1.

Life

 born on November 7, 1913

 father: 1914, died of shrapnel wounds suffered
 only thing Camus ever learned about his father -- violently ill after witnessing a public
execution … novel L’Etranger .
 moved to Algiers where they lived with his maternal uncle and grandmother in her
cramped second-floor apartment in the working-class district of Belcourt.
 Camus’ mother = illiterate, partially deaf, and afflicted with a speech pathology, worked
in an ammunition factory and cleaned homes to help support the family.
 high school years Camus -- avid reader (absorbing Gide, Proust, Verlaine, and Bergson,
among others), learned Latin and English, and developed a lifelong interest in literature,
art, theatre, and film.

 a goal-keeper): “I learned . . . that a ball never arrives from the direction you expected it.
That helped me in later life, especially in mainland France, where nobody plays straight.”
It was also during this period that Camus suffered his first serious attack of tuberculosis,
a disease that was to afflict him, on and off, throughout his career.

 1933 Camus enrolled at the University of Algiers – philosophy

 L’Etranger  (The Stranger), published in 1942 to favorable critical response, including a

lengthy and penetrating review by Jean-Paul Sartre.

 Le Mythe de Sisyphe (The Myth of Sisyphus), his philosophical anatomy of suicide and

the absurd, and joined Gallimard Publishing as an editor, a position he held until his
death.

 In the late 40’s La Peste (The Plague), an allegorical novel and fictional parable of the
Nazi Occupation and the duty of revolt,

 In 1951 he published L’Homme Revolte (The Rebel), a reflection on the nature of

freedom and rebellion and a philosophical critique of revolutionary violence.

 In 1956, Camus published La Chute (The Fall), the short, confessional novel, which
unfortunately would be the last of his completed major works and which in the opinion of
some critics is the most elegant, and most under-rated, of all his books.

 January 4th of 1960, Camus died tragically in a car accident

 Upon hearing of Camus’ death, Sartre wrote a moving eulogy in the France-Observateur,

saluting his former friend and political adversary not only for his distinguished
contributions to French literature but especially for the heroic moral courage and
 “stubborn humanism” which he brought to bear against the “massive and deformed
events of the day.”

2.

a. Fiction

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

5. Philosophy

“More a writer than a philosopher.”

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

 To re-emphasize a point made earlier, Camus considered himself first and foremost
a writer (un ecrivain). -- journalist, humanist, novelist, and even moralist.
 However, uncomfortable identifying himself as a philosopher .

Themes and Ideas.

i. The Absurd

 Camus has been used to explain episodes of Seinfeld and The Simpsons

 it is largely through the thought and writings of the French-Algerian author that the
concept of absurdity has become a part not only of world literature and twentieth-century
philosophy, but of modern popular culture as well.

 What then is meant by the notion of the absurd?

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

 So here we are: poor creatures desperately seeking hope and meaning in a hopeless,
meaningless world.

 The absurd arises from the human demand for clarity and transcendence on the one hand
and a cosmos that offers nothing of the kind on the other. Such is our fate: we inhabit a
world that is indifferent to our sufferings and deaf to our protests.

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

1. Our first choice is blunt and simple: physical suicide. Camus rejects this choice as
cowardly. A renunciation of life, not a true revolt.
2. the religious solution of positing a transcendent world of solace and meaning beyond
the Absurd. -- “philosophical suicide” and rejects it as transparently evasive and
fraudulent. An annihilate reason, which in Camus’ view is as fatal and self-destructive
as physical suicide.
3. the only authentic and valid solution is simply to accept absurdity, or better yet to
embrace it, and to continue living. … b/c the absurd is an unavoidable, indeed
defining, characteristic of the human condition, the only proper response to it is full,
unflinching, courageous acceptance. Life, he says, can “be lived all the better if it has
no meaning.”

The Myth of Sisyphus  … Doomed to eternal labor at his rock, fully conscious of the essential
hopelessness of his plight, Sisyphus nevertheless pushes on … an icon of the spirit of revolt and
of the human condition. To rise each day to fight a battle you know you cannot win, and to
do this with wit, grace, compassion for others, and even a sense of mission, is to face the
Absurd in a spirit of true heroism.

ii. the spirit of revolt

 What is revolt?

 Simply defined, it is the Sisyphean spirit of defiance in the face of the Absurd. …it is
a spirit of opposition against any perceived unfairness, oppression, or indignity in the
human condition.

 Rebellion in Camus’ sense begins with a recognition of boundaries and limits that define
one’s essential selfhood and thus must not be infringed – as when the slave stands up to
his master and says in effect “thus far, and no further, shall I be commanded.”
  This defining of the self appears to be an act of pure egoism and individualism, but it
is not.
o an act of conscientious revolt is ultimately far more than just an individual gesture
or an act of solitary protest.
o The rebel effectively says: there is a “common good more important than his
own destiny” and that there are “rights more important than himself.”
o The rebel acts “in the name of certain values which are still indeterminate but
which he feels are common to himself and to all men.” (The Rebel, 15-16.)

 Camus then goes on to assert that an “analysis of rebellion leads at least to the
suspicion that, contrary to the postulates of contemporary thought, a human nature
does exist, as the Greeks believed.”
 After all, “Why rebel,” he asks, “if there is nothing permanent in the self worth
preserving?”
 The slave who stands up and asserts himself actually does so for “the sake of everyone
in the world.” … “all men – even the man who insults and oppresses him – have a
natural community.”
 Here we may note that the idea that there may indeed be an essential human nature is
for Camus something like a fundamental article of his humanist faith. … here Camus
is not an existentialist

 True revolt, then, is performed not just for the self but in solidarity with and out of
compassion for others.
o And for this reason, Camus is led to conclude, that revolt too has its limits.
o If it begins with and necessarily involves a recognition of human community and
a common human dignity, it cannot, without betraying its own true character, treat
others as if they were lacking in that dignity or not a part of that community.

iii. The Outsider

 the character or perspective of the “L’Étranger” or outsider. In French, étranger can

mean: foreign, overseas, unknown, extraneous, outsider, stranger, alien,
unconnected, disturbing, and irrelevant.
 Mersault, the narrator of L’Étranger, is the most obvious example.
 He seems to observe everything, even his own behavior, from an outside perspective.
 he records his observations with clinical detachment at the same time that he himself is
warily observed by the community around him.

 Camus lived most of his life in various groups and communities without really
being of them: a European in Africa, an African in Europe, an infidel among Moslems,
a lapsed Catholic, a Communist Party drop-out, an underground resister, a “child of the
state” raised by a widowed mother (who was illiterate and virtually deaf and dumb),
  This outside view, explains both the cool, objective precision of much of his work and
also the high value he assigned to longed-for ideals of friendship, community, solidarity,
and brotherhood.

iv. Guilt and Innocence

 again Mersault in The Stranger provides a striking example.

 Is he legally innocent of the murder he is charged with? Or is he technically guilty?
o no conscious intention behind his action. Indeed the killing takes place almost as
if by accident, with Mersault in a kind of absent-minded daze, distracted by the
sun.
o it is hard for the reader not to share the view of other characters in the novel,
especially Mersault’s accusers, witnesses, and jury, in whose eyes he seems to be
a seriously defective human being.

 The Fall, Jean-Baptiste Clamence (a voice in the wilderness calling for universal
clemency and forgiveness) is tortured by guilt in the wake of a seemingly casual incident.
o the suicidal plunge of a young woman into the Seine
o comes to view his inaction as typical of a long pattern of personal vanity and as a
colossal failure of human sympathy on his part.
o Wracked by remorse and self-loathing, he gradually descends into a figurative
hell.
o In the final sections of the novel, he declares his crucial insight that, despite our
pretensions to righteousness, everyone is guilty. Hence no human being has
the right to pass final moral judgment on another.

v. Individual vs. History and Mass Culture

A primary theme of early twentieth-century European literature and critical thought is the rise of
modern mass civilization and its suffocating effects of alienation and dehumanization. By the
time Camus was establishing his literary reputation, this theme had become pervasive. Anxiety
over the fate of Western culture, already intense, escalated to apocalyptic levels with the sudden
emergence of fascism, totalitarianism, and new technologies of coercion and death. Here then
was a subject ready-made for a writer of Camus’ political and humanistic views. He responded to
the occasion with typical force and eloquence.

In one way or another, the themes of alienation and dehumanization as by-products of an

increasingly technical and automated world enter into nearly all of Camus’ works. Even his
concept of the Absurd becomes multiplied by a social and economic world in which meaningless
routines and mind-numbing repetitions predominate. The drudgery of Sisyphus is mirrored and
amplified in the assembly line, the business office, the government bureau, and especially in the
penal colony and concentration camp.
In line with this theme, the ever-ambiguous Merseault in The Stranger can be understood as both
a depressing manifestation of the newly emerging mass personality (that is, as a figure devoid of
basic human feelings and passions) and, conversely, as a lone hold-out, a last remaining
specimen of the old Romanticism – and hence a figure who is viewed as both dangerous and
alien by the robotic majority. Similarly, The Plague can be interpreted, on at least one level, as
an allegory in which humanity must be preserved from the fatal pestilence of mass culture, which
converts formerly free, autonomous, independent-minded, human beings into a soulless new
species.