Foreign News: Questing Humanist

The great mystery is not that we should have been thrown down here at random between the profusion of matter and that of the stars; it is that, from our very prison, we should draw from our own selves images powerful enough to deny our nothingness.

−André Malraux

On the cell walls of 20th century man’s bedeviled self, few writers have inscribed more powerful images of revolt against the “absurdity” of man’s fate than France’s Albert Camus. Last week the 43-year-old novelist, essayist, playwright, philosopher, editor and Resistance leader was decorated with literature’s Legion of Honor, the 1957 Nobel prize, for “clearsighted earnestness which illuminates the problems of the human conscience of our times.” Not since Rudyard Kipling received the award in 1907 at the age of 41 had it been granted to so young a man.

As he chain-smoked cigarettes, embraced old Resistance buddies and held gracious court for Paris literati at his publisher’s reception, Albert Camus admitted generously that he thought the award should have gone to AndréMalraux, “my early mentor.” Even as he chatted, he inadvertently revealed the major qualities that won him the award−an unflagging humanism coupled with an unremitting skepticism. Pressed to make “one wish in the name of humanity,” Camus unhesitatingly answered, “Freedom.” Asked about his enemies, he replied with a shrewd Gallic twinkle: “One has to know how to make people forgive success.”

Orphaned at the Marne. The successful Nobelman was born in the Algerian village of Mondovi, the son of a poor artisan. Orphaned at ten months by the Battle of the Marne, Camus never saw his French father, spent his sou-less boyhood in Algiers with his Spanish mother. Working his way towards a philosophy degree at the University of Algiers, young Camus was invalided by a bout with TB, which may have stimulated his lifelong preoccupation with death. He recovered completely, as he did from a brief bout with the Communist virus contracted at about the same time (1934).

By 1943, Camus had rocketed into the Parisian literary firmament and the existential orbit of Jean-Paul Sartre. During the German occupation Camus fired the morale of the underground with eloquent pieces in his clandestine Combat. After the war he personified, with Sartre, the “engaged” writer, an active intellectual always ready to slide down the bell rope of the ivory tower and answer the fire alarms of left-wing social and economic causes. The two friends split irrevocably in 1952 over Communist ideology, with Camus holding that ends never justify means (“For a faraway city of which I am not sure, I will not strike the faces of my brothers”). Since that time, Camus has become what François Mauriac calls “the conscience of the [French] younger generation.”

The Madness of Excess. Operating from the underlying premise that God does not exist, Camus argued in The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) that the certainty of death made life itself a ridiculous charade, and therefore “absurd.” He likened man’s lot to the somber task of the Greek mythic hero Sisyphus, who was condemned by the gods to roll a huge boulder to the top of a hill, only to see it roll down again, to the end of time. But from this recognition Camus drew his own peculiar sustenance: “Crushing truths perish by being acknowledged,” i.e., knowledge of one’s absurd fate is a kind of Pyrrhic victory over absurdity.

Sisyphusisme soon proved to be cold stoic comfort to pit against the Wehrmacht and Gestapomen of World War II. Confronted with the Hitler terror, Camus cried “What values did we have . . . which we could oppose to his negation? None.” In The Plague (1947), a parable of the Resistance couched in terms of a city under sentence of bubonic death, Camus voiced his social ethic: “All I maintain is that on this earth there are pestilences and there are victims, and it’s up to us . . . not to join forces with the pestilences.” In The Rebel (1952), Camus turned to attack the pestilence of modern revolutionary ideologies: “Revolt and revolution both wind up at the same crossroads: the police or folly.” To curb the “madness of excess” which breeds the “hangmen” of the extreme left or right, Camus counseled a return to the “Greek Middle Way” of reason and classical restraint.

The Niagara of Faith. Neither classical restraint nor stoic endurance can resolve the problem of evil to which Camus has always been acutely sensitive. In his latest book, The Fall, the nameless narrator plumbs the depths of his own and, in effect, all men’s pride and self-love. Camus seems to abandon his view of man as a Rousseauistic innocent trapped in the vise of the human condition, and almost adopts the metaphysics of original sin. The irony is that sin without God to redeem it is just as unbearable as a world without God to explain it.

André Malraux once defined the task of modern man as filling the void left by the 19th century’s loss of faith. He himself has recently retreated to the religion of art, embracing the Nietzschean view that “we have art in order not to die of the truth.” At a fellow-traveling distance, Jean-Paul Sartre consoles himself with the shifting certitudes of Communism. Albert Camus has too lucid a mind and too scrupulous a moral conscience to opt for such relatively easy solutions. With each successive book, he seems to be sweeping closer to a Niagara of faith, albeit he paddles strenuously upstream towards his professed atheism. Witty, skeptical, man-intoxicated, Camus may never take the final leap of religious faith, but he is already one of the richest intellectual assets of the Western world, if only for his power of negative thinking and his restless, questing humanism.