
indeed most of the rest of his life, in France, and for the duration of the war he
was almost completely cut off from his wife and family. This separation, and
the suffocation of being trapped, weighed heavily on him and form important
themes of the novel.
While Camus is now one of the best-known authors of the Resistance,
at the beginning of the war he was known to only a few among the French
intelligentsia, and then only for the editorial work he had done in Algeria.
The Stranger was published in 1942, a year after he had finished his “Three
Absurds,” and The Myth of Sisyphus, the series of philosophical essays that
shed light upon it, was published a year later. Both received excellent critical
reviews, but Camus had not yet reached a larger public. By 1945, he was con-
siderably more famous for his work in the Combat network than for his fic-
tion and philosophy. The Plague, however, conceived in 1941 and published
in 1947, changed his status in France and made him an almost instant celeb-
rity. He was overwhelmed by letters and requests to speak, and he wrote to his
friends Michel and Janine Gallimard, “The Plague is up to 96,000 [sales]. It’s
made more victims than I thought.”2
It is a temptation to label The Plague an allegory, both because of its typified
characters and because of its rather heavy-handed moral. Technically, however,
the narrative structure for an allegory is missing. Before the story even begins,
Camus openly instructs the reader to look for symbolism, with his epigraph
from Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year: “It is as reasonable to represent
one kind of imprisonment by another, as it is to represent anything that really
exists by that which exists not.”3 Camus draws much of his symbolism from the
medieval trope, which represents a definite departure in his work. The events
Prison, Plague, and Piety ● 97
of the novel take place in “194—in Oran”4: Camus chooses a modern city and
a contemporary time period. This is no new city, however. Oran was founded
in the tenth century, and is encircled to this day by a wall and several ancient
fortresses. This city, attacked by a plague—the Black Death—that for Europe-
ans recalls the Middle Ages, gradually sheds its initial appearance of modernity
and returns to a dark version of its own medieval origins. The reasons behind
Camus’s choice of this particular imagery for contemporary, war-torn France
have to do with the political realities he saw around him, especially fascist and
Vichy use of the medieval trope.
Camus’s diaries give the essential clue to his own use of this medieval imag-
ery. In them, he gives the key to the symbolism in The Plague, and provides his
own ideas on governmental use of the medieval trope during the war. In 1942,
Camus wrote from Le Panelier,
Modern intelligence is in total disarray. Knowledge is distorted to such a degree
that the world and the mind have lost all point of reference. It is a fact that we
suffer from nihilism. But what I admire most are the sermons on “returning.”
Return to the Middle Ages, to a primitive mentality, to the land, to religion, to
the arsenal of old solutions. In order to give these balms the slightest chance to
work, we’d have to act as if our knowledge no longer existed—as if we had learned
nothing—indeed, we’d have to pretend to erase what cannot be erased. We would
have to scratch out with one stroke of the pen the support of several centuries and
the undeniable acquisitions of a mind which finally [and this is its most recent
progress] has recreated chaos for its own benefit.5
The inspiration for Camus’s use of the medieval trope becomes clear. He is
rebelling against something preached over and over by the Vichy government:
the idea of a return to the Middle Ages. Camus utterly rejects this idea of a
“return,” claiming that the world must adjust to modernity, rather than have
modernity disappear for the convenience of the world.
It is, perhaps, no surprise that certain characteristics of the medieval trope
made it ideally suited for government propaganda. The pervasive Christian
influence, the inescapably hierarchical structure of feudal society, the power
held by the church and by small elite groups over the people—all this was
attractive to the more conservative elements of society, and obviously antago-
nistic to the Left, and particularly to communists. Vichy politicians, including
Maréchal Pétain, made the most of this. The Middle Ages, they claimed, were
a golden age of hierarchy: a time when church and state in harmony ruled a
prosperous land of farmers and artisans.6 Conservatives also drew heavily on
the rhetoric of the birth of the nation. It was during the Middle Ages, an era
that embodied so many conservative virtues, that France was at its strongest,
they argued: then, it had conquered instead of being conquered. This developed
into an argument not for learning from the past, but actually for reconstructing
it in a social sense, for creating a twentieth-century version of the Middle Ages
that would somehow also incorporate the best parts of the revolution. “Travail-
Famille-Patrie” (Work-Family-Homeland), the slogan of the Vichy government
that had replaced “Liberté-Egalité-Fraternité” (Liberty-Equality-Fraternity),
accompanied on posters by pictures of fortresses or of rolling farmland, repre-
sented the essence of Vichy medievalism.7
This concept of social reconstruction was easily conveyed by the metaphor
of physical reconstruction: Pétain drew on the medieval trope and used the
images of the medieval walls that dotted France’s countryside. The metaphor
is easy to adapt: When discussing the reasons for France’s defeat, for instance,
Pétain pointed out that egoism and nihilism had sapped France’s strength, just
as neglect and time had brought decay to the ruined walls that circled many
French castles and towns. Pétain insisted that France had forgotten the original
purpose of the “walls” of discipline and self-sacrifice. They had not been used
for defense, and so they had slowly crumbled. Walls in such a state of disrepair
had naturally been unable to keep out the enemy (not the German in these
speeches, but the Jew and the Bolshevik), and France had fallen because of
her own inattention to the traditions and people who are in all cases the best
defense of a nation’s spirit: “The spirit of enjoyment has destroyed what the
spirit of sacrifice has built.”8 Once the old ways had been reconstructed, Pétain
claimed, France could return to her ancient greatness, and would once again
be the strong castle protecting her people from all attackers. The language and
imagery used by the Vichy government capitalized upon this idea of strength
and protection. Posters showed the ideal, impenetrable castle walls of a once
and future France; Pétain’s speeches referred to the unity of the common peo-
ple as the strong and necessary foundation for the future: “We plan to rebuild
France on the unshakeable rock of French unity.”9
A large and vocal part of the French community, shocked by defeat and
at a loss for the future, enthusiastically accepted these grand sentiments. In
1943, the Centre Français de Synthèse, a political think tank under Pétain’s
Vichy and home of the Université Jeune France, promised to fight against
such enemies as individualism, egoism, nihilism, criticism, and the rule of
technology. In place of these, it proposed, among other things, to establish
the following:
• “Primal mysteries: the sense of the natural, the salvation of creation, the
magic of a provident God and of the virile act, and fidelity to one’s tribe
and to the city.”
• “Classic mysteries: Christianity, Christendom, feudalism and chivalry,
the monarchy of the strong State, and the vigilance of Rome.”10
The notion of a return to a carefully reconstructed Middle Ages had by then

been almost completely absorbed by those sympathetic to the Vichy regime,
and their version of the medieval trope was common rhetorical currency.
Pétain and his cabinet promoted these values through more than just
speeches: they incorporated them fully into the life of the new government. By
doing so, they introduced a new set of terms into the medieval trope: artisan-
ship, folklore, costumes, regional differences, peasantry, and land. The Vichy
minister for employment started ethnographic inquiries into rural arts, tra-
ditions, and ways of life under the rubric “Intellectual and Artistic Building
Sites.” The government so valued these “building sites” that young people were
exempt from the STO (Service du Travail Obligatoire [Compulsory Work Ser-
vice], a program by which one French prisoner of war was released for every
three people who went to work in German farms and munitions factories) if
they helped with these inquiries.11 All this was in aid of reconstruction: a rebuild-
ing of an idealized older world on the foundation of a modern peasantry. Neces-
sity also aided the government’s efforts, as even the real farmers were reduced to
premodern methods: due to wartime restrictions, they had no chemical fertil-
izers, no fuel for their machinery, and very few men available for labor. Pétain’s
policies both caused the necessity for a real “return to one’s roots” and gave
moral and ethical justification for such a return.
In The Plague, Camus turns Pétain’s rhetoric of reconstruction into a vicious
critique of menace and isolation. The walls of Oran, within which the novel
is set, are the first element to confront the reader. Oran was founded as a port
city in the tenth century AD by Arabs, and was inhabited by successive waves
of conquerors. The city is medieval in origin, strongly defended and important
for trade.12 The walls, many times repaired and rebuilt, are all that remains of
the founders of the town, and are a constant reminder of the past. For a French
public, the image of a walled city works particularly well: it is part of the Euro-
pean medieval trope, and yet need not be set in Europe to be recognizable. A
walled city is symbolic of strength and protection against enemies; essential to
its role in the literary-political vocabulary, it creates community among those
who live inside it. This ability to create categories—inside and outside, the self
and the other—is particularly important in wartime, when identification with
one side or the other can cost or save lives.
Camus’s use of Oran’s medieval walls as a metaphor for occupied France,
however, provides the perfect ironic counterpoint. When the gates of Oran are
closed at the end of the first section of The Plague, it is not to keep out a pos-
sible enemy, but to quarantine the city—to cut it off from all possible help,
and to keep the plague in. Far from giving the sense of protection and security
for which they were designed, the barred and guarded gates give only a sense
of foreboding and fear. Imprisonment is a terrifying revelation of the human
condition, and in The Plague, even those characters who act in solidarity with
one another are acutely aware that unity cannot bring about their salvation.13
Camus gives the reader the feeling of being walled in by the medieval: the dan-
ger in The Plague comes from within rather than from without, and the greatest
threat comes from the structures originally designed to protect. This meta-
phor is particularly apt for the collaborators of Vichy. At the armistice, they
had eagerly huddled under the protective wing of their conquerors, designat-
ing themselves part of the ruling force through the fact of their collaboration.
During the course of the war, however, what had originally seemed protective
became increasingly menacing, and even the term “Zone Libre” (Free Zone)
became first sardonic and then a threat.
The walls continue to become more important during the course of The
Plague, both physically and metaphorically. As the novel progresses, the people
of Oran become more and more completely habituated to the life they live
under the reign of the plague. Camus places great stress in his works on the
importance of consciousness and self-awareness. One of the things that shocked
him most about his observations of life in Vichy France was the rapidity with
which people became accustomed to their new circumstances. In The Plague,
Camus uses both the walls and the plague itself to demonstrate this dangerous
tendency. As the plague escalates, the people can no longer imagine their lives
before its appearance in the streets of their city; they have accepted their expe-
rience to such an extent that it seems natural. In the same way, the confining
walls, once so easy to exit and enter at will, become a natural part of life, a mere
extension or manifestation of the plague itself. It seems that the walls have never
done anything but imprison or threaten. Indeed, after a few weeks have passed,
the myth has been created in Oran that the walls were made by God for this
purpose. It is this naturalization of the walls’ new function that is their most
dangerous aspect.
Camus draws some of his images of the walls of Oran from an ornate,
Gothic tradition. The most chilling scene in which the walls play a role is at
the height of the plague, when some of the inhabitants burn their own homes
to prevent the spread of the disease, and others take to looting the flaming
structures. The only rule the citizens obey, says the narrator, is the curfew. It is
then, at night, that the walls take over the city, reducing it to immobility and
silence. The result is a ghastly caricature of a medieval city, a stone metropolis
of the dead. “After eleven o’clock, plunged into darkness, the town was like a
monument . . . The silent town was henceforth a heap of massive, motionless
cubes . . . These mediocre idols reigned beneath a heavy sky on lifeless cross-
roads, unfeeling brutes who evoked rather well the state of immobility into
which we had drifted—or at least its final state, that of a necropolis in which
plague, stone and night would finally have silenced every voice.”14
Camus, surrounded by the propaganda of his enemies, turns their own polit-
ical trope against them: the Vichy government itself provided Camus’s inspira-
tion for the use of medieval walls not as a metaphor of France’s strength, but
of its political isolation. Camus’s depiction of the medieval walls of Oran is
the inevitable result of a rebellion against that imagery. His claim is that mod-
ern society is not meant to be surrounded by medieval walls, however strong;
modernity is not suited to the medieval imagery used with such insistence by
the Vichy government. He shows his reader that walls can be menacing, a trap
as well as a protection. Certainly in wartime France, mechanisms put in place
to “reconstruct” France in the image conceived by Vichy did more to keep the
French in their place than to keep the Germans out.
Another way in which Vichy leaders wanted to link themselves to the Mid-
dle Ages was through the emphasis they placed on religion. The Middle Ages
are inescapably associated with the Catholic church, from cowshed to Cru-
sades, and some of the most vivid and memorable surviving medieval spaces—
cathedrals, abbeys, monasteries—are religious ones. Along with its return to the
agricultural basis of the Middle Ages and its grasp of heroic figures such as Joan
of Arc, then, Vichy incorporated a vision of the church combined with the state,
faith living in happy harmony with government. Pétain, an agnostic himself,
was clever enough to exploit this useful tool. He had an excellent model: in Ger-
many, that harmony had become so complete that the Reichskirche was little
more than an appendage of the Reich. The same process of aligning church and
state became evident in Vichy: the official French Catholic Church, terrified of
the perceived Communist menace to world religion, stood behind Pétain and
encouraged its members to unite. Liénart, the archbishop of Lille, wrote to the
faithful in his diocese that Catholics should bear their fair share of the blame in
defeat: “We have our part in the disorder which has . . . relaxed the moral stan-
dards of France . . . Let us therefore first accept with generosity our fair share
of the great national penance in order to expiate our own faults.”15 Despite
the active resistance of many individual Catholic and Protestant churches, the
vocabulary of the medieval trope lent itself well to this alliance between church
and government, and the mainstream church looked favorably on Pétain’s insis-
tence on folklore and the land. Once officials from both church and state had
adopted the medieval vocabulary offered by Pétain’s propaganda, the events that
followed were a logical extension: the gradual intermingling of religious and
political discourse, pilgrimages, and days of national contrition in response to
the “punishment” that had fallen on the people.16
The church joined Pétain in encouraging mea-culpism on the part of the
people as a matter of policy. The whole tenor of Pétain’s speeches, from the time
he concluded the armistice with Germany in June 1940 onward, pressed such a
view on France. He insisted that France had sinned in thought, word, and deed;
as a result, nihilism, egotism, and communism had nearly destroyed the country,
which he now had the task of reconstructing. These “undesirable elements” had
diluted France’s purity and therefore her strength, and it was because of them
that she had been weak enough to be invaded by the Germans. In his speech
of June 20, 1940, immediately after the armistice, Pétain said, “We will draw a
lesson from these lost battles. Since the victory, the spirit of enjoyment has won
out over the spirit of sacrifice. We have demanded more than we have served.
We have wanted to spare ourselves effort; today, we encounter misfortune.”17
The church joined Pétain in the belief that France’s defeat by the Germans
was a punishment for the country’s collective sins. Church leaders saw the
defeat less as a result of French repugnance for self-sacrifice, however, and more
as a punishment for French agnosticism as a nation: “Every defeat awakens the
old feeling that the misfortunes of France are attributable to the unfaithfulness
of the oldest daughter of the Church. Whilst Maréchal Pétain was explaining
defeat to the French by their propensity for enjoyment, the men of the Church
went even farther.”18 Both the Vichy government and the Catholic Church felt
that the people of France had to be convinced of their own part in the country’s
downfall before they could be brought to accept the reconstruction Vichy had
to offer.
And indeed most people did enthusiastically accept this message. Especially
during the time immediately following the armistice, they seemed to feel that
any explanation for what had befallen them was better than none. Manifesta-
tions of religious fervor increased in wartime France, especially at first, as they
did in Camus’s Oran. Religious enthusiasm took on a quasimedieval tone in
response to the imagery in the speeches of Pétain and church leaders. One of
the best examples of this increase in “medieval” religious demonstration was the
resurgence of pilgrimages as a symbolic task taken on by an individual penitent.
Still more significant were the mass pilgrimages sanctioned by the government.
In 1942, at the Feast of the Assumption, La Jeunesse Française (French Youth)
organized “les grands jours du Puy” (the Great Days of Le Puy): a pilgrimage,
offered as an act of penitence and as a request for God’s mercy. In the official
account of this event, Vichy rhetoric mixed with traditional religious formulas:
the pilgrimage was offered in union with “The Pope, the Maréchal, the hierar-
chy, our faraway brothers, prisoners, and Mary.”19
The most obvious medieval referent in Camus’s novel, present on every page,
is The Plague itself: the bubonic plague, the Black Death, which attacked Europe
in the fourteenth century. Why the plague? In modern literary metaphor, the
disease most often used to represent evil is cancer: a foreign body that first
mysteriously invades and then slowly eats away at its host. Cancer character-
izes a situation as unqualifiedly and irredeemably wicked, An incurable disease,
extended to an entire society, must be attacked rather than treated—poisoned
or excised wholly.20 Camus might also have created a metaphor from the disease
he himself suffered from, and sometimes despaired of surviving: tuberculosis,
the “white plague,” which also refines or consumes its host. Yet Camus instead
chose bubonic plague for his novel, a disease that had not been a threat to
Europe for six hundred years.
In fact, his choice of the plague is ideal for his metaphoric purposes. Camus
plays with the archaism of plague, the complete lack of preparation on the part
of the modern world to meet a disease that, among Europeans, is associated
exclusively with the past. Camus describes in The Plague the terrible danger
that modern intelligence has created for itself. He sees the fascist philosophy as
a frightened unwillingness to confront, understand, and make use of the dis-
coveries of centuries of science and art.21 Such a reactionary approach can only
increase and spread the danger of oppression. A return to the Middle Ages is
therefore linked, in Camus’s book, with disease and death.
The primary reason for Camus to use the bubonic plague in its character of
medieval disease, however, is that it lends itself more readily than any modern
disease to the image of the scourge that haunts The Plague. A scourge, in French
fléau, comes from the Latin word flagellum, for whip. In a figurative sense, it
is associated with the notion of punishment: usually punishment from God,
in the form of war, natural disaster—or pestilence. As Camus points out, such
calamities are known to happen, but usually not to us: again, the exotic and
unreal nature of legend unfits the people of Oran for experiencing the reality
of the terrible myth of plague. “Pestilence is in fact very common, but we find
it hard to believe in a pestilence when it descends upon us. There have been
as many plagues in the world as there have been wars, yet plagues and wars
always find people equally unprepared.”22 Here Camus describes very well the
atmosphere of the “drôle de guerre,” before the German invasion and before the
terribly serious nature of the war had made itself apparent: “When war breaks
out people say: ‘It won’t last, it’s too stupid.’ And war is certainly too stupid, but
that doesn’t prevent it from lasting.”23
The medieval disease is inextricable, for Camus, from the notion of divine
punishment. Modern medicine renders the idea of a contemporary scourge
ridiculous, but the people of Oran—and symbolically the people of France—
find themselves in just such a predicament, being told that the plague is indeed
their fault. The mixture of political and religious rhetoric in The Plague is an
eerie echo of Vichy propaganda. In Pétain’s speeches, quoted earlier, about the
French people’s tendencies to self-indulge, bringing sorrow on their own heads,
we see the intertextual model for the sermon Paneloux preaches to the people
of Oran: “My brethren, a calamity has befallen you; my brethren, you have
deserved it.”24 In The Plague, it is only once the plague begins to kill people
in earnest that the people of Oran remember the origin of the word fléau, and
begin to believe that their sins have brought the disease upon them. The next
step is to expiate those sins if they can.
Even minor images in The Plague use this combination of political and reli-
gious rhetoric. Camus’s use of St. Roch, “le saint pestiféré,” stands out in this
regard. One particular saint stood for all the things Vichy wanted to promote to
the people of France: Joan of Arc. Her feast day, for which Pétain gave speeches
every year, was one of the major holidays celebrated by the Vichy government.
As a female figurehead, Joan suited the Vichy agenda far better than the revolu-
tionary Marianne: for them, she stood for God and hierarchy rather than for a
spirit of insurrection against the status quo. Pétain described her thus: “Peasant
from our eastern provinces, faithful to her soil, faithful to her prince, faithful to
her God, Joan, with her standard, has drawn the most luminous furrow of our
history.”25 The Vichy government used her image as anti-British propaganda;
when the Allies bombed Rouen, Vichy issued posters picturing the attackers as
the murderers returning to the scene of their medieval crime.26 Joan was appeal-
ing because of her political value. She was not canonized until the 1920s, mak-
ing her a misunderstood heroine. Filtered through Vichy propaganda offices,
Joan transmitted a message to the French people: even in hardship, even though
others misunderstand and condemn your actions, you must fight for the purity
and strength of France. This was an apt message for a country collaborating
with the Germans, and the French adapted Joan as a wartime saint.
St. Roch, on the other hand, the medieval patron saint of plague victims,
haunts The Plague in the same way that Joan of Arc’s image permeated Vichy
society. Paneloux preaches his first sermon during a solemn mass dedicated to
this saint. Little altars appear around the city, in dark corners, before hastily
executed figures of St. Roch. When the saint appears, it is always in the context
of blind, fearful superstition: talismans, good-luck charms, potions, the predic-
tions of Nostradamus, and an absurd reduction of Pascal’s wager: It can’t do any
harm. The people of Oran are reduced to placating the spirit of the plague, as
if modernity has been wiped away entirely. This twisting of Vichy veneration
of Joan of Arc is particularly interesting; it is no coincidence that the square in
front of Oran’s cathedral is decorated with a gilded statue of Joan herself.
A natural outgrowth of this superstitious, premodern way of thinking about
sickness, linked to the idea of illness as punishment, is the idea that disease
is the outer sign of inward sin, which only repentance can cure. The notion
that illness reflects a state of sin or unbelief places the fault of the disease on
the patient, or, in the case of an epidemic, on the community. The onus is
therefore on the patient to recover, rather than on the doctor to find a remedy.
Since the nineteenth century, however, there has been a fundamental change in
the public’s view of illness, from a primarily spiritual to a primarily biological
model. Modern identification of bacteria and viruses as the real culprits behind
disease has banished superstition about most illnesses, except those that remain
incurable, which retain their own mystique.27 This point of view brings disease
down from a scale on which divine punishment and reward are meted out to a
community, to a scale of an individual battling an individual’s illness, without
question of fault.
The paradigm of disease as punishment for sin on which Paneloux insists in
his sermon—and by extension, on which the Vichy propagandists were play-
ing—is associated in Camus’s book with the medieval trope. It wipes away the
medical knowledge that removed a patient’s personal guilt, and thus performs
part of the abolition of modernity that Camus is portraying as an extension of
Vichy politics. Religion mixed with the arbitrary nature of disease leads only
to the still greater absurdity of culpability, and not to a speedy cure, or even
to a limitation of the disease. Paneloux’s listeners are indeed forced into his
medieval view of the plague—one of crime and punishment—but they do not
turn to God, because they are fundamentally modern men and women. They
are robbed of the comforts of science and yet cannot accept the comforts of
religion. “Quite simply, the sermon made some people more receptive to the
notion—which had remained vague up to then—that they were condemned for
some unknown crime to an unimaginable term of imprisonment.”28
The fact that, even under duress, the people of Oran do not turn to reli-
gion, reflects Camus’s idea that a true abolition of modernity is impossible:
twentieth-century people cannot truly adopt a medieval mindset. Rieux’s atti-
tude toward the plague throughout the novel is in opposition to Paneloux’s
religious approach, and it is here that we can see most clearly the distinction
Camus makes between a modern and a medieval standpoint. Rieux looks on the
plague as a disease attacking and killing one man at a time, even if the men add
up to thousands. Paneloux’s emphasis on collective (read “national”) sins denies
this focus on individuality. Rieux sees the plague as something to fight, but
Paneloux simply asks, How can one fight divine punishment? Paneloux, a rep-
resentative of the Church, one of the great powers of the Middle Ages, enforces
a medieval view of the plague. This is a view that continues to strip Oran down
to its medieval origins, forcing attention onto the community rather than the
individual, and erasing singular destinies in favor of the masses—another medi-
eval trait that Camus wishes to reject in Vichy’s policy.
Camus was a clear-eyed observer of Pétain’s attempt at a return to a glori-
fied version of the Middle Ages, and of the results that were stark and barbaric
in comparison with the high-flown rhetoric being used in speeches. Pétain’s
notion of reconstruction was based not only on contribution to the agricultural
economy he wished to create but also on a purist concept of “the French race.”
Jews, Communists, and Freemasons were “extraneous elements” of society with
no ties to the land, to be excluded from participation in the peasantry: Jews were
represented in propaganda as wealthy businessmen taking advantage of the peo-

ple. This governmental position—that members of these groups had no place
in the reconstruction of the quasi-medieval world of the Etat français—led to
the arrest, deportation, and slaughter of thousands of French men and women.
The “ancient unity” between church and state of the medieval world, invented
for political purposes and stressed in Pétain’s speeches, actually meant enforced
homogeneity: repression of all other points of view, by means of degrees of cen-
sorship ranging from the suppression of newspaper articles to murder. It was not
uncommon to hear such rallying cries in Pétain’s early speeches as “We will sup-
press dissension in the City. We will not allow it into our factories and farms.”29
Camus’s observations and his reflections on them affected his choice of
metaphor in The Plague. The ubiquitous medieval trope gave the images of
walls and plague and priests a political weight they had not had before the war.
The Plague develops as an ironic extension of the medieval aspect of the Vichy
ideological line. In this novel, Camus implicitly asks the question, What if it
were possible to abolish modernity and return to the Middle Ages? The initial
conceit of the novel involves a modern problem in the modern city of Oran.
The narrative structure gradually strips away the layers of time. During the
course of the plague, Oran loses its urbane, modern feel and slowly returns to
Camus’s notion of a medieval, dystopian state. While Vichy promoted recon-
struction, a focus on the community, and due respect for God and government,
Camus used metaphor to point out where such reasoning would eventually
lead. Scarcity, darkness, disease, slavery, ignorance, and despair—all these are
symbolized in The Plague by images from the medieval trope. Camus’s vision
makes it clear that France ought not to return to such a world, but rather learn
from it and avoid it.
Camus’s remedy for the medieval dystopia of The Plague is the reestablish-
ment of modernity. Dr Castel, the man who eventually invents an anti-plague
serum, never loses his faith in modernity—in this case symbolized by science—
and his vaccine eventually inspires hope. Hope does what nothing else was able
to do: it crumbles the power of the medieval walls. “For months they had per-
sisted in waiting, with self-effacing tenacity, despite prison and exile; and now
the first sign of hope was enough to destroy what fear and despair had not
managed to dent.”30 As the plague recedes, modern life returns along with tele-
graphs, trains, and newspapers. But the danger of falling back into modern life
as if the plague had never happened is forgetfulness, which neither Rieux nor
Camus can allow.
Where Pétain and his ministers promote a false return to a glorified past,
Camus suggests a strict adherence to the advantages gained by centuries of
thought and discovery. The Plague, as a medieval dystopia, represents an ironic
extension of Vichy politics: Camus explored what might happen if the “return”
preached by Pétain actually took place, and wrote his vision of a medieval incur-
sion into a modern city. His agenda transforms a fascist agenda into an impla-
cable medieval disease, which kills arbitrarily until modern medicine is finally
able to resist its advances. The neat circle of modern to medieval and back to
modern again is emphasized by Camus’s admonition that there must be a writ-
ten chronicle of events: monuments are not enough to prevent suffering from
falling into oblivion. The Plague, written during the war, is such a chronicle.
Camus did not intend to allow the medievalization of France to be forgotten.
Memory is the only cure for memory.
Notes
1. “Comme des rats!”; Albert Camus, Carnets, vol. 2 (Paris: Gallimard, 1962), 53.
Unless otherwise stated, all translations are mine.
2. “La Peste en est à 96,000. Elle a fait plus de victimes que je ne pensais”; Albert
Camus, La Peste, in Œuvres complètes d’Albert Camus, ed. Roger Grenier, vol. 2
(Paris: Gallimard, 1983), 13.
3. Albert Camus, The Plague, trans. Stuart Gilbert (New York: Modern Library,
1948), 1 (“Il est aussi raisonnable de représenter une espèce d’emprisonnement
par une autre que de représenter n’importe quelle chose qui existe réellement par
quelque chose qui n’existe pas”; Camus, Peste, x).
4. Camus, Plague, 3 (“194—à Oran”; Camus, Peste, 11).
5. “L’intelligence moderne est en plein désarroi. La connaissance s’est distendue à ce
point que le monde et l’esprit ont perdu tout point d’appui. C’est un fait que nous
souffrons de nihilisme. Mais le plus admirable sont les prêches sur les “retours.”
Retour au Moyen Age, à la mentalité primitive, à la terre, à la religion, à l’arsenal
des vieilles solutions. Pour accorder à ces baumes une ombre d’efficacité, il faudrait
faire comme si nos connaissances n’existaient plus—comme si nous n’avions rien
appris—feindre d’effacer en somme ce qui est ineffaçable. Il faudrait rayer d’un
trait de plume l’apport de plusieurs siècles et l’indéniable acquis d’un esprit qui
finalement (c’est son dernier progrès) recrée le chaos pour son propre compte”;
Camus, Carnets, 26.
6. Philippe Pétain, La France nouvelle: Appels et messages, vol. 1–2 (Montrouge: Drae-
ger Frères, 1941), 143.
7. Denis Peschanski, Images de la France de Vichy (Paris: La documentation française,
1988), 100.
8. “L’esprit de jouissance a détruit ce que l’esprit de sacrifice a édifié”; Pétain, Appels,
1:20. Emphasis mine.
9. “Nous entendons rebâtir la France sur le roc inébranlable de l’unité française”;
Ibid., 1:41.
10. “Des mystiques primitives: le sens du naturel, le salut de la création, la magie du
Dieu provident et de l’acte viril, la fidélité à la tribu et à la cité”; “Des mystiques
classiques: christianisme, chrétienté, féodalité et chevalerie, monarchie de l’Etat fort
et la vigilance de Rome”; Christian Faure, Le projet culturel de Vichy (Lyon: Presses
Universitaires de Lyon, 1989), 99.
11. Ibid., 40.

12. Conty, Henry Auxcouteaux de. Guides pratiques Conty: Algérie/Tunisie (Paris:
Guides Conty, 1913), 98.
13. Mary Ann Frese Witt, Existential Prisons: Captivity in Mid-20th-Century French
Literature (Durham: Duke University Press, 1985), 8.
14. Camus, Plague, 72–73 (“A partir de onze heures, plongée dans la nuit complète, la
ville était de pierre . . . La grande cité silencieuse n’était plus alors qu’un assemblage
de cubes massifs et inertes . . . Ces idoles médiocres trônaient sous un ciel épais,
dans les carrefours sans vie, brutes insensibles qui figuraient assez bien le règne
immobile où nous étions entrés ou du moins son ordre ultime, celui d’une nécro-
pole où la peste, la pierre et la nuit auraient fait taire enfin toute voix”; Camus,
Peste, 173).
15. “Nous avons notre part dans le désordre qui a . . . détendu les ressorts moraux de
la France . . . Acceptons donc d’abord généreusement notre juste part de la grande
pénitence nationale pour expier nos propres fautes”; Michèle Cointet-Labrousse,
Vichy et le fascisme (Paris: Editions Complexe, 1987), 149.
16. Faure, Projet culturel, 188.
17. “Nous tirerons la leçon des batailles perdues. Depuis la victoire, l’esprit de jouis-
sance l’a emporté sur l’esprit de sacrifice. On a revendiqué plus qu’on a servi. On a
voulu épargner l’effort; on rencontre aujourd’hui le malheur”; Pétain, Appels, 1:10.
18. “Toute défaite réveille le vieux sentiment que les malheurs de la France sont
imputables à l’infidélité de la fille aînée de l’Eglise. Alors que le Maréchal Pétain
expliquait la défaite aux Français par leur propension à la jouissance, les hommes
d’Eglise renchérissaient”; Cointet-Labrousse, Vichy et le fascisme, 149.
19. “le Pape, le Maréchal, la hiérarchie, les frères séparés, les prisonniers et Marie”;
Faure, Projet culturel, 188.
20. Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors (New York: Picador,
2001), 45.
21. Camus, Carnets, 100.
22. Camus, Plague, 18 (“Les fléaux, en effet, sont une chose commune, mais on croit
difficilement aux fléaux lorsqu’ils vous tombent sur la tête. Il y a eu dans le monde
autant de pestes que de guerres. Et pourtant pestes et guerres trouvent les gens
toujours aussi dépourvus”; Camus, Peste, 58).
23. Camus, Plague, 18 (“Quand la guerre éclate, les gens disent, ‘Ça ne durera pas,
c’est trop bête.’ Et sans doute une guerre est certainement trop bête, mais cela ne
l’empêche pas de durer”; Camus, Peste, 58).
24. Camus, Plague, 41 (“Mes frères, vous êtes dans le malheur, mes frères, vous l’avez
mérité”; Camus, Peste, 62).
25. “Paysanne de nos marches de l’Est, fidèle à son sol, fidèle à son prince, fidèle à son
Dieu, Jeanne a de son étendard, tracé le plus lumineux sillon de notre Histoire”;
Pétain, Appels, 1:143.
26. Peschanski, Images de la France de Vichy, 95.
27. Sontag, Illness as Metaphor, 58.
28. Camus, Plague, 43 (“Simplement, la prêche rendit plus sensible à certains l’idée,
vague jusque-là, qu’ils étaient condamnés, pour un crime inconnu, à un empris-
onnement inimaginable”; Camus, Peste, 111).
29. “Nous supprimerons les dissensions dans la Cité. Nous ne les admettrons pas à
l’intérieur des usines et des fermes”; Pétain, Appels, 1:25.
30. Camus, Plague, 111–12 (“Alors que pendant des mois, avec une obscure ténacité,
malgré la prison et l’exil, ils avaient persévéré dans l’attente, la première espérance
suffit à détruire ce que la peur et le désespoir n’avaient pu entamer”; Camus, Peste,
260).
CHAPTER 8
Summer by Albert Camus

The Essay in the Mirror of Fiction
Mamadou Abdoulaye Ly
Translated by Emmanuelle Anne Vanborre
S
ummer is one of the most fragmented and desultory of Camus’s essays.
This text appears as a mosaic. Some texts, like “Minotaur or the Halt at
Oran” are almost contemporary of the first of Camus’s essays, such as
Nuptials or The Right Side and the Wrong Side; others are written in the 1940s,
as “The Almond Trees” (1940), “Prometheus in the Underworld” (1946) or
“Helen’s Exile” (1948); and others belong more or less to the period of the
publication of Summer, such is the case for “The Enigma” (1950) and “Return
to Tipasa” (1953). What reinforces the impression of a mosaic is the nature of
the texts, as some borrow the form of the travel narrative and others that of
autobiography.
Beyond the fact that Summer operates as the synthesizer between the roman-
tic vein of Nuptials and the revolutionary spirit of The Rebel, its originality is
constituted by a common scheme that unites the diversity of the texts. This
scheme is the transformation of the essay by fiction.1 All the texts that com-
pose Summer drown the argumentation characteristic of the essay through the
unfolding of literary writing. This text thus questions the principle of separa-
tion between the text of fiction based on creative activity and the text of diction
whose raw matter is reality.2 That is why Camus not only places Summer under
the sign of poetry with the epigraph borrowed from Friedrich Hölderlin and
sprinkles his texts with references to ancient and modern writers (Gérard de
Nerval and Honoré de Balzac) but also, and above all, resorts on one hand to
myth and on the other to journals in order to give his philosophical demonstra-
tions the colors of literature.3
Essay and Myth
Summer first takes the form of a reflection on human freedom. We know that
this topic is of interest to Camus as evidenced by his works from The Stranger
and The Plague to The Rebel. Thus the texts titled “The Almond Trees,” “Pro-
metheus in the Underworld,” “Helen’s Exile,” and “The Enigma” tackle the
question of man’s confrontation with the world. This confrontation is of a dual
nature: one of action and one of art. The protestation of man against the absur-
dity of the world is represented by the figures of the conqueror and the artist.
It is not, however, staged by a cold philosophical demonstration but rather
uses the medium of the myth, which “implies a rupture of Time and of the
surrounding world; he brings about an opening towards Great Time, toward
Sacred Time.”4 To deal with the conqueror’s commitment and with the value of
artistic creation, Camus integrates Greek mythology through the characters of
Prometheus and Helen.
Abstract dissertation on revolutionary action and beauty gives way to sym-
bolic discourse, which elucidates the meaning of the myths of Prometheus and
Helen and their significance within the twentieth century.5 This is probably
why Camus adds more poetic titles like “The Almond Trees” or titles borrowed
from oral tradition, such as “The Enigma,” to the titles explicitly referring to
Greek mythology. The actuality of discourse is constantly surpassed by the per-
manence of the myth: “Myths have no life of their own. They wait for us to
clothe them in flesh. If one man in the world answers their call, they give us
their strength in all its fullness.”6 Greek mythology transforms essays inscribed
in time, as their respective dates indicate, into timeless texts by linking them to
the continuum of human history. This is also a way of giving a certain thematic
unity to the fragmentation of the essays.
Camus consequently starts tackling the question of human revolt under the
angle of the conqueror’s actions by using the figure of Napoleon Bonaparte in
“The Almond Trees” and Prometheus in “Prometheus in the Underworld.”7
These two men embody the ideal of the liberation of men from under the
dominance of gods and from the conquest of the world. But Napoleon and Pro-
metheus, who represent respectively, a historical figure who became a myth, and
a mythical character who became a historical figure, each use different means to
liberate man. Napoleon resorts to armed force whereas Prometheus brings the
fire of knowledge to humanity.
Summer by Albert Camus ● 113
“Do you know,” Napoleon once said to Fontanes, “what fills me most with won-
der? The powerlessness of force to establish anything. There are only two powers
in the world: the sword and the mind. In the end the sword is always conquered
by the mind.” Conquerors, we see, are sometimes melancholy . . .8
Prometheus was the hero who loved men enough to give them fire and lib-
erty, technology and art. Today mankind needs and cares only for technology . . .
What, on the contrary, characterizes Prometheus is that he cannot separate
machines from art.9
Napoleon and Prometheus thus embody two opposite dispositions of man: the
cult of violence and the cult of the spirit. The drama of humanity resides in
the choice of war and scientific civilization at the expense of the promotion
of the arts. War and utilitarianism have exiled beauty and the cult of the spirit
from modern life. Through Napoleon and Prometheus, Camus revives the old
debate between soul and body, between sword and pen, even if both belong to
the race of conquerors. Camus thus proves that since antiquity, the question of
the liberation of man depends on the age-old fight between force and spirit.10
He notes, on this point, that this noble fight always ends tragically since force
will always lack the guiding lights of the spirit and the spirit will always lack
the fulfilling power of force. The myth of the conqueror is, therefore, the sign
of the triumph of man by the grandeur of his revolt and at the same time, the
sign of his defeat made evident by the betrayal of the ideal of the conquerors
(Napoleon and Prometheus) by their descendants. “Yet the men of today have
chosen history, and they neither could nor should have turned their faces from
it. But instead of mastering it, they agree a little more each day to be its slave.
It is here that they betray Prometheus . . . It is here that they go back to the
wretchedness of the men whom Prometheus tried to save.”11 For Camus, one
does not consider man’s salvation while perpetrating Prometheus’s act but, on
the contrary, one submits to the meaning of history. In antiquity, man tries to
conquer his freedom by refusing to submit to destiny, whereas in the twentieth
century he lives in humiliating alienation. The Greek transcendental vision is
thus opposed to the Marxist historical vision. From being once a conqueror,
man becomes a slave. Therefore, it seems that the conqueror is only able to get
his force from imagination and that his real action is always doomed to failure.
Thus only myth can talk about the figure of the conqueror for the reason that
mythical discourse transfigures and embellishes historic reality.
Faced with the limits of the action of the conqueror to completely free man
from his fate, Camus resorts to the powers of artistic creation. Human freedom
will henceforth be embodied in art: “Both the historical spirit and the artist seek
to remake the world. But the artist, through an obligation of his very nature,
recognizes the limits which the historical mind ignores . . . Of course, no one
thinks of defending beauty solely for its own sake. Beauty cannot do without
man . . . In a way, the meaning of tomorrow’s history will not be where men
think it is. It lies in the struggle between creation and the inquisition.”12
Camus also notes the irreducible opposition in the modern world between
the artist’s creation, which is necessarily individual, and the will for social trans-
formation that drives history. For him, the point is not to defend the idolization
of beauty but rather to free the artist from historic servitude. Artists and writers
will have to replace conquerors. The myths of beauty in general represented by
Helen and of writing in particular symbolized by Camus himself will serve as
potential instruments for the liberation of man.
Camus thus advocates the return to the cult of art and the purity of writ-
ing. The figure of Helen and the choice of “The Enigma” as a title, show that
art, according to Camus, obeys an irrational principle, which is the only one
that simultaneously ensures its permanence and escapes both the public and
nonartists. Therefore, beauty must become again an absolute that structures
man’s imaginary world. Besides, the writer only exists through a degree of
objectivity and the impersonal quality of his work. That is why, as Camus
confides to Jean Grenier, “Truly, I am disgusted to my heart by what is said
about the ‘modern’ and about the ‘epoch’ as we say, including my old books.”13
Art should obey neither the dictatorship of the artist’s biography nor the reac-
tions of the public or of critics: “The idea that every writer necessarily writes
about himself and depicts himself in his books is one of the puerile notions
that we have inherited from Romanticism. It is by no means impossible, on
the contrary, that a writer should be interested first and foremost in other
people, or in his time, or in familiar myths . . . A man’s works often retrace
the story of his nostalgias or his temptations, practically never his own story,
especially when they claim to be autobiographical. No man has ever dared
describe himself as he is.”14
We can tell that Camus considers literature with a classical rather than
modern angle. Not only does he oppose the literature of the self, advocated
by romanticism and the proliferation of autobiography in the twentieth cen-
tury, but he also defends the rights of a literature open to the world. Literature
must stop being narcissistic and become once again the narrative of dreams and
memories common to the writer and his environment. Camus thus goes back
to the classic tradition of representing the world through literary text. It must
escape the present to engage in the painting of the past and future. The ideal
literary work, for Camus, would be either the epic tale or science fiction. Thus
literature must remain a universe of total creative freedom with the only objec-
tive of serving beauty, just like in Greek antiquity. But Camus observes that this
ideal of beauty and of absolute art, once cultivated by the Greeks, deteriorated
into utilitarian art in the twentieth century:
We turn our back upon nature, we are ashamed of beauty. Our miserable trage-
dies stink of offices, and the blood they run with has the colour of dirty ink. That
is why it is indecent to proclaim today that we are the sons of Greece. Or, if we
are, we are sons turned renegade . . . The world has been deliberately cut off from
what gave it permanence: nature, the sea, hills, evening meditations. Awareness
can now be found only in the streets . . . And, consequently, our most significant
works bear witness to the same prejudice. One seeks in vain for landscapes in
major European writers since Dostoyevsky.15
According to Camus, modern art and literature have failed in their mission
to represent beauty through nature. The portrayal of reality and of the times
according to the naturalist principle is all that matters and is what gives modern
texts a unanimously tragic tone. Poetry, though it maintains the permanence
of literary works, is lacking. Hence there is an absence of landscapes and an
overabundance of the small miseries of men in twentieth-century literature.
And yet true art resides for Camus in the representation of natural elements
that survive fate, limit man, and guarantee the permanence of the world. Yet
twentieth-century art must illustrate ideas and the artist must take sides. This
is why Camus is labeled by the vox populi as a writer of the absurd: “As far as
such a thing is possible, I would . . . have liked to be an objective writer. What
I call an objective writer is an author who chooses themes without ever taking
himself as the subject. But the modern mania of identifying the author with his
subject-matter cannot allow him to enjoy this relative liberty. Thus one becomes
a prophet of the absurd . . . They choose the cliché: so I am absurd as before.”16
In modern literature only the narcissism of the writer has value. He is con-
demned to write only about his life. The literary quality of his works is not
considered, only his ideas are, as a means to label him. The blindness of the
public and critics is added to the writer’s submission to the subjectivism of
the time. Hence Camus is nostalgic for the status of an objective writer, which
goes against the myth of the subjective writer, created by the twentieth century.
Camus thus expresses both his desire to escape the process of the formatting of
writers toward intimate literature as well as his desire to diversify the topics of
writing. But in twentieth-century literature, especially after the Second World
War, one does not talk about the beauty and gratuitousness of art but rather
of commitment.17 The confusion between man and his work kills art, which
becomes a dependence of the artist’s subjectivity.18 The myths of the committed
writer and of useful art supplant those of beauty and of the impersonal writer.19
But even if Camus criticizes this autobiographical tendency as well as the
erasing of the artistic ideal in favor of the cult of the artist’s personality, he
nonetheless yields to them because to the myths of the conqueror and the artist
is added the myth of Camus himself in the four other texts of Summer. This is
the case in “Minotaur or the Halt at Oran,” “Short Guide to Towns without a
Past,” “Return to Tipasa” and “The Sea Close By. Logbook,” where Camus goes
back to his childhood.
Essay and Diary

The failure of conquerors and artists to free man of his condition leads Camus
to look for an instrument of salvation in going back to his past and his represen-
tation of childhood landscapes. This gives to texts like “Minotaur” and “Return
to Tipasa” the sense of a going-back-to-his-sources story and of a diary, which
aims at being “the everyday relating of personal events and thoughts, private
and not meant for publication.”20 This return to Algerian origins would be
similar to the endeavor of bringing back the myths of ancient Greece if Camus
was still concerned about man in general instead of Camus the individual.
The past is painted not with the colors of the great history of conquerors and
artists, but with those of the teenager who lived in poverty by the sea in Algeria.
Camus writes that the work is a confession: “I must witness. I only have one
thing to say, clearly. It is in the life of poverty, among these humble and vain
people, that I most certainly touched what seems to me the real meaning of life.
Works of art will never suffice.”21 Private poetry thus replaces general reflections
on the fate of humanity. It is not about rebelling but about praising the beauty
of nature and the joy and grief of childhood. It will be about recovering the
lost paradise of Algerian impressions and sensations, in other words, the fusion
of the Oran teenager with the world surrounding him. “On these beaches in
the province of Oran each summer morning feels like the first morning of the
world. Each dusk feels like the last . . . But this cannot be shared through
speech. It must be lived. So much solitude and grandeur give these places an
unforgettable appearance . . . These are the lands of innocence.”22 There is, in
this evocation of the Oran of his childhood, an Eden-like dimension centered
on the sunrise and sunset. Men cease to exist in front of the immensity of
nature. The writer is disarmed before the beauty of the world. This explains why
words cannot address it any longer. Literature is thus defeated by the enjoyment
of life. For Camus, fiction will replace a personal journal when retracing the
story of his life in Oran is in question. Henceforth, Camus becomes a guide in
the two big cities of his childhood, Oran and Algiers. Through his pen, the two
cities appear like places outside of history because of the persistence of islands
of nature in the middle of the cities. What is striking in his representation of
these cities is his refusal to enter history and modernity, as neither literature
nor art have been able to reach and describe their richness. They are still virgin
grounds in which the innocence of the first times of the world reigns. “As far as
picturesqueness is concerned, Algiers offers an Arab town, Oran a Negro village
and a Spanish district, and Constantine a Jewish quarter. Algiers has a long
necklace of boulevards along the sea; you must walk there at night. Oran has
few trees, but the finest stones in the world.”23 They offer the nudity of nature
and thus remain, like a maze, impenetrable to strangers. Only the sons of Alge-
ria, like Camus, can penetrate its mysteries. Not only do these cities constitute
crossroads of age-old civilizations like Judaism, Islam, and Spanish Christianity,
but they also remain untamed. Unlike cities such as Paris and Toledo that were
sanctified by artists like Barres or Le Greco and recognizable by their historic
monuments and museums, Oran and Alger only offer to the world the vastness
of the sea and the beauty of the stones: “The gentleness of Algiers is rather Ital-
ian. The cruel glare of Oran is more like Spain . . . But Spain and Italy are over-
flowing with memories, with works of art and educative ruins. And Toledo has
had its Greco and Barrès. The cities I am discussing are, on the contrary, towns
without a past . . . Passionate travellers (of other people’s passions), oversensitive
minds, aesthetes and newlyweds have nothing to gain from going to Algiers.”24
These cities do not lend themselves to romantic passion or fiction, they remain
inviolable territories that one must conquer, not admire. They remain closed
to tourists but are welcoming to the sons of the land that the brightness of the
sun does not scare away. Camus explores them by adopting the form of the
travel narrative. Unlike the travel narratives written by strangers, Camus’s texts
adapt a more intimate and direct turn.25 Camus only evokes these Algerian cit-
ies through his complicity and fusion with this land that is also his: “As far as
Algeria is concerned, I am always afraid to lean on this matching inner chord,
whose blind and serious song I know so well. But I can at least say that it is
my true country, and that anywhere in the world I recognize its sons and my
brothers by the friendly laughter that seizes me when I meet them. Yes, what
I love about the towns of Algiers does not cut me off from the men who live
in them.”26 The description of Oran and Algiers is wrapped in pantheism and
return to the motherland, even if it does not exclude the Algerian people’s pas-
sion for simplicity. Yet Camus is aware of the risk of this fusion with Algeria as
it annihilates the distancing and objectivity necessary for the writer to be able
to write about his topic. Nevertheless, this intimate dimension of writing is
strongly emphasized in the essays titled “Return to Tipasa” and “The Sea Close
By.” We leave the form of the travel narrative to adopt that of the diary, first
shown in the transition from third-person narration, which was characteristic
of texts such as “Prometheus in the Underworld” and “Helen’s Exile,” to the
first-person narration present in “Return to Tipasa,” even though this change
was already felt in the essays devoted to Oran and Algiers.
This transformation is characteristic of the autobiography, which is the
“retrospective prose narrative a real person gives of their own existence when
they stress their individual life, in particular the story of their personality.”27
The more Camus grows close to Algeria and abandons the discussion of the
great problems of humanity, the more his writing becomes personal. Readings
and reflection are replaced with the evocation of memories and with introspec-
tion:28 “There is not a single one of these sixty-nine kilometres that is not filled
for me with memories and sensations. A violent childhood, adolescent day-
dreams to the hum of the bus’s engines, mornings, the freshness of young girls,
beaches . . . Always the same sea as well, almost impalpable in the morning air,
which I glimpsed again on the horizon.”29
We are far from the indifference that characterizes The Stranger and close to
the evocation of personal memories typical of intimate literature. We are now
in the realm of the return to childhood and origins, as was the case in his first
essays.30 Camus reaches here what Roland Barthes calls “writing degree zero,”
which allows the writer to express his individuality and at the same time to open
literature to portray society, Algerian society in this case. Camus rediscovers
sensations from his youth through the pilgrimage to the ruins of Tipasa, travel
at sea, and the recollection of adventure narratives by R. L. Stevenson: “Hence
once more I found ancient beauty, a young sky, and measured my good fortune
as I realized at last that in the worst years of our madness the memory of this
sky had never left me . . . I had always known that the ruins of Tipasa were
younger than our new buildings or our crumbling towns. There, the world was
born again each morning in a light that was always new . . . In the depths of
the winter, I finally learned that there lay in me an unconquerable summer.”31
Tipasa represents the lost paradise of his childhood, which still endures in
the midst of the great twentieth-century convulsions. This city introduces a bit
of poetry and dream in the twentieth-century tragedies in which Camus was
involved. The evocation of this personal past reaffirms the rights of beauty at
the heart of humanity’s tragedies. Hence time does not exist any longer, and
memory only feeds the essays. We seem to witness a return to the first mornings
of the world, between human poverty and nature’s virginity.
On this subject, we notice the same process in A Happy Death and The
First Man because “the diverse materials of the novel (A Happy Death) merge
to form the couple of lost time and gained time. Lost time will be the time of
poverty, work, prosaic life . . . Gained time will be the time of the house in
front of the world and the escape in nature.”32 Besides, The First Man marks a
return to the beginning of creation with the choice of the original title Adam.33
Camus does not regain lost time thanks to art and writing but rather thanks to
the rediscovery and contemplation of nature. More precisely, man seems only
to escape from the absurd by giving in to nature, just like the boat gives in to
the sea. “I grew up in the sea and poverty was sumptuous, then I lost the sea and
found all luxuries grey and poverty unbearable. Since then, I have been waiting.
I wait for the homebound ships, the house of the waters, the limpidity of day.”34
This nostalgia for the Algerian sea makes Camus feel the loss of innocence and
happiness in the modern world. It also allows him to measure the distance that
separates the carefree Algerian teenager from the adult French man. Besides,
writing seems unable to conjure this loss of time, hence, the waiting for the
return of the childhood years to which the writer is condemned. We note here
Camus’s recourse to the theory of the eternal return characteristic of Hindu
philosophy. Perhaps only cyclic sacred time, not the discontinuous time of the
literary text, can talk about these years of innocence. Thus, in Camus, we go
from a poetry of human revolt to a cosmic poetry. “We sail across spaces so vast
they seem unending. Sun and moon rise and fall in turn, on the same thread of
light and night. Days at sea, even and indistinguishable as happiness . . . The life
rebellious to forgetfulness, rebellious to memory, of which Stevenson speaks.”35
This travel at sea is maybe nothing other than the metaphor of the journey of
the return to the sources. It also symbolizes the abandon of the writer to the
process of remembering. Hence the evocation of the triumph of the immensity
of space over men and the convocation of R. L. Stevenson’s texts. This means
that this time of Algerian childhood is the time of limbo as it appears mid-
way between forgetting and remembering. It really is the time of undetermined
waiting and of primary/elementary enjoyment of life. Outside civilization and
human action, Camus thus goes back to the land of adventure and innocence.
History or men no longer exist. Nature alone is triumphant. Writing therefore
gives way to elementary living.
Ultimately, Summer is distinguishable by the constant transfiguration of
essay by fiction. This is probably why Jean Grenier writes that “to this work
[that of Camus] there are two keys: Moby Dick’s myth and Simone Weil’s
thought.”36 Camus’s ideas on human freedom appear through the lens of myth
and autobiography. The diversity and fragmentation of the essays are subsumed
by Camus’s resorting to the powers of art. The convocation of the figures of the
conqueror and the artist, the praise for the beauty of landscapes, and the evo-
cation of the Algerian childhood, constitute many open doors to the feelings,
sensations, and privacy of the writer who supersedes the philosopher. There is in
Camus the desire to take away the current time aspect of the essays comprising
Summer in order to inscribe them in the permanence of artistic creation thanks
to mythology and memory resources that link the present to the past.
Hence there is the refusal to adopt the form of pure philosophical essay and
instead the use of either travel or initiation narrative or diary. Summer is more
the text of a poet who sings of the beauty of the world and the millenary fight of
man against his fate than the work of an essayist. Thus it is filled with references
to Greek tragedians like Aeschylus and to romantic writers such as Chateaubri-
and and Nerval.37 This text is a lot closer to those of Giono than committed
texts such as Sartre’s.38 It is full of Camus’s life and personal experience, which
gives to the essays the colors of passion and sensuality that animate his Algerian
motherland. This explains the omnipresence of the sea and sun, which trans-
form men’s poverty into interior wealth and the tragedy of life into dreams of
liberty. It is also perhaps this nostalgia of his childhood’s lost paradise and this
organic fusion with Algeria that make for a unity between the texts of Summer.
In the end, Summer is nothing more than a call to beauty and happiness ren-
dered by the use of literary forms.
Notes
1. Camus’s fictions and essays are often closely linked, as, for example, in the trilogy
on the absurd (The Stranger, 1942; The Myth of Sisyphus, 1942; and Caligula, 1944)
and the pair on revolt (The Rebel, 1951; and The Plague, 1947). We can also note
the fact that Camus’s first essays, like Nuptials (1938) and The Right Side and the
Wrong Side (1937), echo Summer (1959) in the mixing of philosophical reflection
and literary creation.
2. See Gérard Genette, Fiction et diction précédé de Introduction à l’architexte (1979;
repr., Paris: Seuil, 2004).
3. This reference to Hölderlin, who is part of German romanticism, announces the
mixture of poetry and philosophy and the fragmentation of the texts present in
Summer. Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe show, in L’Absolu littéraire
(Paris: Seuil, 1978), that Fragments from Athenaeum impose the fragment as an
autonomous entity in literature and philosophy.
4. Unless otherwise stated, all translations are ours; (“Implique une rupture du Temps et
du monde environnant; il réalise une ouverture vers le Grand Temps, vers le Temps
sacré” Mircea Eliade, Aspects du mythe (1963; repr., Paris: Gallimard, 1988), 75.
5. Camus was already interested in Sisyphus in The Myth of Sisyphus (1942). We can
also detect, in the posthumous text The First Man (1994), the resurgence of the
myth of Adam and Eve. Greek or biblical mythology never ceases to fuel Camus’s
essays and fictional narratives.
6. Albert Camus, Summer, trans. Philip Thody (New York: Penguin Books, 1995), 40
(“Les mythes n’ont pas de vie par eux-mêmes. Ils attendent que nous les incarnions.
Qu’un seul homme au monde réponde à leur appel, et ils nous offrent leur sève
intacte”; Albert Camus, L’Eté in Essais, ed. Roger Quilliot [Paris: Gallimard, 1965],
843).
7. Prometheus incarnates, according to Camus, the figure of the rebel and symbolizes
conciliation between the fight for freedom and the cult of beauty.
8. Camus, Summer, 32 (“Savez-vous, disait Napoléon à Fontanes, ce que j’admire le
plus au monde? C’est l’impuissance de la force à fonder quelque chose. Il n’y a que
deux puissances au monde: le sabre et l’esprit. A la longue, le sabre est toujours
vaincu par l’esprit. Les conquérants, on le voit, sont quelquefois mélancoliques”;
Camus, L’Eté, 835).
9. Camus, Summer, 36–37 (“Prométhée, lui, est ce héros qui aima assez les hommes
pour leur donner en même temps le feu et la liberté, les techniques et les arts.
L’humanité, aujourd’hui, n’a besoin et ne se soucie que de techniques . . . Ce qui
caractérise Prométhée, au contraire, c’est qu’il ne peut séparer la machine de l’art”;

10. The text L’intelligence et l’échafaud comes to mind, as it highlights the permanence
of the fight between the sword and the pen throughout history.
11. Camus, Summer, 38 (“L’homme d’aujourd’hui a choisi l’histoire et il ne pouvait ni
ne devait s’en détourner. Mais au lieu de se l’asservir, il consent tous les jours un peu
plus à en être l’esclave. C’est ici qu’il trahit Prométhée . . . C’est ici qu’il retourne à
la misère des hommes que Prométhée voulut sauver”; Camus, L’Eté, 842).
12. Camus, Summer, 52, 54 (“L’esprit historique et l’artiste veulent tous deux refaire
le monde. Mais l’artiste, par une obligation de sa nature, connaît ses limites que
l’esprit historique méconnaît . . . Bien sûr il ne s’agit pas de défendre la beauté pour
elle-même. La beauté ne peut se passer de l’homme . . . D’une certaine manière, le
sens de l’histoire de demain n’est pas celui qu’on croit. Il est dans la lutte entre la
création et l’inquisition”; Camus, L’Eté, 856–57).
13. “En vérité, je suis dégouté jusqu’au cœur de ce qui se dit et s’écrit du ‘moderne’ et
de ‘l’époque’ comme on dit, y compris mes anciens livres”; Albert Camus and Jean
Grenier, Correspondance 1932–1960 (Paris: Gallimard, 1981), 226.
14. Camus, Summer, 60 (“L’idée que tout écrivain écrit forcément sur lui-même et se
peint dans ses livres est une des puérilités que le romantisme nous a léguées. Il n’est
pas du tout exclu, au contraire, qu’un artiste s’intéresse d’abord aux autres, ou à son
époque, ou à des mythes familiers . . . Les œuvres d’un homme retracent souvent
l’histoire de ses nostalgies ou de ses tentations, presque jamais sa propre histoire,
surtout lorsqu’elles prétendent à être autobiographiques. Aucun homme n’a jamais
osé se peindre tel qu’il est”; Camus, L’Eté, 864).
15. Camus, Summer, 50–51 (“Nous tournons le dos à la nature, nous avons honte de la
beauté. Nos misérables tragédies traînent une odeur de bureau et le sang dont elles
ruissellent a couleur d’encre grasse. Voilà pourquoi, il est indécent de proclamer
aujourd’hui que nous sommes les fils de la Grèce. Ou alors nous en sommes les fils
renégats . . . Délibérément, le monde a été amputé de ce qui fait sa permanence:
la nature, la mer, la colline, la méditation des soirs. Il n’y a plus de conscience que
dans les rues . . . A sa suite, nos œuvres les plus significatives témoignent du même
parti pris. On cherche en vain les paysages dans la grande littérature européenne
depuis Dostoïevski”; Camus, L’Eté, 854–55).
16. Camus, Summer, 60, 61 (“Dans la mesure où cela est possible, j’aurais aimé être . . .
un écrivain objectif. J’appelle objectif un auteur qui se propose des sujets sans
jamais se prendre lui-même pour objet. Mais la rage contemporaine de confondre
l’écrivain avec son sujet ne saurait admettre cette relative liberté de l’auteur. Ainsi
devient-on prophète d’absurde . . . On a choisi la formule: me voilà absurde comme
devant”; Camus, L’Eté, 864).
17. The committed art refers to existentialist theory highlighted and exemplified in
L’existentialisme est un humanisme (1945) and in the novel cycle of Les chemins de la
liberté (1945). It seems that The Stranger (1942) and The Plague (1947) both reply
to these existentialist demands and to this theory of commitment.
18. This confusion between man and his work is inherited from Sainte-Beuve and
acts as the basic premise of biographical criticism. Proust replied to the confusion
between man and his work in his Contre Sainte-Beuve, highlighting the existence
of the two “selves” of the writer—his social self and his private self. On this point,
Camus is closer to Proust than to Sainte-Beuve.
19. This Greek ideal of the impersonality of the writer and of the cult of beauty for its
own sake is brought back to the forefront in the nineteenth century by Mallarmé,
who writes, “The work of pure poetry implies the elocutionary disappearance of
the poet, who yields the initiative to words mobilized by the clash of their inequal-
ity” (our translation) (“L’œuvre pure implique la disparition illocutoire du poète,
qui cède l’initiative aux mots, par le heurt de leur inégalité mobilisés”; Stéphane
Mallarmé, Œuvres complètes [Paris: Gallimard, 1945], 366).
20. “la relation quotidienne d’événements ou de pensées personnels, privés et non des-
tinés à la publication”; Françoise Simonet-Tenant, Le Journal intime (Paris: Nathan/
HER, 2001), 8.
21. “Il me faut témoigner. Je n’ai qu’une chose à dire, à bien voir. C’est dans cette vie
de pauvreté, parmi ces gens humbles et vaniteux, que j’ai le plus sûrement touché
ce qui me paraît le sens vrai de la vie. Les œuvres d’art n’y suffiront jamais”; Albert
Camus, Carnets (1935–1940), in Œuvres complètes, ed. Raymond Gay-Crosier and
Jacqueline Lévi-Valensi, vol. 2 (Paris: Gallimard, 2006), 795.
22. Camus, Summer, 27 (“Sur ces plages d’Oranie, tous les matins du monde ont l’air
d’être les premiers du monde. Tous les crépuscules semblent être les derniers . . .
Mais ceci ne peut se partager. Il faut l’avoir vécu. Tant de solitude et de grandeur
donnent à ces lieux un visage inoubliable . . . Ce sont ici les terres de l’innocence”;
23. Camus, Summer, 45 (“Pour le pittoresque, Alger offre une ville arabe, Oran un
village nègre et un quartier espagnol, Constantine un quartier juif. Alger a un long
collier de boulevards sur la mer; il faut s’y promener la nuit. Oran a peu d’arbres,
mais les plus belles pierres du monde”; Camus, L’Eté, 849).
24. Camus, Summer, 42 (“La douceur d’Alger est plutôt italienne. L’éclat cruel d’Oran
a quelque chose d’espagnol . . . Mais l’Espagne et l’Italie regorgent de souvenirs,
d’œuvres d’art et de vestiges exemplaires. Mais Tolède a eu son Greco et son Barrès.
Les cités dont je parle sont des villes sans passé . . . Les voyageurs de la passion (celle
des autres), les intelligences trop nerveuses, les esthètes et les nouveaux mariés n’ont
rien à gagner à ce voyage algérien”; Camus, L’Eté, 847).
25. In general, “traveling confronts the idea of exoticism and introspection; it throws
the traveler, who is often isolated, into an environment that is ruled by different
laws, in which the quest for familiar reference points is a way of comprehending
difference and of dealing with solitude and disorientation” (our translation) (“le
voyage confronte l’exotisme et l’introspection; il projette le voyageur, souvent isolé,
dans un milieu régi par des lois différentes, dans lesquelles la recherche de repères
connus est une manière d’appréhender la différence et de gérer solitude et dépay-
sement”; Odile Gannier, La littérature de voyage [Paris: Ellipses, 2001], 7). With
Camus, this exoticism does not exist, as Algeria is his homeland. What remains is
introspection, which allows him to explore the hidden beauties of Algerian cities
and invite potential travelers to discover them.
26. Camus, Summer, 46–47 (“En ce qui concerne l’Algérie, j’ai toujours peur d’appuyer
sur cette corde intérieure qui lui correspond en moi et dont je connais le chant
aveugle et grave. Mais je puis bien dire au moins qu’elle est ma vraie patrie et qu’en
n’importe quel lieu du monde, je reconnais ses fils et mes frères à ce rire d’amitié
qui me prend devant eux. Oui, ce que j’aime dans les villes algériennes ne se sépare
pas des hommes qui les peuplent”; Camus, L’Eté, 850).
27. “Récit rétrospectif en prose qu’une personne réelle fait de sa propre existence
lorsqu’elle met l’accent sur sa vie individuelle, en particulier sur l’histoire de sa per-
sonnalité”; Philippe Lejeune, Le Pacte autobiographique (1975; repr., Paris: Seuil,
1996), 14.
28. This introspection is not made in the vein of representing man as emblematic of
the whole humanity that Sartre portrays in Les Mots, nor is it in the vein of the
unique man that Rousseau describes in his Confessions. Camus’s autobiography is
that of the Algerian teenager in total harmony with nature. It is written in the vein
of the travel narrative.
29. Camus, Summer, 69 (“Il n’est pour moi un seul de ces soixante-neuf kilomètres
de route qui ne soit recouvert de souvenirs et de sensations. L’enfance violente, les
rêveries adolescentes dans le ronronnement du car, les matins, les filles fraîches, les
plages . . . Toujours la même mer aussi, presque impalpable dans le matin, que je
retrouvai au bout de l’horizon”; Camus, L’Eté, 872).
30. Nuptials (1938) and The Right Side and the Wrong Side (1937) come to mind, as
well as the posthumous novels A Happy Death (1971) and The First Man (1994),
in which biographical elements are obvious. Journal writing is not unknown to
Camus, who was corresponding with René Char from 1949 to 1959 and with Jean
Grenier from 1932 to 1960. He wrote three diaries (Notebooks), published from
1962 to 1989, and Journaux de voyage, published in 1978.
31. Camus, Summer, 72 (“Je retrouvais ici l’ancienne beauté, un ciel jeune, et je mes-
urais ma chance, comprenant enfin que dans les pires années de notre folie le souve-
nir de ce ciel ne m’avait jamais quitté . . . J’avais toujours su que les ruines de Tipasa
étaient plus jeunes que nos chantiers et nos décombres. Le monde y recommençait
tous les jours dans une lumière toujours neuve . . . Au milieu de l’hiver, j’apprenais
enfin qu’il y avait en moi un été invincible”; Camus, L’Eté, 874).
32. “les divers matériaux du roman (La Mort heureuse) se regroupent selon le couple du
temps perdu et du temps gagné. Le temps perdu sera celui de la pauvreté, du travail,
de la vie prosaïque . . . Le temps gagné sera celui de la Maison devant le monde et
de la fuite dans la nature”; Jean Sarocchi, “Genèse de La Mort heureuse,” in Cahiers
Albert Camus I ‘Albert Camus, La Mort heureuse’ (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), 13.
33. See Herbert R. Lottmann, Albert Camus, trans. Marianne Veron (Paris: Seuil,
1978), 18–19.
34. Camus, Summer, 76 (“J’ai grandi dans la mer et la pauvreté m’a été fastueuse, puis j’ai
perdu la mer, tous les luxes m’ont alors paru gris, la misère intolérable. Depuis, j’attends.
J’attends les navires du retour, la maison des eaux, le jour limpide”; Camus, L’Eté, 879).
35. Camus, Summer, 81 (“Nous naviguons sur des espaces si vastes qu’il nous semble
que nous n’en viendrons jamais à bout. Soleil et lune montent et descendent alter-
nativement, au même fil de lumière et de nuit. Journées en mer, toutes semblables
comme le bonheur . . . Cette vie rebelle à l’oubli, rebelle au souvenir, dont parle
Stevenson”; Camus, L’Eté, 882).
36. “de cette œuvre (celle de Camus) il existe deux clés : le mythe de Moby Dick et la
pensée de Simone Weil”; Jean Grenier, Albert Camus, souvenirs (Paris: Gallimard,
1968), 142. In the same vein, Roger Quilliot, in La Mer et les prisons, essai sur Albert
Camus, shows that the work of Camus evolves from men (The Stranger), to a prob-
lem (The Misunderstanding), and finally to a myth (The Plague).
37. To this nonexhaustive list of writers, we can add Verlaine, Bergson, Jehan Rictus,
Jean Grenier, Gide, and Stendhal, to whom Camus devotes articles and reviews in
Algeria between 1932 and 1935. See Roger Grenier, Albert Camus, soleil et ombre
(Paris: Gallimard, 1987), 20–22.
38. This connection with Giono is not accidental, as Giono’s half-poetic, half-
philosophical essays, such as Les Vraies richesses (1936) and Provence (1993), remind
us of Camus’s essays, like Summer or Nuptials, from the standpoint of the cult of
nature. Giono and Camus also share the same interest in the ancient myths of Pan
and Prometheus and a common passion for another myth inventor, Hermann Mel-
ville. Indeed, Camus wrote the preface to L’œuvre d’Hermann Melville (1952) and
Giono translated Moby Dick in Les Cahiers du Contadour in 1939 and wrote Pour
saluer Melville in 1941.
CHAPTER 9
Affliction, Revolt, and Love

A Conversation between Camus and Weil
Sophie Bourgault
“I know only one single duty, and that is the duty to love.”
—Camus, Notebooks I (1937)1
D
uring his famous visit to Stockholm in 1957, Albert Camus was repeat-
edly invited to comment upon the evolution, meaning, and future
directions of his work. In one particular conversation, he summed
up his works as a trilogy loosely organized around the following three concepts
(or “layers”): absurdity, revolt, and love.2 Indeed, Camus identified love as the
third “layer” that was going to be at the heart of his reflections in the years to
come. In the preface to the second edition of L’Envers et l’Endroit, Camus also
admitted that the œuvre that he “dreamed of ” would speak of “a certain kind
of love.”3 But unfortunately for us, Camus died soon after making these state-
ments, leaving us with an unfinished trilogy. His “third layer” failed to get as
sustained a treatment as the absurd received in The Myth of Sisyphus, or revolt
received in The Rebel. While some of Camus’s novels and plays are peppered
with vivid pronouncements on the difficulties or beauty of love (whether erotic
love, the love of a mother, or the love of living),4 on the whole it seems that we
have a fairly modest textual basis to work with in order to theorize what could
be called “Camusian love.” This silence is particularly regrettable given the fact
that revolt, a central concept for Camus, ends—if not begins—with love.5 Love
seems to be the “backdrop” of everything, as he intimates at the end of The
Rebel and in his Carnets. “From the starting point of the absurd,” he writes, “it
is impossible to live in rebellion without leading, in some manner, to the experi-

ence of a love that remains to be defined.”6 But what if there was, in fact, a way
to define this love, to speculate on what Camusian love could have been had
the author lived a little longer? Perhaps the work of Simone Weil (1909–1943)
could be instructive here.
It was in 1949, while working for Gallimard, that Camus published Weil’s
L’Enracinement. By publishing Weil’s work, Camus suggested to his French
public that Weil’s remarkable “traité de civilisation” could perhaps best be
summed up as a tranquil provocation: a provocation about “the certainties of
love.”7 Readers mildly familiar with Weil’s work may find this claim particularly
striking. After all, her book is typically remembered for its rich critique of rights
discourse, its assault on political parties and deceitful media, and its analysis of
imperialism, fascism, and working-class uprootedness. Why, then, did Camus
see in L’Enracinement a treatise on love, and how did his reading of this work
inform his conception of a politically significant kind of love? The present chap-
ter tackles these questions by drawing largely on what Camus appreciated the
most in Weil: her stirring depiction of factory life, her denunciation of the
silence (or “dumbness”) of the afflicted, and last but not least, her call for com-
passion and solidarity. We will consider here not only what Camus treasured
about Weil’s diagnosis of modern ills but also what he admired about Weil’s
proposed cures. Camus was convinced that Weil both brilliantly understood
“the sickness of the age”8 and the way out of nihilism.9 My goals are thus to
underscore some10 of the striking affinities between Weil and Camus, and also
to make a few modest claims about what a Camusian “politics of love” might
have looked like. I suggest that this politics of love would have looked a lot
like Weil’s, and I briefly intimate that both are remarkably timely. Indeed, at a
time when various indignés (protesters, such as Occupy Wall Street) around the
world object to the unfair distribution of wealth, to joblessness, and to the silent
suffering of countless and nameless workers, the œuvres of Weil and Camus may
turn out to be more relevant than ever.
“Les déracinés”: Workers, Machines, and Thoughtlessness

“We cannot think about anything else—we think about nothing.”
—Weil, La Condition ouvrière11
Between the years 1949 and 1960, Gallimard published (in the series Espoir,
created and overseen by Camus) seven works of Simone Weil, including
L’Enracinement (1949), La Source grecque (1953), Oppression et liberté (1955),
and the Ecrits de Londres (1957). Many contemporaries of Camus have argued
Affliction, Revolt, and Love ● 127
that these works had a significant impact on the man’s thought: a claim that
might seem surprising given the fact that Camus does not frequently cite Weil
in his books. Indeed, apart from a few substantive entries in his Carnets and
a dozen pages in The Rebel, Camus does not refer much to Simone Weil in
his work—or, at least, he does not do so explicitly. But I would argue that,
despite not referring to her overtly, many of Camus’s essays and plays from
the 1950s are in part informed by Weil’s writings. Take, for instance, Camus’s
conception of malheur (affliction). At various places in his writings, Camus
suggests that true malheur is not physical suffering, but rather, humiliation—
whether of the very poor in front of the very rich or of the worker in front
of an abusive superior.12 Despite the fact that he does not cite her, the stark
distinction made by Camus between malheur and suffering, and the close
connection established between the former and humiliation, was most likely
inspired by Weil’s own analysis of malheur (which Camus had read closely).13
Camus himself often expressed his philosophical affinity with Weil: for
instance, when asked in Stockholm with which French authors Camus felt
the greatest intellectual kinship, Camus answered, Simone Weil and René
Char.14 Camus’s close friend Jean Grenier goes so far as to suggest that “there
are two keys to his work: the myth of Moby Dick and the thought of Simone
Weil.”15 Last but not least, before departing for Sweden in order to receive his
Nobel Prize, Camus is said to have paid a visit to Weil’s mother in order to
“collect his thoughts.”16
Like many others who enjoyed seeing in Weil something of a saint,17 Camus
was attracted to Weil as much for her self-sacrificing deeds as for her written
words. More specifically, what Camus greatly admired was her lifelong activ-
ism and her deep concern for the poor and the voiceless—which, he claimed,
reminded him of his own. “What Albert Camus most admired in Simone Weil,”
Jean Grenier writes, “was that she pursued right to the end the experiment of
living life according to an ideal, a demanding challenge and a tenacity (which
reminded him of his own).”18 Weil was concerned not only with understand-
ing the nature of oppression (by confronting herself with its reality) but also
with finding concrete ways of alleviating it. In 1934, after having spent years
mobilizing factory workers and giving free lessons to countless ouvriers (factory
workers), Weil decided to temporarily leave her job as a philosophy teacher in
order to work in the factories of Renault, of Carnaud & Forges de Basse-Indre,
and of Alsthom.19 Her frail body (and her clumsiness) hardly made her fit for
the challenges of early twentieth-century factory life: she had to take numerous
sick leaves and was fired for her low productivity.
The detailed diary she kept during those difficult months (her Journal
d’usine), and various essays she wrote on factory work, machinery, and liberty,
would be closely read by Camus after her tragic death (1943). (Most were pub-
lished, in 1951, by Gallimard under the title La Condition ouvrière.) In an arti-
cle written for L’Express in December 1955, Camus suggested that La Condition
ouvrière is “the greatest, the most noble book”20 that has been published since
France’s liberation. Like no one else, Weil succeeded in showing the horrors of
the factory world—a world devoid of hope and solidarity. “The suffering of the
worker dishonors our civilization,” Camus observed. “We must remedy this
without delay.”21
Before discussing what Camus (and Weil) envisioned as appropriate rem-
edies for our civilization’s great shame (and why these remedies are closely
related to love), we must first determine what exactly Camus thought was so
disturbing about the situation of the working class. It is in The Rebel—within
the context of a harsh critique of Marxist revolutionary politics—that one finds
the most sustained discussion of Simone Weil. (Weil wrote extensively on the
contradictions and limits of Marxism.) In The Rebel, Camus credits Weil for
exposing two of the most serious mistakes of Marxism: its failure to predict the
coming of an era of “technocrats” and its blindness to the terrible impact that
modern factory technology would have on human beings. Marx and his fol-
lowers failed to see that, with or without capitalists, machines could remain a
terrible source of oppression. “To the two traditional forms in which humanity
has known oppression—by arms and by money—Simone Weil added a third:
oppression by one’s function.”22 Camus commends Weil for seeing the inhu-
manity of assembly-line work and the wider sociopolitical consequences of this
inhumanity. While numerous Left-leaning intellectuals had denounced the low
wages and the unacceptable poverty of the proletariat, Weil stressed that better
wages would not, in fact, necessarily bring an end to oppression. True dignity
at work required much more than a bigger paycheck: “Simone Weil is correct
to say that the worker’s condition is doubly inhuman, first deprived of money
and then of dignity. Work in which we can take an interest, creative work, even
badly paid, does not degrade life. Industrial socialism has done nothing essen-
tial for the worker’s condition because it has not touched the principles of pro-
duction and the organization of work—these it has, on the contrary, exalted.”23
This is not to suggest that Weil and Camus were hostile or indifferent to
union demands for increased wages and better security. If both authors liked to
speak of the certain beauty and “poetry” of poverty,24 they never suggested that
the proletariat’s hunger or low wages were legitimate. In the preface to L’Envers
et l’Endroit for instance, Camus speaks warmly of his childhood poverty—
associating it with a certain “enlightenment” and with the learning of love for
men. “Poverty . . . has never been a misfortune to me: light shone its riches
here. Even my rebellions were enlightened.”25 But we should note that almost
immediately after these lines, Camus proposes a sharp contrast between the
“enlightening” and beautiful poverty he experienced in Algeria and the dreadful
and cold poverty he saw in French industrial suburbs: “Born poor, in a work-
ing class neighborhood, I nonetheless did not know what real affliction was
before I encountered our cold suburbs. Even the extreme poverty of the Arabs
cannot compare . . . but once one has experienced these industrial suburbs
one feels forever dirtied, I believe, and responsible for their existence.”26 Again,
what makes Weil and Camus’s analysis of working-class conditions particularly
striking is that both authors were convinced that money was not the only or
the main requisite for workers’ dignity and liberty. As we will see in a moment,
both underscored the necessity for serious reforms in factory management, in
production, and also in education.
Now, Camus seems to have been hopeful that Weil’s Oppression et liberté and
La Condition ouvrière could succeed in making France move in the direction of
such reforms. He hoped that these texts could stimulate a sense of indignation
among their readers. “One must read the texts of Simone Weil on the condition
of the factory worker in order to understand the degree of moral exhaustion and
silent despair that is occasioned by the rationalization of work.”27 In Camus’s
view, Weil understood the nature and causes of this “silent despair,” thanks
largely to the numerous months spent working and living with factory workers.
She saw that the root cause of this silent alienation had to do with the fact that
too few workers had the opportunity to use their minds at work: “The work
is too machinelike to offer any material for thought, and yet . . . it forbids all
other thought.”28 Here is thus the tragedy so passionately decried by Weil and
Camus: not only are the tasks required by the modern day ouvrier incapable of
stimulating his or her mind, but the high speed and the concentration they call
for make it impossible for the worker to think about anything else. Daydream-
ing and creative thoughts are an escape that no bored worker can afford—after
all, such wandering of the mind decreases one’s productivity and thus not only
dangerously compromises one’s wage (and bodily safety) but also risks attract-
ing the ire of one’s superiors.
Moreover, in La Condition ouvrière Weil also brought her readers’ attention
to the fact that modern machines are constructed in such a way that the average
individual no longer understands anything about the production process. The
consequences of this are not only the death of work satisfaction but also the
inability of an average worker to fix her machines when they malfunction. This
incomprehension was highly significant to Weil, for she saw here a great source
of silent helplessness and alienation.29
Camus fully agreed with Weil that spending eight hours a day without hav-
ing recourse to one’s intellect was simply unacceptable. One can find an implicit
claim to that effect in Les muets, when Camus suggests that for Yvars, giving
up on a trade that he understands, that he masters would be absolutely awful.30
Chain work (“rationalized” work) turns human beings into numb, humiliated
creatures: no love or pride in one’s work is possible in such conditions, no
understanding either, and thus no dignity and no freedom. Quite revealing in
that regard is Camus’s conviction that the greatest treason of modern intellectu-
als has been to have accepted this intolerable separation between manual and
intellectual work.31 Intellectuals have regrettably (if unwittingly) acquiesced to
modern production schemes, crossing the limits of the acceptable, and falling
into démesure (excess).32 As Camus succinctly puts it in The Rebel, “The real
and inhuman excessiveness is in the division of labor.”33 Given the great pres-
sures for maximum efficiency, the absence of reflexivity, and the very limited
opportunities for communication and meaningful contact with fellow human
beings, the modern ouvrier is thus inevitably forced into an “exil intérieur”
(interior exile).
Camus denounces this “exil intérieur” not only in The Rebel but also in a
very short piece published in L’Express that is filled with Weilian overtones.
The title of the article itself is revealing: “The Uprooted” (“Les déracinés”).
Evocative of Weil’s L’Enracinement—where the author speaks extensively
about proletarian uprootedness and alienation—Camus paints with vivid col-
ors the deplorable condition of workers: “Camped on the outskirts of the city,
parked in horrid suburbs, harnessed for miserable wages, to tasks in which
the mechanism itself ravages man, the French workers, victims of a de facto
segregation, no longer have the sentiment of belonging to the body of the
nation, which demands of them duties without inviting them to its pleasures.
They produce, others enjoy.”34 Assembly-line work not only turns us into
numb and joyless individuals; it also isolates us. Indeed, Weil was convinced
that modern production schemes deeply compromised any collective action
or revolt: “Only the sentiment of fraternity and indignation at the injustices
inflicted on others subsist intact—but in the long run, how long will all of
this resist? . . . revolt is impossible, except in flashes . . . in the first place,
against what? One is alone with one’s work.”35 This undermining of solidarity
was also, naturally, a central object of concern for Camus. He knew, like Weil,
that with time, factory life tended to lead to more rather than less resignation.
“At a certain extremity of misery, we find more resigned people than rebels.”36
What most troubled Camus about these résignés (resigned people)—in addi-
tion to their suffering and mind-numbing daily reality—was the bridling of
their tongues, their silence. But as we will now see, if both Camus and Weil
knew that silence was an ill, they also—paradoxically—saw in silence a partial
solution to modern ills.
Weil and Camus on the Silence of the Afflicted

“Rage and impotence are sometimes so bad that one cannot even scream.”
—Camus, Les muets37
If Camus admired Weil’s sharp critique of modern technology and line work, he
was also deeply moved by Weil’s stirring analysis of the silence of all subjugated
individuals (e.g., slaves, jobless migrants, petty criminals, maltreated children,
distressed ouvriers, etc.). It is in her short essay “La personne et le sacré” (pub-
lished posthumously in La Table ronde in 1950) that Weil provides her finest
and most concise analysis of the issue of silence and the solutions for it. On
the basis of a revealing entry in a 1950 Carnet, we can gather that Camus had
closely read and enjoyed Weil’s piece.38 More specifically, Camus agreed with
Weil that what is most sacred in human beings is not—contra what personal-
ists like Mounier claimed—their “person” or their personality. Rather, it is that
part of their souls that expects that goodness will be done to them; that part of
their souls that longs for and makes them appreciate justice, beauty, and truth.
For Weil, it is that part of our souls that screams in protest when we are hurt
or ill treated. But what Weil underscores in “La personne et le sacré” is that
this ability to cry out is severely compromised among those who have greatly
suffered. She writes, “In those who have suffered too many blows . . . this part
of the heart that normally cries out when harmed seems dead. But it is never
entirely so. Only it can no longer cry out. It has reached a state of dull and
uninterrupted groaning.”39 Extreme poverty and alienating work are not the
only reasons for speechlessness (and for the loss of one’s identity), but they are
the ones that Weil is most concerned with denouncing in L’Enracinement and in
“La personne et le sacré.” In both works, she underscores the very tragic nature
of sociopolitical life: those who should speak cannot (they are dumb, alogos),
and those who could speak on their behalf most likely won’t. They will not speak
up on behalf of the afflicted because they very likely lack what it takes to get
into the shoes of the mute: love—or what Weil sometimes refers to as attentive
compassion. Weil was convinced that it is extremely rare for individuals to have
the strength necessary to experience genuine love for those who suffer. And
thus, the afflicted (the tongue-tied) go on suffering. Weil writes, “When the
afflicted complain, they complain futilely, without evoking their true affliction;
and, moreover, in the case of profound and permanent affliction, a great shame
stops their complaints. Thus each condition of misery among men creates a
zone of silence in which human beings find themselves imprisoned, as if on an
island.”40 In many of his plays and essays, Camus also evokes these incredibly
difficult circumstances faced by the afflicted, which make them withdraw into
a silent “exil intérieur” and which break down the possibilities for communi-
cation, solidarity, and thus revolt. In The Rebel, for instance, Camus writes,
“Instead of this implicit and free dialogue with which we recognize our simi-
larity and consecrate our destiny, servitude causes the most terrible silence to
reign . . . It kills the smallest being that can come into the world through the
mutual complicity of men.”41 As we will see shortly, it is this complicity—this
love—that Camus and Weil want their readers to embrace. Indeed, Camus saw
this as the most urgent task of the intellectual and the artist: to fight against the
three main sources of silence and solitude—deception, terror, and servitude.42
One can find echoes of Weil’s “La personne et le sacré” not only in The
Rebel but also in a short story written by Camus in 1952 that was included in
L’Exil et le royaume: Les muets. Described by Camus as a piece of socialist real-
ism,43 Les muets illustrates vividly the type of silence that Weil and Camus were
troubled by. It also captures brilliantly the subtleties of their perspectives on
silence: at once an ill and a potential cure, to put it most simply. In Les muets,
we find a group of factory workers returning to their jobs after a failed strike.
Their demands for higher wages having been ignored, and starving workers like
Yvars resign themselves to going back. “But resignation . . . is not easy,” writes
Camus. “It was difficult to have one’s mouth closed, to not be able really to discuss
the matter, and every morning to follow the same path with an accumulating
fatigue.”44 Angry and humiliated, they go back to the factory and resume work,
together, in silence. “Humiliated by this defeated entrance, furious at their own
silence, but less and less able to break it as it went on.”45
But as the story unfolds, we learn that the workers’ silence is not merely
a symptom of suffering and thus a curse: Camus later on suggests that theirs
is a silence of solidarity and indignation that has the double power of vexing
their boss, Monsieur Lassalle, and of giving them some warm camaraderie. The
workers may not have succeeded in having any of their demands met, but I
think that we are invited by Camus to see in this story a small if subtle victory
for the workers—a victory achieved thanks to their stubborn collective silence,
but one that is certainly compromised by the tragic ending. “They all worked in
silence, but a warmth, a bit of life, reemerged little by little in the workshop.”46
Thus what Les muets intimates is that silence can be a sign of alienation and suf-
fering, but can also be a nonviolent means of protest and revolt.
A similar thesis can be found in various works of Weil—most notably in
“La personne et le sacré” and Attente de dieu. Indeed, both authors were keenly
aware of the fact that not all silences are equal. If some silences are an outward
sign of affliction or the expression of life’s meaninglessness (the silence of God
and the silence of the world),47 other silences can be pregnant with meaning or
even be expressions of revolt. Instances of the latter might be said to include the
“silent,” loving commitment of intellectuals and artists repeatedly mentioned
by Camus,48 and the meaningfulness of a truly attentive gaze. “Silence,” Camus

writes in L’énigme, “retains a meaning if the eyes speak.”49 Camus also alludes
to the possibility for meaningful silence in the preface to L’Envers et l’Endroit,
where he writes, “Poverty as I have known it has not taught me resentment . . .
but a mute tenacity.”50
Since Camus envisions love as the opposite of resentment,51 one could perhaps
draw a connection between Camusian love and silence. This kinship seems to be
captured, for instance, in the portrait Camus draws of doctor Rieux’s mother—
who is not only loving and devoted but also, as many have noted, remarkably
silent. Like Camus, Weil was convinced that if most silences tended to be symp-
tomatic of oppression, many could be testimonies of genuine love and even of
selfless action for social justice. In “Luttons-nous pour la justice,” for instance,
Weil wrote, “Love does not seek to express itself. It shines irresistibly by the
accent, the tone, and the manner, through all thoughts, all words, and all acts.”52
In short, if Camus and Weil were both keenly aware of the power of words
in their fights for social justice (as we can evidently gather from their numer-
ous journalistic pieces), they both toyed with the idea that silence could, in
some cases, be a potent way to communicate or to be at peace. In L’Enigme, for
instance, Camus writes, “Peace would be to love and to create in silence!”53 We
know that both writers were extremely wary of revolutionary violence and of
all “démesure”—whether of the excessive violence of fascism and totalitarianism
or of the excessive noise and pressures of modern factories. As such, it may not
be a surprise to see both authors adopt a kind of mediating position between a
politics of violent screaming and one of total silence (or complete passive resis-
tance). Indeed, both authors invite us to embrace a difficult and always shifting
equilibrium between revolt and consent.54
Camusian and Weilian Cures: “L’ouvrier

devenu artiste,” Love and Revolt
“For once, when silence cries, listen to it.”
—Camus, Œuvres complètes55
“In the light, the world remains our first and our last love.”
—Camus, The Rebel56
We saw that what Camus particularly appreciated in Weil was her perceptive
understanding of the “exil intérieur” of the proletariat: he thought she was abso-
lutely right to call for a civilization where manual labor would no longer be
completely separated from intellectual work. And we have here, indeed, one of
Weil’s most insistent political prescriptions: in L’Enracinement, in Réflexions sur

les causes de la liberté et de l’oppression sociale, and in Oppression et liberté, we find
recurring calls for reforms that would give back to manual labor its dignity.57
Among the various measures that she proposes are the abolition of large factories,
the involvement of all workers in management and production planning, and
the investment of much more time and resources in the culture of the mind of
laborers.“Men would group themselves into little working collectives,” she sug-
gests, “in which each one would be able to understand clearly and to control the
relations of the rules to which his life would be subjected and the general inter-
est.”58 As we indicated briefly, Weil thought that all manual workers should be
given the opportunity to be intellectually stimulated, and more specifically, to
cultivate the capacity for “attention,” an important term of art for Weil. Attention
is a faculty that is central to her conception of an ideal politics and ideal educa-
tion: it is what makes human beings capable of not only compassion (and thus of
justice)59 but also meaningful reflection and creativity. She bitterly lamented the
fact that modern factory line work was completely at odds with the cultivation
of such a faculty. In L’Enracinement, Weil insists that what is needed is a kind of
“communion” between the worker and his machine—which requires a technol-
ogy that allows the worker to fully understand what he does and thus to be truly
attentive and confident. “This supposes a regime of attention that is very differ-
ent . . . this union is clearly the condition of a complete happiness. It alone makes
work the equivalent of art.”60 To transform toil into art was, according to Weil,
one of the most powerful ways to restore the dignity of work and of the worker.
We know that Camus also aspired to transform workers into artists, and to
give back to manual labor its dignity “in legitimizing this thirst for understand-
ing.”61 In the speech he gave upon receipt of his Nobel Prize, he insisted upon
the urgency of reconciling work and the culture of the mind.62 He went as far
as to suggest—with Weil—that the overcoming of modern nihilism and of suf-
fering depended greatly upon manual labor being made more creative. In his
“Défense de l’Homme révolté,” he wrote, “The contradictions are not resolved
in a synthesis . . . but rather in a creation. Only when the work of the laborer,
like that of the artist, has a chance at fecundity will nihilism be definitively over-
come.”63 Now, Camus agreed with Weil that the solution is not to get rid of
technology and machinery; neither of their works contains a luddite manifesto.
In The Rebel, Camus clearly insisted that “It is futile to want to reverse the
progress of technology. The age of the spinning wheel is gone, and the dream
of an artisanal civilization is vain. The machine is only bad in the way it is cur-
rently used.”64 The solution to the déracinement (uprootedness) of the workers
is rather, as we have just indicated, to satisfy their thirst for understanding. This,
needless to say, presupposes that they are given a decent and fulfilling educa-
tion. And it is to this very project—giving workers free education in French,
mathematics, geometry, philosophy, and Greek tragedy—that Weil devoted

countless hours of her short life.
Now, the greatest impediment to this cultivation of the minds of the prole-
tariat is that those who are most terribly crushed by factory work and poverty
are those who are least likely to ask for reforms and for a decent education. For
Weil as much as for Camus, it is thus the vital responsibility of the privileged—
and especially of the intellectuals and artists—to listen to the awkward and
muted scream of the afflicted and to give them the tools they need to be heard.
This is a task that can only be undertaken by those animated by love. For Weil
as much as for Camus, it is love that can make us pay attention to those invis-
ible or voiceless downtrodden; it is love that can make one find satisfaction and
pride at work.65 It is love, perhaps, that will make artists and writers remember
the silence of the humiliated, the persecuted, and the oppressed.66
Far from being conceived as an easy or an ordinary thing, love is in fact
regarded by Weil and Camus as exceptional. For Weil, pure compassion was
extremely rare in light of the fact that few of us are willing to go through the
kind of radical self-abnegation that compassion calls for. “To listen to someone
is to put oneself in his place while he speaks,” writes Weil in “La personne et
le sacré.” “To put oneself in the place of one whose soul is mutilated by afflic-
tion . . . is to negate one’s own soul. It is more difficult than suicide would be for
a child who delights in life.”67 To listen and care for someone who is suffering
also requires an intense, sustained attention that few of us are capable of. In a
way, Tarrou, in The Plague, might be said to express this very tragic fact when
he affirms that “no one is truly capable of thinking about anyone else, even in
the worst of afflictions. For to truly think about another is to think minute
after minute, without being distracted by anything: the household chores, the
fly buzzing around, the dinner, an itch. But there are always flies and itches.”68
Hence it will hardly surprise us to hear that a true love for human beings is akin
to a kind of madness, a type of madness that is most valuable for politics—
much more so than the longing for power and for total revolution upon which
imperialism and communism are based. “The spirit of justice is nothing other
than the supreme and perfect flower of the madness of love,” observes Weil.
“The madness of love makes compassion a motive stronger than greatness or
glory . . . It forces us to abandon all things for compassion.”69 But despite its
rarity and great difficulty, love is precisely what Weil called for throughout her
œuvre: it is not only what informs her analysis of factory work, but it is also the
backdrop to all solutions she proposes for modern ills—whether poverty, crimi-
nality, factory oppression or fascism. Camus was certainly correct to see Weil’s
L’Enracinement as a work expressing “les certitudes de l’amour.” Here indeed,
Weil proposes a most challenging, mad kind of love for all “déracinés”: a theory
of obligations toward mankind—a responsibility to love.
These intimate connections between justice and love can be found in

Camus’s work—although he died too soon to flesh them all out as explicitly
as Weil. Nevertheless, in the last few pages of The Rebel, Camus argues that
true revolt is, ultimately, about an unconditional, total, selfless love. “Rebel-
lion cannot exist without a strange kind of love . . . This insane generosity is
the generosity of rebellion, which immediately gives the strength of its love
and which refuses without delay injustice. Its badge of honor is that it does not
calculate, but rather distributes everything . . . to its living brothers.”70 Like Weil,
Camus did not want merely to propose a politics of love on the level of theory:
he also made it his personal and very concrete task to speak on behalf of “tous
ces hommes silencieux” (all these silent men) and to work his way toward the
greatest solidarity possible.71 If at the beginning of his career many saw in him
an author heavily concerned with a self-regarding nihilist plight, most of his
critics were forced to acknowledge in his later work a clear movement away
from that individualist concern and toward a more loving and generous poli-
tics of solidarity. Camus himself saw this evolution in his work, seeing in The
Plague a vivid illustration of this solidarity.72 Indeed, The Plague can be read as a
meditation on love and compassion: whether expressed in the (saintly) devotion
of Tarrou, the “colder” but unconditional generosity of the soft-spoken doctor
Rieux, or the quiet devotion of Rieux’s mother or even that of Rambert. Over
these memorable pages, we see these different characters struggle with the first
principle of Camusian morality: the duty to love. This duty, Camus formu-
lated most explicitly in an early Carnet, “If I had to write a book on morality,
it would have a hundred pages and ninety-nine would be blank. On the last
page, I would write ‘I know only one duty, and that is to love.’”73 This duty
to love, Camus insists repeatedly in The Rebel, does not entail an abstract love
for Man or for a humanity to come. Here, again echoing Weil, the love Camus
calls for is the love for this particular human being, in the here and the now. It
is such love that motivates Rieux in his daily visits, and in his daily sacrifices.
And it is perhaps precisely this love of the particular that informed the infamous
statement that Camus made while in Sweden: “I believe in justice, but I would
defend my mother over justice.”74 It is perhaps regrettable that Camus’s spon-
taneous remark framed the question as an either-or (either justice or love). But
what an attentive reading of his work clearly indicates is that Camus was not
rejecting justice here. Rather, he expressed an unconditional commitment to
the workings of justice through the love of every single, particular human being.
Revolutions may prefer “l’homme abstrait à l’homme de chair” (the abstract
man to the man of flesh and blood) but Camusian revolt is anchored in the love
of l’homme et la femme de chair. That the road to social justice and peace could
be defined as love is intimated by the famous reply of Tarrou to Rieux’s question
about the path to peace.75 It seems that Camus believed that only love could
generate the kind of warm solidarity needed to put into motion a struggle for
social justice and freedom that was not going to end in blood or in increased ser-
vitude. As he wrote in The Rebel, “Revolt . . . is the movement of life itself . . . Its
purest cry brings forth being. It is, then, love and fecundity, or it is nothing.”76
Camus readily and repeatedly acknowledged in the 1950s that the high-
est goal of art (of his art?) was to stand for this human solidarity—to teach
this great Weilian compassion: “The artist, at the end of his journey, absolves
instead of condemning . . . He is the perpetual advocate of the living creature—
because the creature is living. He truly pleads for love of one’s neighbor.”77 If both
Camus and Weil knew that politics was bound to be corrupted and to harm the
artists and intellectuals that were to take part in it, they remained convinced
that staying on the margins was not an option. For Camus, it was obvious that
“the time for artists to remain seated is over.”78 Indeed.
Notes
1. “Je ne connais qu’un seul devoir et c’est celui d’aimer”; Camus, Carnets I (1937).
Unless otherwise stated, all translations are mine.
2. “I was already foreseeing a third layer, around the theme of love. These are the proj-
ects I am working on”; “J’entrevoyais déjà une troisième couche, autour du thème
de l’amour. Ce sont les projets que j’ai en train.” Camus, Essais, ed. Roger Quil-
liot (Paris: Gallimard, 1965), 1610. Cited in Arnaud Corbic, Camus. L’absurde, la
révolte, l’amour (Paris: Les Editions de l’atelier, 2003), 27–28.
3. Camus, Essais, 12.
4. The Plague and Le Premier Homme, for instance, are highly suggestive with regard
to the love of a mother (and we will come back to this later). See also Noces and
L’Envers et l’Endroit (the fourth essay in particular).
5. Albert Camus, L’Homme révolté (Paris: Gallimard, 1951), 380–81.
6. “Parti de l’absurde, il n’est pas possible de vivre la révolte sans aboutir en quelque
point que ce soit à une expérience de l’amour qui reste à définir”; Albert Camus,
Carnets (1946), in Œuvres complètes, ed. Raymond Gay-Crosier and Jacqueline
Lévi-Valensi, vol. 2 (Paris: Gallimard, 2006). My italics. The Œuvres complètes (La
Pléiade) will hereafter be referred to as OC.
7. “les certitudes de l’amour”; Camus, “L’Enracinement de Simone Weil,” in OC, 864.
The Plague ends with the affirmation of the following certitudes: “l’amour, la souf-
france et l’exil” (Paris: Gallimard, 1947), 242.
8. “la maladie de l’époque”.
9. Camus, OC, 864. See also Olivier Todd, Albert Camus: A Life, trans. Benjamin Ivry
(New York: Knopf, 1997), 291.
10. Due to space constraints, I will only be able to touch on some of the affinities
between these two authors. Readers who would like to learn more could consult
Fred Rosen, “Marxism, Mysticism, and Liberty: The Influence of Simone Weil on
Albert Camus,” Political Theory 7, no. 3 (August 1979): 301–19; Stefan Skrimshire,
“A Political Theology of the Absurd? Albert Camus and Simone Weil on Social
Transformation,” Literature and Theology 20, no. 3 (September 2006): 286–300;
Linda Rasoamanana, “Simone Weil et Albert Camus lecteurs d’Héraclite. Notes

sur la Némésis,” Cahiers Simone Weil 28, no. 4 (December 2005): 341–64; M. C. L.
Bingemer, “Simone Weil et Albert Camus. Sainteté sans Dieu et Mystique sans
Eglise,” Cahiers Simone Weil 28, no. 4 (2005): 365–86; and Gabriella Fiori, “Albert
Camus et Simone Weil: Une amitié sub specie aeternitatis,” Cahiers Simone Weil 29,
no. 2 (June 2006), 128–39.
11. “On ne peut pas penser à autre chose—on ne pense à rien”; Simone Weil, La Con-
dition ouvrière, ed. Robert Chenavier (1951; repr., Paris: Gallimard, 2002), 192).
12. See, for instance, Albert Camus, “Création et liberté,” in Essais. See also Jacques
Cabaud, “Albert Camus et Simone Weil,” Kentucky Romance Quarterly 3 (1974):
386–87.
13. Weil writes, “Le fait capital ce n’est pas la souffrance, mais l’humiliation” (“The
most important fact is not suffering but humiliation”). See Weil, La Condition
ouvrière. In his Carnets of February 1949–March 1951, Camus copied a lengthy
passage from “La Personne et le sacré” where Weil proposes the distinction between
malheur and suffering.
14. See Camus, OC, 1412.
15. “de [son] œuvre, il existe deux clés: le mythe de Moby Dick et la pensée de Simone
Weil”; Jean Grenier, Albert Camus, souvenirs (Paris: Gallimard, 1968), 142.
16. Cabaud, “Albert Camus et Simone Weil.”
17. Camus was sometimes also referred to as a saint and profoundly abhorred the term.
See Camus, Essais, 1621.
18. “Ce qu’estimait par-dessus tout Albert Camus chez Simone Weil, c’est qu’elle ait
fait jusqu’au bout l’expérience d’une vie conforme à un idéal; c’est une exigence et
une ténacité (qui faisaient penser aux siennes)”; Grenier, Albert Camus, souvenirs,
136. In his Carnets, Camus also commends Weil for her heroic asceticism: “Moi
qui depuis longtemps vivais, gémissant, dans le monde des corps, j’admirais ceux
qui, comme S.W., semblaient y échapper. Pour ma part, je ne pouvais imaginer un
amour sans possession et donc sans l’humiliante souffrance qui est le lot de ceux qui
vivent selon le corps” Albert Camus, “Janvier 1942–mars 1951,” in Carnets, vol. 2
(Paris: Gallimard, 1964), 341. “I, who for a long time lived, trembling, in the world
of bodies, admired those who, like S.W., appeared to have escaped it. For my part,
I could not imagine a love without possession and thus without the humiliating
suffering that is the lot of those who live according to the body.”
19. Detailed accounts can be found in La Condition ouvrière, but also in the authorita-
tive biography by Simone Pétrément, La vie de Simone Weil (Paris: Fayard, 1973).
20. “le plus grand, le plus noble livre”; Camus, “La Condition Ouvrière,” OC,
1058–59.
21. “Le malheur ouvrier est le déshonneur de cette civilisation. On doit y porter remède
sans délai”; Camus, OC, 1059.
22. “Aux deux formes traditionnelles d’oppression qu’a connues l’humanité, par les
armes et par l’argent, Simone Weil an ajouta une troisième, l’oppression par la fonc-
tion”; Camus, L’Homme révolté, 271.
23. “Simone Weil a raison de dire que la condition ouvrière est deux fois inhumaine,
privée d’argent, d’abord, et de dignité ensuite. Un travail auquel on peut s’intéresser,
un travail créateur, même mal payé, ne dégrade pas la vie. Le socialisme industriel n’a
rien fait d’essentiel pour la condition ouvrière parce qu’il n’a pas touché au principe
même de la production et de l’organisation du travail, qu’il a exalté au contraire”;
Camus, L’Homme révolté, 273. My italics.
24. Camus, Essais, 6. For Weil on the “beauty” of poverty, see, for instance, Simone
Weil, Ecrits de Londres et dernières lettres (Paris: Gallimard, 1957), 180–82.
25. “La pauvreté . . . n’a jamais été un malheur pour moi: la lumière y répandait ses
richesses. Même mes révoltes en ont été éclairées”; Camus, L’Envers et l’Endroit, in
OC, 112.
26. “Né pauvre, dans un quartier ouvrier, je ne savais pourtant pas ce qu’était le vrai
malheur avant de connaître nos banlieues froides. Même l’extrême misère arabe ne
peut s’y comparer . . . Mais une fois qu’on a connu les faubourgs industriels, on se
sent à jamais souillé, je crois, et responsable de leur existence”; Camus, L’Envers et
l’Endroit, in Essais, 7.
27. “Il faut lire les textes de Simone Weil sur la condition de l’ouvrier d’usine pour
savoir à quel degré d’épuisement moral et de désespoir silencieux peut mener la ratio-
nalisation du travail”; Camus, L’Homme révolté, 272–73. My italics.
28. “Le travail est trop machinal pour offrir matière à la pensée et . . . néanmoins il interdit
tout autre pensée”; Weil, “Journal d’usine,” in La Condition ouvrière, 67. My italics.
29. Weil, La Condition ouvrière, 180.
30. See Albert Camus, Théâtre, récits, nouvelles (Paris: Gallimard, 1962), 1599.
31. Camus, Essais, 798.
32. Central to both Weil and Camus are the notions of mesure, limites and démesure.
For an excellent and detailed discussion of these “Hericlitean” affinities, see Rasoa-
manana, “Notes sur la Némésis.”
33. “La vraie et inhumaine démesure est dans la division du travail”; Camus, L’Homme
révolté, 368–69.
34. “Campés aux portes des cités, parqués dans d’affreuses banlieues, attelés pour des
salaires misérables à des besognes dont le mécanisme même ravale l’homme, les ouvri-
ers français, victimes d’une ségrégation de fait, n’ont plus le sentiment d’appartenir
au corps de la nation qui les astreint à ses devoirs sans les appeler à ses joies. Ils
produisent, d’autres jouissent”; Camus, “Les Déracinés,” L’Express, 25 novembre
1955, in OC, 1050. My italics.
35. “Seul le sentiment de fraternité, l’indignation devant les injustices infligées à autrui
subsistent intacts—mais jusqu’à quel point tout cela résisterait-t-il à la longue? . . .
la révolte est impossible, sauf par éclairs . . . d’abord contre quoi? On est seul avec
son travail”; Weil, La Condition ouvrière, 103–4. But Weil repeatedly speaks of the
friendly gazes or smiles exchanged in a factory. She also notes in her Journal d’usine
that it is in a factory that she has experienced for the first time true or total friend-
ship (camaraderie totale). See Weil, La Condition ouvrière, 134.
36. “A une certaine extrémité de misère on trouve plus de résignés que de révoltés”;
Camus, “Les Déracinés,” OC, 1050.
37. “La colère et l’impuissance font parfois si mal qu’on ne peut même pas crier”;
Camus, Les muets, in Théâtre, récits, nouvelles, 1605–6.
38. It is likely that Camus read this short essay more than once, since the piece was
included in one of the books he published in the Espoir series: Weil’s Ecrits de Lon-
dres et dernières lettres.
39. “Chez ceux qui ont subi trop de coups . . . cette partie du cœur que le mal infligé
fait crier de surprise semble morte. Mais elle ne l’est jamais tout à fait. Seulement
elle ne peut plus crier. Elle est établie dans un état de gémissement sourd et ininter-
rompu”; Weil, “La personne et le sacré,” 14. In her “Expérience de la vie d’usine,”
she also describes affliction as mute or inarticulate: “Rien n’est plus difficile à con-
naître que le malheur; il est toujours un mystère. Il est muet” Weil, La Condition
ouvrière, 341. “Nothing is more difficult to understand than affliction; it is always
a mystery. It is mute.”
40. “Quand les malheureux se plaignent, ils se plaignent toujours à faux, sans évoquer
leur véritable malheur; et d’ailleurs, dans le cas du malheur profond et permanent,
une très forte pudeur arrête les plaintes. Ainsi chaque condition malheureuse parmi
les hommes crée une zone de silence où les êtres humains se trouvent enfermés
comme dans une île”; Weil, “Expérience de la vie d’usine,” in La Condition ouvrière,
342
41. “Au lieu de ce dialogue implicite et libre par lequel nous reconnaissons notre res-
semblance et consacrons notre destinée, la servitude fait régner le plus terrible des
silences . . . Elle tue le peu d’être qui peut venir au monde par la complicité des
hommes entre eux”; Camus, L’Homme révolté, 354.
42. Ibid.
43. See Camus, OC, vol. 4, 1348.
44. “Mais la résignation . . . n’est pas facile. Il était difficile d’avoir la bouche fermée, de
ne pas pouvoir vraiment discuter et de reprendre la même route, tous les matins,
avec une fatigue qui s’accumule”; Camus, Théâtre, récits, nouvelles.
45. “Humiliés de cette entrée de vaincus, furieux de leur propre silence, mais de moins
en moins capables de le rompre à mesure qu’il se prolongeait”; Ibid. My italics.
46. “Tous travaillaient en silence, mais une chaleur, une vie renaissaient peu à peu dans
l’atelier”; Ibid., 1602.
47. See, for instance, Camus, L’Homme révolté, 18.
48. For instance, see the end of his Discours de Suède, where Camus speaks of the “silent
promise” made by intellectuals to combat affliction and persecution, Camus, OC,
vol. 4, 243.
49. “Le silence garde un sens si les yeux parlent”; Camus, OC, 606.
50. “La pauvreté telle que je l’ai vécue ne m’a donc pas enseigné le ressentiment,
mais . . . la ténacité muette”; Camus, Essais, 8. My italics.
51. See, for instance, Camus, L’Homme révolté, 380.
52. “L’amour ne cherche pas à s’exprimer. [Il] rayonne irrésistiblement par l’accent, le
ton et la manière, à travers toutes les pensées, toutes les paroles et tous les actes”;
Weil, Ecrits de Londres, 57. My italics.
53. “La paix serait d’aimer et de créer en silence!”; Camus, OC, 607.
54. “La justice a pour objet l’exercice terrestre de la faculté de consentement . . . la
liberté, c’est la possibilité réelle d’accorder un consentement. Les hommes n’ont
besoin d’égalité que par rapport à elle. L’esprit de fraternité consiste à la souhaiter
à tous”; Weil, “Luttons-nous pour la justice?,” in Ecrits de Londres, 51. “Justice has,
for object, the terrestrial exercise of the faculty of consent . . . liberty is the real pos-
sibility of according consent. Men only need equality with regard to it. The spirit
of fraternity consists in wishing it for everyone.”
55. “Pour une fois que ce silence crie, écoutez-le”; Camus, OC, 1060.
56. “Dans la lumière, le monde reste notre premier et notre dernier amour”; Camus,
L’Homme révolté, 381.
57. In many writings, she insists that it is manual work that should be deemed most
significant and valuable. “La civilisation la plus pleinement humaine serait celle
qui aurait le travail manuel pour centre, celle où le travail manuel constituerait la
suprême valeur”; Weil, Réflexions sur les causes de la liberté et de l’oppression sociale,
in Œuvres, ed. Florence de Lussy (Paris: Gallimard, 1999), 330. “The most com-
pletely human civilization would be the one that had manual labor at its center, the
one in which manual labor would constitute the supreme value.”
58. “Les hommes se grouperaient en petites collectivités travailleuses où chacun pour-
rait clairement comprendre et contrôler le rapport des règles auxquelles sa vie serait
soumise avec l’intérêt général”; Weil, Œuvres, 332. My italics. See also Weil,
L’Enracinement, in Œuvres, especially 1067–74.
59. See particularly Attente de Dieu. For a detailed discussion of the link between justice
and compassion in Weil, see Richard Bell, Simone Weil: The Way of Justice as Com-
passion (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998).
60. “Cela suppose un régime de l’attention très différent [du travail asservi] . . . Cette
union est évidemment la condition d’un bonheur plein. Elle seule fait du travail un
équivalent de l’art”; Weil, La Condition ouvrière, 187. My italics.
61. “en faisant droit à cette soif de comprendre” (“in legitimizing this thirst for under-
standing”); Camus, L’Express, 13 décembre 1955, in OC, 1059. My italics.
62. Camus, OC, vol. 4, 242.
63. “Les contradictions ne se résolvent pas dans une synthèse . . . mais dans une créa-
tion. Quand le travail de l’ouvrier, comme celui de l’artiste, aura une chance de fécon-
dité, et alors seulement le nihilisme sera définitivement dépassé”; Camus, “Défense
de l’Homme révolté,” in OC, 377. My italics. See also Camus, L’Homme révolté,
369.
64. “il est inutile de vouloir renverser la technique. L’âge du rouet n’est plus et le rêve
d’une civilisation artisanale est vain. La machine n’est mauvaise que dans son mode
d’emploi actuel”; Camus, L’Homme révolté, 368.
65. See Weil, L’Enracinement (first section) and Attente de dieu.
66. Camus, Discours de Suède, in OC, vol. 4, 240.
67. “Ecouter quelqu’un, c’est se mettre à sa place pendant qu’il parle. Se mettre à la
place d’un être dont l’âme est mutilée par le malheur . . . c’est anéantir sa propre
âme. C’est plus difficile que serait le suicide à un enfant heureux de vivre”; Weil,
“La personne et le sacré,” in Weil, Ecrits de Londres, 36.
68. “personne n’est capable réellement de penser à personne, fût-ce dans le pire des
malheurs. Car penser réellement à quelqu’un, c’est y penser minute après minute,
sans être distrait par rien, ni les soins du ménage, ni la mouche qui vole, ni les repas,
ni une démangeaison. Mais il y a toujours des mouches et des démangeaisons”;
Camus, La peste, 193.
69. “L’esprit de justice n’est pas autre chose que la fleur suprême et parfaite de la folie
d’amour. “La folie d’amour fait de la compassion un mobile bien plus puissant que
la grandeur, la gloire . . . Elle contraint à abandonner toute chose pour la compas-
sion”; Weil, “Luttons-nous pour la justice?,” 56.
70. “La révolte ne peut se passer d’un étrange amour . . . Cette folle générosité est celle
de la révolte, qui donne sans tarder sa force d’amour et refuse sans délai l’injustice.
Son honneur est de ne rien calculer, de tout distribuer . . . à ses frères vivants”; Camus,
L’Homme révolté, 379–380. My italics.
71. The memory of his childhood, he says, became a catalyst for his fight for social
justice: “elle m’aide encore à me tenir, aveuglément, auprès de tous ces hommes
silencieux qui ne supportent dans le monde la vie qui leur est faite que par le sou-
venir ou le retour de brefs et libres bonheurs.” Camus, OC, vol. 4, 242. “It helps
me to abide, blindly, by all those silent men who only tolerate the life that they are
accorded in this world by means of the memory or the return to brief and free joys.”
72. He himself insisted upon this evolution: “S’il y a évolution de L’Etranger à La Peste,
elle s’est faite dans le sens de la solidarité et de la participation.” Camus, Lettres sur
la Révolte, in Essais, 758 (“If there is an evolution from The Stranger to The Plague,
it is in the direction of solidarity and participation”).
73. “Si j’avais à écrire ici un livre de morale, il aurait cent pages et 99 seraient blanches.
Sur la dernière, j’écrirais: ‘je ne connais qu’un seul devoir et c’est celui d’aimer’”;
Camus, cited in Corbic, Absurde, 139.
74. “Je crois à la justice, mais je défendrai ma mère avant la justice.”
75. Camus, La peste, 204.
76. “La révolte . . . est le mouvement même de la vie . . . Son cri le plus pur, à chaque
fois, fait se lever un être. Elle est donc amour et fécondité, ou elle n’est rien”;
Camus, L’Homme révolté, 380.
77. “L’artiste, au terme de son cheminement, absout au lieu de condamner . . . Il est
l’avocat perpétuel de la créature vivante, parce qu’elle est vivante. Il plaide vraiment
pour l’amour du prochain”; Camus, OC, vol. 4, 261. My italics.
78. “le temps des artistes assis est fini”; Camus, “Défense de l’Homme révolté,” in OC,
377.
CHAPTER 10
Tormented Shade
Camus’s Dostoevsky
Thomas Epstein
A
lbert Camus’s engagement with Russian literature, and especially
with Fyodor Dostoevsky, is enormous, unparalleled in French letters.
Yet Camus did not know the Russian language and, unlike many key
French intellectuals, he did not devote monographs to the great nineteenth-
century Russian writers. He did, however, adapt Dostoevsky’s The Possessed for
the French stage and also wrote a play, The Just Assassins, based on a terrorist cell
during the Russian Revolution of 1905. He refers to Dostoevsky frequently in
his diaries, his most important nonfiction, and engages in intertextual dialogue
with him in almost all his fiction and plays. Nevertheless, Camus is strikingly
reticent about the two Dostoevskian texts that probably have the most to tell us
about the Camus-Dostoevsky relationship: The Idiot and Notes from the Under-
ground. Moreover, there is something fragmentary, not fully articulated, and
often elliptical about his overall relation to Russian literature.1 Most important,
Camus’s very lucidity tends to blind him to a darkness both in himself and in
Dostoevsky. This brief study is thus as cognizant of what Camus does not tell
us about Dostoevsky as what he does.
Camus first encountered Dostoevsky through mediators, indeed through
three of the most important contemporary intellectual figures in his life:
André Gide, André Malraux, and Jean Grenier. Gide, along with André Suarès
and Romain Rolland, was part of the fin-de-siècle generation that “discov-
ered” Russian literature for modern France. While the subject of “France read-
ing Russia”—and “Russia reading France”—is beyond the scope of this essay, I
do think it useful to briefly discuss Gide’s book on Dostoevsky, since it played

such an important role in the reception and initial interpretation of Dostoevsky
among French intellectuals, including Camus. Begun in 1908 but finished only
in 1923, Gide’s Dostoevsky comprises five lectures and two essays.2 Very much a
personal reading, the book combines biographical observations, some of them
quite speculative and tending to emphasize Dostoevsky’s “darkness”; an analy-
sis of the letters; a broad cultural reading of Russia and the West; and impres-
sionistic but impressive literary analysis. Trying to account for the resistance to
Dostoevsky in France (the more “Western” sensibilities of Leo Tolstoy and Ivan
Turgenev had already been assimilated), Gide juxtaposes the Western novel,
which “concerns itself solely with relations between man and man, passion
and intellect, with family, social, and class relations,” with Dostoevsky’s, which
investigates “relations between the individual and his self or to God, which are
to Dostoevsky all important.”3 This subjective approach to the novel, accord-
ing to Gide, is “almost never” seen in the West. Indeed the only French analogs
to this bottomlessly interiorized spirituality that he can identify are Blaise Pas-
cal and Charles Baudelaire. He then goes on to write of the Russian character
or soul, which is generous, disorderly, humble, and does not submit to “our
Western logic.”4 The artistic result is a combination of intense introspection,
spasmatic emotionality, and a “chaotic” narrative that is in complete contrast
to what he calls the French Tradition, which privileges reason, consistency, and
linearity. Indeed, Gide tells us, the “self ” in Dostoevsky’s depiction is hardly
recognizable to the Cartesian mind: in its constant flux, in its contradictory
strivings, it seems to act in contradiction to itself, as if lacking a rational center.
Clearly, as we will see in the following pages, Camus’s reading of Dostoevsky
in the pre–World War II period will use a similar frame or point of departure.
As a practical matter, it was Jean Grenier, Camus’s mentor and philosophy
professor beginning in 1931, who played the central role in exposing Camus to
Russian culture and history. Indeed Grenier, and along with him Camus, was
one of those twentieth-century Westerners for whom the Russian nineteenth
century, with its passionate and persistent attention to the “cursed questions”5
of life, proved inescapable. Camus, from all we can observe, had from the
beginning an insatiable interest in all things Russian. In his first foray into the-
atre, in 1937–38 with the Le théâtre de l’Equipe, three of the eight productions
were based on Russian sources:6 Alexander Pushkin’s Don Juan, Maxim Gorky’s
The Lower Depths, and Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. In Karamazov,
Camus played the role of Ivan and said of it, “Perhaps I did not play it well but
it seemed to me that I understood him. To play Ivan all I had to do was express
myself.”7 From his letters and journals we can see that Camus is constantly read-
ing Russian literature, and not only from the “A list.” Just to give two examples:
Tormented Shade ● 145
from his diaries we learn that in 1942 he is reading the seventeenth-century

Old Believer Priest Avakkum’s memoirs and at the end of April 1949 he sends a
thank you letter to Grenier for providing him with a copy of Mikhail Saltykov-
Shchedrin’s The Golovyovs.8 His narrative The Fall was almost called A Hero of
our Time in homage to Mikhail Lermontov’s novel.9 Anton Chekhov, frequently
Tolstoy (see the following paragraph), and even Alexander Blok crop up in his
diary. But it is of course Dostoevsky whom we find everywhere: in his diaries,
letters, essays, articles, interviews, and in his fiction and drama. As he wrote of
The Possessed in 1955: “I first encountered this work when I was twenty and I
can still feel the shock of it now, twenty years later.”10
All of this, however, is not to claim that Camus’s engagement with Russian
literature was an exclusive passion. We know, from his own account, that the
young Camus read voraciously from his uncle’s library.11 Moreover, he seems
always to be reading for models to which he can aspire to and against which
he can react. Indeed this process—of seizing upon models, masters, stumbling
blocks—is at the heart of Camus’s dialogical creative method. He is tirelessly
going about creating genealogies for himself. To give but a few examples: In
the 1957 interview in Théâtre, récits, nouvelles he discusses which playwrights
(note that Dostoevsky is granted the status of playwright) he would stage were
he to head up a Parisian theater: “Shakespeare, Eschylus, Dostoevsky, the great
Spaniards. Molière and Corneille. Later, Racine. And our contemporaries if we
can.”12 To Jean-Claude Brisville, who asks Camus which authors helped him
most to “understand what it was you wanted to say,” Camus answers: “Among
my contemporaries: Grenier, Malraux, Montherlant. Among the French clas-
sics: Pascal, Molière. Russian literature of the 19th century. The Spaniards.”13 In
a 1951 interview, Camus is asked about Gide’s influence, to which he answers,
“He reigned over my youth—while Grenier nevertheless remained the keeper of
the garden—Gide, or to be more accurate, the Malraux-Gide conjunction . . .
Montherlant also affected me very deeply at that time. Not only by the ascen-
dancy of his style: Service inutile is a book that moved me . . . As for the earlier
writers, the ones you go back to when you are tired of reading your contem-
poraries, it is Tolstoy I like to reread nowadays.”14 Finally, in his definition of
what makes great literature: “The loftiest work will always be, as in the Greek
tragedians, Melville, Tolstoy or Molière, the work that maintains an equilib-
rium between reality and the rejection of that reality, each forcing the other
upward in a ceaseless overflowing characteristic of life itself at its most joyous
and heart-rending extremes.”15 All of this was said without ever mentioning
Friedrich Nietzsche, the figure who is perhaps the greatest influence of all and
of whom Camus, at one point in time, said, “He is the only man whose writ-
ings, formerly, had an influence on me.”16
None of this is said to diminish the significance of the analysis I under-

take here: Dostoevsky was the most important “case,” the inspiration, idol, and
obstacle needed by Camus in order to define himself. He was the privileged
figure, toward and against which Camus defined his own project and through
which he interpreted others: a fire-breathing alternative to the well-behaved
official French culture from which Camus, who rose from poverty, was even
more estranged (and perhaps nostalgic for) than were either Gide or Malraux.
Dostoevsky’s fierce, primordial free world entranced Camus. Moreover, as
mediated through Gide, Malraux, and Grenier, the young Camus immediately
had access to a Dostoevsky whose emphasis was on the emotions; in whom
reason and will, desire and renunciation, battled; a Dostoevsky of ruptures, psy-
chological, political, and aesthetic; of ultimate questions; and of a self-defined
immanently by its choices.
Surely there was personal identification as well; Dostoevsky’s epilepsy and
Camus’s own tuberculosis, which set them both apart from others; their com-
mon sensual natures, which the early biographies of Dostoevsky emphasized;
Dostoevsky’s “death sentence” of 1849 and Camus’s own illness; and perhaps
most important, Dostoevsky’s peculiar combination of populism, grandeur, and
a tragic philosophy of life. No less attractively, Dostoevsky also gave Camus
much to react against, to “correct,” most notably his self-proclaimed Christian
faith, existential as it might be, and his Great-Russian nationalism.
Camus’s approach to Dostoevsky thus combines acceptance, rejection, and
disguise. This combination of motives is especially revealing in The Myth of
Sisyphus, where Dostoevsky and his work are explicitly engaged by Camus.17
Admittedly, it is a strange encounter—but it is a strange text, not a work of
philosophy proper but an attempt to produce an “absurd” essay. Sisyphus seeks
not so much to analyze or understand its subject—suicide—as to express, like
Nietzsche or Dostoevsky, the underlying psychic state that produces the ques-
tions it asks and the answers it gives.
Dostoevsky haunts the work. The famous opening line, “There is but
one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide,” seems to spring
directly from a reading (and rereading) of Dostoevsky, in all of whose major
novels suicide is a central question. Yet Camus chooses here to defer the discus-
sion of Dostoevsky and, when he finally initiates it, he immediately curtails it;
indeed in regard to Dostoevsky, the entire text is marked by indirection and
reticence. On the one hand, it is perhaps the supersaturated subtext that allows
Camus to say so much about (and to) Dostoevsky without saying very much at
all; but on the other hand, there does seem to be some authentic anxiety about
the relation. One thing is certain: as time passes and Camus’s art (and perhaps
his person) matures, his references to Dostoevsky become more frequent, more
overt, and more coherent.
The paradigm of Dostoevsky’s underground man, in which the unnamed

antihero simultaneously accepts and rebels against the “absurdity” of life, is cen-
tral both to The Stranger and The Myth of Sisyphus, although it is only much later,
in The Fall, that the narrative form itself “requires” this Dostoevskian intertext.18
While it is only in Notebooks that Camus mentions Notes from Underground,
and there only fleetingly,19 the subchapter of The Myth of Sisyphus, “Absurd
Walls,” seems to gesture to the Underground Man, whose famous discourse on
“the brick wall” (of positivist rationality) is an inverted plea for human dignity
and freedom, quite close to the argument of The Myth of Sisyphus.
The following section of The Myth of Sisyphus, “Philosophical Suicide,” also
points to Dostoevsky. For one, the title itself alludes to Kirillov’s “logical suicide,”
a subset of philosophical suicide, and a reference to Caligula’s “superior suicide,”
which Camus will mention when he finally gets to Kirillov—Dostoevsky’s
great and perverse nihilist-hero figure. Moreover, the entire discussion of Leon
Chestov in this section not only anticipates the Kirillov discussion but points
to (indeed confesses) an important source of Camus’s overall engagement with
Dostoevsky and Russian culture. Leon Chestov (1866–1938), the exiled Rus-
sian protoexistentialist philosopher who taught at the Sorbonne, wrote exten-
sively on Dostoevsky and on his relationship to Nietzsche and Tolstoy. His
impact on Camus, like Nikolai Berdyaev’s, is substantial and “negative” in a
positive sense: it was their strongly existential Christian reading of Dostoevsky
that gave Camus something to reject.
It is in the next chapter of The Myth of Sisyphus, “The Absurd Man,” that we
have the first taste of the actual, and as it turns out very brief, Dostoevsky dis-
cussion. Significantly, the chapter has for its epigraph a comment by Kirillov on
the main character of The Possessed, Nikolai Stavrogin: “If Stavrogin has faith,
he does not believe he has faith. If he does not have faith, he does not believe
that he does not have faith.” Strikingly, the epigraph itself is never engaged and
Stavrogin makes only a fleeting appearance in the text overall. Yet the quote
could surely be applied to Dostoevsky and perhaps to Camus himself. Is he
teasing us? There follows, almost immediately, the famous statement from Ivan
Karamazov that Camus never tired of quoting, “Everything is permitted,”20 and
which he takes up again—ever so briefly—later in the chapter to illustrate the
liberating but nevertheless heavy and bitter freedom of the absurd man.
Some 75 pages later we “finally” reach the section entitled “Kirillov”—but
instead of Kirillov, Camus launches into a discussion of Dostoevsky, writing in
his “A Writer’s Diary” for October 1876, some five years after he finished The
Possessed. Why does Camus do this? For one, as Camus makes explicit later in
the essay, he rejects the idea of separating the artist from his work. The artist is
his work, his work is him, indeed “perhaps the great work of art has less impor-
tance in itself than in the ordeal it demands of a man and the opportunity it
provides him of overcoming his phantoms and approaching a little closer to

reality.”21 Thus the pursuit of Kirillov is the pursuit of Dostoevsky trying to
master Kirillov. By giving us Dostoevsky’s explicit public understanding of the
meaning of “modern suicide” (defined here as the inevitable consequence of a
lucid atheism), Camus can pry Dostoevsky out of the “absurd” and into the
“existential” camp, the structuring theme of much of the book. He can also
shift the emphasis from the ambiguities of Dostoevsky’s art to the unswerving
convictions—at least publically—of the author himself and their meaning for
Camus. Kirillov is, for Camus, “childish and irascible, passionate, methodical,
and sensitive. Of the superman he has nothing but the logic and the obsession,
whereas of man he has the whole catalogue . . . He is the complete man, being
the one who realized the most absurd condition.”22 In other words, Camus loves
and admires Kirillov: he is lucid, life loving, joyous, and bitter. Then why does
“Dostoevsky” kill him, why can’t “Camus” save him? It is because Dostoevsky
is a victim—and author—of hope, ever false hope, which the absurd man must
abjure. Dostoevsky, according to Camus, must thus kill the uncompromising
“absurd man” in Kirillov, as he must drive Ivan Karamazov insane and Stavrogin
to suicide. As Camus writes: “Thus Kirillov, Stavrogin, and Ivan are defeated.
The Brothers Karamazov replies to The Possessed. And it is indeed a conclusion.”23
Is this true? Is Dosteovsky’s novel as “conclusive”—a word full of negative
connotations here—as Camus claims? For Camus, at this stage of his intellec-
tual development—his self-confessed period of the absurd and of negation—it
must be true: it is this truth about Dostoevsky (in the Nietzschean sense) that he
needs. In The Myth of Sisyphus Dostoevsky is constructed as a temptation that
must be resisted. Unlike the Kirillov that Dostoevsky—according to Camus—
gives us, Camus’s absurd man does not want to become God (or Man-God, as
Kirillov names his unattainable goal)—he wants to become man, a man, who
thus must not kill himself nor, like Ivan Karamazov, go mad. He will be lucid
and happy, like Sisyphus.
World War II changed Camus’s thinking, a fact that he did not hide. Indeed
his introduction to The Rebel is positioned as an explicit sequel to, and critique
of, The Myth of Sisyphus. Here absurdity gives way to rebellion, indifference
to ethics, truth to justice, and the individual to the community. “Dostoevsky”
changes too, substantially. The hero Kirillov is gone, replaced by Ivan Karam-
azov and his “metaphysical insurrection,”24 he who judges God’s creation and
finds it wanting: “If the suffering of children,” says Ivan, “serves to complete
the sum of suffering necessary for the acquisition of truth, I affirm from now
onward that truth is not worth such a price.” Ivan rejects the basic interdepen-
dence, introduced by Christianity, between suffering and truth.25 This switch
from Kirillov to Ivan as Camus’s Dostoevskian cynosure engenders a much
deeper identification of Camus with his subject: “Ivan Karamazov sides with
mankind and stresses human innocence. He affirms that the death sentence
which hangs over them is unjust. Far from making a plea for evil, his first
impulse, at least, is to plead for justice, which he ranks above the divinity. Thus
he does not absolutely deny the existence of God. He refutes him in the name
of a moral value.”26 This could be Camus himself speaking—or Rieux of The
Plague. At the same time, the author Dostoevsky is no longer chided for sur-
render to hope or to Christian existentialism but rather praised for his searing
portraits of metaphysical rebellion and for his prophetic vision, in The Legend of
the Grand Inquisitor, that shows where such rebellion leads: to nihilism, murder
and mass murder, to “nothing is permitted” (Chigalyov).
Even more striking, Camus, in stark contrast to The Myth of Sisyphus, identi-
fies with Dostoevsky the man. For one, he tells us that the metaphysical rebel
Ivan Karamazov who will live and love life “in spite of logic”27 is Dostoevsky
himself! This is the same Dostoevsky who “defeated” Camus’s idealized Ivan in
The Myth of Sisyphus. We are even told in a footnote that Dostoevsky “is more
at ease in this role than in the role of Aliosha.”28 Knowing of Camus’s own
theatrical history with Ivan Karamazov, it is hard not to see identification here.
Indeed it is as though a new, a different “Dostoevsky” has been discovered,
one who has (temporarily) helped Camus overcome his “Dostoevsky anxiety,”
done away with the dangerous “existential temptation” and found a way out of
tragedy and isolation as a philosophical given. Ivan Karamazov defeated is Ivan
Karamazov victorious.
Or is he? Can Camus allow himself such a “conclusive” victory? In this same
chapter, Camus draws our attention to Ivan’s “even if,” a central motif in The
Rebel: “Ivan’s most profound utterance, the one which opens the deepest chasms
beneath the rebel’s feet, is his even if: ‘I would persist in my indignation even if I
were wrong.’ Which means that even if God existed, even if the mystery cloaked
a truth, even if the starets Zosima were right, Ivan would not admit that truth
should be paid for by evil, suffering and the death of innocents. Ivan incarnates
the refusal of salvation.”29 Yet for Camus, without a doubt, this quote of Ivan is
placed in intertextual dialogue—never cited, of course—with Dostoevsky’s own
equally famous even if: “Even if someone proved to me that Christ was outside
the truth, and that in reality the truth were outside Christ, then I should remain
with Christ rather than the truth.”30
Thus Ivan (no more than Camus, no less than Dostoevsky) is not declaring
himself faithless per se but is calling for a rebellion within the believing subject:
of the sons against the father. Far from being in polar opposition to Ivan, Dos-
toevsky says the same thing, from the opposite side. And Camus knows this. Is
absurd faith becoming its own authentic “revolt”? Camus’s enthusiasm for the
very “Dostoevskian” Simone Weil would suggest the possibility. After World
War II Camus certainly seems more drawn to transcendence—in justice or in
God—than he can admit. In any event, The Fall will signal a rude return to the
“old” Dostoevsky and the “old” Camus.
In The Rebel negation thus gives way to affirmation—thanks in part to
Camus’s “new reading” of Dostoevsky and the Russian tradition. The rumina-
tions on history, as unsatisfactory as they may be, are positively immersed in
Russia, Russian history, and in figures real (Mikhail Bakunin, Sergei Nechaev,
Vissarion Belinsky, etc.) and imaginary (Chigalyov, Peter Verkhovensky, the
Karamazovs, etc.) who preoccupied Dostoevsky nearly a hundred years before.
And they are crowned by Kaliaev, about whom Camus was writing a play at the
time and who is the intellectual center of The Rebel. Equally, in Camus’s most
“reconciled” and “instructive” novel, The Plague, it is Ivan’s question about the
meaning of the suffering of innocents (the death of the Otton boy) that is the
novel’s dramatic and unironic heart. The exile seems to have found a (tempo-
rary) home.
Yet for all this apparent mastery, this lucidity about what Dostoevsky means
to him, Camus is strangely reticent about The Idiot. As Jean Pierre Morel, in his
Dictionnaire Camus entry on Dostoevsky laconically comments: “Oddly, The
Idiot is left almost completely aside.”31 Later in the entry he even accuses Camus
of an inattentive or a superficial reading when he quotes from Camus’s intro-
duction to the Pléiade edition of Roger Martin du Gard, where Camus analo-
gizes the distinction between “the young women in The Possessed and Natasha
Rostov” of War and Peace to that “between a character in the movies and one on
the stage: more animation and less flesh.”32 Morel asks somewhat impatiently:
“Would he have stuck to this claim had he paid attention to Nastasia Filip-
povna?” (the heroine of The Idiot).33
While a lack of attention would appear an unlikely cause of Camus’s “mis-
reading” of The Idiot, Morel has nevertheless hit on an important question:
Why does Camus have so little to say about the Dostoevsky novel, which in
its thematic range, in some of its formal devices, and in its ending is the most
“Camusian”?34 From the first pages of The Idiot Prince Myshkin is preoccupied,
almost obsessed with the theme of execution, of Camus’s condamnés à mort,
which Myshkin comes to symbolize. He talks about it with everyone he meets,
and in a variety of forms: from an execution he witnessed in Switzerland to
an execution that he heard about (in which the condemned man was granted
reprieve at the last minute); an execution he imagines as a painting; and an
execution, the supreme example in the Western tradition, where art and life
meet, in this case Holbein’s daunting masterpiece Der Leichnam Cristi im Grabe.
This painting is subsequently commented on in depth by two of Myshkin’s
most important “doubles,” Rogozhin and Hippolyte. Death by execution, in
the form of Madame du Barry, is also a central concern to the novel’s ironic
“master-thinker,” Timofey Matveevich Lebedev, who preaches incessantly on
the book of Revelation. Indeed all the novel’s characters are, in one way or
another, condamnés à mort—not unlike the entire world of The Plague.
Twinned with murder stands the theme of suicide. Although in this case
the linkage is not unique to The Idiot among Dostoevsky’s works, the charac-
ter around whom it centers could have stepped out of the pages of The Rebel
(although he is never mentioned in it), or out of Camus’s own life: Hippolyte
Terentyev, a 19-year-old jeune homme révolté who is dying of consumption. It
is hardly a stretch to remark on the parallels between the fate (and thinking) of
the fictional Hippolyte with the real Albert Camus: both are young and sick,
impoverished and fatherless; both are angry at the God behind nature; both are
writers, would-be lovers, desperate to live and to be remembered.
More than any of Dostoevsky’s novels, The Idiot is concerned with beauty
and happiness, both themes central to Camus. The Idiot also contains a sus-
tained discourse on the relationship of art to life, unique in Dostoevsky and
of crucial importance to Camus. Why then the silence? Why so little inter-
text? Camus’s “blindness” to The Idiot would seem to derive from Dostoevsky’s
characterization of Myshkin. Camus was happy to embrace (and repulse) Dos-
toevsky’s presentation—as interpreted by Camus—of the “ideological atheists”
Ivan Karamazov and Aleksey Kirillov, who were “punished” with madness and
suicide. Myshkin, however, is presented by Dostoevsky not as an atheist but
with a strongly Christic side and yet he too has all the characteristics of the
“absurd hero”—he who pursues beauty and happiness without reason, mean-
ing, or transcendent goal. (Isn’t that why he is an “idiot”?) In this sense, Sartre’s
identification of Meursault with Myshkin is insightful and appropriate.35 Both
Meursault and Myshkin manifest a vertiginous openness to experience, one that
does not distinguish between good and evil but goes beyond them, accepting
and seeking to unify all experience (even what is “unacceptable”). While Camus
does, years later, in his 1955 preface to The Stranger, ironically allude to Mysh-
kin (and to Sartre’s reading), when he writes that Meursault is “the only Christ
we deserve,” the only published line on Myshkin that Camus left us comes from
The Myth of Sisyphus, and runs as follows: “Aliocha’s case is not ambiguous, as is
that of Prince Muichkin. Ill, the latter lives in a perpetual present, tinged with
smiles and indifference, and that blissful state might be the eternal life of which
the Prince speaks.”36 While Camus seems here to laud Myshkin for lacking
the supposedly unambiguous nature of Aliocha, and for being “indifferent,” he
does associate him with the nihilistic illusion of eternity (hope).
Myshkin is often smiling, yet this is a decidedly inadequate description
of his attitude toward existence. He is full of care, compassion, and insight.
Immanence is all Myshkin knows, indeed he calls himself a “materialist,” and
his entire life journey can be read in Camusian terms—that is, toward an
acknowledgement of a world defined by “double thoughts”37 (beauty and death,
humility and pride, power and self-sacrifice) that are not “overcome” or synthe-
sized but lived—in Myshkin’s case, in Hippolyte’s case, and in Nastasia-Aglaya-
and-Rogozhin’s cases—to the breaking point. Given his own position however,
Camus cannot allow the status of an absurd hero, an ideal, to be accorded to
a “Christian” character. Yet, had he allowed himself, Camus would have seen
that Myshkin’s greatest similarity is not to his own Meursault, as asserted by
Sartre, but to Kirillov, Camus’s Dostoevskian character of choice in The Myth
of Sisyphus. Like Myshkin, Kirillov loves children and is indeed something of a
child himself. He loves life, especially nature, and believes that “everything is
good,” which is exactly what the “idiot” Myshkin sees. Moreover, both Mysh-
kin and Kirillov strive for a form of existence in which “time will be no more”;
and, if Dostoevsky hasn’t yet made his comparison clear, Stavrogin, upon hear-
ing Kirillov talk in this way, asks him, “Do you suffer from epilepsy?” Finally,
Kirillov dreams of a state of humanity in which there will be no procreation,
which the innocent Myshkin has already attained. Yet at the same time Mysh-
kin is immoral (because he is “polygamous”) and is able to fall in love simulta-
neously and unblushingly with both Nastasia and Aglaya.38 Indeed one could
argue that Myshkin is the more true “absurd man” than either Kirillov or Meur-
sault and the very ideal of the homme révolté that Camus so eloquently describes:
The protest against evil which is at the very core of metaphysical revolt is signifi-
cant in this regard. It is not the suffering of a child, which is repugnant in itself, but
the fact that the suffering is not justified. After all, pain, exile or confinement are
sometimes accepted when dictated by good sense or the doctor. In the eyes of the
rebel, what is missing from the misery of the world, as well as from its moments
of happiness, is some principle by which they can be explained. The insurrection
against evil is, above all, a demand for unity. The rebel obstinately confronts a
world condemned to death and the impenetrable obscurity of the human condi-
tion with his demand for life and absolute clarity. He is seeking, without knowing
it, a moral philosophy or a religion. Rebellion, although it is blind, is a form of
asceticism. Therefore, if the rebel blasphemes, it is in the hope of finding a new
god. He staggers under the shock of the first and most profound of all religious
experiences, but it is a disenchanted religious experience. It is not rebellion itself
that is noble, but its aims, even though its achievements are at times ignoble.39
The resonances with Myshkin are striking here. Pain, exile, and confinement are
exactly what Myshkin undergoes, and at the hands of a doctor. He notoriously
finds no “principle” to explain suffering. He is an ascetic who could be seen as
“seeking, without knowing it, a moral philosophy or religion.” And some read-
ers have detected blasphemy in his end—that is, in his accession to Rogozhin
and subsequent complicity in the murder of Nastasia Filippovna. However, for
our purposes, what is most important is whom Camus is describing: Yanek
Kaliaev, the “fastidious assassin,” Camus’s character most like Myshkin and his
much-disputed ideal of tragic modern rebellion.
Clearly the postwar period—right up to Camus’s death—marks a reinten-
sification of Camus’s engagement with Russian literature and history: The Just
Assassins (premiered December 15, 1949), The Rebel (1951), and The Possessed
(premiered January 30, 1959) testify directly to this engagement, while The Fall
(1956) and The First Man (unfinished at the time of his death) bear impor-
tant intertextual traces of Dostoevsky. However, it is The Just Assassins, and its
protagonist Kaliaev, who would appear to “lead the way,” being among other
things, with Ivan Karamazov, the fulcrum of The Rebel.40 In that play, and in
that chapter of The Rebel on the historical Kaliaev, Camus tries to define a “third
way,” that is a legitimate postnihilistic form of revolt; one that neither humili-
ates nor despises mankind by setting a transcendent value above the human
being but rather serves the human purpose, which is to strive for beauty, happi-
ness, and justice in a world circumscribed by death. To dramatize the contrast
between heroic revolt and nihilistic revolution Camus focuses on the Russian
revolutionary-terrorists, the “fastidious assassins” who helped to bring about the
Russian Revolution of 1905. The hero of the play, Yanek Kaliaev, is known to
his fellows as “the poet”—and he might as well take the Shakespearian epithets
of lunatic and lover with it. His entire value system, his “theory of justice”
and revolt, could be summed up in his statement: “I’m in love with beauty,
happiness.”41 For Kaliaev, love, beauty, and happiness form a unity that is the
purpose and pride of man; but it is precisely this conception of the human that
modernity—and not only in Russia—has abandoned in favor of a dehuman-
ized, neutral, abstract mass man manipulated from above. Hence in the name
of humanity, Kaliaev champions the necessity of revolt, even of killing, but only
if it is carried out within the norms of human conscience. This is, of course,
impossible—killing always sets up the human being outside conscience as judge
or God. In other words, this rebellion is necessary but unjustifiable and tragic.
Kaliaev, the revolutionary, is also a lover—but he is a lover who does not
have the time or the right to love in this world. As Dora says, “Those whose
hearts are set on justice have no right to love.” Instead of procreating they must
kill, must dream of death, of murdering the Grand Duke Sergey—so that inno-
cence can be returned to the world. While regretting that “the world” has forced
him to become a murderer, Kaliaev takes solace in knowing that he too will
die, either under the wheels of the carriage or by a soldier’s bullet. Then in a
moment right out of The Idiot:
Dora: That’s how it should be, Yanek. To kill, and to die on the spot. But, to my
mind, there’s a still greater happiness. [She falls silent, Kaliaev glances at her.
She lowers her eyes.] The scaffold!
Kaliaev [with feverish excitement]: Yes, I, too, have thought of that. There’s some-
thing incomplete in dying on the spot. While between the moment the bomb
is thrown and the scaffold, there is an eternity, perhaps the only eternity a
man can know.
Kaliaev seeks to die twice: first as a murderer, then as a martyr; first for him-
self, then for mankind; first in time, then for eternity. The difference between
this “eternity” in The Idiot and that in The Just Assassins is that in the latter,
execution is imagined as a happy death while for Myshkin it evokes a mute, sub-
lime horror. As Camus says about the fastidious assassins (and it is a lot—much
more than can be said of Myshkin): “Their only evident victory is to triumph
at least over solitude and negation.”42
As mentioned earlier, Ivan Karamazov’s rejection of “creation as it is,” and
his consequent claim that “everything is permitted,” was a source of lifelong
reflection and concern for Camus. Along with so much else, in the 1950s
Camus turned Karamazov’s slogan on its head, saying that if God is dead in
modernity then in fact “nothing is permitted”: Everything is ruled by the iron
law of necessity, whether natural or historical. Here again Camus’s interpreta-
tion of the Russian experience is central to his reading of modernity: On the
one hand Stalinism, on the other “The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor.” In
other words, Ivan’s freedom, “the only consistent one there is,”43 is not the kind
preached by modern revolutionaries. In The Just Assassins Kaliaev is faced with
Ivan’s choice: Must he kill or must he not kill? The catalyst for this choice is the
historically documented fact that Kaliaev’s first attempt on the Grand Duke’s
life was aborted when he saw, unexpectedly, the niece and nephew of the Grand
Duke traveling in the carriage he was to attack. Violently criticized by his fellow
revolutionary, the “Stalinist” Stepan, for putting his personal conscience and
devotion to the concept of “innocence” above the future happiness of mankind,
Kaliaev argues that the killing of innocents is a betrayal of true revolution and
portends tyranny not liberation; Kaliaev has “passed” both Myshkin’s and Ivan
Karamazov’s test.
Faithful to the facts, Camus depicts Kaliaev as a believer, indeed as a Chris-
tian, although outside the church. The same is true of Myshkin (in distinction
to Aliosha Karamazov): not only does Myshkin not take holy orders, but he
does not even enter a church in the course of The Idiot. Kaliaev crosses himself
before icons but when Dora says, “But you have faith, and faith is what we need,
all of us,” he answers, “Faith? No. Only one man had faith in that sense.”44 This
is exactly what Dostoevsky said about Myshkin in relation to Christ: There was
only one of Him.45 Both Myshkin and Kaliaev are “idiots” (hommes révoltés),
seekers of unity in a world that insists on the separation of love from equality,
pride from humility, and man from man.
The last decade of Camus’s life, with all its well-known ups and downs, is
also marked by a groping toward a new ideal, suggested “negatively” in The Fall,
in the short story “The Renegade,” and in the brilliant adaptation of The Pos-
sessed, and “positively” in The First Man. This last work, remarkable in so many
ways, also signals the final stage in Camus’s relationship to Dostoevsky—the
attempt to escape or overcome him by reaching “Tolstoy.”
While Camus was introduced to Tolstoy by Grenier in 1931 or 1932, his
diaries reveal that Camus’s most sustained interest in Tolstoy dates to World
War II (his first entry on the Russian master is in 1942).46 Camus’s interest
is twofold, literary and biographical. Through the latter, which includes the
autobiographical prose, Camus discovered Tolstoy’s orphanhood, his spiritual
restlessness, his militant opposition to the death penalty, his own intense fear of
death and preoccupation with suicide. In other words, a Tolstoy who was per-
haps more like himself than was Dostoevsky. As he said, “There is an anguish
in Tolstoy and a tragic sense doubtless less spectacular than Dostoevsky’s, but
which I persist in finding overwhelming since it remained his own fate until the
very end: of the two, it was Dostoevsky after all who died in his own bed.”47
This identification became intensely personal, almost mystical, as this diary
entry for 1949, when Camus was 36, reveals: “The last work of Tolstoy, which
was found unfinished on his worktable: ‘In the world, there are no guilty.’ He was
born in 1828. He wrote War and Peace between 1863 and 1869. Between the
ages of thirty-five and forty-one.”48
The literary works to which Camus was most drawn were Tolstoy’s Rousseau-
inspired autobiographical trilogy and War and Peace, both of which figured into
Camus’s thinking on The Last Man. The fullness, the earthiness, the joy, and the
epic grandeur of Tolstoy’s prose captivated Camus. (And probably the “French-
ness” of his style.) Indeed, as Jean Sarocchi has brilliantly highlighted, Tolstoy
may have appealed to Camus as a potential alternative “father,” an end to Oedi-
pus and a way around Dostoevsky’s darkness—but as Sarocchi also shows, even
the way to Tolstoy went through Dostoevsky.49 As much as The First Man aspires
to Tolstoyan tranquility, it is rooted (as ever) in Dostoevsky’s haunted sonhood;
here, his 1877 novel of growing up abandoned, The Adolescent.
Camus had of course been rehearsing his relationship to Dostoevsky from
the beginning: from the negative reading of the Christian existentialist in The
Myth of Sisyphus, to a Dostoevsky whose critique of Western progressive ideol-
ogy Camus was coming to identify with more and more, and finally, now, to
a deep sense as an intellectual and artist that such a position could only pro-
duce that unbalanced, excessive, schematic modern writing that Camus yearned
finally to overcome. In the 1948 essay “Helen’s Exile” Dostoevsky is associated
with two ominous signs of modernity: He is the first writer for whom landscape
(nature) no longer has a place in art, and he is also the writer who describes
men (Marmeladov from Crime and Punishment is the model, as Petersburg of

the same novel is the model of the city divorced from nature) who are excessively
humble (humiliated), unbalanced, and lacking measure. Thus Dostoevsky’s
world, faithful to modernity, is lacking in what is properly human: harmony,
beauty, and pride.
This picture of Dostoevsky is fleshed out in the Pléiade introduction to
the complete works of Roger Martin du Gard. Here Camus simultaneously
acknowledges that the modern novel descends from Dostoevsky and implicitly
laments it: “Our current literary production could, in fact, when it is valid,
claim descent from Dostoevsky rather than from Tolstoy. Inspired or impas-
sioned shadows outline the commentary in motion of a reflection on man’s
fate. Doubtless there is also depth and perspective in Dostoevsky’s characters;
but, unlike Tolstoy, he does not make such qualities the rule for his creation.”50
Identifying Martin du Gard as “the only literary artist of his time who can be
counted among Tolstoy’s descendants,” Camus writes, “the real ambition of our
authors, after they have assimilated The Possessed, will be one day to write War
and Peace.”51
Easier said than done: Recall that The Possessed is the last literary work that
Camus prepared. Moreover, as an artist Camus knew that he could not give up
Dostoevsky for Tolstoy, for their quests are linked. In “For Dostoevsky,” Camus
wrote, “Dostoevsky’s greatness (which is like Tolstoy’s, although expressed
differently) will not stop growing, for our world will either die or prove him
right.”52 The same dual acknowledgement is apparent in his correspondence
with Jean Grenier. On April 25, 1949, Camus writes, “The Russian demon, it
is the petty demon except in Tolstoy—who is number one, in my opinion, even
if he preaches.” Still, only a few months later, on February 15, 1950, he can say
of Dostoevsky, in regard to Grenier’s series of articles on the problem of evil:
“It is the contemporary subject and, in a way, the only one. For me everything
comes down to Dostoevsky’s choice.”53
In the end it is not so much either/or as both: Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, Rous-
seau and Pascal, Gide and Martin du Gard. As he wrote in his Notebooks, “A
mind somewhat accustomed to the gymnastics of intelligence knows, like Pas-
cal, that all error comes from an exclusion. On the frontiers of intelligence we
know most certainly that there is truth in any theory and that none of the great
experiences of humanity, even if they are apparently quite opposed, even if they
are named Socrates and Empedocles or Pascal and Sade, is a priori insignificant.
But the occasion forces us to a choice.”54 Camus chose. Even in writing his
“Tolstoyan” novel The First Man, Camus was with Dostoevsky. And not only
with Dostoevsky but also with Myshkin. With Myshkin in the form of his own
mother. In the “Notes and Plans” to one of the unfinished sections of The First
Man, Camus writes, “His mother is Christ” and “Maman is like a Myshkin
who doesn’t know it. She doesn’t know the life of Christ, except perhaps for the
cross. And yet who is closer to it than she?”55 Camus has certainly come a long
way in recognizing his own kinship with Myshkin. What more to add except
that Jacques Cormery has the same initials as the Christian savior? However we
want to define Camus’s spirituality, and I would argue that it is very much like
Dostoevsky’s (“If Stavrogin has faith, he does not believe he has faith. If he does
not have faith, he does not believe that he does not have faith”), it is clearly not
of the positivist kind in which suicide “too” has no meaning.56 For Camus and
Dostoevsky there are, rather, too many meanings. Transcendence, tormentingly,
is everywhere. And nowhere. When asked in what turned out to be his last
interview what he thought the critics had neglected in his work, he said, “The
dark part, what is blind and instinctive in me.”57 His relationship to Dostoevsky
may help us cast light in that direction.
Notes
1. This is the same Albert Camus who kept photographs of only two writers in his
study: Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.
2. The essays were delivered in 1921, in conjunction with Dostoevsky’s centenary,
at Jacques Copeau’s Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier, famous for its production of The
Brothers Karamazov. The production of The Brothers Karamazov, mounted by
Camus’s Le théâtre de l’Equipe, was in part an homage to Copeau, whom Camus
greatly respected.
3. André Gide, Dostoevsky, translator unnamed (London: J. M. Dent, 1952), 15.
4. Ibid., 74.
5. These are the Russian “proklyatye voprosy,” which begin precisely with Camus’s own
“Is life worth living?”
6. The other plays also provide insight into Camus’s complex sensibility. They are
Malraux’s Le temps du mépris, Gide’s Le retour de l’enfant prodigue, Eschylus’s Pro-
méthée enchaîné, de Rojas’s La Célestine, and Ben Jonson’s La femme silencieuse.
7. Albert Camus, Théâtre, récits, nouvelles (Paris: Gallimard, 1962), 1712. My
translation.
8. Jan F. Rigaud, trans., Albert Camus and Jean Grenier: Correspondence, 1932–1960
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003), 134.
9. It’s almost a pity that he didn’t do so because the Lermontov title might have drawn
attention to the distance between the author and his protagonist, a distinction
explicitly drawn by Lermontov in his introduction to Hero and to which the critics
of The Fall paid little heed.
10. Camus, Théâtre, récits, nouvelles, 1879. My translation.
11. See Albert Camus, “Rencontres avec Gide,” in Théâtre, récits, nouvelles, 1117–23.
13. Albert Camus, Essais, ed. Roger Quilliot (Paris: Gallimard, 1965), 1923. My
translation.
14. Albert Camus, Lyrical and Critical Essays, ed. Philip Thody, trans. Ellen Conroy
Kennedy (New York: Knopf, 1968), 351. Malraux, an avid reader of Dostoevsky,
had a strong literary impact on Camus. In The Myth of Sisyphus, before launching
into his discussion of Kirillov, Camus writes that he might equally have used Mal-
raux’s work to exemplify “the absurd.”
15. Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion, and Death: Essays, trans. Justin O’Brien (New
York: Modern Library, 1960), 203. While there is no room for discussion of it here,
Camus does invoke Quixote on more than one occasion.
16. Quoted in Oliver Todd, Albert Camus: une vie (Paris: Gallimard, 1996), 510. My
translation.
17. The Camus-Dostoevsky relation has attracted a fair amount of commentary,
including two valuable monographs: Ray Davison’s Camus: The Challenge of Dos-
toevsky (Exeter, UK: University of Exeter Press, 1997); Peter Dunwoodie’s Une
histoire ambivalente: Le dialogue Camus-Dostoïevski (Paris: Libraire Nizet, 1997);
and Jean Sarocchi’s penetrating and at times brilliant work Le dernier Camus, ou,
Le premier homme (Paris: Nizet, 1995). The critical literature shows that traces of
Dostoevsky can be found in Camus from the beginning of his career, including in
his “prequel” to The Right Side and The Wrong Side, written in 1933. Overall the
Camus-Dostoevsky intertext presents an embarrassment of riches, and commenta-
tors often disagree about which works to partner. I have chosen to analyze Camu-
sian works where Dostoevsky and his works are explicitly named in an attempt to
show that here, too, complexity reigns.
18. I refer here to the monologic form of both texts, although the critical literature is
not unanimous on which Dostoevskian text to partner with The Fall, Notes from
Underground, or “Stavrogin’s Confession” in The Possessed. See Davison, Camus:
The Challenge of Dostoevsky, 256n59, for entry into this discussion.
19. Albert Camus, Notebooks, 1942–1951, trans. Justin O’Brien (New York: Paragon,
1991), 198.
21. Ibid., 114. By this definition Dostoevsky was the ultimate artist!
22. Ibid., 107.
23. Ibid., 110–11.
24. Albert Camus, The Rebel, trans. Justin O’Brien (New York: Knopf, 1956), 18.
25. Ibid., 56.
26. Ibid., 55.
27. Ibid., 57. The personal relevance of this comes out in a diary entry: “One must love
life before loving its meaning, D. says. Yes, and when the love of life disappears, no
meaning consoles us for it.” Camus, Notebooks, 1942–51, 218.
28. Ibid.
29. Camus, The Rebel, 56.
30. Letter to Fonvizin, February 1854. My translation.
31. Jeanyves Guérin, ed. Dictionnaire Albert Camus (Paris: Robert Laffont, 2009), 226.
My translation.
32. Camus, Lyrical and Critical Essays, 256.
33. Dictionnaire, 227. My translation.
34. The novel’s end, by far the most dissonant and “incomprehensible” of Dostoevsky’s
work, would appear to fulfill Camus’s ideal of a “modern tragedy” and of the absurd
work, which must abjure illusion and the “happy” (reconciled) ending. He writes,
“If the commandments of the absurd are not respected, if the work does not illus-
trate divorce and revolt, if it sacrifices to illusions and arouses hope, it ceases to
be gratuitous” (Camus, Sisyphus, 102). For Camus himself, indeed, “the last scene
of The Idiot is Dostoevsky’s greatest piece of writing” (Dunwoodie, Une histoire
ambivalente, 41).
35. See Jean-Paul Sartre, “An Explication of The Stranger,” in Camus: A Collection of
Critical Essays, ed. Germaine Brée (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1962),
111.
36. Camus, Sisyphus, 111.
37. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky
(New York: Vintage Books, 2003), 309–12.
38. Camus thought enough of this observation by Gide to mention it in Sisyphus, 112.
39. Camus, The Rebel, 100–101.
40. The first published chapter of The Rebel was the one about the 1905 Russian Revo-
lution, Les meurtriers délicats, which is both the basis for the play Les justes and a
central node of the The Rebel itself.
41. Albert Camus, Caligula and Three Other Plays, trans. Stuart Gilbert (1938; repr.,
42. Camus, The Rebel, 170.
43. Albert Camus, Notebooks, 1935–1942, trans. Philip Thody (New York: Modern
Library, 1965), 95.
44. Camus, Caligula, 244.
45. On this, see Dostoevsky’s crucial letter of January 1868 to his niece Sofia Iva-
nova, in Fyodor Dostoevsky, Complete Letters, trans. and ed. David A. Lowe, vol. 3,
1868–1871 (Ann Arbor: Adris, 1990), 17.
46. Camus, Notebooks, 1935–1942, 241.
47. Camus, Lyrical and Critical Essays, 351.
48. Camus, Notebooks, 1942–1951, 230.
49. Sarocchi, Le dernier.
50. Camus, Lyrical and Critical Essays, 254–56.
51. Ibid., 258.
53. Rigaud, Correspondence, 134, 141.
54. Camus, Notebooks, 1942–1951, 79.
55. Albert Camus, Œuvres complètes, ed Raymond Gay-Gosier and Jacqueline Lévi-
Valensi, vol. 4 (Paris: Pléiade: 2009), 925, 931. My translation.
56. Fyodor Dostoevsky, Demons, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New
York: Everyman’s Library, 2000), part 3, chapter 6.
57. Camus, Œuvres complètes, 661. In French, “La part obscure, ce qu’il y a d’aveugle
et d’instinctif en moi.”
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Notes on Contributors
Michael Y. Bennett is an assistant professor of English in drama at the University

of Wisconsin–Whitewater. He is the author of three books: Reassessing the The-
atre of the Absurd: Camus, Beckett, Ionesco, Genet, and Pinter (Palgrave Macmillan,
2011); Words, Space, and the Audience: The Theatrical Tension between Empiricism
and Rationalism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); and Narrating the Past through The-
atre: Four Crucial Texts (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). He is also the editor of Refig-
uring Oscar Wilde’s Salome (Rodopi, 2011) and the coeditor of Eugene O’Neill’s
One-Act Plays: New Critical Perspectives (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
Sophie Bourgault is an assistant professor of political philosophy at the Uni-

versity of Ottawa’s School of Political Studies. Her primary research interests are
ancient and modern political thought—particularly Plato, Jean-Jacques Rous-
seau, Friedrich Nietzsche, Simone Weil, and Hannah Arendt. In addition to
forthcoming book chapters dealing with compassion in politics and with French
Enlightenment philosophy, she has published articles on music and politics in
Eighteenth-Century Thought, Symposium and the Journal of Aesthetic Education.
Matthew H. Bowker is a visiting assistant professor of interdisciplinary studies

at Medaille College in Buffalo, New York. He holds degrees in political theory
from Columbia University (BA) and the University of Maryland (MA, PhD).
He has recently published several scholarly articles and book chapters concern-
ing the psychosocial dynamics underlying ethical and political ideals, such as
moral autonomy, individual freedom, absurd revolt, and political equality. His
2008 dissertation (“Albert Camus and the Political Philosophy of the Absurd”)
developed a preliminary psychosocial reinterpretation of Camus’s moral and
political thought. Bowker is currently completing a book on the relationship
between terror, absurdity, and mourning in political experience and serves as
associate editor of the new Journal of Camus Studies.
Thomas Epstein is a Slavist and a specialist in Russian modernism and post-

modernism with a keen interest in Franco-Russian literary and cultural rela-
tions. He is a translator of contemporary Russian poetry, is chief editor of the
170 ● Notes on Contributors
online humanities journal New Arcadia Review, and is working on a book on

the “unofficial” culture of Leningrad of the 1970s and 1980s. He is an associate
professor in the Arts and Sciences Honors Program and Slavic Department at
Boston College.
Araceli Hernández-Laroche is an assistant professor of modern languages

(French and comparative literature) at the University of South Carolina,
Upstate. She completed her dissertation, “Sartre’s Confrontation with Colonial-
ism: The Algerian Case and His Engagement against Communism,” in 2009 at
the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Totalitarian Threats
and Colonial Geography: The Politics of Defining Terrorism in Beauvoir, Camus,
and Dib (Purdue e-Pubs, November 2011).
Mamadou Abdoulaye Ly studied in France and Senegal, where he obtained a

BA in political sciences and a master’s degree in French literature. He is finish-
ing his doctoral dissertation in French studies and teaches at Yunnan Normal
University in China. His most recent publications include several articles and
book reviews on Albert Camus and André Malraux, and his first monograph,
titled La théâtralité dans les romans d’André Malraux, was published in January
2012 by the French publishing company L’Harmattan.
Aurélie Palud is a French doctoral student at the University of Rennes. She is

interested in novels about epidemics—more specifically, in their depiction of
history and the human condition. Holder of the agrégation qualification, she
teaches literature in a high school in Le Mans and in an institute in Rennes. In
2010, her paper about the political reflection in Blindness by José Saramago was
published in the volume Roman et politique (edited by Isabelle Durand-Leguern
and Ioana Galleron). She also participated in several colloquiums in France and
abroad (Portugal and Canada).
Edmund J. Smyth is reader in French at Manchester Metropolitan University

(UK). His books include Postmodernism and Contemporary Fiction, Autobiog-
raphy and the Existential Self, and Jules Verne: Narratives of Modernity. He has
published widely on modern and contemporary French writing, and his recent
publications include studies of Alain Robbe-Grillet and Samuel Beckett. He
was the editor of a special two-volume edition of Romance Studies titled Noir
Cityscapes and is the series editor of Contemporary French and Francophone Cul-
tures (Liverpool University Press).
Jennifer Stafford Brown is an associate professor of French at Whitworth Uni-

versity in Spokane, Washington, where she teaches all levels of the French cur-
riculum. She specializes in the ways in which the Middle Ages have haunted,
Notes on Contributors ● 171
energized, politicized, and aesthetized French literature of the twentieth cen-

tury. Her most recent publications are “Au Feu de Ce Qui Fut Brûle Ce Qui
Sera: Aragon and the Subversive Medieval” (Romanic Review 103, no. 1 [May
2010]) and “Ni Avec Toi, Ni Sans Toi: The Deconsecration of the Grail in
Julien Gracq” (forthcoming in Literature and Theology).
Emmanuelle Anne Vanborre is an assistant professor of French at Gordon

College in Wenham, Massachusetts. Her research focuses on twentieth-century
fiction, literary theory, and Francophone literature. She has published articles
and book reviews on French and Francophone literature, especially on Maurice
Blanchot, Albert Camus, and Maryse Condé. Her book Lectures blanchotiennes
de Malraux et Camus (Peter Lang, 2010) highlights certain aspects of Malraux’s
and Camus’s writings that have often been left in the shadows and that tackle
essential questions about literature, writing, and death.
Index
absurd, 10, 14, 23, 57, 58, 59, 60, 67, commitment, 26, 28, 112, 115, 119,
73, 84, 96, 105, 112, 115, 118, 121, 132, 136
125, 146, 147, 148, 149, 151, 152 community, 24, 26, 84, 89, 99, 104, 105,
Auschwitz. See genocide 148
complexity, 3, 7, 20, 22, 30, 158
Blanchot, Maurice, 14, 41, 43, 45
Descartes, René, 59, 62
Camus, Albert Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 36, 143, 144, 146,
Caligula, 71, 90, 120, 147 148, 150, 154, 156, 157
Exile and the Kingdom, 12, 15, 132
Fall, The, 9, 12, 14, 15, 35, 37, 39, Ècole d’Alger, 84, 85, 87, 88, 90
41, 43, 45, 47, 48, 49, 145, 147, existentialism, 10, 11, 13, 14, 53, 54, 56,
150, 153, 155, 157 59, 60, 149
First Man, The, 12, 15, 118, 153, 155,
156 freedom, 2, 28, 41, 45, 54, 56, 58, 67,
Happy Death, A, 118, 123, 154 70, 72, 85, 98, 112, 113, 115, 119,
Just Assassins, The, 143, 153, 154 120, 129, 130, 137, 147, 154
Myth of Sisyphus, The, 56, 57, 58, 60, Freud, Sigmund, 70, 71
64, 66, 67, 69, 70, 96
Notebooks, 96, 97, 103, 107, 123, 125, genocide, 23, 39, 40, 41, 42, 67, 68, 71
127, 138, 147, 156 Gide, André, 82, 83, 143, 145, 146, 156,
Nuptials, 87, 88, 91, 111, 119, 123, 159
124, 137 Grenier, Jean, 114, 119, 123, 124, 127,
Plague, The, 3, 9, 12, 14, 20, 21, 22, 143, 144, 145, 146, 155, 156
23, 24, 25, 27, 30, 80, 95, 96,
97, 99, 100, 102, 104, 106, 107, history, 7, 9, 10, 13, 19, 20, 22, 25, 27,
112, 124, 135, 136, 149, 150, 28, 39, 41, 43, 47, 48, 79, 81, 83,
151 85, 88, 95, 104, 112, 113, 114,
Rebel, The, 20, 23, 57, 59, 67, 69, 75, 116, 119, 144, 150, 153
111, 112, 125, 127, 128, 130,
132, 134, 136, 137, 140, 148, judgment, 19, 28, 39, 42, 83, 148, 153
149, 150, 152, 153
Right Side and the Wrong Side, The, Kristeva, Julia, 36, 37, 74
111, 120, 123, 125, 133, 158
State of Siege, The, 79, 81, 83 liberty. See freedom
Stranger, The, 8, 9, 11, 12, 13, 15, 83, love, 23, 25, 26, 29, 53, 58, 68, 70, 71,
89, 96, 112, 118, 142, 147, 151 72, 73, 79, 87, 113, 125, 126, 128,
Summer, 111, 112, 115, 119, 120 131, 133, 135, 136, 149, 152, 153
174 ● Index
memory, 26, 27, 28, 40, 66, 68, 71, 74, 112, 113, 119, 125, 130, 132, 133,
107, 118, 119, 142 136, 137, 149, 152
modernity, 9, 12, 19, 21, 30, 97, 101,
104, 105, 106, 116, 153, 154, 156 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 2, 7, 10, 11, 19, 27, 28,
myths, 95, 112, 114, 115, 116, 124 43, 46, 54, 55, 56, 59, 60, 67, 69,
88, 90, 119, 123, 151, 152
nouveau roman, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 14, 16 Shoah. See genocide
Sisyphus, 56, 58, 60, 61, 63, 64, 66,
originality, 1, 3, 7, 11, 15, 29, 41, 55, 69, 70, 90, 96, 119, 125, 146,
111, 118, 150 147, 148, 149, 151, 152, 154,
158, 159
postmodernism, 7, 8, 9, 12, 14, 16, 20, solidarity, 23, 59, 100, 126, 128, 130,
26, 27, 28, 30 132, 136, 137, 142
rebel, 2, 7, 14, 20, 23, 57, 58, 63, 65, theatre, 36, 57, 144, 145, 149, 157
67, 68, 69, 73, 75, 97, 101, 111, Tolstoy, Leo, 144, 145, 147, 155, 156
112, 120, 125, 127, 128, 130, 132,
134, 136, 137, 147, 148, 149, 150, Vichy, 96, 98, 100, 102, 105
152, 153
religion, 31, 57, 88, 90, 97, 101, 105, 152 war, 1, 8, 23, 31, 39, 56, 67, 74, 79, 80,
remembering. See memory 81, 82, 85, 86, 88, 90, 95, 96, 99,
resistance, 1, 20, 22, 63, 66, 71, 90, 96, 101, 103, 106, 107, 113, 144, 148,
101, 133, 144 149, 153, 155
revolt, 2, 14, 24, 27, 54, 57, 58, 59, 65, witness, 28, 36, 39, 40, 41, 42, 47, 48,
67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 75, 82, 65, 80, 82, 115, 116, 150

Emmanuelle Anne Vanborre (Eds.) - The Originality and Complexity of Albert Camus's Writings

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The Originality and Complexity

of Albert Camus’s Writings

Edited by Emmanuelle Anne Vanborre

All rights reserved.

First published in 2012 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.

Design by Scribe Inc.

First edition: October 2012

9 Affliction, Revolt, and Love: A Conversation between

I would like to thank Gordon College, the Faculty Development Committee

return to modern life and an inscription into memory—testifies to the system-

Camus, the Nouveau Roman,

of totalitarianism in any form situated him, in the eyes of his detractors, as

characterization: in these works, we are not given explicit explanations of an

In Ghosts in the Mirror, the first volume of Romanesques, the autobiographi-

the agenda for the growth of poststructuralism and postmodernism in French

7. Alain Robbe-Grillet, Pour un nouveau roman (Paris: Minuit, 1963).

The Complexity and

Hybridity and Polysemy: A (Post)Modern Aesthetic

present in Saramago’s novel where the narrator, apparently objective, makes

A Complex and Ambiguous Signification: An “Open Work”

reader to an allegorical interpretation; in other words, from the anecdotic to the

philosophy in a city “without a soul.” So the plague might be a way to upset

Camus, A Visionary Writer

Albert Camus’s The Fall

Emmanuelle Anne Vanborre

irony of the narration by indicating that “Camus’s enigmatic récit, although it

Philosophical and Political Reflections

Camus’s Unbeknownst Legacy:

An existential crisis may result from

• the sense of being alone and isolated in the world,

Alasdair Macintyre’s “Epistemological Crisis”

who struggled to transcend politics, was increasingly unwilling to commit to

if we decide to rebel, it must be because we have decided that a human society

were decried as angelism by the existentialists.”32 Camus believed in an inherent

In short, The Myth of Sisyphus concludes that Sisyphus is happy because he

Sisyphean (Out)rage and

existence resulting from the inexorable discrepancy between human conscious-

Absurdity and (Out)rage

of outrage. Indeed, invocations of absurdity define a posture of revolt against

to be so, he builds up piece by piece . . . a category of the man possessed.”21

Mourning the Philosopher

an account of a harrowing emotional experience, not “the object of a mere idea”

Melancholy and Absurd Revolt

Albert Camus’s Warring

quite simply, a revolution in Algeria—communist or not—meant the reorder-

desert-like virgin terrain where he claims to have inadvertently and pointlessly

Landau’s Algérianistes who had attempted to Latinize French Algeria’s history,

Memmi and other Ecole d’Alger writers of non-European mother tongues

16. Ibid., 145.

Evolution and Influences

Prison, Plague, and Piety

Jennifer Stafford Brown

observation of the emergence of the Vichy government following the occupa-

The notion of a return to a carefully reconstructed Middle Ages had by then

represented in propaganda as wealthy businessmen taking advantage of the peo-

11. Ibid., 40.

Summer by Albert Camus

Essay and Myth

Essay and Diary

caractérise Prométhée, au contraire, c’est qu’il ne peut séparer la machine de l’art”;

Affliction, Revolt, and Love