art and politics in albert camus: beauty as defiance and art as a spiritual quest

Literature & Theology, Vo\ J_J ho 2 June 1999

ART AND POLITICS IN ALBERTCAMUS: BEAUTY AS DEFIANCE

AND ART AS A SPIRITUALQUEST

John Randolph LeBlanc

Abstract

Albert Camus's interrogation of the ethical and spiritual vacuity of thetwentieth century convinced him that authentic political existence requiresa vision that embraces while transcending the human condition He foundhis ethical model in art The work of the artist can be analogous to that ofthe just political actor The principal components of ethical political beingare all present in Camus's aesthetics a vision of life in human community(lucidity), a grounded sense of justice subject to the limitations of humanexistence (beauty), a need to redress the defects of political reality (the urgeto create), and an understanding that any structural solution is of necessitytemporary (the need to rearticulate the initial vision) Camus's vision requireshim to reject our positive political categories in the name of creative,grounded human being

|P]erhaps the greatness of art lies in the perpetual tension between beauty andpain, the love of men and the madness of creation, unbearable solitude and theexhausting crowd, rejection and consent Art advances between two chasmswhich are frivolity and propaganda On the ridge where the great artist movesforward, every step is an adventure, an extreme risk In that nsk, however, andonlv there lies the freedom of art A difficult freedom that is more like an asceticdiscipline' What artist would deny this' What artist would dare to claim thathe was equal to such a ceaseless task' Such freedom presupposes health of bodyand mind, a style that reflect*, strength of soul, and a patient defiance 2

ALBFRT CAMUS'S inquiry into the spiritual vacuity of modern social andpolitical order inevitably took him back to his art Modem political life wasmissing a creativity that could transcend the human condition Camus foundthat transcendence in the expression of beauty that is the object of the artist'swork Only the artist seeking beauty could reject and exalt the world in onemotion without bringing death or destruction Camus saw art as an expression

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JOHN RANDOLPH LEBLANC 127

of human freedom of a much needed kind capable of being intensely critical

and transformatively constructive all at once He believed the realisation of

this freedom in concrete reality could be redemptive for the individual as

well as for human community Taking seriously Camus's assumption that the

aesthetic and the political are intimately intertwined, I will argue that Camus's

aesthetic considerations are intelligible as meditations on human freedom in

the modem world, that for Camus creative existence is a corollary to thought-

ful political action The key to Camus's complex political thought and his

often obscure spirituality may be found in his aesthetic writings 3

Camus considered life in community inherently political the political act

was one of forging human self-identity, dependent upon each human being's

self-consciousness, not only of what he or she is, but of what he or she is

not For Camus, an authentic conception of politics must transcend institu-

tional and ideological constructs This reading denies the argument that

Camus tended toward the apolitical 4 Acknowledging the impossibility of a

community of one enabled Camus to discern and respect the importance

of 'the other' Camus's conception of human self-identity demanded other

human presences and the interconnectedness of human being is precisely the

spiritual content of his work 5 By embracing this interconnectedness and

applying its demands to political community, Camus's political thought may

be seen as an attempt to resolve the incongruity that Paul Ricoeur later

isolated in the essay 'The Political Paradox' In this essay, Ricoeur argues

that 'the political sphere is divided between the ideal of sovereignty and the

reality of power' Ricoeur, like Camus, seeks the resolution of the paradox

in individual human existence 'I believe it must be maintained,' Ricoeur

insists, 'against Marx and Lenin, that political alienation is not reducible to

another, but is constitutive of human existence, and in this sense, that the

political mode of existence entails the breach between the citizen's abstract

life and the concrete life of the family and work '6 Camus believed that we

overcome this breach and define ourselves by the existence we create and

constantly re-create, always in the context of 'others' In authentic human

community, then, autonomy is not tht sole or even the most important

characteristic of the created life In its simplest political form, human identity

derives from the individual's creation of a life, respectful of the created

existences of others Camus believes that twentieth century political existence

has come to involve consciously subjugating our creative capacities (and the

limits inherent in human being) to our relatively boundless capacity for

destruction (even of ourselves) For Camus, a self-conscious creativity was

the only antidote for this self-destructive capacity

Camus denied the distance between the act of creation and the world of

ethics and politics, doing so in a way critics long failed to appreciate John

Cruikshank observed the ethical component of Camus's art without venturing

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128 A R T A N D P O L I T I C S IN A L B E R T C A M U S

into political considerations, finding in Camus an ethically paralysing conflictbetween moderation and extremism 7 Camus understands moderation, how-ever, to be as central as the problem of extremism Contemporary 'modera-tion' led easily to inactivity, to capitulation and to the sort of ethical paralysisthat allowed twentieth century human beings to turn their backs on massmurder In ancient times, Camus writes in The Rebel, 'the blood of murderat least produced a religious horror and in this way at least sanctified thevalue of life The real condemnation of the period we live in is, on thecontrary, that it leads us to think that it is not bloodthirsty enough' Thismurderous self-deception is one of the dimensions of modern nihilism'[Bjlood is no longer visible, it does not bespatter the faces of our phanseesvisibly enough This is the extreme of nihilism, blind and savage murderbecomes an oasis, and the imbecile criminal seems positively refreshing incomparison with our highly intelligent executioners '8 Camus's response tothis valueless destruction, I will argue, was to call for the restoration of thevalue of creativity, the impulse to create human existence Germaine Bree'swork recognises, though it like other studies does not pursue, the centrahtyof this art-to-ethics relationship in Camus 9 She argues that he ultimatelytned to 'integrate into his vision his own violently disruptive experience'The result, I will argue, was a 'political' aesthetic abiding no separation ofcreative vision from either experience or human action Similarly, DavidSpnntzen finds in Camus's thought that '[t]he concrete significance of artemerges in its attempt to respond to the dual dimension of human rebellions,for metaphysical insight and for human liberation Its answer, when successful,is a unitary expression of both needs in the achievement of an integral workthat is the stylised embodiment of a concrete vision' " Spnntzen seemssympathetic to Camus's project, but concludes that artistic creation is inad-equate as a mode of political existence because 'art only offers its unity tohuman experience' and the manifestations of these offerings are brief andinfrequent Camus the artist fails to meet 'the problem facing human living',Spnntzen wntes, which 'is to structure expenence so as to make it more sureand endunng' 12 Camus's sense of beauty, I will demonstrate below, decon-structs this limitation

Beauty, as we shall see, undergirds Camus's understanding that the ethicalcomponent of art is precisely in its suspicion of'structures' and in that it only'offers' unity Camus appreciated that the effective work of art, like theeffective political or religious order, must also be engaged by the agent ratherthan merely imposed by the creator The artist seeks order from reality, butonly offers the vision to the agent The artist bears only hmited responsibilityfor the endurance of the vision as he or she is compelled to move on, therest is up to the agent The artist's contnbution, like that of the politicalactor, is necessanly limited, but no less decisive In this relation is Camus's

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precise revisiomng of the relationship between ethics and his aesthetics he

speaks to the individual as the ordering component of the political order In

art and politics, Camus valued endurance, but it was the existential endurance

of the individual within the community which he embraced rather than the

endurance of concrete political institutions ordering human existence

For Camus, the function of artistic creativity is the restoration of a lost

dignity to humanity, a loss that emerged at the precise point at which science

had ceased to live up to its metaphysical claims 'During the last century,'

Camus writes in Tfie Rebel, 'man cast off the fetters of religion,' but 'hardly

was he free, when he created new and utterly intolerable chains ' 1 3 Modem

science offered shackles strikingly similar to those of the older religious type

With the Enlightenment, Camus argues, a tyrannical 'virtue dies but is born

again, more exacting than ever' 14 Like Nietzsche, Camus's critique of science

runs parallel to his critique of religion Science, Camus writes in The Myth

of Sisyphus, describes the world with such efficiency as to reduce its mysteries

to 'laws'

You take apart its mechanism and my hope increases At the final stage youteach me that this wondrous and multi-colored universe can be reduced to theatom and that the atom itself can be reduced to the electron All this is goodand I wait for you to continue But you tell me of an invisible planetary systemin which electrons gravitate around a nucleus You explain this world to mewith an image I realise that you have been reduced to poetry I shall neverknow 15

Like Nietzsche, Camus accepted the truism that 'a science that was to teach

me everything ends up in a hypothesis, that lucidity founders in metaphor,

that uncertainty is resolved in a work of art' lf> Accepting this view, as we

shall see, need not entail existential despair The essence of the diversity of

human experience, Camus realised, could be more fundamentally captured

by art than it could be empirically observed and conclusively stated by science

Modernity, Camus understood, lacked an articulated spiritual meaning

Camus's reflections on art were an attempt to resolve this problem of meaning

The impulses to faith in science and faith in a Christian deity each reflected

the same fundamental human need a faith in the possibility of a comprehens-

ible order But in each instance the order was to come from without,

humanity's inevitable ordering response was to appeal to something outside

itself The ubiquity of disorder in our 'absurd' world cast doubt upon the

relevance of human existence, obscuring human claims to dignity Camus

agreed with Nietzsche that neither religion nor science had provided humanity

with adequate spiritual solace Camus was convinced of the inadequacy of

organised religion and Western humanity's dangerous dependence on the

symbol 'God' Ties to God and nature, at least as they were inadequately

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articulated in religion and science, had been severed, rendering humanitytembly free Nietzsche voiced concern that humanity would not adapt wellto this freedom, Camus experienced the fruits of Nietzsche's prophecy

The problem with the intermingling of the aesthetic and the politicaldenves from the common perception that the work of the artist is necessarilydetached from reality and that art embodies the supposed separation ofthought and action Against this view, Camus understood art as participatory,as ethical act In Camus's ethics, as Serge Doubrovsky reminds us, 'vitalparticipation is both act and value' 17 Camus's experience made it impossibleto deny a gap between the elements of creation, thought and imagination,and creative action, though he wrestled with reconciling them until his deathHis response to the problem was to deny the mantle of philosopher, choosingthat of artist 'The first choice an artist makes,' Camus wrote, 'is precisely tobe an artist, and if he chooses to be an artist it is in what he is himself andbecause of a certain idea he has of art1 l 8 Camus's own idea of art was asmediator of the tensions of absurd existence Bree writes that Camus 'wasaccustomed to harsh realities and with these he grappled intellectually, con-vinced that thought must be welded into action, that there are more funda-mental elements involved in human conduct than the niceties of theoretical,verbal argumentation' 19 Camus's sensitivity was heightened by having experi-enced the effective unity of thought and action in concrete political circum-stances as a member of the French Resistance during the Second WorldWar 20 Those who dwell on Camus's ethical paralysis in the case of the morepolitically complex Algerian Civil War too easily dismiss the formativeResistance experience The moral and ethical clarity of the earlier situationwas simply absent from the later Even that clarity, in fact, disappeared shortlyafter the liberation as Camus's initial support for the post-liberation purgesin France indicates 21 Bree writes that 'except in the years of the Germanoccupation, when thought and action coincided, Camus keenly felt the gapthat separated formulation from action' 22 For much of his life, Camus chafedagainst this feeling In his vision of the function of art and his role as artist,conviction must be reconciled to participation None of this is to deny thedifficult tension between thought and action, rather it is to illustrate that outof this tension Camus could conceive the artist as analogous to the politicalactor and similarly fashioned artistic creation as an analog of political actCamus understood artistic creation as being among the highest forms ofhuman activity, a way of bridging the gap between the creativity necessaryto restore value to human existence and ethical political action necessary toorder that existence

Creativity was Camus's valuative response to the absurdity of humanexistence Though he did not consider himself an existentialist, Camus'saesthetic considerations, like all of his thought, began with an appreciation

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of the existential assessment of human existence For Camus, existence was,by its nature, absurd He reconceives the concept of the absurd in spite oflosing patience with the term In a 195 1 Camus told Gabnel d'Aubarede that'This word 'Absurd' has had an unhappy history, and I confess that now itrather annoys me When I analysed the feeling of the Absurd in The Mythof Sisyphus, I was looking for a method and not a doctnne I was practicingmethodical doubt l23 This was a suitable starting point, for Camus knew hehad to penetrate his doubt before he could create Fred Willhoite notes that'Camus spoke to a situation in which despair and spiritual chaos wereubiquitous realities, and out of an existential knowledge that derived fromthe harsh experiences and dashed hopes brought on by the German occupa-tion of France and by the irrefutable postwar revelations of Stalinist terror-ism '24 With this awareness, perhaps it was inevitable that Camus's firstextended philosophical essay, The Myth of Sisyphus, was a meditation on theabsurdity of existence, that 'confrontation between the human need [tounderstand] and the unreasonable silence of the world1 25

Camus surveyed human responses to the absurd and found them lackingHe understood that the Medieval response to the 'silence of the world' hadbeen faith in a Christian deity, then a Church, the modern response, ofwhich Camus had more direct experience, had been a faith in human reason,then scientific progress In this century, neither faith nor reason had preventedthe murder of millions of human beings in the name of history 'Rebellion,'Camus writes, 'cut off from its origins and cynically travestied, oscillates, onall levels, between sacrifice and murder The form of justice that it advocatedand that it hoped was impartial has turned out to be summary The kingdomof grace has been conquered, but the kingdom of justice is crumbling too '26

Modern attempts to rationalise 'the unreasonable silence' resulted in thedestruction and ethical paralysis wrought by two world wars, creating the'deadly climate' of twentieth century Europe As early as The Myth of Sisyphus,but throughout his work, Camus's essential concern was that human beingsrecognise the 'deadly' character of existence as a call to action 'To say thatthe climate is deadly scarcely amounts to playing on words,' Camus writes,existence 'under that stifling sky forces one to get away or to stay Theimportant thing is to find out how people get away in the first case and whypeople stay in the second '27 Camus found a critical distance in the aestheticprocess Acknowledging the absurd as our climate of existence was simplyCamus's starting point in meeting the exigencies of that existence After that,comprehension and articulation are requisite to human overcoming 'Staying',that is, resisting the temptation to abandon existence as futile and insteadwork to affirm it, is the human choice, the choice of the artist, and Camus'schoice This is clear in Camus's work beginning with his rendering of TheMyth of Sisyphus

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The creative act required an image, and Camus chose the myth of Sisyphusas his first philosophical vehicle In the myth, Sisyphus is condemned forloving life to the detriment of his reverence for the gods His punishment isto 'ceaselessly' roll a rock to the top of a mountain, 'whence the stone wouldfall back of its own weight' 28 The gods judged the futility of the punishmentappropriate to the cnme they 'thought with some reason', Camus writes,'that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor' 29

For immortal gods this would indeed be true, but it was clear to Camus thatthe immortals of the myth failed to appreciate that which Sisyphus compre-hended all too well What the gods imagined to be 'dreadful punishment'was precisely what Sisyphus (and Camus) understood as absurd existenceReason would have it that punishment presumes crime, but in Camus'sembrace of the absurd worldview, cnme and punishment work in a dialecticalrelationship (1 e , as suffering), neither necessanly preceding the other InSisyphus's case, mere existence or embracing and engaging that existence,became cnme and punishment Camus used the myth to validate our absurdcondition expenentially as well as rationally

Camus, however, did not understand absurdity as a quality rendenng thehuman condition hopeless, but rather as our ethical and philosophical base-line 3() The question of a theoretical 'Justice', one leading to an actionappropriate in all places and in all situations, for Camus, was impossible, andas such meaningless In human existence, between birth and death, the onlyreal question for Camus was what one is to do 31 Camus the artist choserebellion He recognised the decision as difficult, and weighed its con-sequences in the closing lines of 77ie Myth of Sisyphus

I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain1 One always finds one's burdenagain But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raisesrocks He too [like Oedipus] concludes that all is well The universe henceforthwithout a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile Each atom of that stone,each mineral flake of that mght-fiUed mountain, in itself forms a world Thestruggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart One mustimagine Sisyphus happy 32

In Camus's world, wherein we are all condemned to death, commitment is'the struggle' Committing to engage the absurd on its own terms is aspiringto 'the heights' These heights are immanent, they are to be found withinhuman existence, here and now 33 A life of creation, the demand of one'shumanity in the face of absurd existence, the demand of unity from diversity,is enough 'to fill a man's heart' Spnntzen finds in Camus's early work a'commitment to lucidity, passion and freedom, resulting in an ethic ofquantity without any ordenng principle' 34 But even in The Myth of Sisyphusthe 'ethic of quantity' gives way to the ordenng pnnciple of acceptance

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without surrender The artist simultaneously embraces and denies absurdexistence, accepting the consequences of the tension no matter how tediousor unpleasant The beauty of Sisyphus1 universe ('each atom of that stone')lay before him to discover and to order Only in Sisyphus's love for thatuniverse of 'mineral flakes', Camus was convinced, can one 'imagineSisyphus happy'

Sisyphus's capacity for happiness depends upon his possession of a kind ofawareness Camus called 'lucidity' 'Everything begins,' he writes in The Mythof Sisyphui, 'with lucid indifference l35 For Camus, lucid indifference meantseeing things clearly from a perspective beyond the personal There is a tragic(1 e , Greek) sense to this lucidity This lucid indifference is tragic, Camusbelieved, only in moments when it becomes conscious Then we realise thatthe hopeful or hopeless character of absurd existence hes in the our approachto the burden of that existence We can either find a defiant joy in theceaseless struggle, like Sisyphus, or despair of our inevitable fate (death) Weare free to choose either course the first is creative, even redemptive, thesecond is destructive, degrading We must be conscious of the choice wemake and accept responsibility for its consequences Human freedom, asD'Arrast learned in Camus's short story 'The Growing Stone', is predicatedon human consciousness36 Sensitivity to the tragic involves this ethicalchoice We may despair of our fate, give in, or invent imaginary counter-fates, passively waiting for these counter-fates to come to fruition, as inmillenniahst Christianity or manufactunng them on the backs of others, asin the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century In modern Europe,Camus believed, revolution had come to mean the invention of counter-fates, the positing of false destinies Resisting the temptation to constructcounter-fates, as we will see in his discussion of the novel's handling ofdestiny, was critical to Camus's political thought His early encounter withthe absurd convinced him that humanity must make the most of its destiny(death) by demanding dignity from this existence (life) This is the demandat the core of Camus's work, and what he understood as rebellion The artistmakes this demand, the work of the artist is the work of rebellion

The creative rebellion Camus envisioned contained identifiable elementsthough the rebellion itself lacked a definitive structure The specific modesof rebellion change, like genre or art form, as the conditions they meet differPart of the rebel artist's task is to make sure the form of expression is thebest for its purposes Before drawing Camus's analogy of artistic creation andpolitical existence, therefore, we must identify the elements of creativerebellion and give some sense of the manner in which they function

Creative rebellion required vision of a special sort which Camus termed'lucidity' 'Of all the schools of patience and lucidity,' for Camus, 'creationis the most effective '37 The awareness or 'lucidity' Sisyphus enjoyed was

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134 ART AND P O L I T I C S IN ALBERT C A M U S

essential for C a m u s , and lies at the hear t o f the artist's 'spiritual quest '

Lucidity drives the creative process, b u t defies precise defini t ion It is a

disclosure o f w h a t Ceci l Eubanks has suggested is Camus ' s sense o f 'grace ' 3it

Eubanks argues Camus ' s sense of grace is 'grace in its i m m a n e n t and t ranscend-

ent aspects' It is 'intuitive in nature, felt, but it is community throughaction' 39 Lucidity then is best understood as taking the importance for Camusthat grace has to Christian theologians Lucidity, as a sort of wisdom, is barelyrational and quite intuitive, but no less a component of experience It drivesthe creative process by articulating the tensional movement between thephilosophical and the spintual Lucidity is insight and vision, but it is moreIt is an experience that impels one to action in the community 'In otherwords,' Camus wrote, 'at the very moment when the artist chooses to sharethe fate of all, he asserts the individual he is l4<1

The impulse to create denves from a lucid encounter with reality Theartist expenences the demand to glean an affirmation of human selfhood anddignity from an otherwise indifferent (absurd) existence Action upon theimpulse requires rational freedom, but is barely rational 'In the time ofabsurd reasoning,' Camus writes in The Myth of Sisyphus, 'creation followsindifference and discovery It marks the point from which absurd passionsspnng and where the reasoning stops '41 In the creative impulse's characteras a moment of lucidity, the artist intuits that existence owes humanity someaffirmation of its dignity Once expenenced, the artist constantly seeks morelucid insight into (or encounters with) reality This the artist can do onlythrough the creative articulation of experience Inevitably finding the creationto be an incomplete understanding, the artist is motivated to rearticulate theexpenence The need for rearticulation is human creativity insisting uponbecoming a mode of existence Understood in this way, art and rebellionemerge as articulations of the lucid encounter with reality, and each creativeact becomes an articulation demanding rearticulation

The creative human being's need to articulate existence reflects the deepesthuman desire It exhibits, Camus notes in The Myth of Sisyphus, 'an insistenceupon familiarity, an appetite for clanty Understanding the world for a manis reducing it to the human, stamping it with his seal' 42 The creative actvalues, if only for a moment, that which it depicts Art's function is not therepresentation of some singular aspect of reality, but the derivation of awholeness from reality through the defiant character of what Camus under-stands as 'beauty' The function of beauty is to reveal an order in that whichis without order and to see unity in that which lacks unity The artisticdepiction of beauty defies absurd existence While it is true that art, asSpnntzen argues, only offers this order and unity to our expenence, therecognition of beauty allows the human creature as creator to order, if onlyfor a moment, a creation which lacks coherence This momentary clanty is

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J O H N RANDOLPH LEBLANC 135

then also available to the other individuals in the potential communi ty ,

though they too must understand the temporary character of the artist's

insight

Camus constantly reestablishes the link between art and communi ty

through beauty H e saw beauty as an analog to truth, potentially bo th creative

and dangerous 'Beauty, ' Camus writes, 'even today, especially today, cannot

serve any party, it cannot serve, in the long or short run, anything but men's

suffering or their liberty '4 Beauty's metaphysical content is only marginally

important, for beauty must chiefly serve human experience Camus argues

in The Rebel that ' to create beauty' the human being 'must simultaneously

reject reality and exalt certain of its aspects '44 In its rejecting capacity, beauty

defies absurd existence, acknowledging the world while expressing a prefer-

ence for another vision Through beauty, art articulates a potentiality that is

the realisation of an experiential sameness among human beings For Camus,

art and rebellion each speak from the ground of this c o m m o n human nature

Rebell ion in man, Camus holds in a Kantian momen t , 'is the refusal to be

treated as an object' and ' the affirmation of a nature c o m m o n to all men,

which eludes the world of power ' 45 It is in asserting this c o m m o n human

nature that art and rebellion defy the finality of absurd existence and the

inevitability of human suffering At the same time, art and rebellion, inasmuch

as each requires an engagement of reality, offer a foundation on which to

build social and political order W e must now examine this engagement, the

imaginative reconstruction of this foundation

T h e defiant character of beauty, Camus understood, means that its 'p roced-

ure ' which 'is to contest reality while endowing it with unity is also the

procedure of rebellion' 46 Creativity is rebellion, but Camus took pains to

distinguish this rebellion from modern conceptions of revolution Modern

revolution involves the physical imposition of an absolute unity, a distortion

of reality lacking limits or boundanes without which modern revolutions

came to define themselves by their destructive capacities Revolutions begin

by destroying all that surround them and conclude by destroying themselves

Rebell ion, on the other hand, though like revolution born of the absurd

realisation that things are not as they should be, is a response in quite another

direction While each entails a vision imposed, revolution physically imposes

the vision, destroying that which has been created For its part, rebel creation

offers its vision, one of a more complete , if never ultimately complete,

existence Embracing the Greek notion of limits, Camus believed rebellion

to be ' the affirmation of a limit, a dignity, and a beauty c o m m o n to all men

[which] only entails the necessity of extending this value to embrace every-

thing and everyone and of advancing toward unity wi thout denying the

origins of rebellion' 47 Art and rebellion posit a value whose function is to

limit history that value is the coherence o f human experience Imagination,

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thought, and action, Camus argues, demand a corresponding unity in orderto exist, therefore, the human conception of a better world could be nomore adequately expressed than in artistic creation But the notion of unitymust not lose its tensional relationship to the diversity of existence Anyvision of a better world must remain a vision No creative work is final,vision always demands rearticulation Unlike the revolutionary's materialaspiration to absolute unity, the rebel's vision must be grounded in the goalof a more lucid articulation rather than revolutionary consummation of unityCreativity, not tyranny, is the authentic political manifestation of lucidity

The artist so engaged lives life in rebellion In The Rebel, Camus arguesthat art is the final perspective on the content of rebellion But life in fruitfulrebellion requires discipline of the self In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus writesthat artistic creation is an activity that 'calls for daily effort, self-mastery, aprecise estimate of the limits of truth, measure and strength'48 Art, Camusbelieves, 'constitutes an ascesis', a curious term which adds a religious characterto the idea of aesthetic discipline 49 But Camus clearly did not intend theartist to be a monk, nor did he wish to bring to mind Nietzschean asceticpnests, an interpretation of the role of political and spiritual leaders for whichCamus had great sympathy From the prison chaplain in The Stranger toFather Paneloux in The Plague, this is a recurring character-type in Camus'sfiction These characters deny the world as it 'is' for a world beyond that is'ought' This position is unacceptable to Camus to the degree that it allowsthese knowing figures not to duty their hands in the plagues of this worldInstead, art like existence is a matter of constant confrontation with realitylucidity is an ongoing experience Art, for Camus, is a vocation, literally acalling from within, a yearning to creative expression consonant with thehuman need to defy death Creation is the human longing for freedomhurling itself against a terminal existence It is the act of creation, the processitself, which concerns Camus The act of artistic creation is the articulatemediation of the tensions of existence unity and diversity, order and disorder,revolution and rebellion, the 'is' and the 'ought', thought and action, themundane and the divine, reason and revelation While it can never claim, asis the temptation, to resolve these tensions, the work of art takes as its taskexpressing their tension as a unity Artistic expression, for Camus, bestowsmeaning upon the creative act

Articulator of tensions, ascetic creation requires the recognition of limitsin order to reflect genuine creativity As we have seen this is a function ofbeauty, but it is also the function of what Camus called 'style' Creation givesexpression and form to the 'impossible demand' to impose order on whatseems hopelessly disordered 50 The kind of order the artist imposes on reality,Camus says, is indicative of the intensity and the value of the artist's rejectionof reality A lucid creativity will avoid the extremes of acquiescence or total

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rejection The artist whose rejection of reality is next to non-existent as inthe case of realist art, which makes a futile, if exhaustive attempt to depictreality or whose rejection is total, as in the case of excessively abstract orformalist work compromises the value of his or her insight Realism andformalism, like the values posited by modern revolution, are manifestationsof the same mistake neither sufficiently mediates the tensions of existence,neither exhibits the balance required of true creativity From Camus's per-spective, realism and formalism each lack the discipline (or ontological limits)of style

In the act of creation, it is 'style' which limits the artistic reconstructionof the world 'The unity in art,' Camus wntes in The Rebel, 'appears at thelimit of the transformation that the artist imposes on reality '51 Style is thelimit imposed by the artist 'by his language and by a redistnbution of elementsderived from reality' 5 Whereas beauty is a more general aesthetic quality,style is as much act as quality The artist gives form to reality through style'In this domain,' Camus argues in The Rebel, 'as in others, any unity that isnot a unity of style is a mutilation Whatever may be the chosen point ofview of an artist, one principle remains common to all creators styhsation,which supposes the simultaneous existence of reality and of mind which givesreality its form '53 Style acknowledges the autonomy of reality, while mindengages reality to derive the creative interpretation The essential element ofthe act of creation is maintaining the interaction of form and content Noconvincing unity is expressed in a work in which 'the content overflows theform, or in which the form drowns the content' 54 Camus believed that thetwo chief defects of modem art, the tendencies to realism and formalism hadtheir analogs, their parallels in the conduct of modern politics

With this bnef sketch of creative rebellion in hand, drawing the analogyto political existence becomes possible Creative political being requires vision(lucidity), a certain critical openness to the problems of social and politicalorder In order for those problems to be addressed, they must be articulatedin relation to some, albeit limited, human sense of justice (beauty) If thissense of justice is recognised by the human community as a whole (unity),then a style of active, if limited, redress becomes possible Acknowledgmentof the limits of this ameliorative action is critical no solution is final orwithout need of maintenance This bnef account simplifies the subtlety ofthe relationship of Camus's political and aesthetic thought by reducing itscomplexity to a nearly programmatic depiction of political existence Camuswould reject any such programmatic depiction Camus the artist, however,might accept the simplification in its illustrative power as analogous to thesimplification done complex reality by all artistic creation and political action

It is the style of the artist as well as the style of the political communitythat determines the potentiality for the existence of beauty or justice in that

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community In the social and political realm, style gives form to one'sexistence It is a discipline of self and society which finds its expression inritual or myth 55 Camus's idea of style functions as a locus for his concernfor maintaining the discipline required of true creativity and the nearly asceticcommitment required of the artist The artistic genius creates and respectshis own limits Those limits begin at the point of our contact with the otherThe creative political actor must act in the context of others and so must actever mindful of those limits The artistic vision is offered to the other, notimposed upon the other Likewise, in the creation of political life, theindividual must be conscious of and respect the limits that existence in acommunity of human beings requires All is not permitted

As an ascetic activity, then, creation requires the conscious discipline ofthe artist In art, some measure of artistic genius may be found in any of theseveral aesthetic activities Sculpture, Camus argued, is 'bent on captunng,in three dimensions, the fugitive figure of man, and on restonng the unityof great style to the general disorder of gestures' 56 Likewise, the painter'schoice of frame and subject is about imposing stability on incessant changeEach of these forms imposes its own order and asserts its own unity Butpolitical existence requires engagement and neither of these art forms interactswith its world to a degree satisfactory to Camus Style remains the form ofinteraction, as surely as Camus's insistence on engagement defines his notionof creative human existence

Camus's idea of the novel illuminates his notion of engagement as art'sfunction in the modern world The novel, Camus believed, was the productof the time of the spirit of rebellion, allowing Camus the artist to embracethe world as the home of human beings while denying it as the place oftheir torment 57 Germame Bree observes

Literature was for Camus an essential human activity, one of the most funda-mental It expresses and safeguards the aspiration toward freedom, coherenceand beauty, those components of man's relative happiness, an aspiration whichalone makes life valuable for each separate transient human being It defines thatpart of existence in which each individual is more than a social unity or aninsignificant cog in the evolution of history58

For Camus, the novel 'is the art form whose precise aim is to become partof the process of evolution in order to give it the style it lacks' 59 Camus'sview of the novel is not unlike that of M M Bakhtin who believed thenovel to be the only developing form of literature Literature, Bakhtin held,assimilates real histoncal time and space At various stages of literary develop-ment, this process of assimilation produces a novehstic narrative which yieldsassociated images of human beings For Camus, the novel draws upon

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humanity's need to control its destiny, depicting that control (if not imposing

it, as in modern revolution) while remaining conscious that the very notion

of the human control of destiny is an impossibility This concern with destiny

is reflected in human desires for perpetuation and possession For instance,

Camus believed that a sense of its permanence makes suffering endurable

'[I]n this insatiable need for perpetuation,' Camus wrote, 'we should better

understand human suffering if we knew that it was eternal '6 0 Perpetuation

allows the teleological presence of eternity, Camus's reasoning goes, which

in turn gives human beings a sense of destiny Millennialist faith in the return

of Christ, the Enlightenment's faith in man's conquest of nature, and the

history-driven totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century had been sympto-

matic of this tendency

Western liberal democracies were not immune from a similar, if less openly

monstrous, flaw Liberal commercial democracies, where human rights were

bound up with the possession of property, freely bought into the fetish for

destiny Camus argues that it is for the sake of destiny that we desire to

possess the human need to possess, on which commercial societies are

founded, leads to the need to possess others as we possess objects, all belying

a deeper need to control some part of our destiny In the novel, for Camus

an artistic form born of the modern era, this very human need is satiated In

the novel, Camus wrote in The Rebel, the reader 'is finally able to give himself

the alleviating form and limits which he pursues in vain in his own life' 61

The novel's significance is that it engages the reader in the reader's present,

it 'creates destiny to suit any eventuality and is, therefore, part of absurd

existence, while denying it by positing a destiny' 6 2 It is the novel's handling

of destiny, Camus thinks, which is its chief aesthetic value The novel exhibits

a teleological defiance, offering a means to discern the permanent value of

human existence, that is, it squarely rejects reality 'without accepting the

necessity of escaping it' 6 3

The style of Camus's rebel creation, then, be it in art or politics, is a

creativity somewhere between realism and formalism Human creation can

never be perfect by definition it bears the distortion 'that is the mark of

both art and protest' 64 Style must retain the delicate equilibrium that is the

mark of both creation and civilization 'It is the same thing with creation as

with civilization it presumes uninterrupted tension between form and matter,

between evolution and the mind, and between history and values,' Camus

wrote in The Rebel 'If the equilibrium is destroyed, the result is dictatorship

or anarchy, propaganda or formal insanity In either case creation, which

always coincides with rational freedom, is impossible '6 5

The lesson of modernity which Camus gleans from his experience is that

all interpretations of human existence are in need of the limits of style

Modern art and contemporary European politics each chose either realism

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HO A R T A N D P O L I T I C S IN A L B E R T C A M U S

or formalism Each choice is a counterproductive fundamentalism, like thatof the scientist denying the existence of God or that of the Chnstian denyingthe worth of science, both positions detrimental to human existence Bycontrast, the style of the rebel acknowledges the boundaries and limits of the'created universe'

The purposes of artistic creation and pohtical participation are the samefor Camus imaginative participation in the reconstruction (rebellion) asopposed to the matenal destruction (revolution) of the human being's uni-verse Camus offers Proust as an example of an artist who accomplished theartist's task Proust,

demonstrated that the art of the novel can reconstruct creation itself, in the formthat it is imposed on us and in the form in which we reject it In one of itsaspects, at least, this art consists in choosmq the creature in preference to his creator Butstill more profoundly, it is allied to the beauty of the world or of its inhabitantsagainst the powers of death and oblivion It is in this way that his rebellion iscreative bb

Art descnbes reality without conceding to it, embraces life without denyingdeath Similarly, political existence involves engaging reality without conced-ing to the finality of the absurd Camus's fundamental requirement of bothartistic creation and political participation is that they assert the value of unityin the face of absurd diversity The assertion and the unity, creation and thevalue it posits, are dialectically related Neither can exist without the otherAs the value that drives human creativity, unity in the midst of diversitynurtures and exalts the human, it does not beat human beings into anunnatural homogeneous conformity Illustrating the point, Camus wrote that'[rjehgion or cnme, every human endeavor in fact, finally obeys this unreason-able desire and claims to give life a form it does not have The same impulse,which can lead to the adoration of the heavens or the destruction of man,also leads to creative literature, which denves its content from this source* 67

For Camus, the need or quest for unity is always the passion that lifts humanbeings above 'the commonplaces of the dispersed world' and is thus the fountfor all extraordinary human endeavors, artistic and political

Camus could not distinguish the task of the artist from the obligations ofhuman beings living in community In a lecture on Algena entitled 'Appealfor a Civilian Truce' Camus conceded

I am not a political man, and my passions and inclinations do not lead me topublic platforms / step onto the podium only when forced to by the pressure ofcircumstances and by my conception of my function as a writer As to the basis of theAlgenan problem, I shall probably have, as events multiply and suspicions increaseon both sides, more doubts than certainties to express 68

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The wnter's obligation is to express with passion in a way not hostile toreason the complexities of a given situation (in this case, Algena, Camus'shome, the most personal of situations) For Camus, the essential element inthe relationship between art and politics may be found, then, in the motivationof the artist the assertion of what human beings hold in common throughthe articulation of the lucid encounter with reality Camus would have usunderstand him (Camus as artist) as neither a reporter describing (as in realistart) nor a prophet prescribing (as in formalist art) The artists' vocation is notjudge, but justifier judging contemporary man,' he wrote, 'in the name ofa man who does not yet exist is the function of prophecy '69 The prophetjudges absolutely The artist cannot 70 In a lecture on the subject, Camus saidof the artist

If he judged absolutely, he would arbitrarily divide reality into good and evil,and thus indulge in melodrama The aim of art, on the contrary, is not tolegislate or to reign supreme, but rather to understand first of all Sometimes itdoes reign supreme, as a result of understanding But no work of genius hasever been based on hatred or contempt This is why the artist, at the end of hisslow advance, absolves instead of condemning71

Camus deals with this question of the artist as prophet in the short story 'TheArtist at Work' in Exile and the Kingdom The story's principal, the painterJonas, is named for the Biblical Jonah, the reluctant prophet 72 Jonas becomesso consumed by being the celebrated person called artist that he mustundertake a period of spiritual and physical exile to restore his creativityJonas rediscovers his creative self only by putting down his brushes Jonasrealised that the work of the artist is understanding, not explanation Theartist as cause ceiebre spends far too much time explaining or listening toexplanations of this work Though the artist's is an incomplete understanding,his task is expressing, creating it To view the work of the artist as eithercomprehensively descriptive or prescnptive is to bastardise the tension heseeks to articulate Here Camus's notion of the artist's ascesis is essentialAscetic discipline compels the artist to constantly rearticulate his lucid experi-ence with reality Lucidity demands the artist justify human existence, evenif it means condemning the present order as inhuman This is the artist'sspiritual and political obligation, for the need to rearticulate his existentialexperience is an ontological and political one Political order requires anascetic engagement of reality by the political actor

At the poles of absurd existence, then, are absolutes Modern revolutionembraces absolutes in the name of a given set of values It posits an absoluteknowledge of human nature either in the form of abject sinfulness or in asuperhuman form capable of all knowledge By contrast, rebellion is existence

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in resistance to the assertion of absolutes It simultaneously acknowledgeshuman limitations, and denies the moral and ethical tyranny implicit in thoselimitations The unity or wholeness posited by the artist is of the commonalityof human experience This commonality of human being is the only valueexplicit in Camus's aesthetics, and it is the foundation of political participationIn The Rebel, Camus wntes

One can reject all history and yet accept the world of the sea and the stars Therebels who wish to ignore nature and beauty are condemned to banish fromhistory everything with which they want to construct the dignity of existenceEvery great reformer tries to create in history what Shakespeare Cervantes,Molicrc, and Tolstoy knew how to create a world always ready to satisfy thehunger for freedom and dignity which everyman carries in his heart Beauty.no doubt, does not make revolutions But a day will come when revolutionswill have need of beauty73

An articulate longing for unity must not degenerate into a futile attempt atdefinition Camus understood that attempts to define human nature inevitablyfall into the trap of enumerating a set of contingent values The capacity toparticipate creatively in community, or philosophically, to participate creat-ively in a community of being, is the only value that Camus derives fromhis sense of a common human nature Camus, in choosing rebellion, revealedhis belief that positing a unity in human nature need not mean devisingdefinitions of human nature

In the end, Camus leaves us with a critical questioned answered 'Is itpossible eternally to reject injustice,' Camus asked in Tlie Rebel, 'withoutceasing to acclaim the nature of man and the beauty of the world5 Ouranswer is yes ' 4 The sense of the commonness of human being permeatedCamus's conception of the relationship of art and politics Like the life ofthe artist, political life is a way of being in the world Its task is the constantquestioning, the constant redefinition of an existent order which can neverbe perfect Spnntzen recognised Camus's questioning as 'dialogic' It is, hewntes, 'the social formulation of the doctrine of open inquiry' as 'themovement toward and continuing support of community' 75 But Spnntzenconcludes that Camus, 'incapable of adequately and creatively grasping theWestern vision that offers the opportunity of transcending its 'ownmost'metaphysical limitations—that is, the Hegelian—Marxian conception ofhumanity's collective self-creation by labor through time—Camus is leftwith a tragic vision at a practical dead end' 7b That he did not embrace this'Western vision' need not amount to Camus's not grasping it While unableto completely disengage himself from it, Camus the French-Algenan, Camusthe Mediterranean, simply did not trust this Western vision Moreover, inrelation to this 'vision', one might say that Camus's expenence of life as'other' precluded his ultimate embrace of the vision His response to this

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experience was to offer an ethical as opposed to transcendental view of

politics, he required of the political actor an ascetic discipline of participation

and constant re-evaluation

Having responded to the charge of Camus's 'failure to embrace the Western

vision', we nonetheless are left with Spnntzen's potent observation that

Camus's is a 'tragic vision at a practical dead end' What indeed does Camus's

political-aesthetic position mean5 On the one hand, it seems 'democratic'

As sharers in 'a common human nature' it seems incumbent upon us to work

at creatively interpreting our existences, and likewise share the fruits of the

similar labors of others Theoretically, this awakens an awareness that we do

share something, that is, a common ground upon which to make decisions

about how we are to live But is it reasonable to expect we will all have the

opportunity to creatively interpret our existences' Moreover, is it reasonable

to expect that we will possess the critical apparatus to appreciate our work

as well as that of others'1 If the answer to either of the these questions

(let alone both) is 'no', then we are not talking about a democracy of any

real description On the other hand, Camus's vision is of a collectivity of

individuals Having agreed that many individuals will have neither the time

nor the talent to creatively evaluate their own existences, Camus's vision of

a community of the creatively-engaged seems doomed from the outset We

indeed seem to be left at a practical dead-end

To give a Camusian response, we must now return to the problem of the

Western vision, and, more importantly, its vocabulary From the perspective

of our political vocabulary, we have just seen that Camus's vision of politics

falls woefully short But in considering politics from this perspective we have

fallen into his trap I expect Camus would be pleased with our inability to

make his vision work in our terms It is precisely this (our) political vocabulary

that Camus is trying to get us to consider critically His suspicion of that

vocabulary may be concretely illustrated by the fact that very rarely in his

short life did Camus side with an institutional arrangement (both times

temporarily) 7 In the aftermath of two world wars, in a era of nuclear

weapons, Camus believed that the old categories no longer apply 78 Power

is no longer an adequate base on which to build a human community, for

the power we possess outstrips our ability to control it From Camus's

perspective, property, in all its manifestations, has never been an adequate

basis on which to build political community There is never a useful distribu-

tion of property, so all such regimes are born of artificial inequality We

cannot denve our spiritual meaning and solace from our political institutions,

any more than we can afford to let our spiritual institutions run our politics

The one must create a space for the other All the ways we have tried to

order our political affairs have proved at best inadequate and at worst savage

The analogy of art and politics in the thought of Albert Camus denves its

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value precisely from the fact that it invites us to discard the old forms andcreate something new We have seen that Camus would preserve limits inthis project of creation, but limits do not necessanly mean ineffectivenessMost challengingly, while some 'political orders' will be more effective thanothers, none is final In no case will we have attained the ordered simplicityof beauty In no case will the justice we attain be complete The point,rather, is style, the form in which we conduct our political lives Camus'sonly requirement of a community's style is that it be a style without murder

Camus's aesthetic considerations, examined for what they tell of his, attimes, obscure political position, reveal a man preoccupied with preservinghuman existence in community, while embracing a politics profoundly indi-vidual and ethical, rather than collective and institutional Camus's was apolitics of individual participation in human community, an ethic of self-conscious political participation 79 The danger in such thinking, of course, isthat each man might become a law unto himself But this is the precisetendency which Camus thought the ascetic requirement of his ethic, derivedfrom his notions of human creativity, would derail The self-conscious efforton behalf of the individual would lead to an awareness of some 'commonhuman nature' and, in turn, to the formation and undergirdmg of humancommunity Camus had no Utopian vision that a day would come whensuch a civilization would emerge Camus the artist recognised that such amode of being was at best an Aristotelian potentiality within human beingsNonetheless, chief among our political duties is the constant questioning ofexistence, not in existential despair, but rather, as a challenge to humanpotentiality Camus's words upon accepting the Nobel Pnze, are a fittingsummary of his view of his craft and a testament to his vision of this humanpotentiality

I cannot live as a person without my art And yet I have never set that art aboveeverything else It is essential to me, on the contrary, because it excludes noone and allows me to live, just as I am, on a footing with all To me, art is nota solitary delight It is a means of stirring the greatest number of men byproviding them with a privileged image of our common joys and woes Henceit forces the artist not to isolate himself, it subjects him to the humblest andmost universal truth And the man who, as often happens, chose the path of artbecause he was aware of his difference soon learns that he can nourish his art,and his difference, solely by admitting his resemblance to all The artist fashionshimself in that ceaseless oscillation from himself to others, midway between thebeauty he cannot do without and the community from which he cannot tearhimself This is why true artists scorn nothing They force themselves to under-stand instead of judging And if they are to take sides in this world, they can doso only with a society in which, according to Nietzsche's profound words, thejudge will yield to the creator, whether he be a worker or an intellectual 80

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J O H N R A N D O L P H LEBLANC 145

The rebel and the slave each knows when to say 'no', but must also recognisewhen to say 'yes' Camus the rebel artist said 'yes* to the twentieth century,placing his confidence in the individual acting in the formation and constantredefinition of the community, rather than in the community acting to thatend on the individual

University of Texas at Tyler

REFERENCES1 The author wishes to thank Carolyn MJones of the LSU Department ofPhilosophy and Religion for her guidanceand insightful suggestions regarding thecontent and preparation of this essay Healso would like to thank Cecil Eubanks andEllis Sandoz of the LSU Political ScienceDepartment, and James D Hardy, Jr andGait M Carnthers, Jr of the LSU HonorsCollege for their helpful readings of thisessay

2 A Camus, Resistance, Rebellion and Death,trans J O'Brien (New York, i960)pp 267-8

3 My approach differs in form ind contentfrom that of Emmett Parker who made anintensive study of Camus' journalism as away of getting at the politics of theAlgerian See E Parker, Albert Camus TfieArtist in the Arena (Madison, 1966)

4 Alan N Woolfolk sees Camus as apoliticalHe concludes that 'Camus exemplifies theanti-creedal idealism of a culture sufferingfrom a disenchantment with public com-mitments from which we have notrecovered' See A L Woolfolk, 'TheDangers of Engagement Camus' PoliticalEsthetics', Mosaic, XVII 3 (Summer 1984),pp 59-69 Quote is from p 68Camus shared many of the political con-cerns of phenomenology Essential tounderstanding the political implicationsof phenomenology is Hwa Yol Jung,"An Introductory Essay The PoliticalRelevance of Existential Phenomenology'in llxisienttal Phenomenology and Political'Ilteory A Reader (Chicago, 1974) Hwa YolJung (ed ), pp xvn-lv Two examples willsuffice Camus' political thought may beseen as an attempt to resolve the incongru-

ity Paul Ricoeur isolates in the essayThe Political Paradox' (in Hwa (ed),

PP 337—^7) wherein the 'political sphereis divided between the ideal of sovereigntyand the reality of power' (352) Ricoeur,like Camus, seeks the resolution of theparadox in the individual's existence Hewrites, I believe it must be maintained,against Marx and Lenin, that political ali-enation is not reducible to another, but isconstitutive of human existence, and in thissense, that the political mode of existenceentails the breach between the dozen'sabstract life and the concrete life of thefamily and work' (353) Another aspect ofthe phenomenological outlook with whichCamus had sympathy is the insistence onhope' B Dauenhauer in The Politics ofHope (New York and London, 1986) takesas his method one strikingly similar to thatfound in Camus 'On my view, men canconstitute a politics which in turn fosterstheir own appropriate understanding ofthemselves Individuals, the communityand their political institutions can mutuallystrengthen one another, even if none ofthem can be brought to stable perfection'(20)

* Quotes from Ricoeur, "The PoliticalParadox' in Jung, bxistenttal Phenomenologyand Political ITieory A Reader, pp 352 and

3537 J Cruikshank, Albert Camus and the

Literature of Revolt (New York, [960) arguesthat the fundamental conflict betweenmoderation and extremism resulted inCamus' adoption of a 'neither/nor posi-tion' This tendency in Camus' work 'madehis arguments mainly defensive in characterin so far as he attempts to protect certain

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ART AND POLITICS IN ALBERT CAMUS

values against the extremes of nihilism'

(224)8 A Camus, /Tie Rebel An Essay on Man in

Revolt, trans by A Brower {New York,1991 [ong 1956]), pp 279-80 In ancienttimes, he writes, 'the blood of murder atleast produced a religious horror and in thisway sanctified the value of life The realcondemnation of the period we live in is,on the contrary, that it leads us to thinkthat it is not bloodthirsty enough' (279)G Bree, Camus, revised edn {New York,1964) Even Fred Willhoite's valuable studyof Camus s political thought takes littledirect consideration of Camus's aestheticsSee F Willhoitejr Beyond Nihilism AlkrtCamus's Contribution to Political Thought(Baton Rouge, 1968) Willhoite correctlyconcludes that 'Camus's principle contri-bution in the long run will prove to be hiscontention that, bereft of any certainty ofdivine guidance or consensus on a meta-physical system, we need not float adnft ona sea of nihilism' (212)

10 liree Camus, describes how Camus cameto rely on his own experience, an experi-ence in which "the existence of the 'king-dom of man' that he had sought from theoutset had been more and more sharplychallenged", until he tame to feel {253)'that it was imperative to integrate into hisvision his own violently disruptive experi-ence' Though some have cnticistd herfor being less than critical of Camus, herwork nonetheless set the tone for furtherreflections on Camus' art and politicsD Spnntzen, Camus A Critical Examination(Philadelphia, 1988) p 222

12 Ibid at p 24113 Camus, The Rebel, p 27914 Ibid15 A Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other

Essays, trans J O'Brien {New York,1991). P 20

16 Ibid at 20 Nietzsche in The Birth of I raqedy[ The Birth of I ragedy and The Genealogyof Morals trans F Golffing (New York,1990)), noted the Enlightenment's hubnstic'illusion that thought, guided by the threadof causation, might plumb the farthestabysses of being and even correct it' (93)He continued, '[t]his grand metaphysical

illusion has become integral to the scientificendeavour and again and again leads scienceto those far limits of its inquiry where itbecomes art—-which, in this mechanism, iswhat is really intended' (93)

17 S Doubrovsky, 'The Ethics of AlbertCamus' in G Bree (ed), Camus >\Collection of Critical Essays {New York,1962), p 74

18 A Camus, Actuellcs I, p 263 quoted inBree, Camus, p 244

19 G Bree, Albert Camus (New York, 1964),

P 9

20 See the accounts of Camus ' wartime activ-ities in P McCarthy, Camus A Criticalstudy of His Life and Work (London 1982),pp 164-97 Jnd H Lottman, Albert Camus(New York, 1979), pp 204-17 andpp 284-337

21 See A Judt, Past Imperfect FrenchIntellectuals, 1944-56 (Berkelev, 1992)

22 Bree, Camus, p 823 T h e in te rv iew is translated and repr in ted in

A Camus, Lyncal and Critical Essays, PThody (ed), trans E Conroy Kennedy(New York, 1968), p 356 It is with thisunderstanding that I use the term 'absurdin discussing the corpus of Camus' work

24 Willhoite, p 17825 C a m u s , Myth of Sisyphus, p 2826 C a m u s , The Rebel, p 28027 C a m u s , 77ie Myth oj Sisyphus, p 292S tbtd at p 11929 ibid3(1 In response to a question regarding tht

relationship of absurdity and despair in a1945 interview with Jeanine DelpecbCamus said 'All I can do is reply on myown behalf, realising that what I say isrelative Accepting the absurdity of every-thing around us is one step, a necessaryexperience it should not become a deadend ' Interview in Lyncal and CriticalEssays, p 346

31 As I have developed it, the relationship ofthought to action was a crucial one, andwas one of the central issues in the Camus-Sartre dispute On the one hand, a criticalif sympathetic reading of Camus leaves onelittle surprised that his thought and sensibil-ities paralysed him on the Algerian ques-tion Camus clearly found it difficult to sort

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JOHN RANDOLPH LEBLANC

out his own inner conflict he was a nativeAJgenan, had real sympathy with the plightof the Arabs from very early in his life, yetcame of age in an intellectual milieuof European colonialism On the other,Sartre's modus operandi seems to have beenthink-act-rationahse Though when con-sidered as a whole the body of Sartre'spolitical actions seem to lack consistency,his enormous intellect allowed him torationalise his acts after the fact Forexample, J Gerassi in Jean Paul SartreHaled CotisaencL of His Century Volume iProtestant or Protester7 (Chicago, 1989),p 112, quotes Sartre on this point 'I didnot believe myself committed b\ my past,so 1 was free Individual freedom meantperpetual detachment A writer, I insisted,must keep his independence But 1 was alsoverv moralistic In that Rouen cafe incid-ent, what happened was that a very badlydressed worker walked in and the ownerimmediately ushered him out I reacted onthe spot bv saying to Castor [Simone deBeauvoir] "1 should join the CIJ" But thatwas not a political statement It was a moralreaction to the cafe owner's action I wassimply expressing my hatred of his class,the bourgeoisie In any case, I just said itI didn't do it

32 ibid at p 12333 H Peyre in ' C a m u s the Pagan' in Bree

(ed ) , uses the Latin Hie et nunc to describeit, Camus, p 66 As many interpret C a m u sas too m u c h a Christian, w i th s tatementslike Peyre's that ' C a m u s ' most originalrevolt is against h o p e ' (68), Peyre interpretsC a m u s as a pagan with too little sense ofthe transcendent

34 Spnn tzen p 22235 Ibid at p 943b A C a m u s , ' T h e Growing S tone ' in

Exile and the Kingdom (New York 1991[ong 1958]), pp 159-213

37 Ibid at p 11538 C L Eubanks, 'Walker Percy Eschatology

and the Politics o f Grace ' , SouthernQuarterly, \o\ XVII 3 (Spring 1980),pp 121-36

3" Eubanks, p 13240 Camus, Resistance, Rebellion and Death,

p 228

41 Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, p 9542 C a m u s , tbtd at p 1743 C a m u s , Resistance, Rebellion and Death,

p 26744 C a m u s , The Rebel, p 25845 Ibid46 Ibid at p 27647 Ibid at p 2514R Camus, Tlie Myth of Sisyphus, p 115 P

Thod\ in Albert Camus A Study of HisWork (New York. 1957), p 104, finds'|t]helyricism of lite Myth of Sisyphus is genuine,that of The Rebel seems forced and is anattempt to reintroduce feeling into a worldfrom which an excess of logic has ban-ished it'

*"* C a m u s , 77ie Myth of Sisyphus p 11550 C a m u s , Vic Rebel p 27151 Ibid at p 26852 Ibid53 Ibid at p 27154 Ibid55 See Camus's concern with the funeral ntual

in b o t h 77K1 Stranger and ITie Plaque5(1 Ibid at p 25657 See Bakhtin The Dialogic Imagination Four

Essays, t rans M Holqu i s t {Austin, 1981)58 B ree , Camus, p 24259 C a m u s , The Rebel, p 25860 Ibid it p 26161 Ibid at p 26462 Ibid63 Ibid at p 260M Ibid at p 27165 Ibid66 Ibid at p p 2 6 7 - 8 (my emphasis)fi7 Ibid at p 26268 M y emphas i s C a m u s , Resistatict, Rebellion

and Death, p 13269 C a m u s , Resistance, Rebellion and Death

p 26670 This idea of judging' n one of the central

problems in Camus' work As this charac-terisation of the prophet and that of thejudge—penitent in T\ie fall {New York,ios(5) indicates, Camus did not want to

judge, yet knew that to live is to judgeAlso if we accept Camus' understanding ofthe work of the prophet, it is difficult tocharactense him as such though J Kelloggdoes so in Dark Prophets of Hope Dostoevsky,Sartre, Camus, Faulkner (Chicago, 1975)

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148 ART AND POLITICS IN ALBERT CAMUS

More useful, perhaps, is the approach ofF S A Rysten who studied the figure of thefalse prophet in the work itself See Rysten,False Prophets in the fiction of Camus,Dostoevsky, Melville, and Others {CoralGables, 1972)

71 Ibid72 A Camus, 'The Artist at Work' in llxile

and lite Kingdom, pp 110-5871 Camus, /Tie Rebel, p 276

Camus, Hie Rebel, p 27675 Spnntzen, p 2687(1 Ibid at p 270

Once was in Ins early embrace of socialism,abandoned in the 1930s This was more anideological response to government s inab-ility to deal with poverty which he knewwell The second time was during theAlgerian Civil War, when he embraced MLaunol's republican solution to the con-flict This second embrace is testament tohis frustration with the savagery of tht.

Algerian Civil War See Resistance, Rebellionand Death, pp 149—53 His siding with theAllies against tht. Axis in the Second WorldWar was less an embrace of liberal demo-cracies than of a rejection of the evil hefound embodied in Hitler's project See'Letters to a German Friend' in Resistance,Rebellion and Death, pp 3-32See Camus, |On the bombing ofHiroshima), Combat, 8 August 1945 in ACamus, Between Hell and Reason Assays fromthe Resistance Newspaper Combat, 1944-1947, trans A de Gramont (Hanover, NH,

199')- PP ' 'O-i 1Camus found his own ethical standarddifficult to live up to He has been roundlycriticised by Spnntzen Patrick McCarthyand others for his paralysis on the matterof the Algerian Civil WarSpnntzen vn—ix repnnts the entire text ofthe speech

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art and politics in albert camus: beauty as defiance and art as a spiritual quest

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