Published as the introduction to Albert Camus, Selected Fiction and Essays.

London: Everyman’s Press, 2004. Millennium Library. ISBN 1857152786

Publication 8.7

Albert Camus 1913-1960

The Sun, the sea…

Albert Camus was born on November 1, 1913, at Mondovi, a small town in the
eastern part of Algeria, which was then an integral part of the French state. His early life
was harsh and poor, but a boy doesn’t need to be rich to relish the best things about
Mediterranean life: sun, sea, soccer… and girls. Though much of Camus’s work as a
writer tackles tough moral issues from a perspective that is bleak at best, it is also shot
through with the joy of physical life. Many of Camus’s characters share their author’s
delight in the sea. For example, Tarrou and Rieux, the two stalwart defenders of the
human race in its struggle against evil and oppression, cement their friendship by going
for a swim in the warm, star-lit sea (The Plague, page 256-257). Similarly, in all Camus’s
works the sun represents not just warmth and pleasure, but life itself. Soccer, which
occupied much of Camus’s energy as a boy, figures more rarely in the work, but it
remained a fundamental part of Camus’s sense of self:
Only in team sports played in my youth have I ever known that overpowering
sense of hope and solidarity that goes with long periods of training leading up to
victory or defeat on the day of the match. Really, the little moral philosophy I
know I learned on the soccer pitch and on the stage; those were my two real
universities (Quoted by Grenier from a television interview, 1959)

The main part of Camus’s life that is almost entirely omitted from his works is the subject
of women and sexual love. Camus was from his teens a handsome and energetic charmer
of the opposite sex. His conquests were legion, ranging from one-night stands after a
beach encounter to a drawn-out, stormy romance with the great actress Maria Casarès.
But save for an oblique confession in the pages on Don Juan in The Myth of Sisyphus,
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Camus did not write about desire, love, or sex. His are novels of ideas, not novels of
adultery in the manner of Balzac or Tolstoy; they are novels of moral and topical import,
not stories of amorous intrigue or psychological analysis. It is true that Meursault, the
central figure of Camus’s first novel, The Outsider, picks up a girl and spends the night
with her – but the episode is narrated as a matter of routine, as something so
unexceptional as to require no explanation or analysis. The beach, the sea, and the body
are as it were equal partners in the immaculate sensuality of Mediterranean life.
Camus was both deeply attached to heliotropic physicality and irremediably cut off
from it. At the age of seventeen he contracted tuberculosis, and remained a more or less
sick man, requiring periods of convalescence and care, for the rest of his life. From then
on, however much he liked to kick a ball around, Camus did not have enough wind to last
a match, and he had to fall back on flag-waving for his old club, Racing Universitaire
d’Alger, for which he had briefly played goal. Illness, though, had many more serious and
fruitful consequences. At that time an incurable as well as a contagious and infectious
disease, tuberculosis debarred Camus from teaching at school or university. Without the
infection Camus would almost certainly have been a teacher as well as a writer. If at
times his essays sound a little schoolmasterly, it is out of frustration, not out of habit or
routine. Tuberculosis also exempted Camus from military service, and furthermore
prevented him enlisting in wartime. Passionately opposed to Franco’s fascist rebellion in
Spain, passionately opposed to Nazism and to German aggression against Poland and
then France, Camus could only ever fight evil with words. But chronic illness never
stopped Camus from loving the outdoor life or from chasing every good-looking woman
who crossed his path. He was a man of his time in this as in many other respects: his
colleagues and rivals Jean-Paul Sartre, Arthur Koestler, even Romain Gary were equally
voracious in their sexual appetites; and with the exception of Gary, they all drank and
smoked — in blind disregard of tuberculosis or any other condition — to a degree that
would today have that whole bunch of Parisian intellectuals dispatched to a rehab clinic
for multiple substance abuse.

Scholarship Boy
Camus had the good fortune to be a bright boy in the heyday of the French education
system. Scholarships were available to ensure that he pursued the curriculum through to
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the baccalaureate at age eighteen. He also had the good fortune to encounter first-rate
teachers who awoke his interest in philosophy, literature and politics. The curriculum in
Algeria was of course identical to the one pursued in every other part of the French
Empire, from Brittany to Indo-China. The curriculum in literature and philosophy, with
their associated exercises of explication de texte and dissertation, constituted the mortar
which held France’s far-flung communities together and made the “civilizing mission”
of the colonial project self-evident. Camus proved very good at subjects held to sit at the
very pinnacle of the system. Schooling in Latin, in literature, and in philosophy made a
proud and self-confident Frenchman out of a poor boy from the back of beyond.
He went on to the University of Algiers, which similarly taught the standard French
curriculum, obtained a first degree in letters and then a master’s in philosophy, with a
dissertation entitled Christian Metaphysics and Neo-Platonism: Plotinus and Saint
Augustine (1936). Camus’s dissertation supervisor, Jean Grenier, a humanist philosopher
with an interest in Eastern religions, had immense influence on the younger man, who
became and remained a close friend and companion.
There were no scholarships for university studies, so Camus supported himself
through all kinds of odd jobs, collecting experience of varied worlds which he would use
now and again in his later work (for example, the strike at the coopers’ yard which
forms the subject of “The Silent Ones”, in Exile and the Kingdom). As a student, Camus
also discovered amateur dramatics, which became a real passion. He founded his own
theatrical troupe, acted and directed, adapted novels for the stage, and ended up writing
his own plays too. Although Camus is now best known for his fiction and essays, he
himself always felt most at home in the theatre. He loved the collaborative aspect of play
production, the process of putting different skills together, the atmosphere and the
illusory reality of the stage. Though not all his plays and productions were well received,
Camus never stopped being involved in theatricals all his life long. Indeed, the last and
perhaps the most completely successful of all his novels, The Fall (1958), is a dramatic
monologue almost ready to be staged as it stands in book form.
There is in all Camus’s writing a quite noticeable aspiration towards the elegance
and abstraction that gets high marks in French schools. It would perhaps be unflattering
but it is not unfair to say that Camus’s concept of good style rests on what he had
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learned by the age of eighteen or twenty. The only way out of poverty and provinciality
for Albert Camus was the education system, and he had every reason to believe that the
values that it was built on as well as the techniques that it taught him held universal,
even magical power. The system had already proved its worth in raising him from the
very bottom of the pile.

White Trash
Camus’s father was vineyard labourer. Though he did not toil in the field but in
the vinification process, his position was barely a rung above that of peasant. He was
conscripted at the outbreak of the First World War and fell on the fields of Flanders.
Camus never knew him. His mother, Catherine Sintès, had to earn her own living
thenceforth: illiterate and unqualified, she became a cleaner. The family had other
relatives in French Algeria who were moderately successful, but Camus’s personal
background is one of such poverty as can hardly be imagined nowadays. It did not make
Camus a bitter or jealous man. But it has profound importance for the ways in which we
should try to understand his moral and political attitudes.
Camus lived in Algeria for all his formative years, and all his fictional works save
for The Fall are set there. Yet as Conor Cruise O’Brien acutely observed thirty years
ago, not a single Arab speaks in the entire œuvre. In the story called “The Guest”, the
Arab prisoner’s comrades leave a message on the blackboard — but still not a word is
spoken aloud. In The Outsider, an Arab is shot — but has not a single word attributed to
him in direct speech. The Oran of The Plague is an entirely European city. The native
population is alluded to here and there, but Arab Algerians are never seen and never
heard in the text, as if only Europeans could even catch bubonic plague. The deafening
silence of the Arabs is not a cynical ploy on Camus’s part, and it is probably a quite
unconscious aspect of the novel. In failing to give any place to the vast majority of the
population of Algeria, Camus reproduces the mindset not of the wealthy colonialists
who employed (and thus encountered) the Arab population, but of the petits Blancs
(“white trash”) whose Frenchness was their only asset.
Alongside theatre, Camus’s main activity in his young manhood in Algiers was in
journalism, and he spoke out courageously against the abuses of colonial rule. But it did
not occur to him that the colonial project itself was flawed, even if he came to fear that it
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was doomed. After he moved to France in 1940, and long after that, as the situation in
Algeria became ever more fraught, he remained unable to comprehend the true drama of
his native land. He was a man of his time, not a far-sighted prophet, and he remained
loyal to his own people and class, the European population of Algeria. He deplored
settler violence but he felt more threatened by the violence of the nationalists. In reply to
a question from the floor after his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in Literature in
1957, Camus said:
I must also denounce a terrorism which is exercised blindly, in the streets of
Algiers for example, and which some day could strike my mother or my family. I
believe in justice, but I shall defend my mother above justice

Camus certainly did his best to promote the cause of justice in the European theatre and
the world at large, and he was not insensitive to the plight of the Arab population of
Algeria. It’s just that he could not connect to them as people: and how could he? Like all
the settlers save those who actually managed farms or factories with Arab employees,
Camus never acquired a single word of Arabic. What we can see in his fiction is an
accurate and sensitive reproduction of the blank stare at the other that lies at the heart of
the historical tragedy of the petits Blancs.

The Work Ahead

Camus is one of those rare writers who worked out what he had to say early on,
and proceeded along a plan laid out in advance. As he said in Stockholm in 1957:
I had a precise plan when I began my work. What I wanted to express first was
negation. In three ways: in novel form (which produced The Outsider); in
theatrical form (which produced Caligula and Cross Purposes); and in essay form
(The Myth of Sisyphus). Then I foresaw three more works expressing positive
values: in the form of a novel (The Plague); as theatre (State of Siege and Les
Justes); and in an essay (Rebellion and Revolt). I also dimly projected a third
layer of writing, on the theme of love.

This is not a retrospective imposition of order on a life as full as any other of

unforeseen events. Camus really did have a plan at the start: “I’m twenty-five, I have a
life ahead of me, and I know what I want”, Camus wrote in his notebook around the
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outbreak of the Second World War, and in its tripartite form Camus’s grand plan reminds
us once again of the influence of his French lycée training. He summed it up in three key
words: The Absurd – Revolt – Love. Of these three terms, the first is the one most
lastingly associated with the work of Albert Camus. He became first and foremost the
“novelist of the absurd”. But as his plan makes clear, the absurd is only the first panel of
the triptych Camus envisaged as his lifework. Nowadays, looking back on a life and on
novels profoundly moulded by a particular place and time, we may not think the absurd
the most important of Camus’s ideas. But it cannot be avoided, as it forms the first pillar
in a moral and literary edifice of lasting beauty and value.
The absurd is the state of being in the absence of religious faith. Camus held no
religious beliefs, of course. But he held his non-belief with a kind of moral fervour and
intellectual intensity that has become very rare – and perhaps rather naïve – in a world
more secularized than the one in which Camus grew up. In the absence of faith or belief
in an order transcending the murky mess of human existence, death is an end that
undermines the value of anything that precedes it. At least, that’s what Camus argued, not
just for the sake of it, but because he felt it deeply. Only a god could make human actions
meaningful in an absolute sense, and as there was no god, actions and states in the world
have no “ultimate” meaning. From this Camus drew the conclusion that life was
“absurd”. As he often explained, there is no credible argument that can justify the
existence of evil; there is no sophistry that can ever make a sense of why bad things
happen to nice people and to innocent babes. So what can you do? Camus’s first project
was simply to describe the true state of our being, to make us see, in fiction, on stage, and
in ideas, just what it is to be alive in a world that is, in his special sense, absurd. That is
the sole real purpose of Camus’s first and still most widely read novel, The Outsider. The
second part of his plan was to investigate the kinds of response such a realisation should
prompt: broadly labelled “revolt”, this phase of Camus’s work is devoted to ways of
making a human sense of an inhumanly meaningless world. Most of the texts grouped in
the present selection of Camus’s writing belong to the second part of the overall project.
It has often been pointed out that Camus’s concept of the absurd is itself rather
absurd. Why should anyone find it all remarkable — or even more strangely, lamentable
— that there is no transcendent meaning to human acts? Things would surely be far
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worse if the opposite were the case. If the world were not at all absurd, in Camus’s sense,
then things in general and acts in particular would be endowed irrevocably with
“meaning”. And that would make the world a very strange and inhuman place indeed.
Every cup of tea, broken shoelace, premature death, and outbreak of slaughter would be
“meaningful”, that is to say fully explicable in terms of a higher order, and thus
necessary. Under such conditions, human life, which characteristically involves
imponderable choices, rough guesses, effort, and surprise, would surely seem quite futile,
since no matter what a person did, it would fit in with a higher scheme by the very fact of
having been done. A necessary world thus seems to many readers (myself included) as
rather more absurd than one in which meanings are not given. Indeed, by the time The
Outsider was completed, Camus himself lost his conviction in the importance of his own
“absurdist” premise:
The greatest timesaving device there is in the realm of thought is to accept the
non-intelligibility of the world — and to get down to worrying about humankind.
(From Camus’s Notebooks, quoted by Todd, p. 332)

All the same, the absence of “ultimate” meaning, even if it is what makes life
possible in practice, was felt by Camus, and by millions of people of his generation, as a
palpable gap, as an emotional void in the place previously occupied by religious faith.
For that reason Camus’s work belongs not just to the history of literature, but also to the
history of European consciousness. Camus gives us access to one important aspect of
what it was like to be alive and to be thinking in a world which, although barely more
than half a century away from us now, really had a different set of collective fears, regrets
and aspirations.
“Revolt”, on the other hand, continues to have great purchase. The point
that Camus makes in The Myth of Sisyphus is that the fact that life is absurd is not a
reason for ending it; on the contrary, “man” should rejoice in the struggle to overcome
absurdity by giving his own life a human, not a transcendental sense. The best way to
cope with the absurdity of existence, Camus argues, is to treat it with contempt — by
behaving as if every aspect of human life really mattered. That is all that Camus really
meant by “revolt”. The Plague is Camus’s principal lesson in “revolt”, and it is therefore
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a novel of vague but persuasive optimism about the possibility for achieving a
meaningful life in the struggle against the incomprehensible and the oppressive.
The third cycle of work that Camus intended, focused on “love”, is in a sense
broached by The Fall and perhaps by the unfinished novel Camus left at his death, The
First Man. But Camus did not have time to develop this “third layer” of his work. He
died in 1960, not of tuberculosis or of the consequences of a difficult and hard-drinking
life — but from a banal road accident. He was not yet forty-seven years of age.

Days and Nights

Journalism was Camus’s first career and the only one in which he could be called
a professional. At the age of twenty-five he was taken on to the staff of a left-wing daily,
Alger républicain, when it was founded in October 1938, and wrote copiously for it as
reporter, book-reviewer, and editorialist until it folded under political pressure in its
second incarnation as Le Soir républicain in early 1941. In 1943, when The Outsider and
The Myth of Sisyphus, both published in 1942, had begun to make Camus a well-known
figure in Occupied France, he joined the clandestine newspaper Combat, and emerged as
its editor-in-chief when the paper appeared legitimately on the Liberation of Paris in
August 1944. For the following four years Camus ran France’s most prestigious if not
most popular daily paper, and wrote a huge number of editorials on the many burning
political and moral questions of post-war France. Working for Alger républicain had
taught Camus how to transform his facility for academic prose into plain-speaking and
pointed fluency. But the obligation to give leadership to public opinion in the fluid,
fractious world of liberation France got Camus into numerous political dog-fights which
pushed him ever forward in the search for abstract and general principles of justice in
human affairs.
Camus, like so many French intellectuals of his generation, but more briefly than
most, had flirted with Communism in his youth. Even after the war, Camus continued to
feel it was wrong to attack the Party, for fear of giving comfort to the “forces of
reaction”. Combat itself proclaimed on its post-war masthead that it would take France
“from Resistance to Revolution”. But from one crisis to another, Camus’s view of the
Soviet Union and of the French Communist Party grew ever more negative, and he
emerged by the late 1940s as the leading anti-Communist intellectual in France. His
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colleague and rival Jean-Paul Sartre moved in the opposite direction, coming ever closer
to the Party, and acting in effect, from about 1952 to 1956, though without declaring any
formal allegiance, as what was then called a “fellow-traveller”. Though it had numerous
other personal, intellectual and cultural determinants, the split between Sartre and Camus
can most easily be understood as a parting of the ways over the question of support for
Communism in France. This clash of the Titans caused vast amounts of ink to be spilled,
and it still does today, though its importance to us is far from obvious. But it led to at
least one important clarification, as it prompted Camus to declare unambiguously that he
was not an existentialist. That much was unquestionably true.
One of the most difficult issues for Camus the journalist was the question of
violence. In 1944, the victorious French resistance sought to punish those who had
collaborated with the Nazi occupiers, and a wave of reprisals, kangaroo courts and
summary justice nearly engulfed France in civil war. Initially Camus led Combat to take
the side of the “purifiers”. But when he realized what that meant in practice – shaving
heads, expropriating owners, imprisonments and executions — he started to take his
distance from “revolutionary justice”. In stages Camus came to preach non-violence as a
mode of action, and to denounce the use of violence wherever it occurred, but more often
in Eastern Europe than elsewhere, such as in the French colonies. He reserved his
strongest language and effort for a campaign against the death penalty, a campaign
inherited from his literary forebear Victor Hugo, and carried forward by the French
socialist party until it was finally enacted into law in 1981. The essay on capital
punishment in the present selection was originally published in 1957 in a jointly authored
volume alongside a piece on the same subject by Arthur Koestler.
Camus’s collected journalism makes up the bulk of all he ever wrote (by volume,
it outweighs the fiction, drama and essayistic work rolled into one). Much of it has aged,
as is only to be expected; but what is most striking about even the best editorials now is
their stylistic resemblance to lay sermons. It’s a tone that doesn’t only belong to its
epoch, but to Camus quite especially; it might best be thought of as the moral earnestness
of a resolutely secular but still surreptitiously Christian preacher.
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Camus and the Church

The Fall presents in the form of a dramatic monologue the paradox of moral
responsibility in a world without God. The speaker-hero Clamence has left an easy life in
Paris to serve the dregs of human society in the rough quarters of Amsterdam, because he
has come to realize that thieves, pimps and thugs are just as human as anyone else,
himself included – or rather, that he, the successful and narcissistic lawyer, is in no
fundamental way morally superior to an offender. In imitation of a Dostoyevskian set-
piece scene, Clamence’s self-abasement is also a moral apotheosis, since he now lives in
accordance with the self-evident moral truth that no man can be an island and that, as
Simone de Beauvoir claimed in the epigraph to The Blood of Others, “we must all answer
for everything to the world at large” (an epigraph attributed by poetic licence to
Dostoyevsky himself). In what sense then is The Fall the story of a fall? The “fall” from
Paris to Amsterdam, from the beaux quartiers to the red-light district, only makes sense if
you fail to adopt Clamence’s moral perspective (and remain snobbishly Parisian and/or
heliocentric as well). The real “fall” to which the title of Camus’s novel-drama alludes is
far more general. It is the fall from grace. And it is not Clamence who falls, as an
individual. His fall is our fall, for what Camus has to tell us is that we all live in a fallen
world in which salvation can come only from human effort, not from providence. The
Fall is not a Christian tract, of course. It is nonetheless couched in the language of the
church and it is only really comprehensible as a vigorous contribution to a moral debate
set by the church. As a work of moral philosophy it is no doubt more passionately
interesting to readers attempting to free themselves from a Christian perspective than it is
to those from a different religious or cultural background; but the underlying questions
that it tackles concern every human being, irrespective of religious views.
The Plague is similarly an argument with the Church conducted in part in the
language of the sermon. Indeed, Father Paneloux gives two extensive sermons in the
novel, and Camus has no difficulty whatsoever in making his pastiches sound like the
real thing. In the first sermon Paneloux argues, in sum, that the plague has been sent by
God to try man’s faith. In the second, he preaches that maybe God is not involved so
directly in a scourge that has caused the deaths of innocent children. Of course Camus
believes and wants us to believe, from the evidence he presents so authentically, that
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Paneloux is plain wrong on both counts. It is neither original nor sophisticated to argue
that the existence of plague proves the non-existence of God (Voltaire had pursued the
same argument with respect to the Lisbon earthquake two hundred years earlier, and with
greater anti-theological punch.) You might even think that only a very recently
dechristianised preacher could possibly imagine that such an abstract issue might be
morally or practically relevant to dealing with an outbreak of plague.
There’s no point doubting Camus’s agnosticism. At the same time, we do have to
recognize that Camus’s fiction is built on premises and couched in language that
constantly imply the presence, not the absence, of Christian discourse and of its religious
presuppositions. This is not just because of Camus’s initial training in Christian theology,
in his master’s thesis on St Augustine; it is also because it spoke eloquently to Camus’s
first audience, large sections of which were still, in mid-twentieth century, straining to
free themselves from the mental and moral authority of the church.

Parables and code

Camus began to sketch out his second novel, The Plague, around 1942, when
France was under German military occupation, but did not finish it until after the end of
the war. It is set in the Algerian coastal city of Oran, which Camus knew well, and it
purports to narrate an outbreak of bubonic plague at an unspecified time which is clearly
intended to be the reader’s “now”. The authorities put the whole city under quarantine, so
that the inhabitants live a long period in an effective state of siege. (When Camus
transposed the underlying theme of the novel to the stage in 1948, he titled the play State
of Siege.) The purely symbolic nature of the epidemic in the novel could hardly be more
clearly indicated than by the measures taken to contain it.
As a matter of fact, the plague bacillus, Yersinia pestis, is a disease of rats
transmitted to humans by a specific flea, Nosopsyllus fasciatus. Infected humans are
neither infectious nor contagious, so they cannot pass the disease on to anyone else.
Quarantine thus serves no purpose whatsoever. The bacillus and the flea were identified
correctly in the late nineteenth century – by French scientists, moreover – and the
outbreaks of plague in Paris in 1920 (mentioned in the text on page 35), in Casablanca in
the 1940s and in the very last epidemic in Europe, at Ajaccio (Corsica) in 1945, were
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quickly eradicated by modern medical approaches utterly unlike those used in Camus’s
novel.
Camus was neither a scientist nor a medical doctor: his “plague” is a literary device,
and its sources are clear enough: Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year (1722), a
largely fictional account of the outbreak of the Black Death in London in 1666; and folk
memories of the Plague of Marseille (1722), when the whole area around the city was not
only quarantined, but shut off from the rest of the world by a huge wall, the mur de
Provence (mentioned on p. 39 of the text), remnants of which still stand not far from
Lourmarin, Camus’s summer retreat in the south of France. What makes The Plague such
a powerful novel is what might be called its constructed authenticity, a literary effect
built not on factual accuracy but on echoes of ancient nightmares, on recourse to literary
reminiscences, and on a barely perceptible play on words. In French as in English we flee
evildoers like the plague. Camus’s novel tackles the obvious question of what we might
or ought do when we’re plagued by something we cannot flee.
The symbolic nature of the setting of Camus’s third novel, The Fall, is similarly
obvious. It is set in the bars of the seedier district of Amsterdam, a city Camus knew only
from a 48-hour stop-over there, on 5 and 6 October 1954, which he spent in the city’s art
museums, not in its bars or brothels. The city where Clamence confesses himself is
simply the opposite of Algiers: dark, wet and cold, “Amsterdam” symbolises Camus’s
personal idea of hell on earth, and the (sharp-angled) canals of the city are for him like
the nine circles of Dante’s underworld. The name Clamence, too, is not an actual name in
French or any other language, but it echoes directly the French pronunciation of the Latin
version of the Gospel according to St Mark, where John the Baptist appears as “The voice
of one crying in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make his paths straight”
(Mark 1.3). “Crying in the wilderness” is clamans in deserto, and Clamence/clamans,
though he may not be John the Baptist and may have no transcendent truth to announce,
is “crying in the wilderness” (of Amsterdam, which is hell, into which he has – as we
have – “fallen”) to tell us at least something we should attend to.
Works like The Plague and The Fall are of course inexhaustible in the meanings that
they suggest. Much of the planning for the first of these novels was done at a place called
Le Panelier, in the Auvergne, where Camus had been sent for health reasons (it has
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particularly dry, clean mountain air). What is almost never said is that the nearby village
of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon was then the centre of a network of Protestant (Darbyist)
priests devoted to saving Jewish children from deportation to the Nazi death-camps. Was
Camus aware that he was living amongst those extremely discreet heroes of the
resistance, whose courage saved several thousand lives? He had the intuitions of an artist
more than the nose of a detective. The Plague would be an even more remarkable novel if
it were a parable of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon written by a man who only guessed what
was going on all around him.

The Message of Albert Camus

The Myth of Sisyphus, which belongs to the first phase of Camus’s three-layered
lifework, tells us simply that life is worth living because it is all that we have. As an essay
on suicide, which it purports to be at the start, it is seriously deficient. It seems to have
been written without extensive knowledge of actual suicides or of the medical, social or
psychoanalytical literature about them. As an essay on the relative importance of human
issues and metaphysical ones, however, it is entirely persuasive. Living a life and living it
well is more important, Camus demonstrates, than knowing what it means.
The Plague is most easily approached as a parable about the German occupation
of France. The “state of siege” under which the residents of Oran are put is easily
decoded as the situation of a subject population under foreign military rule. Paneloux’s
sermons are certainly intended to mimic the spineless response of many Frenchmen
(including large sections of the established church and the implicitly pro-Nazi regime that
ruled the so-called “Free Zone” of war-time France). Rambert’s desperate attempts to flee
“Oran” might also be read as referring to an attempt to escape to Britain to join the Free
French Forces under Charles de Gaulle. And the steady, devoted efforts of Tarrou, Rieux
and their helpers to bring what succour they can to the besieged population offer a
parable of “practical resistance”, not to defeat the enemy in battle, but to preserve human
dignity and to last the course, and in so doing to develop and to promote those virtues
which misfortune can call forth: co-operation, solidarity, and the art of small kindnesses.
The parallels should not be pushed too far, however. The obsessive collection of
statistical data for dealing with the outbreak of plague, even if it is meant to suggest that
knowing the truth is always better than burying your head in the sand, is technically far
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more reminiscent of the bureaucratic efficiency of the Nazi occupiers than of the
behaviour of the occupied French. Furthermore, the novel’s silence about the majority
population of the besieged city — assuming that we take the novel’s Oran to represent
the real Oran — simply has no meaning that can be transferred straightforwardly to the
plight of Occupied France. Similarly, Cottard’s struggle to find the right opening
sentence for his novel belongs to a quite different layer of fiction, one that can’t be read
simply as a parable for resistance or oppression in the immediate context of France in the
Second World War.
The Plague, for all its manifest encoding of the very recent past, is best read as a
parable of a more general kind. It is a novel not so much about the Nazi Occupation, as
about occupation, oppression, isolation, and trial. It shows what it means to resist, not just
a foreign invader, but incomprehensible evil in whatever form it may manifest itself. And
it says: good men — just men — do what they can, and they can do a great deal. In a
story called “The Wall”, which Camus reviewed for Alger républicain, Sartre had argued
forcefully that even in the direst confrontation with death, a man can always make a
choice. The Plague can best be thought of as a brilliant transposition, expansion and
modification of Sartre’s schematic demonstration of the inalienability of human freedom,
and thus as a work of bleak but profound optimism about human nature.
The Fall is much the most complex of the texts included in this selection. Beyond
parable, beyond metaphor, it seeks to bring to life the contradictory, self-ironising and
painfully sensitive mind of a man who is not Albert Camus, but who shares with his
creator a passion for justice in a world where it is far from easy to know where justice
lies. It has no single argument, but it juggles with a whole set of arguments which
contradict and complement each other, and yet constantly return to the question that
plagues anyone who seeks to know how to live: what is justice? What is injustice? What,
in a world without transcendental meaning, makes us able to tell “good” from “bad”? It is
to Camus’s credit as a thinker and artist that The Fall gives no final answers. What it does
magnificently is to make these long-debated problems seem fresh, urgent, and difficult to
solve.
 15

Reading, writing
Camus was a voracious reader in his youth, and a professional reader for much of
his adult life. However, a relatively small set of important books formed Camus’s ideas
of what writing was for, and how it could best be done. Many of these “master texts”
were not part of the canon of French literature as it was taught at school and university. It
is true that Camus’s first novel, The Outsider, can be seen as a modern reply to Victor
Hugo’s Last Day of a Condemned Man (1828), which influenced Camus deeply in other
respects too. There are other instances where Camus is, so to speak, in close dialogue
with well-known works in the French school canon: “The Artist at Work”, for example,
reads like an answer to Balzac’s “Unknown Masterpiece” (1837). It is also true that
Camus’s idea of literary style owes much to the specifically French preference for
brevity, abstraction and harmoniousness. However, the three greatest influences on
Camus’s writerly career come from outside the standard curriculum, and mostly from
outside of France: Fyodor Dostoyevsky, André Malraux, and Franz Kafka. The first
showed how to use the novel form to conduct philosophical argument and exercise moral
suasion (The Fall, in its form as well as its moral content, could almost be an updated
chapter from The Brothers Karamazov). The second offered a brilliant, seductive, utterly
modern model for making fiction a form of thinking aloud about “man’s estate”, as
Malraux’s The Human Condition is often titled in English translation. As for Kafka,
Camus probably misread him (the essay appended to The Myth of Sisyphus would hardly
pass muster with most Kafka scholars today), but he most certainly tried to imitate
Kafka’s blending of the fantastic and the real in stories like “The Renegade” and “The
Growing Stone” (in Exile and the Kingdom).

The Art of Albert Camus

Because Albert Camus cast his first novel, The Outsider, in a very special variety
of French — short declarative sentences rarely involving subordination, simple
vocabulary, and verb forms more characteristic of the spoken than of the written language
— he obtained, and seems to have retained, a reputation as a master of blunt plain
speaking. And because of its special language, over the last fifty years The Outsider has
often been the first book that foreign-language learners manage to read through to the end
in French. Deeply-felt gratitude to the author of the first book read in a foreign tongue
 16

should not be allowed to obscure the fact that only The Outsider was written in that way.
Camus uses language appropriate to the moral, philosophical, and artistic aim of the work
in hand, and his style varies considerably amongst his different novels, stories and essays.
Like any experienced journalist, Camus could be long-winded, vague, pompous,
funny, and sharp, as the matter — and the situation — required. In his fiction, he is long-
winded in The Fall (for Clamence can never quite get to the point of his lament, or to the
bottom of his self-disgust) and sober in The Plague; insanely incoherent in “The
Renegade” (for the narrator is more than a little mad) and magnificently restrained in
“The Guest”, which must be one of Camus’s most finely crafted pieces of all. (It perches
on an even sharper knife-edge of ambiguity in French because the title-word, “L’Hôte”,
means both “guest” and “host”.) Camus is in fact much more varied as a writer and
craftsman of language than he is as a moralist or thinker, in which domain, naturally
enough, he tends to say much the same thing.
Some critics have expressed reservations about the narrative form of The Plague,
regretting the turn in the tale where we learn that the narrator is in fact Dr Rieux (whose
name suggests “smiling”). It is true that re-reading the novel knowing that the narrative is
in Rieux’s own voice runs up against insoluble problems of narrative plausibility: there
are episodes — Rambert’s rendezvous with smugglers in the docks, for example — to
which Rieux is not a witness; and there is the larger question of when such a busy and
exhausted man could have taken time out to write it all down. The only answer to such
criticism is to say that on first reading you really don’t notice. The art of Camus as a
novelist — what he has in common with all great novelists — is the ability to create an
irresistibly convincing fiction in conditions of logical impossibility. What might turn out
to be an embarrassing flaw in a film script is, in the realm of fiction, part and parcel of
the enchantment of art. Many of Camus’s own commentaries about the meaning of his
works make it seem as though art was for him but the sugar coating the pill of moral
inquiry. He should not have sold himself so short. The Plague, The Fall and the stories of
Exile and the Kingdom are amongst the most crafted and polished pieces of story-telling
in all of modern literature.
David Bellos
 17

References and further reading on Camus

Conor Cruise O’Brien, Albert Camus. London: Collins, 1970. Fontana Modern Masters.
A lively, intelligent polemic which focuses attention on the role of Camus’s
background in Algeria in the construction and meaning of his work.

Roger Grenier, Album Camus. Paris: Gallimard, 1982. (Bibliothèque de la Pléïade). —

An outstandingly intelligent and sympathetic illustrated biography by a man who
knew Camus well.

Patrick McCarthy, Camus. New York: Random House, 1982. — A readable “life and
works” of manageable dimensions.

Philip Thody, Albert Camus. London: Macmillan, 1989. Macmillan Modern Novelists.
— Informative and commonsensical, from a resolutely British point of view. Not
especially sensitive to Camus’s philosophical position, but quite acute on his art of
writing.

Olivier Todd, Albert Camus. Paris: Gallimard, 1996. — The standard narrative
biography; a very long book, for specialists.

Philip Hallie, Lest Innocent Blood be Shed: The Story of the Village of Le Chambon and
How Goodness Happened There. New York: Harper and Row, 1979. — An
exhaustive narrative and moral account of the events taking place at and around Le
Chambon-sur-Lignon when Camus was drafting The Plague at Le Panelier in 1942.