Contradictory Impulses in the Nobel-Prize Winning French Writer, Albert Camus

Unsurprisingly, The Plague, a 1947 novel about a mysterious epidemic that pummels a coastal city in Algeria, by the French writer, Albert Camus, has received a burst of new interest during the Covid pandemic.

In a riveting podcast, Oliver Gloag, Associate Professor of French and Francophone Studies at the University of North Carolina (Asheville), delves into the life story and works of Albert Camus. Many of the contradictions braided into Camus’ character and literary outpourings seemed to echo the disquiet that is sometimes expressed by Indian English writers, who wrestle with their own privileged access to particular languages or cultural settings while also attempting to represent marginalized voices. That led me to Gloag’s equally gripping book, Albert Camus: A Very Short Introduction.

As an aside, for those who are unfamiliar with A Very Short Introduction series published by OUP, these works are written by eminent scholars with wide-ranging and imaginative takes on a slew of topics. Moreover, they are designed to be accessible to lay readers; though they’re relatively “short”, they’re anything but shallow. I would compare them to a shot of Kahlua or a square of dark chocolate, a sort of bite-sized dip into scholarly tracts, each imbued with a distinct flavor and lingering aftertaste.

Outside an eclectic literary crowd, Camus may not be widely known or read in India. At the time of his death, in a car accident in 1960, he wasn’t as widely read even in France. By then, as a recipient of the 1957 Nobel Prize for Literature, he had already garnered an international reputation. His funeral, therefore, created quite a stir, in national and international media.

The subsequent crumbling of the Soviet Union led to surging interest in his novels and stories. Since then, his popularity has been on the rise. As Gloag observes, the writer is a raging fashion in intellectual and political circles in contemporary France. Some of that popularity can be attributed to the absence of any particular ideology in his works and public messages; hence he can be claimed by a nation that is split, like many others today, into polarized factions.

Algeria at the time of Camus’ Birth

Albert Camus was born in Algeria in 1913. He was a pied-noir, a somewhat derogatory term that earlier referred to Arab ship workers who used to trundle about barefooted inside ships. Pied-noir, literally meaning black foot, later on became a term that was used to describe white French settlers who were living in Algeria.

At the time of Camus’ birth, Algeria was divided into two distinct groups. In one part, the pieds-noirs possessed all the rights accorded to French citizens. There were about 750,000 pieds-noirs living in Algeria at that time.

In the other slice of the country, 4.7 Million Algerians, also referred to as the “Muslims” by the French State, had no such rights. To them, ‘liberte, egalite, fraternite’ remained an empty and irrelevant slogan; those words had no bearing on the material reality of their lives.

By 1913, France had ravaged Algeria for about seven decades, razing villages and olive fields, killing adults and children in brutal campaigns termed “la razzia”. There were instances, too, of the French army stuffing Algerians into caves, smoking them to death (l‘enfumade) – like animals being cooked alive inside hot ovens.

But also, by Camus’ birth, most Algerian revolts had been stifled. Moreover, as a pied-noir, the history he was taught implied that the Algerians had instigated such attacks. The razzias and enfumades were expediently omitted from history textbooks. More astonishingly, Gloag notes, France was to officially recognize the 1954 Algerian War of Independence only in 2002.

A Difficult Early Life

Camus’ father Lucien – a pied-noir recruited into the army – died in World War I, when Camus was only one-year-old. His mother Catherine, who was “half-deaf and illiterate” was ill-equipped to care for her own kids. So they moved in with Camus’ maternal grandmother – a harsh and even brutal woman, who often beat Camus and tried to dissuade him from attending school.

There were two key mentors in Camus’ early life. One was a primary school teacher named Louis Germain and the other, a philosopher and professor called Jean Grenier. Though Germain often used very punitive methods to discipline his student, Camus remained grateful for having been propelled by his teacher towards higher education. It was Germain who exhorted him to apply for a scholarship to attend secondary school. Camus would even thank Germain much later, during his Nobel-winning speech.

At 17, he passed the ‘baccalaureat” exam. It was also the year in which the French State celebrated its 100 year rule in Algeria – a centenary event that was joyfully commemorated only by the one million pieds-noirs and not by the six million Algerians – the “savage” target of the French mission civilisatrice (‘civilizing mission’).

In the final year of his secondary school, Camus contracted TB. When coughing up blood and encountering his doctor’s frightened visage, he realized how close he was to death. This early brush with his own mortality was to shape many of his future works – both the literary ones as well the philosophical “The Myth of Sisyphus.”

In general, Camus was not a very passionate or devoted student. Surprisingly, for being someone who was to evolve into such a celebrated writer, he wasn’t even “an avid reader.” As Gloag observes, education, for Camus, was only a route to buy himself the means and the time to write. His writings, even at that early stage of life, reveal his disdain of scholarly texts, his skepticism of notions like “progress” and “knowledge”, and his alienation from people who seemed to live unquestioned, cookie-cutter lives.

He was also to toy with the meaninglessness of existence when Death was the inevitable end for all. The only joy or Bonheur that he experienced emerged from his rapport with Nature.

His Stint As A Reporter

In Algeria, the mountainous region of Kabylia held some of its poorest and most neglected inhabitants. Camus wrote a series of articles exposing the harsh conditions of Kabylia, but with a viewpoint that assumed that France needed to redress the situation, rather than withdraw from the country altogether. In Gloag’s words, “Camus wanted to reform colonialism, not abolish it.”

Still, Camus’ seeking more humane conditions for Algerians angered the colonial functionaries and the pieds-noirs. Eventually, the newspaper was forcibly shut down. Later, he would travel to France, and after periods of unemployment, would eventually join a resistance newspaper against the German occupation of France. All along, he had also started getting a sense of how difficult social changes were, and about how “Absurd” life was – a stance that was to be echoed in many of his works.

After the end of the war, Camus’ newspaper pieces shifted from being less ambivalent to more vociferously proclaiming the heroic character of French resistance. This was in keeping with the celebratory mood at that time, and was also a response to the low self-esteem of French citizens.

But even as VE Day (Victory in Europe) was being celebrated in France, in Algeria, a group of demonstrators who unfurled an Algerian flag, were shot dead. Soon after, thousands of Algerians were “systematically and indiscriminately massacred,” by French police and by the pieds-noirs at Setif and Guelma. When Camus reported on these episodes, he toned down French culpability. Gloag writes, “Certainly, to this day, the massacres at Setif and Guelma, are a taboo subject in French history.”

Camus’ Theory of The Absurd Is Woven Into His Works

Existentialists like Sartre accept that all humans are mortal. Hence human beings have to transcend their inevitable ends through Art or some other social/collective engagement. For Camus, however, the absurd has to be accepted as such.

He believes that the old world with rigidified traditions, and outdated belief systems is “dying” and giving way to new ways of doing and being. In the “new world”, there is a heightened consciousness of how absurd everything is.

His “feeling” and “will” of the absurd were to fuel his narrative impulse in three major works: Caligula, The Stranger, The Myth of Sisyphus.

Camus Weaves His Notion of Revolt Into Later Works

The Second World War forced Camus to reconsider his somewhat nihilist position towards the world. He no longer felt that he could justify his indifference, in the face of Nazi atrocities. While his earlier characters, like Caligula and Mersault in The Stranger, seemed to rise above all notions of good and evil, or be indifferent to moral strictures defined by otherwise hypocritical social orders, his new works – The Plague, The Just Assassins and The Rebel – seemed to adopt a different attitude.  He called his new reaction to certain untenable or immensely oppressive situations “revolt” – a feeling that is akin to the feeling of the absurd, in that both responses stem from the heart.

The Plague

The virus, in The Plague, is thought to be a stand-in for the German invasion of France. While setting up the occupation like an ahistorical event – the virus, after all, appears out of the blue, without cause or reason – Camus reveals how different characters respond to the sudden ubiquity of illness and death. Just like in the modern pandemic, the city is suddenly shut down, without people being allowed to enter or leave, in order to contain the spread of the disease.

The narrator of The Plague is a doctor called Rieux, a man who just performs his duties, trying to save patient lives, even though outcomes often seem beyond his control. Rieux is asked if he believes in God. He answers that he cannot believe in a Higher Power that would cause the death of children. Other characters include a Jesuit Priest, with a somewhat dogmatic belief in his own religion, to the extent that he believes that The Plague is a punishment inflicted on the disbelievers. Ironically, the Priest himself dies of the virus. A journalist, who initially attempts to uncover the miserable conditions under which the Arabs live, now turns his attention to the plague, forgetting in the course of the story, the lives of the Arabs.

At The Nobel Ceremony

When Camus won the Nobel Prize in 1957, the war for Algerian independence was raging fiercely in the colony. In a Question and Answer session after the Prize was awarded, Camus was asked about his contradictory views about colonialism. He responded that if asked to choose between his Mother and Justice, he would choose the former. This response also seemed to indicate that the Algerians were indeed fighting for a just cause, but his own personal allegiances did not allow him to endorse their movement.

As Gloag puts it, such warring impulses “became his identity.” And his writing too was tugged this way and that, by his constantly fluctuating internal awareness. But equally, Camus would also be disenchanted with the violence embedded in institutionalized movements, like Communism, which justified killing people in order to propagate particular ideas or ideologies. He advocated for more tempered reforms, rather than for violent revolutions.

References

Gloag, Oliver, Albert Camus: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, New York, 2020