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Four Recent Camus Studies:

The Thought and Art of Albert
Camus: Camus: Albert Camus
and the Literature of Revolt
a
C. G. Christofides
a
Syracuse University
Published online: 06 Sep 2013.

To cite this article: C. G. Christofides (1960) Four Recent Camus Studies: The
Thought and Art of Albert Camus: Camus: Albert Camus and the Literature of
Revolt, Symposium: A Quarterly Journal in Modern Literatures, 14:1, 60-64, DOI:
10.1080/00397709.1960.10732625

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00397709.1960.10732625

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 REVIEWS

FOUR RECENT CAMUS STUDIES

PHILIP THODY: Albert Camus: A Study of his Work. New York, Grove
Press, 1957- 155 pp.
THOMAS HANNA: The Thought and Art of Albert Camus. Chicago, Henry
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Regnery Company, 1958. z04 pp.

GERMAINE BRBE: Camus. New Brunswick, New Jersey, Rutgers University
Press, 1959. z77 pp.
JOHN CRUICKSHANK: Albert Camus and the Literature of Revolt. London,
Oxford University Press, 1959· z49 pp.

NEVER DID Cain kill Abel more methodically and more dispassionately than
in the twentieth century. Never did the estrangement of man from man
receive less understanding from religion or scientisrn than in the generation
which triumphantly crossed the infinite spaces, while man was dooming
two per cent of his brothers on earth to wander in search of a home, only
to find shelter instead. No voice in the West has been more sincere, has
achieved greater artistic range, in stating this plight than the voice of Albert
Camus. Son of the land between the Algerian shore and the Sahara moun-
tains, like Socrates of the Saronic gulf and the hills of Attica, and Moses,
child of the Nile and the Memphis elevations, Camus' conscience reasserts
the humanist values of the Greeks and seeks a nee-decalogue in order to
reconcile the oscillation of the man of his times between nihilism, irration-
ality, and injustice on the one hand and the aspiration to peace, darity,
and perfect justice on the other. The state of the absurd, in the face of
bankrupt Christianity and bankrupt rationalism, must necessarily lead to
revolt in order to lead to self-awareness and possibly beatitude.
Four major critical works on Camus in English appeared between 1957
and 1959, all of them by eminent scholars pursuing divergent lines of
investigation. These works, added to the staggering heap of articles, are
a testimony of the impact on this generation of an artist who in his lifetime
was appreciated as much for his decency as a human being as he was for
his creative output: eloquent manifestation and castigation of the climate
of the age.
Philip Thody's Albert Camus does not suffer from the disadvantage of
having been written first, in spite of only a last-minute mention of L' Exil
et Ie rrryaume. Rachel Bespaloff's judgment on Camus' work up to 1950 will
stand forever: co••• few pages, few words, but, in these few, modern man
and his torment, his sin and his grandeur." L'Etranger and La Peste are
indeed a sufficient creation to assure Camus the immortality that Mallarrne
achieved with some thirty lines. Philip Thody, Lecturer in French at the
60
 REVIEWS 61
Queen's University of Belfast, as well as John Cruickshank, Professor of
French at the University of Southampton, succumbs to the Britisher's
propensity for political and philosophical analysis, at the expense of the
aesthetic approach, in relation to the work of a writer, who, when accepting
the Nobel Prize said: "I cannot live as a person without my art," and who
approved entirely of Gide's position on literary creation. Had Camus laid
claim to political and philosophical authority after the publication of Le
My/he de Sisyphe or L'Homme revol/e, then such an examination, which
accounts for a large section of Mr. Thody's book and about three-fourths
of Mr. Cruickshank's study, might have been justifiable. It is puzzling that
most critics of Camus fail to correlate the dates of composition of the
creative works with those of the theoretical writings. The latter, which
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always come after (as if Camus were seeking to justify or explain his
creations), must be considered unsystematic exercises of a sensibility that
may lack rigor but one that contains much honesty and humility. Malraux,
intelligent artist that he is, conserves his distance by not providing theoretical
sequels to Les Conquerants or La Condition humaine.
Mr. Thody is irked by the lopsided character of L'Homme revoltt, in which
the only revolutions that count are the French Revolution and the Marxist
one; he is irked by Camus' passing over the successful bourgeois revolutions
in England and America and his neglect of non-nihilist but rebellious
writers such as Voltaire, Zola, Ibsen, Shaw, or Malraux, writers who avoided
the nihilism which masquerades as revolt. A more perceptive and wise
critic, Professor Cruickshank, sees in Camus' commentary on revolt not so
much the doctrinaire choice of one axis of history as the statement of a
moral dilemma, once revolt takes on, in the name of justice, the inhuman
character of political revolution. According to Camus, this antinomy may
be resolved by the "philosophie des limites" of pre-Christian revolt. Both
authors restate Camus' explanation of the Nietzschean realization that God
is dead and Dostoievsky's, "If God does not exist, then everything is
permitted," in terms of the trial of Christianity in the eighteenth century
and the banishment of the miracle. A valid question to raise would have
been Camus' not receding to the Reformation when secular government
allied to the divine-right theory began preparing the modern totalitarian
state, a period that witnessed regicides in France and England within thirty-
nine years-after Luther and Calvin had measurably weakened in Europe
the control which the Church had once exercised over medieval princes
(Canossa).
Mr. Thody's interpretation of L'Etranger in the light of Le My the de
Sisyphe is stimulating (his notes are excellent), and could serve to rebuff
the argument of Claude Mauriac that the didactic end does not fit in with
the rest of the book. His cursory summation of Camus' works, however,
and his even more cursory critical analysis, the almost total absence of
considerations of language and art (and his annoying use of the British
translation title for L'Etranger [The Outsider]), make of his work a sketchy
outline that is often witty, which has the appearances but not the virtues
of compactness.
Mr. Cruickshank's seventy-seven pages on "The Art of the Novel" and
 6z Spring I960 SYMPOSIUM

Camus' dramatic preoccupations contain the brilliant expositions and

insights to which his two articles on L' Etranger and La Peste have
accustomed his readers. This should not be taken to mean, of course, that
the methodical and meticulous pages on revolt and the absurd are without
value; only the relative amount of space allotted these problems is
questioned.
Some of Professor Cruickshank's observarions on L'Etranger} La Peste}
and La Chute are worth examining. The style of L' Etranger rightly reminds
him of Hemingway. "Conjunctions involving cause or effect," he writes,
"are rare, and the syntax is correspondingly abrupt." He may have added
that in this zero degree of style there is a fear of saying too much and yet
not saying enough. The explosion of metaphors used by Camus after
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Meursault has killed the Arab is interpreted in terms of Professor Frohock's

metaphor-count (and Professor Viggiani's), for whom metaphor serves to
convey psychological and metaphysical meanings for the act. Not content
with the roman-mythe label for La Peste} Mr. Cruickshank proposes to call
it a symbolist novel: "by this I mean a novel in which the relationship
between two or more levels of meaning is not so continuously sustained as
in allegory," or in politico-metaphysical fiction. Camus, says the author,
places humanity outside time, by means of a central and pervasive symbol.
Because the plague must first assume concrete and historical form, it enables
La Peste to be a philosophical novel and not simply a philosophical treatise;
but since the plague is also a symbol possessing non-literal and non-temporal
meaning, it allows the novel to discuss the problem of evil and of man's
estrangement in the universe in non-historical terms. In La Chute,
Mr. Cruickshank sees man not so much fallen as falling. "There is no rest,
only a continuing slithering movement." He sees cynical despair in
Clamence's final words: "It is too late now. It will always be too late-
fortunately!" The change in moral (as well as physical) climate from
L'Etranger and La Peste is interpreted as denoting guilt, ambiguity, un-
certainty, pessimism. Gone is Meursault's innocence and Tarrou's wish to
become a saint without God. Now the fundamental narcissism of man is
reinforced, and ambiguity is lack of point of reference, as falling is loss
of stability. Professor Cruickshank concludes: "The conflict which character-
izes Camus' mind is as much geographical as temporal, allowing him to
combine commitment and objectivity in a quite unusual way. It is this
dualism which has been the main impulse behind his writing, just as his
writing has largely been the attempt to resolve its persistent tension."
Thomas Hanna's book, which appeared between the publication of
Mr. Thody's work and Miss Bree's, bears the burden of Mr. Hanna's
premise: "It is Camus' curious misfortune that the success of his novels
has obscured the fact that he is primarily a philosopher." (Wrote Camus:
"I am not a philosopher, in fact I can only speak of what I have lived").
This premise is not substantiated by the conclusion, for Mr. Hanna is an
astute reader and critic: "The 'two or three ideas' which Camus has made
his own are simple ideas and do not grow into a complex philosophical
system." To Sartre's, "But I ask you, Camus, who are you to act so aloof?",
Mr. Hanna eloquently replies that Camus is a man "who is passionately
 REVIEWS

concerned with what he argues. When he speaks of death, he means

hil death; when he speaks of a yearning for peace and solidarity, he means
hil yearning; when he speaks of man's revolt, he means bis revolt. These
problems are not indifferent, they are compelling and ultimate; they are,
for Camus, tormenting problems which can be answered only through an
intense and honest inquiry into which one throws his whole being." The
greatest virtue of Mr. Hanna's work is to have provided a systematic
condensation of all major works, excerpting meaningful passages which he
accompanies with unpretentious explications. It is the most comprehensive
handbook that has appeared to date, and in its recent paperback form it
ought to prove very popular with the undergraduate.
By far the most satisfying and illuminating of these four studies on Camus
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is Professor Bree's book. Her approach to Camus' work is "essentially

literary" and she has had the tremendous advantage of having had free
access to much unpublished material, notably the Carnets, and of Camus'
reading of her manuscript. The biographical part of the book is exhaustive
and perhaps over-conscientious ("His friends still remember the serious
goalkeeper with the impeccably rolled white socks; even today Camus takes
a passionate interest in football"). These prolegomena through which Miss
Bree explains much of the characterization and the imagery of the works,
give way to Camus' art and his concept of art. The author's task is revealed
as that of elucidating Camus' attempt to transfigure into art the problems
raised by his experience. Camus, she says, does this without a preconceived
metaphysics, not in order to provide definite answers, but in order to make
a valid work of art out of the chaos and the violence of his generation.
Camus' intellectual and artistic development is traced minutely, and the
Camets are looted to provide answers for the genesis of the creative works,
his passion for life and his ethical concerns-as if they were witnesses to
the great artist's many visions and revisions which a minute will not reverse.
The form of L' Etranger, La Peste, La Chute-objective and impersonal-
reminds Miss Bree of Flaubert, The manner of Gide is also present in these
rkits, since the narrator himself unconsciously exposes attitudes that Camus
observed critically. "Esthetically, their effect rests in great part on the
creation of a certain 'tone' of voice, the tone of the narrator." L'Etranger,
she says, suggests that the failure of man to question the meaning of life
is to condemn him to nothingness. In La Peste, Camus left the universe to
itself and turned to man, his needs, his love of life, his will to live, without
abstracting his own humanism from his experience. "This is why La Pest«
is, within its limits, a great novel, the most disturbing, most moving novel
yet to have come out of the chaos of the mid-century." In La Chute, Camus
continues the fight against nihilism. Clamence yearns for the Old Testament
law of rewards and punishments and is a seeker after his own righteousness.
In his attempt to escape his ego, guilt is the only feeling that he can establish
with other men. The stories in L' Exil et Ie royaume show a Camus who
has "sharpened his instruments and increased his scope." Esthetic equi-
librium is sought in satire and is rooted "in a cosmic reality which sustains
rather than negates that essential though enigmatic quality of man him-
self ..."
 Spring I!J60 SYMPOSIUM

Far from the sardonic critic's, "St. Camus, pray for us I" (the Camus of
American innocents and ladies' literary clubs), Professor Bree's Camus is
the artist committed to the task of expressing universal problems, all the
values that matter, freedom and justice and joy and sorrow, with images
of deliverance: the life-giving sea as it confronts the mystery of the blinding
sun of life. The rest, death, his death, is absurdity.

Syracuse Universiry C. G. CHRISTOFIDES

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MICHEL FOLMAN: Le Secret de Benjamin Constant. Sa maladie, sa vie intime.

Geneva, Tribune de Geneve, 1959· 93 pp.

THE PHENOMENON of the physician who dabbles in literary cnticism is

relatively common. At times these doctors' remarks are a truly worthwhile
addition to our knowledge of a given author or period. Others like Mauriac's
Doctor Elysee Schwartz writing his Sexualite de Blaise Pascal attach them-
selves to insignificant details or medical hypotheses which may very well
be extremely interesting in themselves as case histories or as scandalous bits
of gossip about famous persons, but are perhaps not of overwhelming
literary significance.
Benjamin Constant's secret is that he had syphilis. Corollary secrets
Dr. Folman claims to have discovered are that as a child Constant indulged
in "pratiques solitaires" and that the celebrated liaison between Constant
and Mme de Stael was entirely Platonic. Albertine de Stael, until now
considered the daughter of Constant, Dr. Folman attributes to a brief visit
of the Baron de Stael to Coppet some nine months before Albertine's birth.
Dr. Folman's reasoning goes thus: to cure himself of his "pratiques
solitaires" (this is almost entirely supposition on the author's part), the young
Constant has recourse to "Ies maisons louches et les filles venales" where
he presumably contracts his malady. The ensuing astheniesexuelle forces upon
him for a while a period of continence. This period of continence coincides,
according to Dr. Folman, with the liaison with Mme de Stael, liaison, he
would have us believe, in name only. when renewed strength brings within
Constant a renewed desire, Constant attempts to make an "arrangement"
with a mistress who will accord him the physical counterpart of the in-
tellectual pleasures offered him by Germaine de Stael, This thesis is, at best,
somewhat difficult to accept.
The author then continues by delineating the further stages of the
development of Constant's syphilis, leading us through the wild and painful
sexual desires to the final crippling effects of the disease, which until this
time had been attributed to a bad fall and the failure of the broken limb
to knit.
With a work of this type, the question which must be posed is: What
new light is thrown on the life and works of the individual in question?