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His existential predicament brought his distracted and restive
muses to a point where he had to close with the ghosts that
beckoned him, like Hamlet, to those ramparts of thought where
the mystery of evil, chaos and absurdity becomes a cry of his
drawn spirit. Camus, a product of colonial Algeria, in strange
sympathy with his country’s foes, found himself bound like
Sysyphus, seeking to consummate "the buffoonery of his
emotions" in existentialist metaphysic of the absurd. Thus,
all his earlier novels and essays become a vast allegory of the
human situation. He, in a way, could not but dramatise his
fevers in frame after frame.
The earlier
novels, The Stranger, The Plague (1948) and The Fall (1957)
remained his encounters with the philosophical questions of
evil, alienation, human justice etc., and he chose for the first
book the form so dear to the French novelists, the form of
paronovella, a slim, slender volume that underscored the madness
which possessed the Algerian Arabs and the French rulers
equally. Symbolic tales, they remained his signatures of
authenticity in a world gone berserk in his eyes. In his comment
on Lionel Trilling’s Norton Lectures delivered at Harvard
University in 1969-70, and published under the title "Sincerity
and Authenticity", a leading American critic, Irving
Howe, said: "It takes two to be sincere, one to be
authentic". Camus, then, vindicated his self in this
fashion. The Plague, however, is a much bigger
book, a vast metaphor for the plague spots within us, and within
our bodypolitic. Here is a narrative struggling to carry the
weight of an unspent Mediterranean vision. A certain nervousness
adds to the tension of his prose. No wonder, the style and the
technique assume a peculiar muscular tautness and austerity of
expression. The style is well honed, as in Hemingway, and
becomes a raiment of thought. A stone-washed, neat, clinical
idiom, Camus’s "white prose" in the words of Susan
Santog, thus, served a pondered epistomological purpose.
In all these
earlier books, Camus shows a perennial, primordial legacy, and
the only way open to an honest person was to preserve his
dignity, and suffer alienation, rebellion or exile. There always
remained a huge metaphysical leak in god’s scheme of things,
pushing one into absurdity and challenge. Man couldn’t
"connect" with his human condition, and remained
something of "a dangling man". Cyril Connelly once
described him as "a classical Mediterranean" whose
solar pessimism suggested deep, dark spot in Camus’s humanism
which, otherwise, is deeply imbued with compassion for the
afflicted and the fallen, for the dispossessed and the
deracinated. His angst and anxiety resulted in his concept of
"philosophical suicide".
All this brings me
back to Camus’s last novel, The First Man (whose
manuscript was retrieved from the smashed car), which, as I’ve
indicated in the title, amounted to his final posthumous
testament that could not be published till 1995 for certain
political and sentimental reasons. Translated into English by
David Hapgood, it is, in a broad way, an ode to his own
childhood and home life. The hero, Jacques Connory, an
autobiographical figure, becomes a philosophical picaro, gathering
the airs and essences of life in a rich, luxuriant manner.
Basically, it remains a Bildungsroman or a novel of
passage from childhood to manhood, a story of initiation into
the challenges of life.
Three major
concerns or motifs are (a) search for the father, (b) the poetry
of childhood and school days, (c) the utter mysteriousness of
life. Like the great French novelist, Proust’s Remembrance
of Things Past, this book moves up and down, far and wide,
gathering memories of the dead father and of his dear poor
"Maman" who had managed to keep a struggling family in
bread and raiment. The Homeric motif of the lost father
resonates powerfully throughout the novel.
As for the
richness and fecundity of this last book, it has a Dickensian
flavour. The Algerian countryside and town bazars with their
maddening summer sun, Arab sweets and bonbons and buzzing flies,
all come alive triumphantly. There is a Proustian play of the
imagination on things, persons and places. The style,
reminiscent of the latter Henry James, quite unlike his own
earlier Spartan prose, becomes, towards the end, a long rolling
poem in prose, with periods within periods, winding, unwinding,
giving off an aroma of French champagne.
And yet within
these sheltered memories, Camus manages to give us enough
glimpses of the colonial French Algeria, of the Arab insurgency,
and of his own moral unease in the interstices of the story. The
curves and convolutions of his divided thought reveal the
presence of a highly sensitive poetic and moral imagination. And
even in the midst of such churning and strivings of the soul,
his evocation of childhood brings him close enough to the
Wordsworthian salute to that period when "heavens lay at
our feet". Camus remained a nominal Catholic with no real
belief in religion, and no overt thoughts of God. However, this
long ‘ode to childhood’ does reveal the spiritual side of
his nature. He confesses, he has "a ravenous appetite for
life, an untamed and hungry intellect". The wheel comes
half circle when the hero discovers, like so many sensitive
French settlers, that in Algeria, "each man is first
man" where he has to bring himself up without a father.
Each man is therefore, also a "Sysyphus" who has to
affront his own destiny.
It seems
appropriate, then, to conclude this critique on a sentimental
note. There’s a page before the start of the book which
carries the following inscription:
Intercessor: Widow
Camus —
"To you who
will never be able to read this book."
I trust, this
constitutes his wife’s own little salutation to a man with
whom she shared some of the best as also some of the most
agonising days of their life. It’s also a requiem of a kind.
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ALBERT
CAMUS, the great French existentialist novelist and thinker who died
in a car crash in 1960, has received huge critical acclaim the world
over, and the corpus of his novels and philosophical essays stands
apart, a sui generis phenomenon in world literature. The
Nobel Prize for Literature (1957) had, finally, come to be seen as a
testimony to his genius which had, in fact, been duly acknowledged
when his first novel, The Stranger (1946) made an astonishing
debut, and in one leap, so to speak, put him amongst the greatest
names in the French novel. An obscure, young Frenchman brought up in
the troubled colony of Algeria, France’s "albatross"
that suggested an unenviable doom, he came to occupy, ultimately, a
kind of "middle space" in the French letters, his deep
ambivalence abiding in book after book. Now over 40 years after his
tragic death, his work has received a new insightful commentary,
particularly after the publication of his last unfinished big novel,
Le Premier Homme or The First Man (1995), a work of
fiction so vastly outside of his oeuvre as to cause many a critical dislocation. An autobiography story,
chiefly of his troubled and tormented childhood in Algiers in a
family that lived in genteel poverty, and in the midst of a hostile,
rebellious Arab population, it has in the words of Florene Neiville (Le
Monde), "an overwhelming feeling of purity, almost
grace...". It constitutes his final, absolute statement on his
passage as an artist, a novel that is at once a testament and a song
of nostalgia beyond compare. However, before I take up this great
work of fiction for some detailed comments, a rapid overviews of his
earlier productions becomes imperative.
