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Immortality by Milan Kundera (1990)
Kundera's first novel fully in, and of, the West
Immortality was published in 1990 and it's by far Milan Kundera's longest novel, at a hefty 386 pages in the Faber edition. Both these facts are significant.
By 1990, 42 years had passed since the Communist seizure of power in 1948 which is the backdrop to his first two novels, and 22 years had passed since 1968, when the Russians invaded and crushed the Prague Spring, a trauma which formed the backdrop to The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and The Unbearable Lightness of Being. 15 years earlier, in 1975, Kundera had finally abandoned all hope Czech communism could be 'reformed', and left his homeland to go into exile in France. A lot of time had passed since all of these traumatic events.
And it shows. Immortality feels like the first of Kundera's novels which is fully set in the West and which isn't dominated by theories of History, the Communist Party, and the awful political events of his homeland.
The results, though, are not necessarily beneficial, and represent a definite falling-off in imaginative power and charge. I can identify three:
1. Instead of political insight, moaning
This long novel is full of all-too-familiar Western griping. The first-person narrator, who makes his first in-person appearance on page five:
dislikes the phrase 'consumers' (p.6)
dislikes the rock music pounding at him from every direction
dislikes the way everything is photographed ('the lens is everywhere', p.32. 'God's eye has been replaced by a camera,' p.33)
he hates 'what is sadly called fast food' (p.21)
he loathes the way the pavements of Paris are crowded to overflowing with people prepared to just walk right over you, forcing you to step onto the road ('The cars that have filled the streets have narrowed the pavements…Their omnipresent noise corrodes every moment of contemplation like acid. Cars have made the former beauty of cities invisible.' (p.271)
he has learned of something called a "soundbite" which he spends a page or so satirising (p.60)
even the border between the unimportant and the important has been erased by the universal unending BLAH of the media (p.372)
In other words, Kundera has gone from sounding like a cool and sexy lecturer to sounding like your moany old grandad.
2. The narrator suddenly sounds old
Listening to the plaints of this grumpy old man prompts you to reflect on what made his Czech-era fiction so great. Obviously there was the seriousness and intensity of the political backdrop and the fear and edge it gave to everyone's lives.
But I wonder if it's also because the protagonists of his earlier novels are young. Reading Immortality made me realise that part of the reason I like The Joke so much, maybe more than the famous later novels, is because its main protagonist, Ludvik, is young and tough. Although terrible things happen to him, he is a survivor, and although it turns out that he has misunderstood just about every important thing that ever happened to him, nonetheless it is in a proactive, uncomplaining way, which is inspiring and invigorating to read. His plan to humiliate Helena Zemanek may be immoral in all kinds of ways, but it is lively and funny.
The narrator of Immortality (pretty much the same meandering, opinionated narrator as in the previous two or three novels – basically, Kundera – or Kundera-as-he-presents-himself-in-his-novels), by contrast, sounds tired and and pissed off. Bloody lifts. Bloody muzak. Bloody paparazzi everywhere. Bloody packed pavements.
The essence of the 'grumpy old man' is that he's given up. He just can't be doing any more with muzak and the endless traffic and the crowds on the pavement. He put up with it for a certain amount of time but now…
And so an air of defeat sits over the book. It makes you realise that one of the inspiring things about the earlier books was their air of defiance – defying the communist authorities, defying conventional wisdom, defying the scorn of women, his heroes may well be wrong in their interpretation of their lives, but they are cocky and confident (Ludvik and Tomas) which is life-affirming – whereas the tone of Immortality is defeated and sad.
3. All too familiar
Another aspect of Kundera's settled dislike of numerous aspects of the 'free world', is that we already know about it. When Kundera was writing about the kind of tyranny, fear and power plays which took place at all levels of society in a communist society, it was news, it was like reports from another planet, he was presenting fascinating and deep insights into situations which had a weird compelling logic all of their own and which we, in the West, had never experienced.
But when he moans about the busy traffic and packed sidewalks of Paris, or about the intrusiveness of the paparazzi, or how modern politicians don't even bother to make coherent arguments in their speeches but just repeat sound bites worked out by their PR teams… that's the kind of moaning about the modern world which we in the West grew up in. He sounds like lamenting editorials in the Daily Telegraph or Spectator.
4. Prolix
The stereotype of old men is that they go on and on, they are prolix, which Google defines for me as 'tediously lengthy'. Well, as you read into it you realise part of the reason this book is his longest one is because many of the digressions and historical or cultural references which he'd have made into a snappy half-page in the earlier books, in this one go on for pages and pages.
I wonder if it was something to do with his editors or publishers. I wonder if there was some external constraint requiring the earlier books to be pithy and concentrated. Whatever the reason, it feels like someone has said you him, 'Right you're in the Free West now, you can write as much as you want.' It feels like Kundera has undone his belt… and it's all come flooding out, fifteen years-worth of everything he hates about the decadent West, its pampered narcissistic populations, and their horrifying shallowness, flowing and flooding into this great grumpy purge of a book.
Part One – The Face (44 pages)
Kundera tries to get us interested in a middle-aged woman he names Agnes. He explains how the idea for her character came to him after watching the wave of an older woman at a swimming pool to her young instructor. (This is not new. In The Unbearable Lightness of Being he candidly explains how the seed of Tereza's character was sown when he heard a woman's tummy rumbling inappropriately and trying to cover it up. The entire idea for the character of a woman ashamed of her body came to him in one flash.)
Agnes is married, she has a husband Paul, they discuss big ideas in dialogues of concentrated, pointed wit which could only exist in a novel or play.
Agnes drives to her sauna and health club. She has memories of her Father who everyone thought would die, but it was her Mother who suddenly died, her Father lingered on, when her sister came upon her Father having apparently torn up the photos of his marriage, the sisters had a furious argument and falling out.
Kundera projects his own ageing disillusionment onto her. God, the traffic! And the noise! And the endless yapping of the women at her health club! No surprise that she feels completely alienated, that she has
'the feeling that she had nothing in common with those two-legged creatures with a head on their shoulders and a mouth on their face'. (p.43)
No wonder she compares human beings to Renault cars, mass produced variations on the same basic design, who can only just about be told apart by their faces, a unique combination of familiar elements (much the same as a machine's serial number is a unique number though made up of familiar digits, p.13)
The close association of Agnes' gripes with Kundera's makes the reader feel that she is pissed off because her creator is.
Part Two – Immortality (45 pages)
Then suddenly we are whisked off into History.
In a sudden jump, we are shown the scene where Goethe, the great German poet, met Napoleon, in 1811. Briefly, though, as the great general is mostly distracted with aides and assistants running in and out. Having dwelt at length on the evils of the paparazzi and the ubiquity of cameras, Kundera wittily imagines their meeting being snapped by (invisible) cameras, and scripted by PR people. So much attention is paid because both sides realise this meeting might go down in Posterity. It might become immortal.
Having broached the idea of the immortality of the famous, this section settles into a long and – for Kundera – unusually uninterrupted sequence describing the dogged devotion of Bettina von Arnim for the ageing Goethe. We get her full biography, an explanation of how she is the daughter of a woman Goethe had a passion for when he was a young man. The point of the thirty or so pages detailing her story is that her obsessed fan worship came close to stalking. She bombarded the older man with letters and guarded his replies. Kundera subtly takes us into the mind of the old poet, presenting his awareness that she is more of a threat than a love interest, and explaining the changes in their relationship over the decades as he tries to ward her off.
Where all this is heading is the way, after the poet died in 1832, Bettina got her letters back and then proceeded to doctor all of them, and all Goethe's replies, to make him sound much more in love with her than he ever was, and then published them in a volume titled A Child's Correspondence with Goethe. The von Arnim version became part of the Goethe legend for a century, profoundly affecting biographers' views of the great man until, by chance, in the 1920s the original letters were discovered, published and the record was set straight.
Fascinating though all this is as a chunk of biographical speculation about an interesting historical figure, its real impact is that it operates at a higher level.
For it can't help making you reflect that, while Kundera was in Czechoslovakia – or imaginatively dominated by its political history – his fiction had an urgency about its subject matter. It was telling important truths about the plight of oppressed Europe. But by the time he was writing Immortality he had been living and writing in the West for nearly 15 years, and had been fully subjected to the capitalist West's celebrity machine, with its never-ending round of press and PR stunts and book festivals and interviews and TV documentaries. And reading this long, long section about a woman obsessed with writing a book about a great German poet, and about the later writers who wrote books about the book the woman wrote about the great German writer – you can't help feeling Kundera has become just another Famous Writer writing books about what a pain it is to be a Famous Writer.
Which just feels like a really over-familiar, tired and boring subject, the subject of far too many already-existing novels and novellas and short stories and plays and films about famous writers obsessed with other famous writers. It feels like Kundera was once out there, reporting on the world. But now he has entered The Literary Bubble, and is talking about himself and other people like him.
In a surreal twist, in the last three short sections of this part, Kundera imagines Goethe in heaven, strolling along and chatting to, of all people, Ernest Hemingway. Why? Because among 20th century authors Hemingway has probably come in for more criticism of his personal life and attitudes – show-off, womaniser, misogynist etc – than any other. So he makes a fitting companion to discuss the perils of immortality. For, as Goethe sadly comments: 'That's immortality. Immortality means eternal trial.' (p.91)
Again, I couldn't help thinking that Kundera was also discussing his own plight. While in the East he was a persecuted dissident speaking truth to power, and the supposed 'bravery' of his writings – the fact that they were suppressed in his home country, gave him tremendous cachet and glamour in Western literary circles.
But now he's happily ensconced in the West, he is as free as the rest of us to write what he pleases and… just as likely to be criticised and pawed over by the enormous army of critics looking to make a reputation by slamming the famous, as well as dissected to pieces in a hundred thousand university seminar rooms and, of course, comprehensively vilified by feminists, who find his depiction of predatory men, the male gaze and his sexualisation of pretty much every female character in his oeuvre, a symptom of his gross misogyny.
So the conversation between Goethe and Hemingway doesn't come across as inventively as intended; it sounds like more Kundera complaining about his own situation. Moaning about it.
Part Three – Fighting (110 -ages)
This is the longest section, made up of lots of sub-sections, which overflow with characteristic Kundera ideas.
First and foremost it returns us to 20th century France and to the female characters, Agnes and her sister Laura. (Back from early 19th century Germany – by the way, it's odd how attracted Kundera is to Germany and German culture, the way Beethoven crops up in several of the stories and not, for example, the Czech composers Dvořák or Janáček. Maybe it is symptomatic of the way that, not only does he not want to be pigeonholed as a political novelist, he doesn't even want to be labelled a Czech novelist: he is aspiring to be a European novelist.)
Agnes and Laura are a dyad and, since Kundera's ideas generally come in very neat binary opposites, no-one is surprised that he sets up Laura and Agnes as opposites in a whole range of ways: they wear sunglasses for different reasons; have opposite attitudes towards their bodies, and towards sex (Laura's profound at-homeness, her permanent eroticism – p.178 – versus Agnes's preference for only occasional excitement). And so on. Maybe it's me, but I found all this profoundly unengaging.
At a higher level than the actual story, what interested me more were the signs and symptoms in the text of the issue I've identified above – namely, all the ways in which this is Kundera's first Western novel.
I kept finding signs of one big symptom, which is the way he feels overwhelmed by life in the West. There is just too much of everything. This sense of overmuchness comes out in all kinds of remarks and 'insights'.
In our world, where there are more and more faces, more and more alike, it is difficult for an individual to reinforce the originality of the self and to become convinced of its inimitable uniqueness. (p.111)
Brought up in a small, sparsely populated country, under the pitifully austere conditions first of the war, then of communist tyranny, he is completely unprepared for the monstrous affluence, scale and bombardment of the free world, and this is revealed in lots of touches and ideas.
the notion that people are like Renault cars, variations on the same mass-produced model
the way there are hundreds of radio channels, but they all sounds the same, and the latest ad jingle is indistinguishable from the latest pop hit (p.90)
you just can't find anywhere to park in Paris, these days (p.151)
And the notion that, although there are so many people, there is only a finite set of ideas. So many people, so few ideas (p.113), with the result that you end up hearing people repeating the same clichés as if they've just invented them themselves.
He moans about modern journalists who don't report events but, more and more, just interview people, and like gladiators paid to goad and humiliate their interviewees. Again this sounds like sour grapes. You can't help feeling Kundera has been 'monstered' by French journalists and is now getting his revenge (pp.121-124). The protagonist listens to a radio programme where an interviewer has got a film actor on but only wants to talk about his private life. Can't we talk about my films, the actor asks. What are you trying to hide? the interviewer asks, insidiously. No escape from the ghastly insinuations of the all-powerful media (p.138)
He complains that political discourse has been taken over by Imagology which is run by imagologues (p.127) meaning the people who advise politicians on how to advertise and promote themselves, who run opinion polls which determine what everyone thinks is going on, who determine advertising campaigns and fashion, who determine what appears in newspapers, on TV and the radio, and how it is presented.
He laments that his grandmother in Moravia knew everyone in her village and what everything was made of, from her quilt to her house, to her meals, and knew all the neighbours – whereas his neighbour in his Paris flat drives to work, sits silently across from a colleague all day, then drives home and turns on the TV and believes everything it tells him (p.128). Tut tut, modern life, eh?
This grumbling is half-heartedly turned into 'fiction' by having the 'imagologues' in charge of the advertisers who fund the radio station Paul (Agnes' husband) works for, tell its director, nicknamed the Bear, to sack him from his weekly radio talk. Although he carries on his main job as a lawyer, the sacking has a subtle effect, making him realise he is not as young and amusing as he likes to think he is.
Paul has a young friend at the radio station, an interviewer named Bernard, who has started to date Laura, Agnes's older sister. Both are thrilled because they are being oh-so-naughty (him dating an older woman, she going out with a toyboy).
Paul and Agnes have a grown-up daughter, Brigitte. She is spoilt. Paul manned the barricades in Paris in 1968 (well, for a few days), and for him the boy poet Rimbaud was part of a gestalt which included Che Guevara, Mao and Jean-Paul Sartre. He was against comfortable bourgeois lives. Now he is bewildered by the way his daughter is all in favour of comfortable bourgeois lives, and enjoys living one at her parents' expense.
One day, out of the blue, a stranger walks into Bernard's office and hands him a scroll of paper, a certificate declaring him a Compleat Ass, then walks out. Bernard is astonished. It's one of the few blocks or negatives he's encountered in a lifetime of easy success. He is so preoccupied with this fate that he begins to neglect Laura, who begins to suspect he has taken a mistress. (There are a few pages detailing how Laura thinks she 'knows' Bernard because she has given herself so completely to him; but in fact she doesn't know him at all: Kundera's, by now, stock take on human relationships.)
He begins to distance himself from Laura (they don't actually live together). She notices and becomes querulous. He begins to think of her as a nuisance. She follows him on one of his weekends away to write. He is angry. She is angry. She throws herself on him and they have one of those joyless Kundera couplings, both trying to outdo each other in their fury as they put each other through a humiliating roster of punishing positions.
Bernard announces he is going to Martinique for his annual getaway (nice lives these characters lead, don't they? They are members of the privileged haute bourgeoisie, another reason not to like this book.) And Laura agonises about whether to go, whether to precede him, whether to commit suicide so he finds her body in his holiday home. She drags Paul and Agnes into her agonising, and then phones them from Martinique, claiming to have found a gun and to be about to shoot herself, and generally exhausting everyone by her histrionics. Days later she returns to Paris and turns up in Paul and Agnes's apartment, leading to a furious argument between the sisters.
Hard to care.
Part Four – Homo sentimentalis (32 pages)
Kundera mixes up a great meringue of a disquisition about love and the soul and sentiment. He
invokes the story of Bettina's love for Goethe
how it was interpreted by three 20th century authors (Rilke, Romain Rolland and Eluard – each in favour of Bettina and against Goethe's apparent coolness [and each contemptuous of his fat peasant wife])
swoops from the troubadours of 12th century Provence to an analysis of the love affair at the heart of Dostoyevsky's novel, The Idiot, to interpretations of love scenes from Don Quixote
He splits hairs, and refines definitions, and makes learnèd references in a mighty impressive way, but this is the first sustained passage in all Kundera which I found boring and pointless.
He discusses the nature of sentimentality at length without, I felt, really clarifying it very much. He then reverts to the relationship with Bettina von Arnem and, in particular, to Romain Rolland's interpretation of a famous anecdote which Bettina recounted in her memoirs, but many scholars now think she made up.
One day Beethoven was visiting Goethe in Weimar and the two great men took a walk and they saw the Empress i.e. wife of the ruler of Weimar coming towards them with her entourage. Goethe stopped and ceremoniously swept off his hat and bowed. But Beethoven pulled his hat down harder over his head and continued walking, hands firmly behind his back.
This became a commonly repeated anecdote even though Bettina probably made it up. Kundera repeats it a number of times, and lays out various possible interpretations of its meaning.
I began to be irritated by the way Kundera repeatedly talks about European History as if it is a history of ideas and Great Art, as if the motor of history was Ideas like Romanticism or Sentiment. This just seems to me stupid. For me the important things about European history are its incessant wars which themselves derived from endless competition, and it was this ceaseless competition for power and one-up-manship which drove an unprecedented inventiveness in a) technology and engineering b) trade and economics, and which led directly to c) the conquest of foreign colonies and centuries of imperialism.
Kundera mentions none of this. Instead a made-up anecdote about two Great Men is meant to tell us about the nature of the European Soul.
I know this kind of focus, angle, approach appeals to a cohort of other writers, critics and readers, who think reality should be approached via stories and anecdotes about Great Writers and Artists. Maybe I thought so too, when I was young. But now I believe that it's not only not an adequate approach to the complexity of life and history, but – worse – that it runs the risk of obscuring truths about the world, deeper understanding about the world, rather than enlightening its readers. It helps to create and sustain the Happy Bubble of Literary Consensus, while the real world crashes and bangs around us, inexplicably.
Once again the section ends with a jokey chat between Goethe and Ernest Hemingway in heaven. Goethe says he's moved on now. He went to watch his Eternal trial and realises he doesn't care. He realises now that as soon as he died not only did he, as a person, cease to exist, but his personhood fled from his books. They just became books like all the other books, which don't contain his essence or anything like it.
Part Five – Chance (55 pages)
A chapter about the meaning of coincidences. In his Frenchified, endlessly theorising manner, Kundera suggests that there are five types of coincidence:
the mute coincidence
the poetic coincidence
the contrapuntal coincidence
the story-generating coincidence
the morbid coincidence
He discusses this with his companion, Professor Avenarius, an entirely fictional creation with whom he can have these kinds of mock-intellectual conversations. Now we learn that it was this Avenarius who marched into the office of Bernard the radio broadcaster and handed him the certificate declaring him a Compleat Ass.
Cut to Agnes: she wants to leave Paul and Paris and move back to Switzerland where she grew up. When her company open an office in Bern they offer her a job there and she leaps at the chance. In several passages scattered through this part, we see her thinking as she lies in bed in a Swiss hotel, reminiscing about her childhood, and about her last days with her dying Father – all taking place on this trip to Switzerland, before she gets into her car to drive back to Paris.
Meanwhile Kundera is enjoying a hearty meal (of roast duck) with the professor, at which he elaborates on his notion of the novel, namely that it should resist being able to be translated into other media – film, TV, cartoons. It should resist being reduced to one single line of events. That kind of novel is like whipping your characters down a narrow street towards one dramatic climax where the entire preceding text goes up in the flames of a 'resolution'. No, a novel should be more fragmented and digressive.
A novel shouldn't be like a bicycle race but a feast of many courses. (p.266)
Professor Avenarius shares with the narrator his night-time hobby. He goes jogging with a big carving knife and slices up the tyres of all the cars in his neighbourhood, doing so in a structured geometric way. He tried to interest an environmental group into organising a tyre-slashing commando but they booed him and drove off to protest the building of some nuclear power plant.
Then they discuss a troubling news item the narrator had heard on the radio. It concerned a teenage girl who attempted suicide by walking out of town and into the middle of a busy road and sitting down waiting to be squashed. Unfortunately, the radio explains, a number of cars swerved to avoid killing her and so crashed into the verge or ditch, killing and injuring numerous motorists.
Kundera enters sympathetically into the mind – or at least makes a systematic attempt to imagine the weak character, and the snubs and humiliations she's received, which lead the girl not to proactively jump off a high building or poison herself, but to want something else to make it all stop.
Anyway, having heard the radio account, now Kundera treats us to a vivid description of three cars screeching off the road to avoid hitting her, all crashing at speed, bursting into flames and filling with the screams of people burning to death.
Meanwhile back in Paris, Professor Avenarius tries to persuade Kundera to come tyre stabbing with him, but the author is tired (after their big, boozy dinner) and walks home. Avenarius is just about to attack yet another tyre when a woman walks round the corner, almost bumps into him, and starts screaming. A crowd gathers. Avenarius is arrested.
As he is taken away a dazed man emerges from an apartment block and, seeing the arrest, hands Avenarius his business card saying he's a lawyer, then goes over to the most recent car Avenarius has slashed and, seeing the shredded tyre, bursts into tears.
It is Paul. He's just had a phone call from a provincial hospital saying his wife is there, seriously injured. When he staggers downstairs to get into his car he is appalled to discover its tyres have been slashed (unbeknown to him, by the big paunchy man who's just been arrested and whose card he's just given him). He calls Bernard to beg for a lift, but in the event his grown-up daughter Brigitte turns up, and as soon as he's told her the news, they get back in her car and head off at top speed.
Agnes dies fifteen minutes before they get to the hospital.
Part Six – The Dial (64 pages)
After an unpromising start, this turns into the best thing in the book, worth reading almost by itself, as a short story or – given that this is Kundera – almost a parable in its smooth neatness.
It concerns the erotic life of a man who acquired the nickname 'Rubens' at school for his precocious ability at art.
The dial in question is the zodiac, for astrology, although not literally indicative of your life, is a metaphor for the way your life has a pattern, certain set themes, and you can't escape them. The theme is elaborated via the early erotic career of this young man, Rubens. After a promising start, his artistic career sputters out and so he decides to devote his life to the pursuit of women.
There follow pages of subtle distinctions, categorisations and paradoxes to do with sex, and the different phases of the erotic life:
the period of athletic muteness
the period of metaphors
the period of obscene truth
the period of Chinese whispers
And a lot of chatter about different types of love – true love, fake love, high love, low love, love itself, devotional love – which initially repelled me.
But these early passages are worth reading through, because Rubens, as he pursues his erotic career, devoting his life to what seems like a highly improbable sequence of sexual adventures with an endless sequence of willing women, begins to discover strange and troubling things about human nature.
As he grows older he realises he can't remember most of the hundreds and hundreds of couplings he has taken part in. Or remembers odd quirky details. He can't remember the most sensational of the escapades, but, for some reason, it's often the most plain with the most plain partners which haunt him. Why? It puzzles him.
Then, in Italy, visiting art galleries, he bumps into a woman he'd met way back, when she was just 17. He nicknames her the lute player on the spot, and, for years to come, whenever he's in Paris (her home city) they meet up, two or three times a year, and make love.
Once, they nearly have a ménage à trois but, at the last minute, he sends the other man, his best friend, away. But not before they have stood all three, before the cracked old wardrobe mirror, and he noticed the lute player's distant gaze, not seeing the scene in front of her, gazing into some remote infinity.
It is moments like that that haunt him, even as he notices his powers failing with other women. Ad as his powers decline, so does his interest. It becomes harder and harder, not to make love as such, but to care.
I thought it was a vivid insight when Rubens realises, after one particular failed encounter, that he has crossed a Rubicon and that, from now on, he will find his erotic fantasies only in the past.
When he was young he thought he had the whole world ahead of him, in chagrin at failing to make a career in art, he decided instead to 'live life to the full'. But now, as he ages, he realises, when he looks back over his sexual career, that he can hardly remember any of it. The 'fullness' to which he has devoted his life, turns out to be empty. Or, not quite empty, but a series of random snapshots and moments. It is not the fullness he expected.
He had become used to phoning the lute player every time he was visiting Paris, to make an illicit rendezvous. He knows she's married, it doesn't bother her or him (it never does in Kundera novels). One day she says she can't see him. She can't see him ever again. His puzzlement feels genuine because it's one of the first things in the book which isn't explained. She just says no. He tries to talk her round, he gets a little cross, she just says 'No' to meeting.
He finally accepts it and gets on with his life and with his several other women, and we are told about his increasingly problematic relations with them – especially a young lover who he just can't satisfy, no matter what he does. He can't read her. He has no idea whether she's satisfied or not by their sessions. He has no idea whether he's satisfied, he's just doing it because… because… well, why?
On a whim he phones the lute player, after years of silence. An unknown woman's voice replies. He asks where she is. Where is Agnes? And the woman replies that Agnes is dead. Rubens rings off in shock, but we are moved, as well. All this time the lute player was the Agnes who has been the lead protagonist through all the modern part of the story.
In the final pages Rubens rifles through all the memories he has of his time with her, from their meeting and dancing at some disco when they were 17, through to their chance re-encounter in Rome, and then their settled routine of adulterous afternoons in Paris hotels. And now he envisions her body being cremated, going up in flames except that in his dream of it, Agnes sits up amid the flames, and her look is the same one she had in the mirror of the hotel with him and his friend, staring off into the distance, penetrating some private infinity.
The story ends there, and is the best part of the novel, because, although still packed with rather tiresome ratiocination, it seemed to me to contain more of humanity, of 'the crooked timber of humanity', of the strange depths and unexpected shallownesses and unpredictability and puzzling obstinate difficulties, of life as most of us experience it. It still has many of the qualities of the fairy tale or fable, which most Kundera fiction has about it, a too-pat and just-so quality. But, for me at any rate, it also had real emotional and psychological depth.
Part Seven – The Celebration
A sort of epilogue. The narrator is sitting in his health club, high in some building, with a view over Paris, chatting to Dr Avenarius over a bottle of wine, when in walks Paul. It appears to be years later for Paul is now married to Laura, Agnes's sister. He is drunk. Kundera gives him a drunken philistine speech in which he says he never reads novels, he only reads biographies, and this is part of a conscious effort to overthrow the enormous aesthetic efforts of the Great Artists and break the symphonies down into bite-sized chunks which can be used in toilet paper ads, and the novels become merely replicas of their author's lives, which are far more interesting and gossipy to read about.
The narrator / Kundera is appalled. All this is probably displacement of the frustration he's feeling with his situation. His daughter, Brigitte, ran away when he married his dead wife's sister, Laura. But has recently returned, with a baby. Once again they are at permanent daggers drawn and Paul is caught in the middle. Avenarius and the narrator sympathise.
Paul eventually goes off, following his wife into the changing rooms. We are told that Avenarius, big fat Avenarius, is having an affair with Laura behind Paul's back. We learn that, on the night when he was arrested for apparently threatening a woman with a knife (when he was in fact slashing car tyres), Avenarius took Paul up on his offer to act as his lawyer, and that Paul got Avenarius acquitted.
It is typical of him that he was prepared to go to gaol as a rapist rather than to tell the truth about how he was really slashing people's car tyres that evening. (And we, the reader, get the irony, that, if he had told Paul he was the tyre slasher i.e. that it was on account of Avenarius slashing Paul's tyres that Paul missed his wife's death by fifteen minutes, that Paul might well have strangled him to death.)
Before he leaves, Paul demonstrates the arm gesture which first attracted him to Laura. It is the same gesture with which Kundera created the character of Agnes at the start of the book. The narrator tells us it is two years to the day since he saw the middle-aged woman swimmer make that gesture and began writing the novel and now it is finished.
I found it difficult to review the Unbearable Lightness of Being because it felt so overflowing with ideas that it was impossible to capture them all, to pin them all down – and it combined this fizzing emporium of ideas with a highly charged and emotional narrative, and with plausible and, by the end, highly sympathetic characters.
I felt the exact opposite with Immortality.
There are two strands, one set in the present concerning the trivial characters of Laura and Bernard, Paul and Agnes, and their daughter Brigitte, and I found it impossible to care very much about these spoilt French bourgeois.
The other strand concerns Goethe and the misleading image of him created for posterity by his stalker-admirer, Bettina von Arnem. I found the biographical facts about Goethe mildly interesting, but the level of attention paid to the precise ways in which Bettina distorted the record, and then how her later admirers defended her at the great man's expense, increasingly difficult to care about.
Part of the problem is the choice of Goethe as centrepiece. Generations of critics have pointed out that Goethe represents a great blind spot in English culture; he is a vast influence on the continent and yet he has never made much impression over here. His poetry doesn't translate very well, if at all, and all the scientific explorations he made – into early chemistry, astronomy, the theory of light – were carried out much more definitively by British scientists. So at the centre of the novel is a detailed study of a key memoir which shaped the image of a great European cultural reference point about whom we in England know little and care less.
A novel about a gaggle of spoilt, upper-middle-class French, and a German poet no-one reads. Put like this, you can see why Immortality is a disappointment compared to its predecessors.
Another way of putting it is that the political and psychological intensity of Laughter & Forgetting and Unbearable Lightness made those books feel compelling and important. Somehow, this book, although it uses all the same techniques – the lecturing narrator, with his stylish insights and digressions – the invocation of Great Names from European Culture – its thoughts about the Contemporary World – somehow this novel never manages to get much beyond the merely interesting.
Put yet another way, it boils down to its final scene: Rarefied, very clever, highly literate, obsessed with sex, and high above the crowds whose mass culture they hate and despise, two old men ramble on about Goethe and literary reputations and adultery, making huge and sweeping generalisations about European History and European Society and the Romantic Era and a thousand other subjects, while being completely ignored by the world around them. When push comes to shove, I find the multifarious ever-changing world round them much more interesting than the rarefied and self-satisfied characters in this novel.
Immortality by Milan Kundera was first published in the English translation by Peter Kussi by Faber and Faber in 1991. All references are to the 1992 Faber paperback edition.
Immortality on Amazon
Milan Kundera's books
1967 The Joke
1969 Life Is Elsewhere
1969 Laughable Loves (short stories)
1972 The Farewell Party
1978 The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
1984 The Unbearable Lightness of Being
1986 The Art of the Novel (essays)
1990 Immortality
1995 Slowness
1998 Identity
2000 Ignorance
2014 The Festival of Insignificance
by Simon on September 3, 2019 • Permalink
Posted in Books, Comedy, communism, Novel, philosophy, politics
Tagged 1990, Agnes, Beethoven, Bettina von Arnem, Bettina von Arnim, Biography, communism, Czechoslovakia, Don Quixote, Dostoyevsky, Dvořák, Ernest Hemingway, Goethe, Helena Zemanek, history, Homo sentimentalis, imagologues, Imagology, Immortality, Janáček, literature, ménage à trios, Milan Kundera, Napoleon, novel, Paul Éluard, politics, Professor Avenarius, Rainer Maria Rilke, Romain Rolland, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, The Joke, the Prague Spring, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Posted by Simon on September 3, 2019
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/09/03/immortality-milan-kundera/
The Rebel by Albert Camus (1951)
The logic of the rebel is to want to serve justice so as not to add to the injustice of the human condition, to insist on plain language so as not to increase the universal falsehood, and to wager, in spite of human misery, for happiness. (p.248)
Camus was already one of the leading writers of his day when he published his long philosophical essay, The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt, in 1951. Many critics consider it his best and most important book. At 270 pages in this Penguin translation, The Rebel is well over twice the length of his previous essay, The Myth of Sisyphus. It is a very long recapitulation of the history of political violence from the French Revolution to Stalin's show trials, designed to refute arguments for revolutionary violence or state terror, and to affirm positive, humanistic values.
But because it comes out of the French tradition it takes a long time to do all this, in sentences often convoluted with philosophical attitudinising and verbal paradox. It gives a lot more credence and leeway to the exponents of political violence than you'd expect – as the French left-wing tradition generally does.
Above all, it is framed in terms of Camus's own rather personal 'philosophy' or vision or worldview of the Absurd. It attempts – despite what often seem like long detours into the works of Hegel or the meaning of the contemporary novel – to create one continuous logical argument which starts in Camus's vision of the Absurd and ends with an (admittedly embattled) affirmation of humanism.
The Rebel's place in Camus's works
One of the introductions to Camus explains that while still in his twenties, he developed a Grand Plan for his writing career. He would consecutively address major topics or issues of the day – and depict each one via the differing formats of a novel, an essay and a play.
The first topic was his early philosophy of the Absurd, his semi-nihilistic belief in the absurdity of human existence which he developed during the late 1930s. The resulting 'cycle of the Absurd', the works which define and explore all its implications, are the essay The Myth of Sisyphus, the play Caligula and the novel The Outsider, all written about 1940.
10 years later, in his introduction to The Rebel, Camus is able to look back and describe The Myth of Sisyphus as being very much a response to its time, which he calls the 'Age of Negation'. Not being a historian he doesn't give precise dates but is presumably referring to the period between the wars with its pessimistic and even nihilistic political and philosophical culture – Spengler, Heidegger and so on. For Camus the central question of this period of 'humiliated thought' was whether life was worth living at all in a 'godless universe', epitomised in the issue of suicide. If there is no God, and life is meaningless, why go on? This is the central subject of the Myth of Sisyphus.
At the start of The Rebel, Camus says that now, in 1951, he and his readers are living in a new era, the post-Second World War era which he describes as 'the Age of Ideologies', an era which has seen the uprooting, enslavement and murder of some seventy million human beings, an era of:
slave camps under the flag of freedom, massacres justified by philanthropy or by a taste for the superhuman… (p.12)
Things have moved on from worrying about suicide. Now the central question of the day is whether we – whether anyone – has the right to murder their opponents. Is the widespread culture of political murder at all justified – because it is certainly the political culture of Europe.
Every dawn, masked assassins slip into some cell: murder is the problem today. (p.12)
Why murder?
How does that follow? Why is murder, and specifically political murder, worth writing a 270-page long essay?
Because in 1951 many leading intellectuals of the day, and organised workers' parties all across Europe, saw the communist party as the only way out of the dead-end of failed capitalism, the only alternative to the bankrupt bourgeois values which had characterised the 1930s and which had been shattered to pieces during the unspeakable catastrophe of the world war.
Many intellectuals and a huge number of the working class joined the communist party and voted communist despite knowing that the revolution it calls for entails violence, suffering and death – in short, for political murder. Political murder is at the core of the communist revolution which so many of Camus's contemporaries were calling for – so it really was a central and very pressing question: Can political murder ever be justified?
Camus's answer is 'No'. He reaches this conclusion through two routes: a purely philosophical argument about the nature of human existence, and via his long historical review which is designed to bring out the nihilism and murderous tendencies of all totalising revolutions, which he opposes to his own person concept of revolt or rebellion.
1. The philosophy of the Absurd validates all human life
To take the philosophical argument first, Camus sets out to make a philosophical case against political murder and for the sanctity of human life. To follow it we have to go back to his reflections on suicide, which he recaps early in The Rebel.
Camus's notion of 'the Absurd' – that the universe is blankly indifferent to our longing for meaning and consolation – logically requires two components: the subjectivity which wishes for meaning, and the universe which is indifferent to it. Like two plus two makes four, both parts must be present for the equation to exist.
1. Now, to commit suicide would be irrational because it would remove part of the Absurd equation.
The final conclusion of absurdist reasoning is, in fact, the repudiation of suicide and the acceptance of the desperate encounter between human inquiry and the silence of the universe. Suicide would mean the end of this encounter, and absurdist reasoning considers that it could not consent to this without negating its own premises.
To say that life is absurd – one must first be alive.
Absurd reasoning thus recognises life, human life, as an irreplaceable component of the Absurd equation. Camus's philosophy of the Absurd requires human life for it to exist. Human life is an irreducible requirement of Absurdity. You have to fully accept and buy into this premise to follow what comes next.
2. Because the moment it recognises this basic premise, Absurd reasoning also recognises the importance of all human life.
The moment life is recognised as a necessary good, it becomes so for all men…
Absurd reasoning validates all human lives.
3. Then Camus takes a big leap –
Murder and suicide are the same thing; one must accept them both or reject them both. (p.14)
His Absurd philosophy of revolt embraces all life. He is vehemently opposed to nihilistic thought because it not only tempts people to suicide – but by denying the importance of life it simultaneously tempts people to murder. If life has absolutely no meaning, not only suicide is possible, but murder, too.
You can see what he's trying to do here – build the validation of all human life up from the pit of despair.
Going down into the depths of psychological anguish, into the blackest pit of suicidal misery, Camus grapples with the apparent 'solution' of suicide and rejects it – because suicide destroys the premise of the worldview which drove you to suicide in the first place. Committing suicide because of your sense of the Absurd would destroy the Absurd. It would be logically self-contradictory. And by recognising that life, human existence, is a vital component of the philosophy of the Absurd, you recognise that value for everyone – you acknowledge that all human life is vital.
And if you reject suicide – one form of the denial of life – you must also reject its fellow, its partner, its equal in denying the value of life. You must reject any form of murder.
(In the kind of tangential insight with which the book abounds, Camus points out that history provides many examples of the intimate link between suicide and mass murder. The example fresh in everyone's minds in the post-war era was the way the mass murder of the Nazis culminated in the mass suicide of the Nazi leadership, huddled in their bunker, passing out the cyanide pills. Suicide and murder both stem from a profound negation of all human values. In the German language the connection is more obvious – the word for suicide is Selbstmord, literally meaning 'self-murder'. But Camus's insight also made me think of all those people in our time who go on a killing spree at their local high school or shopping mall before turning their guns on themselves. Or the men who kill their wives and children and then themselves. Yes, many suicides may be solitary acts, but a certain number do seem to involve the nihilist deciding that they will – that they must – take out as many other people as possible before killing themselves.)
If Camus's argument is a little hard to follow I think it's because it is in many places more willed than really argued or thoroughly proved. But by repeating it again and again Camus wants to make it so, and it was only by reading it again and again, in numerous reformulations, that I began to accede to its emotional logic.
To repeat: The entire book is devoted to showing that from the ruins of a post-theological waste land, bereft of God or any transcendental source of moral values, Camus's philosophy of the Absurd offers a reasoned, logical set of steps to help people affirm the value of their own lives – and then of everyone's lives – and then to create a morality based on self-knowledge and a realistic assessment of the limits of human freedom and power.
2. A historical review of revolutionary nihilism
This philosophical argument is most clearly spelled out in the book's first 20 pages (though he then invokes it repeatedly at key points throughout the text).
The next 250 pages are mostly devoted to a historical account designed to show how the revolutionary absolutism which stems from the Enlightenment – by overthrowing God and by claiming no limits to abstract ideas of human freedom, human virtue, human achievement or whatever – unwittingly undermine the practical freedoms of real flesh and blood people in the here and now. Camus goes back to the 18th century to examine the thought of a succession of European writers – thinkers as diverse as Hegel, Dostoyevsky or Nietzsche – having dispensed with God, struggled to identify an alternative source of 'values', and to define the nature of man's freedom.
Camus's review shows how, for thinker after thinker, this meant freedom from all restraints. But he shows how freedom from all restraints, a purely abstract and total concept of human freedom, tends to lead to freedom from respecting other people's freedom. Ignoring the autonomy or rights of other people. It ends in tyranny.
Thus the Marquis de Sade takes the theory of personal sexual freedom to the limits and beyond, but discovers that his untamed appetites require an infinite number of men to torture and kill and women to use and destroy.
Similarly, Camus shows how the revolutionary Virtue of Saint-Just, the outspoken apologist for the French Revolutionary Terror, defeats itself. The Jacobins demanded an impossible level of 'revolutionary' purity from the people but instead found weakness and treachery everywhere, and was led to an downward spiral of violence, guillotining criminals and counter-revolutionaries by the cartload, in what became known as The Terror, until the people – or at least their political representatives – overthrew the Government of the Virtuous in the name of government of the practical – and the exponents of state execution – Saint-Just, Robespierre and their colleagues – were themselves executed by the unforgiving state they had created.
150 years later the Bolsheviks asserted that the proletariat must be led to freedom by a communist party, stripped of any sentimentality or bourgeois morality, which reserves the right to punish anyone hesitating or questioning its right to rule and lead humanity to its promised utopia. By identifying itself with the unstoppable force of History, the Party claims total control of human reality. Anyone questioning it must, of course, be eliminated.
And so his historical survey shows that:
All modern revolutions have ended in a reinforcement of the power of the State. 1789 brings Napoleon; 1848, Napoleon III; 1917, Stalin; the Italian disturbances of the twenties, Mussolini; the Weimar Republic, Hitler. (p.146)
The same logic which drives Stalinism, also drove Hitlerism – it is the attempt to place every single individual in a society under the control of one totalising value (History, the proletariat, the Volk, whatever).
The book really lifts off when it gives a long explanation of the preposterous totalising ambitions of the German philosopher Hegel – and then takes this criticism on into a devastating critique of Karl Marx and the Communist Parties he inspired.
This anti-Marx section is full of all sorts of insights and angles – I was particularly struck by the way Camus claims that lots of Marx's insights were the common currency of his time: the economic analysis of capitalism had already been established by the bourgeois economist Ricardo; the appalling conditions of the industrial proletariat were copied from British Government reports; a blind belief in the power of an ever-improving science and technology to transform humanity was a truism among bourgeois propagandists of his day.
For Camus, Marx's great failure was his vagueness, his changing opinions, his contradictory statements about the single most important element of his vast political philosophy – just how and when the dictatorship of the proletariat would end and the utopia of the classless society begin.
The lack of any definition on this crucial point in effect gives carte blanche to the communist party which leads the 'revolution' to rule forever. Also since – as he shows – almost all revolutionary regimes provoke or are subject to war (the French Revolutionary regime declared war on all the kings f Europe, the Commune of 1870 only occurred because of the Franco-Prussian War, the Russian Revolutionaries called for world revolution), they almost inevitably rule under the embattled conditions of wartime, which justify them in taking the most drastic security measures necessary. Forever.
Camus is echoing George Orwell's vision of the totalitarian party of the future with its jackboot crushing a human face. Forever.
3. Camus opposes tyrannical revolution with his own idea of limited rebellion
Is there an alternative? Yes. For as the book progresses, in each of the detailed analyses of European thinkers, Camus distinguishes between the post-theological revolution, in the name of some Absolute Value, like Virtue or History or Das Volk, which is always bound to fail and end in repression – and his own, much more personal notion of revolt or rebellion against man's fate, against the human condition and so on but which – crucially – respects the limits of the humanly possible.
If rebellion could found a philosophy it would be a philosophy of limits, of calculated ignorance, and of risk. (p.253)
Rebellion, by virtue of the way Camus has defined it, must acknowledge its limits and respect the freedom of others. Rebellion cannot give itself to any totalising ideology because it is a permanent tension, a permanent opposition to human fate and destiny, which also opposes all impositions on the human spirit.
Absolute revolution supposes the absolute malleability of human nature and its possible reduction to the condition of a historical force. But rebellion, in man, is the refusal to be treated as an object and to be reduced to simple historical terms. It is the affirmation of a nature common to all men, which eludes the world of power. History, undoubtedly, is one of the limits of man's experience; in this sense the revolutionaries are right. But man, by rebelling, imposes in his turn a limit to history, and at this limit the promise of a value is born. It is the birth of this value that the Caesarian [i.e. communist] revolution implacably combats today because it presages its final defeat and the obligation to renounce its principles. The fate of the world is not being played out at present, as it seemed it would be, in the struggle between bourgeois production and revolutionary production; their end results will be the same. It is being played out between the forces of rebellion and those of the Caesarian revolution. The triumphant revolution must prove by means of its police, its trials, and its excommunications that there is no such thing as human nature. Humiliated rebellion, by its contradictions, its sufferings, its continuous defeats, and its inexhaustible pride, must give its content of hope and suffering to this nature. (p.216)
There are lots of ways of parsing this fundamental dichotomy (and Camus works through them with fascinating and sometimes bewildering thoroughness).
One key aspect, mentioned in the excerpt above, is that the totalitarians believe there is no such thing as human nature – that human beings are infinitely malleable and so can be turned into Model Workers (which Camus interprets as Unquestioning Slaves). By contrast, Camus asserts that there is such a thing as human nature and that at its core is revolt, revolt against the apparent futility of human destiny, against the apparent meaningless of life in a godless universe, revolt in favour of life.
(You can see how this would have alienated Camus's 'frenemy', Jean-Paul Sartre, whose existentialism is based on exactly the opposite premise – that there is no human nature and that, as a result, everyone is 'condemned' to absolute freedom and that we all create ourselves with our free choices. We cannot blame any pre-existing human nature for limiting our decisions: our decisions are ours and ours alone to justify and bear.)
Camus continues that this personal revolt against death translates into the social value of rebellion, rebellion against any one totalising ideology which is imposed on it, and – consistent with its origin in the Absurd – rebellion against death in all its forms. Rebellion into life, if you like.
Another way of thinking about it is to address that old chestnut: Do the ends (a communist utopia in some remote future) justify the means (terrorising society in the here and now)?
As you might expect by now, Camus's answer is a resolute No. He goes to great lengths in the long sections on Hegel and then Marx to demonstrate that both these German thinkers take the Absolute Value formerly attributed to Christian theology and reassign it to new entities: to the progress of the World Spirit in Hegel, or to Marx's concept of History conceived of as an unstoppable machine moving through successive stages of social relationships up until the advent of capitalist society which will itself, with unstoppable inevitability, give rise to the revolution, the triumph of the proletariat and the End of History coinciding with Paradise for All.
The mistake of both of them, according to Camus, is to preserve the Totalising and Transcendent Value derived from Christianity and attribute it to utterly abstract, inhuman Ideas. With hideous inevitability, you end up sacrificing real people to an unreal inhuman Idea, an Idea (the end of history) which can never be attained because it isn't real. This is another way of saying that communist repression would be, potentially, forever, because it is based on working towards an impossible Ideal which will never arrive.
Instead, argues Camus, you must start from a realistic assessment of fragile, limited, actual human nature which – for him – has at its irreducible core, this one notion, this movement, this gesture, this impulse, to revolt, to rebel against death in favour of life, to cling on, to survive, to battle and overcome.
A realistic political programme can only be based on this vision of mediating between countless conflicting wills. (Though he doesn't say it explicitly, this is obviously a philosophical underpinning for the idea of democracy).
Back to ends and means. Camus very neatly says the question isn't, 'Does the end justify the means?' Given that there is in fact no end – there is no 'end of history', no final revolution, no paradise and no utopia – the real question is, 'Do the means justify the end?'
In other words, you should judge the (purely notional and maybe unattainable) outcomes of a political system by its effects here and now. In which case, the permanent terror state and political murder practiced by all the communist regimes is quite clearly the exact opposite of the freedom, peace, security and justice which they preach. Judged by their means – by the methods they are using, the values they are putting in practice in the here and now – whatever 'end' they claim to be holding on for cannot possibly be justified.
When the end is absolute, historically speaking, and when it is believed certain of realization, it is possible to go so far as to sacrifice others. When it is not, only oneself can be sacrificed, in the hazards of a struggle for the common dignity of man. Does the end justify the means? That is possible. But what will justify the end? To that question, which historical thought [communist theory] leaves pending, rebellion [Camus's philosophy] replies: the means.
Reversing the usual order, Camus says the end itself – if deprived of some kind of supernatural underpinning, if deprived of the German ideological conviction that the end is the guaranteed moment when History comes to an end in the triumph of the World Spirit (Hegel) or the classless society (Marx) – if there is never in fact going to be an end — then all you are left with is the means. And if the means – the entire methodology of political murder and state terrorism – are rotten, then so are the ends.
He doesn't say this but it occurs to me that the means are the ends, because there are no ends. History will never 'end'. There will be no classless society or reign of the Just. It'll just carry on in the same kind of way. Meanwhile, all we have is the means. The means is how we will be judged.
Conclusion of Camus's argument against political murder
Camus's philosophy of the Absurd insists on the value of human life. The individual's revolt against the absurdity of the human condition transfers, on a social level, into men's general rebellion against nihilistic systems of thought and against the vicious oppression which follows in their train.
History testifies, in fact, to the irreducible human spirit of rebellion throughout the ages.
But where this rebellion has turned into, or been commandeered by, the totalising and nihilistic values of revolution, it always ends in disaster – in war, state terror, torture and mass murder – in repressive regimes worse than the ones the revolutionaries set out to overthrow.
The philosophy of the Absurd – and the act of rebellion – by their very nature are against murder and political murder. They are not only for human life, they logically require human life to exist and to be respected.
Thus, via both his philosophical argument and his long review of European history, Camus hopes to demonstrate that human nature, and human values, will always revolt against the totalising oppression – and political terrorism – entailed by the inhuman absolutism of ideologically-driven 'revolution'.
Although it begins as an ostensible investigation of the problem of political murder, this is where The Rebel ends up – as an impassioned defense of the fundamental human act of revolt against individual destiny and against social oppression. And this explains and justifies the title – L'Homme révolté.
(It's a shame the force and power of the phrase L'Homme révolté is not really captured in the English translation of The Rebel. The literal translation of 'The Revolted Man' means something quite different. Revolutionary Man is the extreme opposite of what is intended, since the values of 'revolution' are portrayed throughout the book as the ultimate betrayal of humanity. Some editions of the book have a sub-title, Man in Revolt, which seems better to me than the nominal title.)
Earning the right
From our Anglo-Saxon point of view, it takes Camus 270 pages to arrive at a version of liberal humanism with a respect for universal human rights which many other people (for example, most Americans) never questioned to begin with.
So where's the achievement?
Well, what made the book so important in its time was that it started out from absolutely nothing, from a crushing sense of the absurd meaninglessness of life – from the place of profound depression and moral devastation which afflicted many millions of Europeans after the horrors of the Second World War – and also takes account of the very real threat of the communist party, not only in Soviet-occupied Eastern Europe but in the West, in Italy and France in particular, imposing its rule by terror and political violence – it starts in a stricken and embattled place which is difficult for British and American readers to really appreciate — and then it claws its way on a long, difficult odyssey upwards, through the long litany of betrayal by European thinkers and revolutionaries, before finally arriving at these hard-won conclusions.
We believe that the truth of this age can be found only by living through the drama of it to the very end. If the epoch has suffered from nihilism, we cannot remain ignorant of nihilism and still achieve the moral code we need. No, everything is not summed up in negation and absurdity. We know this. But we must first posit negation and absurdity because they are what our generation has encountered and what we must take into account. (Resistance, Rebellion and Death, page 59)
The Rebel isn't complacent. It earns its arrival at a morality of common decency. It has worked its passage.
Thus, although many readers may have fallen asleep during the detailed analyses of de Sade or Dostoyevsky, of the Russian Nihilists or Hegel's theory of the Master and Slave – if they managed to make it to the end of the book they would be aware that they had been on a long journey across 200 years of nihilistic thought – but a journey of hope, a journey which assured them that common decency can be justified and established in the godless universe of the Absurd, in the post-war rubble, amid the clash of homicidal ideologies.
And so, despite its longueurs and its frequently impenetrable phraseology, The Rebel is a really moving and stirring call to human dignity and morality in a world seemingly hell-bent on destroying both.
Helen's Exile
It is useful to read alongside The Rebel the essay Helen's Exile, which is included in the Penguin edition of The Myth of Sisyphus. Written in 1948, Helen's Exile gives a much pithier version of the central idea of The Rebel but starting from a different place, starting from a consideration of ancient Greek culture.
Camus points out that central to Greek thought was the idea of human limits: the Greek myths and legends are packed with cautionary tales of people who ignore or overstep these human limitations and are savagely punished for their hubris.
It is this self-knowledge of the Greeks, of the necessity of limiting our wishes, our freedoms and our actions in line with the recognised limits of human nature – contrary to the totalising tendency of modern ideologies which assert that human nature is a blank sheet to be written on at will by revolutionary dictators – which Camus thinks we have lost and must regain.
Admission of ignorance, rejection of fanaticism, the limits of the world and of man, the beloved face, and finally beauty – this is where we shall be on the side of the Greeks.
Discussion – a fragile argument
The entire argument, although it ranges widely over European philosophy and art of the last 200 years, is framed within the constraints of Camus's own peculiar and very narrow theory of the Absurd. The crucial logic, the key explanation, is all dealt with in the first twenty pages or so:
The Absurd point of view logically leads to the rejection of suicide, because suicide negates the Absurd equation. Since suicide and murder are two sides of the same coin, rejection of suicide means rejection of murder. This rejection of suicide/murder is the bedrock of man's revolt against the Absurd condition of life. And it is not only a NO to the godless universe but implies some kind of positive value in favour of which one is revolting/rebelling. Because as soon as one rebels against the Absurd condition – rejects suicide/murder and chooses life – one affirms the value of all human life.
Thus: Man's Revolt against suicide/death is an affirmation of all human life everywhere.
And this revolt which is at the core of man's being can never acquiesce in totalising revolutions which practice political murder in the name of abstract ideologies which claim to be able to erase and rewrite human nature. Human nature will always rebel.
Out of the depths of the Absurd comes an irrefutable affirmation of human life and a vehement rejection of any theory which denies it.
Good. Fine.
But all this is built on the idea that you accept Camus's highly specific and, in the end, highly personal definitions of 'the Absurd' and of 'Revolt'; and that you can follow the 'logic' of the arguments he extracts from them.
a) It's unlikely that many, if any, of his readers really genuinely accept his very specific premises.
b) Every time I've reread and summarised the key passages in the book I've been very aware that several steps in the argument are willed rather than convincingly argued.
Possibly that's why he made the book so long – because he hoped that by reiterating and rephrasing his claims, in the detailed analyses of a succession of great writers and of historical events, he would achieve by sheer repetition what he was uneasily aware was logically very fragile if stated clearly and briefly.
The sheer weight of text, its length, its numerous repetitions, and the repeated rephrasings of his humanist conclusions certainly do make for a stirring and inspiring read.
But beneath all the rhetoric, the philosophical analyses and the literary criticism, the fundamental, founding idea that suicide must be rejected because it negates one half of the Absurd equation (living human + indifferent universe = the Absurd), that murder is the same as suicide and so must similarly be rejected because it is illogical for a believer in the philosophy of the Absurd (and in 'rebellion') to abolish a key ground of their beliefs — these form an abstract, academic and very fragile basis on which to base an entire worldview and a complete political morality.
Although like-minded liberals warmly welcomed this elaborate endorsement of their views, the powerful mouthpieces of the French communist party, as well as many professional philosophers and intellectuals, came down on it like a ton of bricks. This was mostly because the book amounts to a sustained attack on communism and most French intellectuals of the time flirted with or became communists. But they were also able to focus their attacks on the fragility of its 'philosophising'.
Camus had hoped to create a philosophical argument strong enough to lift Europe out of its despair; but the unrelentingly negative reactions to the book from the French intellectual élite, and their demolition of his philosophical arguments, plunged Camus into a personal depression. He never again tried to write a 'philosophical' work.
Only a few years later, in 1954, the Algerian War of Independence broke out and Camus found the well-spring of his creativity – his love for the harsh sensual beauty of his homeland – threatened in a new and unexpected way. The oppressed 'natives' of his homeland were enacting his narrative of revolt in a way he had completely missed from his long analysis of the contemporary political scene.
So, while the Paris intellectuals attacked his intellectual shortcomings, the Algerian revolutionaries undermined the basis of his creative vision: Camus was embattled from all sides. In the circumstances it is amazing that he managed to go on writing, creating the foggy allegory of The Fall and then the suite of passionate short stories collected in Exile and the Kingdom, as well as returning to his first love, the theatre, where passion and feeling are more important than clarity or logic.
Thus, amid very difficult political and personal circumstances, Camus did his best to explain and defend human freedom and dignity. It feels like a heroic achievement.
At the very end of The Rebel Camus's argumentation gives way to the high poetic lyricism, to the sensuous imagery of fierce Mediterranean sunlight and the warm blue sea which are always lurking just beneath the surface of his writing. And to ancient Greece, where men knew the limits of themselves and their societies, and so were genuinely free.
At this meridian of thought, the rebel thus rejects divinity in order to share in the struggles and destiny of all men. We shall choose Ithaca, the faithful land, frugal and audacious thought, lucid action, and the generosity of the man who understands. In the light, the earth remains our first and our last love. Our brothers are breathing under the same sky as we; justice is a living thing. Now is born that strange joy which helps one live and die, and which we shall never again postpone to a later time. On the sorrowing earth it is the unresting thorn, the bitter brew, the harsh wind off the sea, the old and the new dawn. With this joy, through long struggle, we shall remake the soul of our time… (p.270)
(Amusingly, Conor Cruise O'Brien chooses just this quote as an example of 'Camus's most lamentable Mediterranean-solar-myth vein' [Camus: Modern Masters p.56].)
L'Homme révolté by Albert Camus was published in France in 1951. This translation by Anthony Bower was published by Hamish Hamilton in 1953. All quotes & references are to the 1971 Penguin paperback edition.
The Rebel on Amazon
The Rebel online
The Rebel Wikipedia article
Reviews of other Camus books
L'Étranger (The Outsider) (1942)
Le Mythe de Sisyphe (The Myth of Sisyphus ) (1942)
Essays from The Myth of Sisyphus
Le Malentendu (The Misunderstanding, or Cross Purpose) (1944)
La Peste (The Plague) (1947)
Camus's style in The Plague
Les Justes (The Just Assassins) (1949)
L'Homme révolté (The Rebel) (1951)
La Chute (The Fall) (1956)
L'exil et le royaume (Exile and the Kingdom) (1957)
Resistance, Rebellion, and Death (1961)
Camus by Conor Cruise O'Brien (1970)
Edward Said on Albert Camus (1994)
Reviews of books by Jean-Paul Sartre
The Age of Reason (1945)
The Reprieve (1945)
Existentialism is a Humanism (1945)
Iron In The Soul (1949)
The Last Chance (1)
The Algerian war of independence
A Savage War of Peace by Alistair Horne (1977)
by Simon on September 25, 2017 • Permalink
Posted in Books, Essays, European History, France, French literature, philosophy, politics
Tagged 1951, Albert Camus, communism, Dostoyevsky, French Revolution, Hegel, history, Marquis de Sade, Marx, philosophy, politics, revolution, Saint-Just, The Rebel
Posted by Simon on September 25, 2017
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2017/09/25/the-rebel-albert-camus/
Cross Purpose by Albert Camus (1943)
I can't bear to hear you talking like that, about crime and punishment… (p.105)
[Martha to her mother, Act 3, Le Malentendu]
Apparently, Camus heard the story this play is based on while on a holiday in Czechoslovakia in 1936:
When his father dies a young man, Jan,leaves home to seek his fortune. Years later he returns a rich man determined to surprise his old mother and grown-up sister, Martha, and asks to stay at their wayside inn without telling them who he is (he is so changed in appearance that they don't recognise him). Little does he know that in the intervening years his mother (reluctantly) and sister (enthusiastically) have adopted the habit of murdering rich travellers who stay with them. Despite umpteen moments when he could have told them who he is, the son continues to conceal his identity and so the women murder him (giving him a sleeping draught in his evening tea, then dumping his comatose body in the river). The next morning, while going through his papers, they discover the truth – that he is their son/brother.
It has the feeling of a folk story, with the grim bitterness of folk wisdom. It certainly makes for a very taut if characteristically diagrammatic play.
In tune with the neo-classicising tendencies of between-the-war France (think the neoclassical works of Cocteau, Stravinsky, Picasso), Camus tries to give the language the clarity and depth of classical tragedy. The more abstract the action, the more allegorical the story becomes, capable of numerous interpretations. The most obvious interpretation is to see it as a demonstration of the 'Absurdity' of the world, and the preposterous vanity of human wishes.
Jan's wife, Maria, has accompanied her husband on his pilgrimage back to his old home and begs him to reveal who he is, her feminine intuition (and the the genre of tragedy) giving her a premonition that something bad will come of keeping silent. But Jan refuses, he wants to get to know his mother and sister again as they naturally are, before revealing his identity, and – after some feverish dialogue – he sends Maria away before checking into the inn.
Above and beyond the schematic nature of the plot, Camus gives the play a kind of structural symmetry by having the daughter of the house, Martha, and the wife, Maria, mirror each other. Martha is motivated to murder rich men in order to fulfil her dream of being able to leave the rainy country behind and go and live in the hot south by the blue sea. Placed in the diagram opposite her is the young man's wife, Maria. Martha, in her dialogue with Jan, paints rhapsodic pictures of the hot country by the blue sea where they live and which they have left behind on this fool's errand – so that Jan can carry out what he thinks of as his duty, and share his money with his mother and sister.
One aspires to travel to – the other has come on pilgrimage from – the unnamed hot country.
When Martha reads the passport which reveals that she has just murdered her brother, she doesn't go wailing hysterical but stands numb. She hands it to her mother who breaks down and vows to kill herself. Martha doesn't stop her mother as she exits the stage to go and throw herself in the self-same river where they disposed of her son's body.
Then Maria enters asking where her husband is. There is absolutely no shred of psychology or any human touch in the way Camus has Martha tell Maria point blank: 'He's dead. We murdered him.' She sounds like a robot, and the news gives rise to an entirely predictable outbreak of weeping and wailing on the part of Maria. But this doesn't result in what you could call any believably human behaviour (like Maria attacking Martha, maybe, or smashing up a few things).
Instead, the pair remain more or less fixed in place and, through tears of anguish, discuss the philosophical issues this dreadful misunderstanding has raised. Well, shout about the philosophical issues.
Le Malentendu confirms the sense I've been developing that Camus's over-riding concern is more about Justice, about the contrast between divine and human Justice, the (im)possibility of Justice in a godless universe – than about absurdist existentialism as such.
As in Caligula the terminology of crime and punishment dominate the characters' dialogue – after all the entire play centres (as does his famous novel, The Outsider) on a murder. It is no accident that Dostoyevsky figures in both The Myth of Sisyphus and The Rebel, nor that Camus's last work was a labour of love converting Dostoyevsky's novel The Devils into an elaborate stage production. The more of Camus I read, the more I realise that crime and punishment seen in are his central concerns.
But they are crime and punishment seen, as in Dostoyevsky, from a religious point of view. Cross Purpose tends to confirm my sense for the centrality of Catholic religion in Camus. On the last page the two women, Martha and her opposite number Maria, reach a crescendo of hysteria, Martha (the murdering sister) yelling at Maria that love is futile and life is pointless, we all end up in the wet mud of the grave eaten by worms:
What do they serve, those blind impulses that surge up in us, the yearnings that rack our souls? Why cry out for the sea, or love? What futility! Your husband knows now what the answer is: that charnel house where in the end we shall lie huddled together, side by side. (p.114)
And she yells in contempt at Maria to pray to her useless God. But despite this atheist harangue, pray to God is just what Maria proceeds to do in the final gesture of the play:
Oh God, I cannot live in this desert! It is on you that I must call, and I shall find the words to say. [She sinks on her knees.] I place myself in your hands. Have pity, turn towards me. Hear me and raise me from the dust, oh Heavenly Father! Have pity on those who love each other and are parted. (p.115)
'Ayez pitié de moi,' is the cry at the end of Racine's searing tragedy, Andromache, but Racine's characters believed in God. Here the very idea of God, or calling on him, is heavily mocked because Maria's agonised prayer is, apparently, answered by the old serving man. This figure has been absolutely mute throughout the play, shuffling here and there in silence to tidy up the dishes and so on. Now, as Maria, stricken, on her knees, begs for mercy, the door opens and the old man comes in and -for the first time – speaks:
THE OLD MANSERVANT [in a clear, firm tone]: What's all this noise? Did you call me?
MARIA [gazing at him]: Oh!… I don't know. But help me, help me, for I need help. Be kind and say that you will help me.
THE OLD MANSERVANT [in the same tone]: No.
These are the last words in the play. I think it is intended to sear your soul with the futility and meaningless of life and to be a really bitter satire on the complete absence of God or divine love from the world – rather the opposite, the ironic presence of mocking humanity. But, as Oscar Wilde said of the death of Little Nell, I think the modern reader would have to have a heart of stone not to burst out laughing at its preposterously pompous self-importance.
The translation
The translation is, frankly, dire. I can't imagine it being used on a modern stage; to be remotely usable it would have to be comprehensively rewritten.
Unhappily one needs a great deal of money to be able to live in freedom by the sea. (p.68)
Do please let us take the chance of someone's coming and my telling who you are. (p.71)
On such occasions one says, 'It's I,' and then it's all plain sailing… There are situations in which the normal way of acting is obviously the best. If one wants to be recognised, one starts by telling one's name; that's common sense. Otherwise, by pretending to be what one is not, one simply muddles everything. (p.72)
I have not been given my rights and I am smarting at the injustice done to me… Let every door be shut against me; all I wish is to be left in peace with my anger, my very rightful anger. (p.108)
It is of passing interest that the hot southern land which Martha longs for and which Jan and Maria come from is pretty obviously Algeria. Camus was effectively exiled in mainland France during the Second World War, when he wrote Le Malentendu, and he pined for his hot homeland and also for his wife, who had stayed there to pursue her career as a teacher.
Martha imagines her hot sun-bleached paradise, and Jan describes to her the sound of the waves and the colourful flowers of spring, and his wife Maria laments having to leave the blue skies of home – all of them quite obviously describing Camus's Algeria,
that southern land, guarded by the sea, to which one can escape, where one can breathe freely, press one's body to another body, rolling in the waves… (p.108)
But having processed this fact – Algeria = sunny paradise, Europe = rainy prison – it doesn't really add much to your appreciation of the play except to make it seem even more schematic.
And having recently read Edward Said's post-colonial critique of Camus makes the informed reader notice that in all three characters' fantasies of this hot country there are no people, certainly no dirty impoverished Arabs to clutter up the scenery. As in L'Etranger and La Peste Algeria is a depopulated allegory of a country rather than a historic place.
Cross Purpose by Albert Camus was written in 1943 in occupied France, and performed and published in liberated Paris in 1944. This translation by Stuart Gilbert was published by Hamish Hamilton in 1948. Cross Purpose was brought together with Caligula, The Just and The Possessed in a Penguin edition in 1984. All quotes & references are to this Penguin paperback edition.
Caligula and other plays on Amazon
Le Malentendu in French
The Misunderstanding Wikipedia article
Posted in France, French literature, Theatre
Tagged 1944, Albert Camus, Algeria, crime, Cross Purpose, Dostoyevsky, drama, Jan, law, Maria, Martha, murder, play, The Absurd, theatre
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2017/09/22/cross-purpose-albert-camus/
The Plague by Albert Camus (1947)
Thus each of us had to be content to live only for the day, alone under the vast indifference of the sky. This sense of being abandoned, which might in time have given characters a finer temper, began, however, by sapping them to the point of futility. (p.63)
We're in Oran, coastal port and second city of the French colony of Algeria, in Camus's day (1940-something, according to the first sentence) which at the time had a population of around 200,000.
Rats start dying and then people, too. After some weeks of denial the authorities acknowledge that there is a major outbreak of plague and close the city so that no one can get in or out. The narrative focuses on Dr Bernard Rieux as he tries to treat the first few victims, and comes into contact with a cross-section of characters from the city. The plague just gets worse and worse with Rieux reporting every step of its development and helping the authorities to cope – setting up isolation wards, establishing quarantine for all diagnosed patients, organising Volunteer Squads to go out checking each district of the city.
The book can be analysed out into three strands:
The narrator's factual, third-person overview of the progress of the plague and its impact on the population's morale.
The narrator's interpretation of the events in terms of its impact on individual psychologies and community morale – an interpretation which invokes contemporary ideas derived from Catholic Christianity, revolutionary communism, and liberal humanism.
And the character development of the half dozen or so major characters who we follow all the way through the plague, who represent different types of humanity with different coping strategies. All of these come into contact with Dr Rieux, acquaintances who he treats or friends who he listens to pouring out their souls, their stories, their hopes and fears. Like planets round the sun.
I found the first hundred and fifty pages of The Plague a struggle to read because of the lack of detail about the disease, the lack of much incident and the lack of scope among the characters; but the final hundred pages significantly altered my opinion, as the characters reveal more and more about themselves, as the mental strain of their medical work or of being locked up in the quarantined city give them more depth, and as we begin to witness actual deaths among those close to Dr Rieux.
The turning point (for me, anyway) is the pain-filled death of the young son of the city magistrate, Monsieur Othon, Jacques. Jacques dies in agony, wailing with childish pain, witnessed by almost all the main characters. From that point onwards the debates about God and judgement and sinfulness and exile and abandonment and so on – which had seemed abstract and flimsy in the first half – acquired a real depth. Not only was the boy's death terrifying in itself – towards the end he begins screaming and doesn't let off till he expires – but the impact it has on the main characters is genuinely unsettling. Grown men are shaken into rethinking their whole lives, but Camus's depiction of the child's death makes this very believable.
Although it has its faults of style and long-windedness, the second half in particular of The Plague very powerfully brings to life a whole raft of issues which concerned mid-twentieth century minds, and convinces you that this is indeed a masterpiece.
The Plague is narrated by a man who calls himself the Narrator, who explains how he has assembled eye-witness accounts and various documents and is able to give third-person descriptions of events and people.
Dr. Rieux is the central character. Aged 35 i.e. around Camus's age, it is he who first stumbles on a dying rat in the hall of his apartment block, comes across the earliest plague patients, phones around other doctors for their opinion, begins to lobby the authorities, helps put in place the quarantine and isolation wards and liaises with his older colleague, Dr Castel, about the latter's home-made attempts to devise a serum. He is a prime mover of the medical strand of the narrative.
But Rieux is also the copper-bottomed humanist who, we can imagine, most closely resembles Camus's own humanist position. It is Rieux who has several in-depth discussions with the novel's priest about God and divine Justice; who discusses the meaning of exile (i.e. being stuck in the city separated from the woman he loves) with the journalist Rambert; who becomes good friends with big strong Tarrou, who represents the political strand of the book.
Rieux is, in other words, a sort of still point around which the other characters rotate, confiding their life stories, sharing their views, debating the 'meaning' of the plague, and of their 'exile', of 'justice', of 'love'.
Father Paneloux is a Jesuit priest, the representative of Catholic Christianity in the novel. He gives two lengthy sermons in the city's cathedral. The first, in the early stages of the plague, castigates the city's population in traditional Christian terms, saying the plague is a scourge sent by God against sinners for turning their backs on Him. It introduces the metaphor of God's flail or scourge swishing over the stricken city, an image which comes to haunt several of the other characters.
Then, at the turning point of the story, Paneloux is present at the bedside of little Jacques Othon during the latter's painful death. He offers prayers etc but, of course, nothing works or remits the little boy's agony.
There follow inevitable are dialogues between Paneloux and the atheist characters, the latter asking how a caring God could torture children. Paneloux roughs out his explanation in conversation with Rieux and then goes on to give a powerful exposition of it in his Second Sermon.
This Second Sermon is, in its way, even fiercer and more unrepentantly Christian than the first, but in a more personal way. For a start, Paneloux stops saying 'you' to the congregation and starts saying 'we'. He is down among them, he is one of 'us'.
Paneloux's argument is that you either believe in God or you don't. If you do, then you must not only accept but embrace the suffering of the world, because it must be part of his plan. It passes our human understanding, but you must want it and will it. If you say you believe in God but reject this or that aspect of his plan, you are rejecting Him. it is all or nothing.
There is a Nietzschean force to this Second Sermon which I admired and responded to for its totality, for its vehemence, as, presumably, we are intended to.
After the death of little Jacques, Paneloux becomes much more interesting and psychologically resonant as a character. He throws himself into the voluntary work being done among the sick. When he himself falls ill and is nursed by Rieux's mother at their apartment, his decline has depth and meaning, and so when he dies it is genuinely moving.
Jean Tarrou is a big, strong good-natured guy. He keeps a diary which the narrator incorporates into the text and which gives us independent assessments of tertiary characters like Monsieur Othon, Dr Castel, Cottard and so on. On the practical level, it is Tarrou who comes up with the idea of organising teams of volunteers to fight the plague i.e. going round checking wards, identifying new patients, arranging their conveyance to the isolation wards.
On the level of character type, Tarrou early on lets slip that he fought in the Spanish Civil War on the losing, Republican, side. This explains why he was hanging out in the Spanish quarter when the plague began. He is the political character in the novel, the image of the 'committed' man who resonates through existentialist thinking. The man who validates his life by giving it to a cause.
After the little boy's death, Tarrou's character moves to an entirely new level, when he confides in Rieux the key incident from his childhood. Tarrou's father was a kindly family man with an entertaining hobby of memorising railway timetables. Tarrou knew he was a lawyer but didn't really understand what this meant until, aged 17, he accompanied his father to court one day and was horrified to see him transformed into a begowned harpy of Justice, shouting for the death penalty to be imposed on a feeble yellow-looking fellow – the defendant – cowering in the witness box.
The scales dropped from Tarrou's eyes and he ran away from home. He joined a worldwide organisation devoted to overthrowing the injustice of bourgeois society, which stood up for the workers and the humiliated everywhere. But he found himself, in turn, acquiescing in the executions which the leaders claimed were necessary to overthrow the regime which carried out executions. Tarrou gives a particularly unpleasant description of an execution by firing squad which he attends in Hungary, in graphic brutal detail. The size of the hole shot in the executed man's chest haunts his dreams.
Tarrou is telling Rieux all this as the pair of them sit on a terrace overlooking the sea. The mood, the background susurrations of the ocean, and the seriousness of what he's saying all chime perfectly. Having rejected the orthodox, bourgeois legal world of his father, he has equally walked away from what is not named but is pretty obviously the Communist Party. Now all he wants to do is avoid murder, and prevent death. And then – using the characteristically religious register of this text – he tells Rieux that he wants to be a saint. A saint without God.
This conversation, and Tarrou's agonised journey from bourgeois rebel, through communist activist and fighter in Spain, to would-be saint is – for me – the best part of the book. For the first time in reading any of Camus's books I felt I was getting to grip with the issues of his day dramatised in an accessible way.
It is all the more heart-breaking then when, just as the plague is beginning to finally let up, the death rate drop and the city begin to hope again – that tough noble Tarrou himself contracts it and dies. Characteristically, he demands that Rieux tell him the truth about the deterioration in his condition right till the end.
Raymond Rambert is the third major character who rotates around Rieux. He is a journalist visiting Oran to write about conditions in the Arab Quarter, when the plague strikes. When the city is closed he finds himself trapped and spends most of the novel trying to escape, first legally by petitioning the authorities, then illegally by paying people smugglers. This latter strand is long and boring, involving being handed from one dodgy geezer to another and primed to be smuggled out of a gate by 'friendly' guards only for the attempt to be permanently delayed due to all kinds of hitches. It is the presumably deliberate opposite of Hollywood exciting. Somewhere the narrator describes the plague as grimly unromantic, as drab and mundane and boring, and that accurately describes this thread of Rambert's frustrated escape attempts.
Apart from this rather dull thread on the level of the plot, Rambert as a type is the main focus for discussions of 'love'. He wants to escape so desperately in order to get back to the wife he loves and left in Paris. His energy and devotion is contrasted with the apathy on the one hand, or the frenzied debauchery on the other, of the other trapped townsfolk.
Again, like all the characters, Rambert is transfigured by Jacques' death. It follows the latest disappointment in his many escape plans and after it, Rambert confides to Rieux, he has stopped trying to escape. After nearly a year in plague-struck Oran, he's realised that the plague is now his plague; he has more in common with the stricken townsfolk than with outsiders. He will stay until the work here is done.
These are the three major characters (beside Rieux) and you can see how they are simultaneously real people and also function as narrative types who trigger periodic discussions of the issues of Camus's time, or of larger issues of justice and love.
Joseph Grand is a fifty-something somewhat withered city clerk and a kind of comic version of the would-be author. In numerous scenes we witness him reading aloud to Rieux and sometimes some of the other serious characters, the opening of his Great Novel which, in fact, has never got beyond the opening sentence which he tinkers with endlessly. This is pretty broad satire on the self-involved irrelevance of many litterateurs. On the other hand, once the plague kicks off, he uses his skills to compile the tables and statistics which the city authorities need and finds himself praised by the narrator as precisely the kind of quiet, obscure but dogged commitment to work and efficiency which the narrator considers the true nature of bravery, of heroism.
Cottard lives in the same building as Grand and we meet both of them when Grand calls Rieux to tell him he's found Cottard just as he was hanging himself. They save and restore him. From that point on Cottard is shifty and evades police and the authorities since attempted suicide is a crime. Once the plague kicks in he becomes much more peaceable, maybe because everyone else is now living in the state of nervous tension which he permanently inhabits. He becomes a black marketeer and pops up throughout the story. When the plague winds down he goes a bit mad and suddenly starts shooting out his window at random passers-by, a scene Rieux and Tarrou stumble across on one of their walks. He is not massacred as he would be in a Hollywood movie, but successfully arrested and taken off by the police.
Dr. Castel is a much older medical colleague of Rieux's. He realises it is bubonic plague quicker than anyone else and then devotes his time to creating a plague serum, using the inadequate facilities to hand. His efforts tire him out and, although his serum is finally introduced, it's not clear whether it has any impact on the plague which ultimately declines because it has just worn itself out.
Monsieur Othon the city's pompous well-dressed magistrate, is often to be seen parading his well-dressed wife and harshly-disciplined children round town. Until his son Jacques dies – at which point he becomes greatly softened. As the relative of a victim he is sent to one of the isolation camps for a quarantine period, but surprises everyone when, upon leaving, he decides he wants to go back and help.
Comments on the characters
Summarising them like this makes it clearer than when actually reading it, how schematic the characters are, how they represent particular views or roles which combine to give a kind of overview of how society reacts to calamity. Having just read three of Camus's plays (Caligula, Cross Purpose and The Just) I now have a strong sense that this is how Camus conceives of characters, as ideological or issue-driven types.
1. Note how none of them are women. It is the 1940s and still very much a man's world. Experience only counts if it is male. In any actual plague there would be thousands of mothers concerned and caring for their children and probably many women would volunteer as nurses. The only women named are the remote 'love objects' which motivate the men – Rieux's wife, who is packed off to a sanatorium at the start of the novel for a non-plague-related illness, and Rambert's wife. In the main body of the narrative no women appear or speak, apart from Rieux's ageing mother who comes and stays with him. The mother is a holy figure in Camus's fiction (compare and contrast the centrality of the (dead) mother in L'Etranger.)
2. You will also note that there isn't a single Arab or Algerian among these characters. Seven years after The Plague was published the Algerian War of Independence broke out and Algerians began fighting for the freedom to write their own narratives of their own country in their own language.
In this respect, in the perspective of history, The Plague is a kind of European fantasy, is set in a European fantasy of a country which soon afterwards ceased to exist.
The medicine and science
There is some medical detail about the plague, some description of the hard buboes which swell at the body's lymph nodes, how they can be incised to release the pus, some descriptions of the fever, pain, the last-minute falling off of symptoms before the sudden death. Enough to give the narrative some veracity, but no more.
But Camus is more interested in personifying and psychologising the plague than in describing it scientifically.
Thus over a relatively brief period the disease lost practically all the gains piled up over many months. Its setbacks with seemingly predestined victims, like Grand and Rieux's girl patient, its bursts of activity for two or three days in some districts synchronizing with its total disappearance from others, its new practice of multiplying its victims on, say, a Monday, and on Wednesday letting almost all escape, in short, its accesses of violence followed by spells of complete inactivity, all these gave an impression that its energy was flagging, out of exhaustion and exasperation, and it was losing, with its self-command, the ruthless, almost mathematical efficiency that had been its trump card hitherto.
Rieux was confronted by an aspect of the plague that baffled him. Yet again it was doing all it could to confound the tactics used against it; it launched attacks in unexpected places and retreated from those where it seemed definitely lodged. Once more it was out to darken counsel. (p.232)
In the first hundred pages or so I was hoping for more science, more medical descriptions, and was disappointed. Maybe Camus's novel reflects the medical science of his day. Or maybe he only did as much research as was necessary to create the scaffold for his philosophical lucubrations.
Either way the book's science and medical content is underwhelming. Early on Dr Rieux advises a plague victim to be put on a light diet and given plenty to drink. Is that it? Paris sends serum but it doesn't seem to work very well and there's never enough. Rieux tries in some cases to cut open the knotted lymph glands and let them bleed out blood and pus – but besides being messy and crude, this doesn't seem to work either. The only real strategy the authorities have is to cart the infected off to isolation wards where they wait to die before their corpses are taken to massive plague pits and thrown into lime.
In this respect, the science and medical side of the narrative is closer to the medicine of Charles Dickens than to our computer-based, genome-cracking, antibiotic-designing era. It seemed pathetic and antique how the novel describes the isolated old Dr Castel plodding along trying to develop a serum locally, by himself, working with the inadequate means he has,
since the local bacillus differed slightly from the normal plague bacillus as defined in textbooks of tropical diseases. (p.112)
and that the narrator considers this feeble old man's home-made efforts as truly 'heroic'.
If it is absolutely necessary that this narrative should include a 'hero', the narrator commends to his readers, with, to his thinking, perfect justice, this insignificant and obscure hero who had to his credit only a little goodness of heart and a seemingly absurd ideal. This will render to the truth its due, to the addition of two and two its sum of four, and to heroism the secondary place that rightly falls to it, just after, never before, the noble claim of happiness.
(Incidentally, this is a good example of the obscurity typical of so much of Camus's prose — 'This will render to heroism the secondary place that rightly falls to it, just after, never before, the noble claim of happiness.' As usual I find myself having to read Camus sentences at least twice to decipher the meaning, and then wondering whether I have in fact learned anything. Does heroism have a secondary place just after, but never before, the noble claim of happiness? It sounds so precise, so logical, so confident. But it's meaningless and instantly forgotten.)
Camus's worldview
As Jean-Paul Sartre usefully, and a little cruelly, pointed out back at the time, Camus is not a philosopher – although he studied philosophy at university, it wasn't to the same level as Sartre who went on to become a philosophy professor. Sartre also denied that Camus was even an 'existentialist' – by which maybe he simply meant that Camus wasn't one of Sartre's tribe – and Camus himself is ambivalent about using the term.
Instead, Camus is a kind of philosophical impressionist. Without much conceptual or logical rigour he is interested in depicting the psychological impact, the feel, the climate, produced by a handful of interlocking 'ideas'.
Chief among these is the Absurd, the result of the mismatch between the human wish for order and meaning and the obvious indifference of a godless universe. 'Exile' is the name he gives to that sense humans have of being removed from their true domain, the place of consolation, meaning and belonging. He uses the word 'hope' to denote the delusions humans create to hide from themselves their complete abandonment in a godless universe.
Thus the brave and heroic Absurd Man faces down a 'godless universe' and lives without hope i.e. without resorting to fond illusions.
And finally, Revolt – the Absurd Man revolts against his condition. The notion of revolt arose from his discussion of suicide in The Myth of Sisyphus (do not kill yourself; face the absurdity; overcome it; revolt against your fate) and was to be developed at length in his other 'philosophical' work, The Rebel.
Why is this relevant to The Plague? Because the advent of a plague, spreading unstoppably and leading to the closing of the city, throws up a wide variety of dramatic situations in which his cast of seven or eight main characters can act out and think through and express various aspects of Camus's worldview.
Very little happens in the 'plot'. The medical aspect is medieval. We read the book to find in it a steady stream of dramatisations of Camus's worldview. His other two novels – The Outsider and The Fall are much shorter at around 100 pages each. The Plague is the longest fictional depiction of Camus's theory of the Absurd. Reading it at such length led me to isolate three distinct themes:
The centrality of Roman Catholic Christianity to Camus's worldview
The revelation that the Law – with its ideas of justice, judgement, crime and punishment – is arguably more important that the ideas around the Absurd
The horrible long-winded style which makes stretches of it almost impossible to read (and which I deal with in a separate blog post).
1. The role of Christianity in Camus's philosophy
It was talking Camus over with my 18 year-old son (who has just completed an A-Level in Philosophy) which made me realise the centrality of French Roman Catholicism to both Camus and Sartre.
Both Frenchmen go on and on and on about the 'anguish' and the 'absurdity' of living in what they never cease to tell us is a 'godless universe'.
But it is only so distressing to wake up to this godlessness if you ever thought it was godful. I was brought up by atheist parents in the mostly atheist country of England where the Church of England is run by nice vicars. The Anglican worldview is one of moderation and common sense and tea and biscuits. There haven't really been many great Anglican thinkers because thinking hasn't been its main activity. Running missions in Africa or the East End or organising village fetes in the Cotswolds have traditionally been Anglican activities. The Anglican church has been a central topic of gentle English humour, from Trollope to The Vicar of Dibley.
French Roman Catholic culture couldn't be more different. It is both politically and philosophically deep and demanding and, historically, has played a vindictively reactionary role in French politics. The Catholic worldview is far more intense, making the world a battlefield between the forces of God and the Devil, with a weekly confession in which you must confront your own innermost failings. Its educational élite are the mercilessly intelligent Jesuits. Its tradition includes Pascal with his terrifying vision of a vast universe, indifferent to us unless filled by the love of God. Politically, the Catholic Church led the attack on the Jewish army officer Dreyfus in the prolonged cultural civil war over his false accusation for treason – the Dreyfus Affair (dramatised by Robert Harris in his novel An Officer and a Spy) – which divided France from 1894 to 1906.
Since the French Revolution, very broadly French culture has been divided into conservatives who line up behind the reactionary Catholic Church, and liberals and socialists, who oppose it.
Think how repressive, how reactionary, how dominating their boyhood Catholic educations must have been in the 1910s and 1920s for young Jean-Paul and Albert. Think how much of a mental and psychological effort it must have been for them to struggle free of their Catholic education. It meant rejecting the beliefs which their parents, their wider family and the entire society around them cherished. It meant standing alone. It meant being an outsider.
Thus my suggestion is that the extremely negative value which Sartre and Camus attribute to the idea of realising that there is no God and that you are free to make your own set of values and decisions derives from their powerful emotional feeling that this involves a loss, the loss of their once life-supporting Catholic faith.
A lot of the emotional intensity of their ideas and fictions derive from the intensity of the struggle to break free from the Catholic Church. Sartre calls this state of lucid acknowledgement of your freedom in the world 'anguish'. They both describe the state as a state of abandonment. Camus in particular again and again uses the analogy of it being a state of exile.
All of this terminology is powerfully negative. It suggests that there once was something – and now it is lost. In Sartre and Camus's works they refer to the lost thing as the 'illusions' or 'habits' of bourgeois life, but my suggestion is that Sartre and Camus don't themselves realise how fundamental their lost Christian faith is to their entire worldview.
Godless. Over and over again they refer to the horror and terror of living in a 'godless' universe. Well, if you weren't brought up to expect a godful universe you won't be particularly surprised or disappointed, let alone thrown into mortal anguish when someone tells you that it is godless.
It was my son who pointed out to me with calm rationality that there is no logical need to be upset or anguished or exiled by living in a 'godless universe'. You can quite logically accept that there is a ridiculous mismatch between our wish for meaning and comfort and security in the world and the absurdity of people being run over by cars or blown up by terrorists – without giving it an emotional value – without making it the source of catastrophic emotional collapse. Just as you can acknowledge the reality of gravity or the speed of light or that humans are mammals without bursting into tears. It is just one more fact among thousands of facts about the world we live, pleasant or less pleasant, which most people process, accept and forget in order to get on with their lives.
Camus, like Sartre, thinks of these 'ordinary' people – people who, alas, aren't writers or philosophers – as sheep, cattle, as 'cowards' or 'scum' (which is what Sartre – rather surprisingly – calls them in Existentialism is a Humanism) because they are hiding from or rejecting or denying the Truth. I think, on the contrary, that most people are perfectly capable of grasping the truth about the world they live in, they just don't make the same song and dance about it as two French lapsed Catholics.
All this is prompted by slowly realising that the supposedly existential or atheist worldview depicted in The Plague is completely reliant on the ideology and terminology of Christianity. Thus it is no surprise that the Jesuit Father Paneloux is one of the central characters, nor that the book contains two chapters devoted to sermons delivered by him, nor that one of the central moments in the book is the confrontation between the humanist Dr Rieux and the Jesuit Paneloux following the death of little Jacques. When the priest insists that God's Plan 'passes our human understanding', the doctor replies:
'No, Father. I've a very different idea of love. And until my dying day I shall refuse to love a scheme of things in which children are put to torture.' (p.178)
God also features in several of the conversations between Dr Rieux and the thoughtful Tarrou:
'Do you believe in God, doctor?…' His face still in shadow, Rieux said that he'd already answered: that if he believed in an all-powerful God he would cease curing the sick and leave that to Him. But no one in the world believed in a God of that sort; no, not even Paneloux, who believed that he believed in such a God…
'After all,' the doctor repeated, then hesitated again, fixing his eyes on Tarrou, 'it's something that a man of your sort can understand most likely, but, since the order of the world is shaped by death, mightn't it be better for God if we refuse to believe in Him and struggle with all our might against death, without raising our eyes toward the heaven where He sits in silence.'
Tarrou nodded.
'Yes. But your victories will never be lasting; that's all.'
Rieux's face darkened.
'Yes, I know that. But it's no reason for giving up the struggle.'
'No reason, I agree. Only, I now can picture what this plague must mean for you.'
'Yes. A never ending defeat.' (p.108)
This is Camus's attitude. Revolt against fate. Rebel against the godless universe. Resist. Fight, even if it's without hope.
But – and this is my point – note how the secular, Absurdist, existentialist, call it what you will, attitude can only emerge by piggybacking, as it were, on the back of Christian theology. This plucky godlessness only really has meaning be reference to the lucky godfulness which precedes it. They can't discuss the meaning of life cold, from a standing start – there always has to be a preliminary clearing of throats, some foreplay, involving God this or God that, do you believe in God, No, do you believe in God etc — it's a kind of warming up and stretching exercise before they can get round to saying what they do believe in – justice, freedom, human dignity or what have you.
The entire discourse of the Absurd absolutely requires there to be a Christianity to reject and replace, before it can express itself.
2. The importance of the law, judgement and punishment
Reading his other two novels has slowly made me realise that pretty old-fashioned ideas of crime and punishment are central to Camus. The Outsider (1942) is about a man who commits a crime (murdering an Arab) and is punished for it. The entire 'drama' of the story is in the mismatch between his inner psychological state of almost psychotic detachment from his own life and actions – but where this absurd mismatch is brought to life, where his detachment from social norms is misinterpreted and distorted to make him appear a monstrous psychopath, is in a court of law.
The Outsider becomes a study of the process of the law and a questioning of the idea of human 'justice'. The entire second part of the book mostly consists of the protagonist's questioning by magistrates, then the long courtroom scenes featuring the prosecution and defence lawyers doing their thing, followed by the judge's summing up. It is a courtroom drama.
The Fall (1956) is even more Law-drenched, since it consists of an uninterrupted monologue told by a lawyer about his own 'fall from grace'. It is a text infested with the imagery of crime and sin, punishment and redemption, judgement and forgiveness. There are some passages about the Absurd but really it is ideas about crime and punishment which dominate.
But also, look at the title. The Fall. A reference to the central event in all Christian theology, the fall of Man. Notions of the law are inextricable interlinked with Christian theology and imagery.
Religion and Law in The Plague
So I was not surprised when I began to discern in The Plague at least as much discourse about religion (about sin and punishment) and about the Law (about justice and judgement) as I did about the ideas Camus is famous for i.e. the Absurd and so on.
In particular, it comes as no surprise when Tarrou, one of the most intelligent characters, reveals that the key to his character, to his entire career as a political activist, was revulsion at the vengefulness of his father's bourgeois form of justice, and a resultant search for some kind of better, universal, political justice. And I have already noted the centrality of Father Paneloux and the debates about God which he triggers wherever he goes.
Many commentators then and now have thought that The Plague is a clever allegory about the occupation of France by the Nazis, and the stealthy way a sense of futility and despair crept over the French population, numbing some, spurring others into 'revolt' and resistance.
Every time I read about this interpretation I wondered why Camus, who apparently was 'active' in the Resistance, didn't at some stage write a novel of what it was actually like to live under German occupation and be a member of the Resistance. That would be of huge historic importance and also directly tie his ideas to their historical context, making them more powerful and meaningful. Maybe it's petty-minded of me – but it is striking how none of Camus' three novels mention the war, the defeat of France, the German occupation, Nazi ideology, France's contribution to the Holocaust, any aspect of the work of the Resistance, or how he and his compatriots experienced the Liberation.
On one level, it feels like a vast hole at the centre of his work and a huge opportunity lost.
Anyway, this historical context is completely absent from The Plague. What there is instead are these dominating issues of law and justice, sin and forgiveness, and the all-pervading language of Law and Religion.
Over The Plague hang the shades of Dostoyevsky's characters interminably discussing whether or not there is a God and how his love and/or justice are shown in the world – and also of Kafka's novels with their obsessive repetition of the idea of a man arrested or turned into an insect for no reason, no reason at all, with their predominating idea of the injustice of the world.
(Camus includes a jokey reference to Kafka on page 51 where the dodgy character Cottard says he's reading a 'detective story' about a man who was arrested one fine day without having done anything, a transparent reference to The Trial.)
Statistical evidence
Because the entire translated text is available online, you can do a word search, with the following results which tend to support my argument – that the novel is far more about ideas derived from Christian religion or the Law and jurisprudence, than the ideas of Camus's brand of existentialism.
absurd – 7 times, and never in a philosophical sense
revolt – 6 – 'Weariness is a kind of madness. And there are times when the only feeling I have is one of mad revolt.' (p.178)
abandoned – 4
futile – 4
suicide – 3
godless – 0
So there is surprisingly little direct reference to the main concepts which made him famous. Now compare and contrast with the frequency of religious terms. These are far more common, far more expressed and discussed.
God – 46 instances
saint – 15
religion – 12
heaven – 8
hell – 7
salvation – 6
purgatory – 2
And finally, legal terminology:
law – 14
justice – 10 – 'When a man has had only four hours' sleep, he isn't sentimental. He sees things as they are; that is to say, he sees them in the garish light of justice, hideous, witless justice.' (p.156)
judge – 6
crime – 6
punishment – 4
judgement – 2
Again, there is more reference to basic ideas of justice and injustice than to the concepts clustered around his Absurdism.
The one Camusian idea which is very present is that of 'exile', which is mentioned 27 times – 'the first thing that plague brought to our town was exile'. This is, if you like, a kind of metaphorical embodiment of the central idea of Camus's version of existentialism – the literal sense of loss, separation, exile from home and loved ones standing for the metaphorical sense of exile from belief systems which give our lives purpose. But it is typical of Camus that it isn't a philosophical idea – it is a metaphor for a distressed state of mind, for the deprivation of the comforts of home which, deep down – as I suggest above – is in fact caused by the loss of religious faith.
Interestingly, the most commonly used abstract word is 'love', occurring 96 times. This suggests the, dare I say it, sentimental basis of Camus's humanism.
La Peste by Albert Camus was published in France in 1947. This translation of The Plague by Stuart Gilbert was published by Hamish Hamilton in 1948, and as a Penguin paperback in 1960. All quotes & references are to the 1972 reprint of the Penguin paperback edition (which cost 35p).
The Plague on Amazon
The Plague online
The Plague Wikipedia article
Posted in Books, French literature, Novel
Tagged 1947, abandonment, Albert Camus, Algeria, anguish, atheism, bubonic plague, Camus, Christianity, communism, Cottard, Dostoyevsky, Dr Bernard Rieux, Dr Castel, Dr Rieux, exile, existentialism, Father Paneloux, fiction, freedom, futility, God, humanism, Jacques Othon, Jean Tarrou, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jesuit, Joseph Grand, judgement, justice, Monsieur Othon, Nietzsche, novel, Oran, plague, Raymond Rambert, Riseux, Spanish Civil War, text, The Absurd, the Dreyfus Affair, The Fall, The Outsider, The Plague
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2017/09/18/the-plague-albert-camus/
The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus (1942)
It sums itself up as a lucid invitation to live and to create, in the very midst of the desert. (p.7)
This volume consists of the long (100-page) essay about suicide, The Myth of Sisyphus, which argues against despair and in favour of life – accompanied by five much shorter essays each exemplifying Camus's healthy lust for living.
It's worth remembering how young Camus was when he wrote these texts. Born in November 1913, he was just 23 when he wrote Summer in Algiers, 26 when France fell to the Germans in June 1940, the year he wrote The Stop in Oran, and so on. A young man just beginning a career in writing and still very much entranced by the pleasures of the flesh, sunbathing, swimming, eyeing up beautiful women (a constant theme in his works).
The Myth of Sisyphus
Camus's preface sums it up. Written in 1940, in the ruins of the defeat of France, the text affirms that even in a Godless universe and a world awash with nihilism, there remain the means to defy and surmount that nihilism. If life is meaningless, the teenager is tempted ask, what on earth is the point of going on living? Why not commit suicide? That is the subject of the essay: it is an essay about suicide – about confronting suicide as the apparently 'logical' consequence of realising that we live in an Absurd world.
Camus's answer is, that we shouldn't commit suicide because it is more human and more noble and more in tune with a tragic universe – to rebel, to revolt against this fate. To face down the obvious absurdity of human existence and to enjoy the wild beauty of the world while we can.
Revolt gives life its value. Spread out over the whole length of a life, it restores its majesty to that life. (p.54)
Essayist not philosopher
Camus takes quite a long time to finally getting round to saying this. In reading Camus I am influenced by the comment of Jean-Paul Sartre in a 1945 interview where he pointed out that Camus is not an existentialist, and not a philosopher – he is much more a descendant of France's 17th century moralists. He is a moralist, an essayist (as the essays later in this volume testify) and, unlike the philosopher, the essayist isn't under any compulsion to produce a coherent sequence of argument. He can be quite content with an entertaining flow of ideas.
Camus certainly plays with philosophical ideas and references a bunch of big philosophical names – early on there's half a paragraph each about Kierkegaard, Jaspers, Heidegger and Husserl – but this very brevity shows that he picks and chooses quotes to suit him, rather like Hazlitt or any of the impressionist Victorian essayists yanking in flowery quotes here or there to support their flow – and in order to create a rather meandering flow rather than a logical sequence of argument.
Camus himself explains that he is not 'examining' the philosophy of a Heidegger or Jaspers – he is 'borrowing a theme' (p.40), he is making 'a sketchy reconnaissance in the origins of the absurd' (p.20). He is not addressing their philosophical arguments – he is bringing out their common 'climate'.
Thus Camus is much more about impressionistic psychology than repeatable arguments, a point he makes repeatedly himself:
The method defined here acknowledges the feeling that all true knowledge is impossible. Solely appearances can be enumerated and the climate make itself felt…
If it would be presumptuous to try to deal with their philosophies, it is possible and sufficient in any case to bring out the climate that is common to them…
Certain men, starting from a critique of rationalism, have admitted the absurd climate…
Never, perhaps, have minds been so different. And yet we recognize as identical the spiritual landscapes in which they get under way. Likewise, despite such dissimilar zones of knowledge, the cry that terminates their itinerary rings out in the same way. It is evident that the thinkers we have just recalled have a common climate. To say that that climate is deadly scarcely amounts to playing on words. Living under that stifling sky forces one to get away or to stay…
Climate. Zone. Landscape. Stifling sky. This is not an argument – it is impressionistic prose poetry.
This hell of the present is his [the Absurd Man's] Kingdom at last. All problems recover their sharp edge. Abstract evidence retreats before the poetry of forms and colors. Spiritual conflicts become embodied and return to the abject and magnificent shelter of man' s heart. (p.52)
This poetic meandering results in the sometimes obscure nature of the text. Camus has a reputation for being clear and lucid, but this book is often surprisingly turgid and difficult to understand.
If thought discovered in the shimmering mirrors of phenomena eternal relations capable of summing them up and summing themselves up in a single principle, then would be seen an intellectual joy of which the myth of the blessed would be but a ridiculous imitation. (p.23)
I understand what he's saying: if any of us could discover a really unified theory underlying the world of phenomena how happy we, and mankind, would be. But you can see how this is not anything like philosophy: it is more a description of what philosophy feels like.
When Karl Jaspers, revealing the impossibility of constituting the world as a unity, exclaims: "This limitation leads me to myself, where I can no longer withdraw behind an objective point of view that I am merely representing, where neither I myself nor the existence of others can any longer become an object for me," he is evoking after many others those waterless deserts where thought reaches its confines. After many others, yes indeed, but how eager they were to get out of them! At that last crossroad where thought hesitates, many men have arrived and even some of the humblest. They then abdicated what was most precious to them, their life. Others, princes of the mind, abdicated likewise, but they initiated the suicide of their thought in its purest revolt. The real effort is to stay there, rather, in so far as that is possible, and to examine closely the odd vegetation of those distant regions. Tenacity and acumen are privileged spectators of this inhuman show in which absurdity, hope, and death carry on their dialogue. The mind can then analyze the figures of that elementary yet subtle dance before illustrating them and reliving them itself. (p.16)
Most of the book is like this. It is not a continuous philosophical argument, it is a series of psychological insights. He uses the Jaspers quote to create a poetic scenario using (aptly for the man of Africa) the image of a desert, and going on to describe how we 'must' stay out there, in the waterless desert of absurd knowledge, in order to study its peculiar features. (Camus uses the metaphor of the desert of human thought seven times in the book – but I don't find human thought a desert; I find it a bounteous and infinite garden.)
When he says the thinking mind is 'an inhuman show' in which a dialogue takes place, you realise this is philosophy envisioned as theatre and from this point I became alert to the other metaphors of theatre and actors scattered through the text. Camus was, after all, himself a successful playwright and a section of the essay is titled Drama.
The irrational, the human nostalgia, and the absurd that is born of their encounter – these are the three characters in the drama that must necessarily end with all the logic of which an existence is capable. (p.32)
By thus sweeping over centuries and minds, by miming man as he can be and as he is, the actor has much in common with that other absurd individual, the traveler. (p.75)
It is a vision obscured, rather than clarified, by the author's habit of imposing histrionic metaphors wherever they'll fit. Absurdity, hope and death in the final sentence have specific meanings: absurdity is the lucid knowledge of the pointlessness of existence i.e the absence of any God or external values; hope is the word he gives to the thousand and one ways people turn away from and deny the reality of life, hoping for a God or a political party or a cause or something to transform the absurdity of the world; and death is the resort some people take from absurd knowledge, either getting themselves killed for a cause or doing away with themselves.
This tripartite categorisation does make a sort of sense. What makes a lot less sense is to talk about how 'tenacity and acumen are privileged spectators of this inhuman show' or 'the figures of that elementary yet subtle dance'.
There is generally a discernible flow to the argument, but Camus's writerly fondness for metaphors, similes, paradox, abrupt reversals and the counter-intuitive too often obscures rather than clarifies his meaning. This is what I mean when I say that he is not a lucid writer. He uses the word 'lucid' no fewer than 43 times in the text, and the continual chiming of this word may begin to unconsciously make you think he is lucid. But he isn't. Sometimes his style descends into almost pure poetry, emotive, descriptive, incantatory.
'Prayer,' says Alain, 'is when night descends over thought. 'But the mind must meet the night,' reply the mystics and the existentials. Yes, indeed, but not that night that is born under closed eyelids and through the mere will of man – dark, impenetrable night that the mind calls up in order to plunge into it. If it must encounter a night, let it be rather that of despair, which remains lucid -polar night, vigil of the mind, whence will arise perhaps that white and virginal brightness which outlines every object in the light of the intelligence. (p.62)
Here is no argument, just rhetoric, poetry, a particular type of melodramatic and harrowing poetry. Some of it teeters on gibberish.
Perhaps we shall be able to overtake that elusive feeling of absurdity in the different but closely related worlds of intelligence, of the art of living, or of art itself. The climate of absurdity is in the
beginning. The end is the absurd universe and that attitude of mind which lights the world with its true colors to bring out the privileged and implacable visage which that attitude has discerned in it. (p.18)
'The end is the absurd universe and that attitude of mind which lights the world with its true colors to bring out the privileged and implacable visage which that attitude has discerned in it.'
Every time I reread this sentence, it moves further away from me. Even when I think I understand it, it doesn't really contribute to any logical argument – it is designed to create a similar climate or attitude in the mind of the reader. It is, thus, a form of attitudinising i.e. creating a mood through poetic means – for example, the way the 'implacable visage' is a melodramatic way of describing the Absurd, which is itself a melodramatic concept.
The text is designed to convert you to its histrionic (and theatrical) worldview. It is a pose. Every page is made up of this often hard-to-follow attitudinising.
It is barely possible to speak of the experience of others' deaths. It is a substitute, an illusion, and it never quite convinces us. That melancholy convention cannot be persuasive. The horror comes in reality from the mathematical aspect of the event. If time frightens us, this is because it works out the problem and the solution comes afterward. All the pretty speeches about the soul will have their contrary convincingly proved, at least for a time. From this inert body on which a slap makes no mark the soul has disappeared. This elementary and definitive aspect of the adventure constitutes the absurd feeling. Under the fatal lighting of that destiny, its uselessness becomes evident. (p.21)
'Under the fatal lighting of that destiny…'
The cumulative effect is to make you stop trying to elucidate what too often turn out to be spurious meanings.
Men who live on hope do not thrive in this universe where kindness yields to generosity, affection to virile silence, and communion to solitary courage. (p.68)
Even before I begin to make the effort to decode what he's saying, I know in advance it will not be worth the effort. Trying to understand a book about quantum physics or about evolutionary cladistics or memorising the different Chinese dynasties – that's the kind of thing that's worth making an effort for, because the knowledge is real and will last. But trying to decide whether this is a universe where 'kindness yields to generosity, affection to virile silence, and communion to solitary courage' strikes me as being a waste of time.
In the rebel's universe, death exalts injustice. It is the supreme abuse. (p.85)
What? Here he is describing music.
That game the mind plays with itself according to set and measured laws takes place in the sonorous compass that belongs to us and beyond which the vibrations nevertheless meet in an inhuman universe. (p.91)
An impressive display of rhetorical fireworks. But useful? Applicable? Enlightening? Memorable?
All this, the emphasis on rhetoric over logic, helps explain why it is much easier to quote Camus's many catchy formulations in isolation than it is to remember any kind of reasoned argument.
An act like this [suicide] is prepared within the silence of the heart, as is a great work of art. (p.12)
Beginning to think is beginning to be undermined. (p.12)
Looked at from one point of view, the text is a kind of impenetrably turgid grey sea from which emerge occasional shiny wave crests, glinting in the sunlight.
In a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. (p.13)
It is always easy to be logical. It is almost impossible to be logical to the bitter end. (p.16)
At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman. (p.20)
A man is more a man through the things he keeps to himself than through those he says. (p.80)
Seen this way, Camus certainly does fit Sartre's description of a traditional moralist, whose text is just the glue which joins together the periodic sententiae or moral statements about life, these jewels being meant to be taken away and meditated on.
To an absurd mind reason is useless and there is nothing beyond reason. (p.38)
Great t-shirt material.
The Absurd
A bit like Sartre circling round and round his central concept of 'freedom', Camus circles round and round his central concept of the Absurd. The word occurs 316 times in the text, again and again on every page.
Put simply, the absurd is the mismatch between man's deep need for a meaning/purpose/rational order in the world, and the world's all-too-obvious lack of any meaning/purpose or order – the world's complete indifference to human wishes. Again and again Camus defines and redefines and approaches and reapproaches and formulates and poeticises the same fundamental idea.
At any streetcorner the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face. (p.17)
That denseness and strangeness of the world is the absurd. (p.20)
The revolt of the flesh is the absurd. (p.20)
This discomfort in the face of man' s own inhumanity, this incalculable tumble before the image of what we are, this 'nausea', as a writer of today calls it, is also the absurd. Likewise the stranger who at certain seconds comes to meet us in a mirror, the familiar and yet alarming brother we encounter in our own photographs is also the absurd. (p.21)
What is absurd is the confrontation of the irrational and the wild longing for clarity whose call echoes in the human heart. (p.27)
The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world. (p.32)
The absurd is essentially a divorce. It lies in neither of the elements compared; it is born of their confrontation. (p.33)
The absurd is not in man nor in the world, but in their presence together. (p.34)
The absurd is lucid reason noting its limits. (p.49)
[The absurd is] that divorce between the mind that desires and the world that disappoints, my nostalgia for unity, this fragmented universe and the contradiction that binds them together. (p.50)
[The absurd is] my appetite for the absolute and for unity and the impossibility of reducing this world to a rational and reasonable principle (p.51)
The basic idea is disarmingly simple. It is the way he repeats it with infinite variations, under the lights of numerous metaphors and similes, included in sentences which evoke emotional, intellectual and existential extremity, suffering, endurance, and so on, which make it more a poetics of living than philosophy.
The absurd mind cannot so much expect ethical rules at the end of its reasoning as, rather, illustrations and the breath of human lives. (p.65)
I'm not sure how you'd measure this but it seemed to me that, as the book progresses, the references to absurdity become steadily vaguer and more poetical and meaningless.
Being deprived of hope is not despairing. The flames of earth are surely worth celestial perfumes. (p.85)
All existence for a man turned away from the eternal is but a vast mime under the mask of the absurd. (p.87)
For the absurd man it is not a matter of explaining and solving, but of experiencing and describing. (p.87)
In the time of the absurd reasoning, creation follows indifference and discovery. (p.88)
The absurd work illustrates thought's renouncing of its prestige and its resignation to being no more than the intelligence that works up appearances and covers with images what has no reason. (p.90)
The most destitute men often end up by accepting illusion. That approval prompted by the need for peace inwardly parallels the existential consent. There are thus gods of light and idols of mud. But it is essential to find the middle path leading to the faces of man. (p.94)
This impressionistic approach, this lack of a coherent logic, this mosaic of quotes from Great Thinkers or abstruse analyses of Great Writers, grandiose examinations of the Stage or the mentality of The Conqueror, interspersed with descriptions of everyday life – how, for example, a sense of the futility of life hits you as you look in the mirror to shave – this may account for Camus's wider popularity than Sartre's. His very patchiness, the way he's less logical and consistent, more given to sudden flashes of insight which can be put on a t-shirt.
Thus even if a lot of Sisyphus is turgid and obscure, with much of it showing off or perverse paradox-making for its own sake, there are many other bits which suddenly leap out with great clarity and make you think 'Yes'.
It takes Camus a long time to get to the punchline which is that we must face the absurdity of the world and overcome it. We must be like Sisyphus who, in the Greek myth is being punished in hell by being made to roll a rock to the top of the mountain only for it to be dashed to the bottom again. Over and again.
That is how we must live. But we must do it with a smiling heart, happy in the knowledge that we do it because we will it. We want to live.
Teenage heroism
And it is not irrelevant to the book's popularity, or the popularity of watered-down 'existentialism' that it helped promote, that throughout the book the person who holds this notion of the absurd, who doesn't give in to false consolations or to the siren call of suicide, who faces the meaningless world without flinching – is considered a hero.
It is a heroic pose to be one man undaunted against an uncaring universe, walking a 'difficult path'.
There is a profoundly adolescent appeal not only in the fascination with suicide but in the rather laughable descriptions of the bold, brave heroism required to outface the absurd, 'fearlessly' and stoically living with his bleak knowledge. Refusing consolation and false comfort, committing oneself to live under 'this stifling sky' in these 'waterless deserts', living a life of 'virile silence' and 'solitary courage'. Sounds like a film noir hero, sounds like Alan Ladd in This Gun for Hire. Down these mean streets the 'absurd man' must go because, after all –
Sisyphus is the absurd hero
The essay is divided into three parts, the second of which is titled The Absurd Man. It's heroic posturing is quite funny if read through the eyes of Tony Hancock or Sid James.
Not to believe in the profound meaning of things belongs to the absurd man. (p.69)
There always comes a time when one must choose between contemplation and action. This is called becoming a man. (p.81)
There is thus a metaphysical honour in enduring the world's absurdity. (p.86)
Around page 70, while taking a break on the internet, I stumbled over several comic strips devoted to taking the mickey out of Camus and Sartre. From that point onwards found it hard to keep a straight face while reading it. This is all so old, so 80-years-old, so much another time. It was passé in the 1960s, now it is ancient history. Old enough to have been satirised and parodied for generations.
Existential Comics – Camus
There is also something specifically comical in the way a writer decides, at the summary of his masterwork about the meaning of life in a godless universe and so on, that the highest possible calling for the Absurd Man is to be… a writer! The section titled Absurd Creation is not much about music or art, but mostly about other writers. It is rather bathetic that a writer decides,after much cogitation, that being a writer is the pinnacle of the kind of lucid courage required to face The Absurd!
Of all the schools of patience and lucidity, creation is the most effective. It is also the staggering evidence of man's sole dignity: the dogged revolt against his condition, perseverance in an effort considered sterile. It calls for a daily effort, self-mastery, a precise estimate of the limits of truth, measure, and strength. (p.104)
So – as the Existentialist Comic puts it – these bookish guys sitting around in cafés and apartments writing novels, plays and essays all agree that the true Resistance to the Nazis and the true heroes of their time must, logically, according to their 'lucid' and 'precise' philosophy — be bookish guys sitting around in cafés and apartments writing novels, plays and essays.
Guys just like them, who can therefore congratulate each other on their 'self-mastery', their 'revolt', their dignity and their strength. How to be a Hemingway hero without even stubbing out your Gauloise!
But perhaps the great work of art has less importance 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 his
naked reality. (p.104)
'Ordeal'. 'Overcoming his phantoms.' Outfacing 'naked reality'. Braving the deserts of 'lucid thought'. Mingling 'intelligence and passion'. Summoning 'diligence, doggedness and lucidity' (p.106). Facing up to this 'difficult wisdom' (p.106). 'Unceasing struggle'.
Wow. Never before or since has sitting at a typewriter smoking a fag been so heroic!
Brief discussion
When I was an over-intellectual 17 year-old these thoughts and Camus' attitude helped to reassure me and calm me down from my own nihilistic panic. My family didn't understand me, my friendships were superficial, I had no job, no wife, no children and little experience of the real world of work and effort. Looking back I can see why I was subject to panic attacks.
But now I'm a fifty-year-old family man with deep commitments, children to care for, bills to be paid and meals to be cooked – I find it impossible to recapture the mood of teenage hysteria which permeates all Camus's books.
I go to the gym and watch, on the bank of TV screens, pop videos showing half-naked young men and women partying in the city or frisking on beaches, under waterfalls, in tropical islands around the world. My kids jet off to exotic destinations I could only dream of back in the 1970s. They text, Instagram and Facebook with friends in America, Spain, the Middle East, even China. The world just no longer is the limited world of one-town boredom and dull routine that Camus describes. Rather than a crushed, defeated, broken, humiliated culture as was the Nazi world of 1940 or the post-war ruins of the 1940s – my kids live in a vibrant, shiny world alive with music, movies, clothes, festivals, travel round the world and futuristic technology: they think life is great.
Looking back, Camus's writings are really a kind of prose poetry which repeats pretty much the same idea from a thousand angles, expressed in countless metaphors and images, laced with wit and paradox in the typical French tradition, but essentially static.
A stranger to myself and to the world, armed solely with a thought that negates itself as soon as it asserts, what is this condition in which I can have peace only by refusing to know and to live, in which the appetite for conquest bumps into walls that defy its assaults? To will is to stir up paradoxes. Everything is ordered in such a way as to bring into being that poisoned peace produced by thoughtlessness, lack of heart, or fatal renunciations. (p.25)
The 'appetite for conquest', the 'poisoned peace', 'fatal renunciations'?
You either enjoy this kind of poetry or you don't. I can feel my way into it as I feel my way into the harsh world of the Icelandic sagas or the sweet humour of Chaucer's poetry or the gargoyle world of early Dickens or the bumptious jingoism of Kipling. Those writers, also, have their truths and their insights, create internally consistent imaginative universes, generate quotable quotes which I may or may not apply to myself or others or the world in general.
But whereas I carry Chaucer and Kipling out into the world, remembering their best lines and beauty to enrich and colour my life, when I closed The Myth of Sisyphus I could remember almost nothing of it. — Some people find life absurd and it drives a tiny minority to suicide but it's best, on balance, to face up to the meaninglessness of a godless universe and to create your own values and purpose within it.
The absurd man catches sight of a burning and frigid, transparent and limited universe in which nothing is possible but everything is given, and beyond which all is collapse and nothingness. 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.
Being aware of one's life, one's revolt, one's freedom, and to the maximum, is living, and to the maximum. (p.61)
The present and the succession of presents before a constantly conscious soul is the ideal of the absurd man. (p.62)
OK. I get it. Most people nowadays do that anyway, and don't need a laboriously over-written, obscure and attitudinising text to help them.
Why is absurdity negative?
My son's just got an 'A' in his Philosophy A-level. He didn't study Camus (who is, after all, not a philosopher) though he did spend a lot of time on Martin Heidegger, the grand-daddy of 20th century existentialists.
I explained Camus's notion of the Absurd to him i.e. the mismatch between the human wish (it's always translated as nostalgia; maybe it means 'longing' as well) for order and meaning in the world and the lack of any such order – and the way it is always presented by Camus as a challenge, a trial, an ordeal, a desert under a hostile sky that only the strongest can face up to and confront, and my son said – 'Why?'
He understood the idea of the mismatch, he got the absurdity of looking for meaning in a 'godless universe'. OK. But… why does it have to be negative? Why does this mismatch have to have a value? Why can't it just be… a mismatch, and up to each of us to make of it what we will, to give it a value? Where does all the horror and anguish come from? The absurd can be funny. In fact all of us know that absurdity often is funny in everyday life. The horror and the anguish which Camus describes aren't logically entailed in the concept of a mismatch. They are a value imposed on the situation.
My son suggests that the entire climate, to use Camus's word, of Sartrean existentialism and Camusian Absurdity, the rhetoric of anguish and despair and futility (in Sartre) and being an alien, an outsider in arid deserts under a stricken sky (in Camus) reflects the grim situation of 1930s and 40s France – the political chaos of the 1930s, the crushing humiliation of defeat by the Nazis in 1940, and the even worse humiliation of liberation by the hated Anglo-Saxons in 1944.
Very few people at the time followed the 'logic' of the existentialists' arguments (where a 'logic' could be discerned) but everyone grasped the way their negativity crystallised into words and ideas the vast, continent-wide, wartime destruction and the collapse of all established social values, the loss of so many friends and family, hecatombs of corpses, which really did spread an atmosphere of anguish and despair through an entire generation.
There was no existentialism in Britain because we never underwent this national humiliation and collapse of values.
The last few pages of the book describe the Greek myth of Sisyphus and the text gives way to an orgy of rhetoric and poetic prose. Sisyphus is condemned in Hades to roll his rock up a hill and then watch it be tumbled back to the bottom, and forced to go back down and start rolling it up again – for all eternity. And yet Camus sees him as a positive figure, the epitome of the Absurd Man who sees the futility of life but sets himself to live it, regardless. All this is expressed with rhetoric not reason.
All Sisyphus' silent joy is contained therein. His fate belongs to him. His rock is his thing. Likewise, the absurd man, when he contemplates his torment, silences all the idols. In the universe suddenly restored to its silence, the myriad wondering little voices of the earth rise up. Unconscious, secret calls, invitations from all the faces, they are the necessary reverse and price of victory. There is no sun without shadow, and it is essential to know the night. The absurd man says yes and his effort will henceforth be unceasing. (p.110)
In its way, and taking into account its very different context, this stirring rhetoric is as full of moral uplift as a speech by Churchill.
The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus was published in France in 1942. This translation by Justin O'Brien was published by Hamish Hamilton in 1955, and as a Penguin paperback in 1975. All quotes & references are to the Penguin paperback edition (which I bought in 1977 for 75p).
The Myth of Sisyphus on Amazon
The Myth of Sisyphus online
The Battle of France
To Lose a Battle: France 1940 by Alistair Horne (1969)
Algerian war of independence
Posted in Books, Essays, France, French literature, philosophy
Tagged 1942, abandonment, absurdity, Albert Camus, aphorism, Camus, Christianity, death, desert, Don Juan, Dostoyevsky, drama, essay, existentialism, film noir, France, futility, God, Heidegger, Hope, Husserl, Jaspers, Jean-Paul Sartre, Kierkegaard, moralists, nihilism, philiosophy, psychology, suicide, The Absurd, The Myth of Sisyphus, theatre, worldview
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