Albert Camus And The Kingdom Of Nature

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Content Copyright by
FRANK DOSTER WETHERILL
1965
ALBERT CAMUS
AND THE
KINGDOM OF NATURE
by
Frank Doster Wetherill
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(French)
June 1964
UNIVERSITY O F SOUTHERN CAUFORNIA
THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY PARK
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA S 0 0 0 7
This dissertation, written by
................JPxiw;k..i?.ciatje.c..W.cjthfixiU.................
under the direction of his Dissertation Com
mittee, and approved by all its members, has
been presented to and accepted by the Graduate
School, in partial fulfillment of requirements
for the degree of
D O C T O R O F P H I L O S O P H Y
4g&SicC.
Dean
DISSERTATION COMMITTEE
.. 3j~+1
Chairman
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
A study such as this is not the total production of
one individual, and most certainly not that of the person
whose name appears on the cover. Rather, it is the distil
lation of the efforts of many people— the author being mere
ly that person who pulls it all together in one place. I
therefore thank Dr. Rene Bell^, my chairman, Dr. Max Berkey,
and Dr. Everett Hesse, the members of my committee for their
forebearance and kind consideration of my topic and of me.
But, most of all, and certainly not last of all, I wish to
extend a vote of deep thanks to my wife, Riekje, who not
only suffered the ignominious task of typing many drafts of
this study, but, as wife, was unstinting in her love, devo
tion and patience of my work.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
ACKNOWLEDGMENT ..................................... ii
INTRODUCTION........ 1
PART I
Chapter
I. LOVE OF THE EARTrf.......................... 7
Poverty and Light, Youth and Senility
e > .
II. TOMBS AND LANDSCAPES........................’ 21
III. A BEAUTIFUL NATURE RESTORES ................ 38
IV. CITIES: NOISY TOMBS ....................... 50
V. STONE: DESERTS AND CITIES................ 58
VI. LAND, SEA AND SUN: EARTH, WATER AND FIRE . . 65
VII. PANTHEISTIC UNION AND THE REVELATION
OF THE ABSURD.......... 81
VIII. LOVE AND LANDSCAPES........................ 96
IX. LANGUAGE, LANDSCAPES AND EXILE . 108
X. MEDITERRANEAN LANDSCAPES AND PSYCHES .... 124
XI. TRAVEL, THE ABSURD AND THE BEAUTY OF
NATURE................................... 134
XII. HELLENISM AND NATURE...................... 148
Chapter Page
XIII. EQUILIBRIUM, HARMONY AND LIMITATION:
THE S E A .................................... 160
XIV. A VOLATILE EQUILIBRIUM: THE S U N ............. 179
*
XV. SILENCE AND THE SUN.......................... 186
XVI. THE OPEN SEA: A RHAPSODY................... 195
The Horizon and Liberty
Movement and Life
The Sea and Liebestod
XVII. EROTICISM AND NATURE........................ 220
PART II
XVIII. L'ETRANGER: PATRICE MERSAULT, A PROTOTYPE . 231
L 1Etranaer: Who Is Meursault?
The Re-enactment of an Ancient Sacrifice
The Relationship of Style to Image
and Perception in L1Etranaer
An Active Nature and a Passive Man
A Man Crucified by the Sun
Prison
XIX. CALIGULA: NATURE TURNED UPSIDE DOWN .... 313
A Bitter Lyrical Duet
XX. LE MALENTENDU: THE LANDSCAPE DRIVES
TO MURDER.................. 331
XXI. LES JUSTES: THE EPITAPH OF NATURE.. 355
XXII. LA PESTE: THE FOUR SEASONS OF THE PLAGUE . . 357
One Form of Suffering Seen in Terms
of Another
Chapter Page
Oran, the Death of a Snail
The Mathematics of Death
The Four Seasons
XXIII. LA CHUTE: THE LANDSCAPE OF A BAD
CONSCIENCE............................... 403
Bourgeois Vikings
A Bourgeois Hell
The "Malconfort"
•«IV. L'EXIL ET LE ROYAUME....................... 434
"La Femme Adult&re": A Symbolic
Seduction by Sand, Wind and Stars
"Le Renegat": The Human Sacrifice
to the Sun God
"Les Muets": Algiers Revisited
"L'Hote": A Kind Man in a Cruel
Desert
"Jonas": Paris is the Whale
"La Pierre Qui Pousse": Solidarity
and the Jungle
Conclusion: Silence, Babel and Beauty
CONCLUSION.......................................... 528
BIBLIOGRAPHY 537
INTRODUCTION
Even before the recent and unexpected death of Albert
Camus, scholarly studies of his work were quite varied and
often contradictory. This diversity has continued to mul
tiply and will probably not cease until the test of time
chooses the valid from the invalid. Often, however, diver
sified interpretations continue to grow many years after the
death of a great author and thus testify to his still living
importance which is then seen from the vantage point of
posterity. Since such a perspective is not yet possible, it
remains necessary to consider the rather voluminous body of
scholarly endeavor available. Several biographical studies
have already been written within the last three years and
undoubtedly many new facets of his achievements are being
studied at the present time. His popularity'with the pub
lic, as well as with critics, is still increasing in France
and in many other countries.
His ideology and political views have already been
quite thoroughly examined, often because they have generated
so much controversy, which as a result has obscured the
2
importance of his artistic creation.1. The philosophical
school of criticism has dealt with the sentiment of nature
in Camus by placing it within the context of philosophy,
thus depriving it of an autonomous role and somewhat mini
mizing its importance. This approach, however, has many
virtues although those who examine this subject by a study
of aesthetics and style have contributed more to it. The
role nature plays, however, cannot be considered as a sole
means of interpretation; rather, it is an important con
tributing factor which is intimately related to the life of
the artist as well as to his creative imagination. We have
sought, therefore, to illustrate the aesthetic treatment of
nature as well as its importance and meaning within the
context of Camus' essays and fiction in the hope of reveal
ing an often ignored facet of his greatness.
Camus' intense love of nature forms an integral part of
his philosophical, social and religious views and thus can
not be ignored by any serious study. An attempt to inter
mit is precisely the attention paid to the ideological
content of Camus' writing— the sense of the absurd, the idea
of revolt— that has tended to divert critics from the study
of the creative process in his novels and plays." S. Beynon
John, "Image and Symbol in the Work of Albert Camus," French
Studies. 9:10, January 1955.
pret certain works outside of his views on nature can lead
to a very distorted understanding which runs contrary to his
intentions. Every minor and major essay, novel, short story
or play, moreover, is directly related to the natural world,
to a greater or lesser degree, and cannot he accurately
understood apart from it. Certain works fall entirely
within the realm of this study.
Among all French writers, Camus' landscapes are perhaps
the most simple and unchanging; the first and the last
writings reveal the same love of an identical nature which
never failed to inspire works of the most different charac
ter. His paucity of images, however, is offset by an almost
unbelievable variety of description. No other Western
writer appears to describe the sun and light in such minute
detail nor to give it such a universal importance. His
motto might be this sentence taken from his notebooks: "On
ne rate pas sa vie lorsgu'on la met dans la lumiere." Each
and every writing attests to this categorical statement.
Although critics and scholars have thoroughly examined
Camus' poverty and sickness which contribute to his attitude
towards nature, they have remained silent concerning his
almost pathological claustrophobia. For him it comprises
the "anti-nature," a dreaded enemy which appears directly or
indirectly in every major work and which cannot be omitted
in any serious study without neglecting his intentions.
Many of his philosophical and social views spring directly
from this intense fear and revulsion.
In this essay we have attempted to reveal the aesthetic
creation of the author rather than to consider it from a
context extraneous to his inspiration. We prefer to let the
author speak for himself as much as possible, and our analy
sis correspondingly attempts to disclose and accentuate the
world as he saw it.
It has been necessary to consider all of Camus' pub
lished works from the very first to the very last in order
to treat properly the subject of this thesis. His entire
literary creation develops from a tiny nucleus to become a
large organism, yet this mucleus is always visible and re
mains unchanged. Throughout his life his earliest atti
tudes and beliefs became more intense, more perfectly ex
pressed, more increasingly loyal to the source of his in
spiration; change in his art proves the development of
consistent values rather than the acceptance of new ones.
Although the outward aspects of his life were indicative of
the turmoil of his generation, although he rose from the
Algerian slums to the pinnacle of world renown, he remained
as constant as the Mediterranean shores which inspired him.
For these reasons we have undertaken an "organic" approach
which conforms to the expression of his art, an approach we
consider to he the most suitable means of revealing his
attitude towards nature.
I
PART I
CHAPTER I
LOVE OF THE EARTH
Poverty and Light. Youth and Senility
Albert Camus remained loyal to his first love, the love
of his native Algeria which he knew as a child and as a
young man. His first essays, overflowing with a lyrical and
rhapsodic love of the earth, yet suggesting a profound in
sight, are echoed even in the last works of his life. His
art evolved, explored new forms of sensitivity and style,
but it remained humble to the source of his inspiration.
His creation grew organically out of itself, from experience
with life. It is very difficult, therefore, to understand
his last works without scrutinizing the first, L*Envers et
L'Endroit. Noces . and most of L’Ete. the essays which he
wrote before undertaking his fictional work. These are of
considerable importance because they contain the essential
images of nature and of his particular form of sensitivity
which he was later to incorporate within his novels, plays
and short stories . He evokes, with a nostalgia common to
7
all men, the remembrance of the nature he knew as a child:
Pour moi, je sais que ma source est dans 1'Envers et
l'Endroit. dans ce monde de pauvrete et de lumiere ou
j'ai longtemps vecu et dont le souvenir me preserve
encore des deux dangers contraires qui menacent tout
artiste, le ressentiment et la satisfaction.^-
His youth, as he states here, belonged to poverty and
light which balance each other. Poverty was the street and
the house in which he lived, his overworked half-deaf char
woman mother, and his tyrannical and lonely grandmother.
In essence, poverty for Camus was darkness, hunger, cold,
sickness, despair, claustrophobia and death; in a word, it
was the "anti-nature." Light was "life, liberty, the pur
suit of happiness," health and hope. Such a definition
undoubtedly is an over-simplification yet it contains the
essential images which Camus was to recreate in all of his
subsequent works.
/ /
The happy equilibrium in the above quotation, written
at a mature age when Camus was famous and living in Paris,
when he could view his youth with nostalgia or detachment,
is a softened form of the same duality he expressed at the
age of twenty-two:
^•"Preface" (1958), L'Envers et L'Endroit (1935-1937),
p. 13.
»
II y a une solitude dans la pauvrete, mais une solitude
qui rend son prix a chaque chose. A un certain degre
de richesse, le ciel lui-meme et la nuit pleine d'etoiles
semblent des biens naturels. Mais au bas de l'echelle,
le ciel reprend tout son sens; une grace sans prix.
Nuits d'ete, mystere ou crepitent les etoilesl II y
avait derriere 1'enfant un couloir puant ... ^
The construction of this short paragraph is quite
masterful; the opposition of relative wealth to poverty is
followed by the turgid strength of the last line which puts
everything in its place; it is a crescendo of beauty fol
lowed by a diminuendo of brutal irony: "where the stars
crackle and sputter"— a joyous elevation towards infinite
freedom and space is followed directly by the joyless
descent into a confined and sordid reality; poetic prose
ends abruptly in the "stinking corridor."
Camus was seriously ill with tuberculosis when he
wrote this autobiographical sketch, a significant fact in
considering the abrupt style of short sentences and pauses
3
which end instantly "with a sort of respiratory spasm"
which blocks the flow of continuity— the very opposite of
^"Entre Oui et Non," L'Envers et L'Endroit. p. 63.
^Jean-Paul Sartre, "Explication de L'Etranoer." Situa
tions . 1:120, 1947. Camus resented this phrase, however
accurate it may be, condemning those who "attribute my art
to my respiratory system" (Les Temps Modernes. August 1952,
p. 325).
10
Chateaubriand's flowing rhythms. Tuberculosis, which Camus
almost never mentions directly, is an important image re
vealed in a variety of disguises in the course of his later
works, especially the "pneumonic" form of the plague in La
Peste.
The Algeria of Camus is a land of brutal contrasts, an
arid spectacle of beauty and poverty without the subtle
transitional zones between these extremes which character
izes the nature of France and the French way of life. It
gives in profusion but denies profusely, "its pleasures
4
have no remedies, its joys no hope." It dominates the
manner and way of feeling of its inhabitants;
Singulier pays qui donne a l'homme qu'il nourrit a la
fois sa splendeur et sa misere'. La richesse sensuelle
dont un homme sensible de ce pays est pourvu, il n'est
pas etonnant qu'elle coincide avec le denuement le plus
extreme. II n'est pas une verite qui ne porte avec
elle son amertume. Comment s'etonner alors si le visage
de ce pays, je ne l'aime jamais plus qu'au milieu de
ses hommes les plus pauvres? (p. 48)
Poverty, in Camus' essays, even his novels and short
stories, bears a close and undeniable relationship to the
beauty and ravages of the natural world. It is the ugly
side of a beautiful coin, it is half of L1Envers et
^"L'lronie," Noces. 1938, p. 48.
11
L'Endroit (Heads or Tails, also entitled Betwixt and Between
in the English edition). As such it is incomplete by it
self, in the same way that the natural world is incomplete
by itself. This equilibrium of opposing forces, so typical
of Camus' manner of feeling, serves to intensify the exper
ience he describes. This opposition, then, is not an aes
thetic device superimposed upon a manner of feeling, rather
it is inherent in it and springs from the very landscape
which Camus describes. One could almost say that his art
grew out of the Algerian soil.
Human poverty and the wealth of natural beauty are
violently opposed in Camus' newspaper articles describing
the famine in Kabylia, one of the most brutal and senseless
in recent history. He describes a beautiful landscape where
"children and dogs fought over the contents of a garbage
5
can" and where "thistle stalks constituted a food staple"
(p. 42). The beauty of the world becomes for him an un
bearable spectacle:
Au retour d'une visite a la "tribu" de Tizi-Ouzou,
j'etais monte avec un ami Kabyle sur les hauteurs qui
dominent la ville. La, nous regardions la nuit tomber.
Et a cette heure ou 1'ombre qui descend des montagnes
sur cette terre splendide apporte une detente au coeur
5Actuelles. Ill, 1939-1958, p. 38.
12
de l'homme le plus endurci, je savais pourtant qu'il n'y
avait pas de paix pour ceux qui de l1autre cote de la
vallee, se reunissaient autour d'une galette de mauvaise
orge. Je savais aussi qu'il y aurait eu de la douceur
a s'abandonner a ce soir si surprenant et si grandiose,
mais que cette misere dont les feux rougeoyaient en face
de nous mettait comme un interdit sur la beaute du monde.
"Descendons, voulez-vous?" me dit mon compagnon. (p. 41)6
The "poverty" and "light," "resentment" and "satisfaction"
assume tragic and universal dimensions in this beautifully
composed paragraph; the individual has been transcended; his
personal experience of "poverty" and "light," "sparkling
stars" and "stinking corridor" now dominate a vast land
scape. Not one individual, but a multitude, knows an abso
lute, not a relative poverty.
In the second quotation from L1Envers et L'Endroit
visual movement describes a vertiginous ascent and descent,
from the "sparkling skies" to the "stinking corridor"; a
joyous ecstasy plunges into sordid despair. Likewise, in
the above paragraph ascent and descent, which dominate the
®Roger Quillot notices why Camus refused to employ a
typical journalistic style in this pathetic description:
"Cette longue citation, extraite du reportage sur la
Kabylie, suffirait a prouver que 1'artiste demeure present
derriere le journaliste et se refuse a sacrifier la forme.
Certains concluront de cette dignite de l’ecriture au di-
lettantisme et a la litterature. Comme si la sincerite se
mesurait au laisser aller ou a la vehemence!" La Mer et Les
Prisons. Essai sur Albert Camus (Paris, 1956), p. 149.
13
composition, are transferred from the visual splendor of
nature to a pitiful humanity: first the ascent to the
summit overlooking the city, then the descending shadow of
night sliding down the mountain and over the starving city,
finally the "fires of poverty." This visual descent, unlike
that of the second quotation, is accompanied by a descent
from individual communion with nature to an acceptance of
collective responsibility. Finally the last line, the
little three-word question, "Descendons, voulez-vous?"
smashes the illusion like a feather which falls with the
impact of a club; the setting sun has left Camus and his
friend standing on the dark summit while their attention
had already fallen to the sordid depths below? the muted
horror of the scene bids them remain silent. The little
question, then, is really saying "Wake up, get hold of
yourself; let's go about our business." After all, his
Kabylian friend was probably accustomed to the sight of
starvation.
It is his acceptance of social responsibility which
falls on him like an "interdiction on the beauty of the
world." Camus intimates that had there been no famine
beneath his feet he would have continued to enjoy the
natural wonder of the scene. He also uses two styles to
14
coincide with this dichotomy: o n e a poetic prose, which in
some of his essays becomes a voluptuous self-abandon occa
sionally reaching a pantheistic union, the other an ascetic
7
self-denial squeezed into an understatement.
This dramatic image of K a b y l i a contrasts strongly with
the romantic elation of the letsct: century described in simi
lar scenes. Rastignac, high ujpon the slopes of the Pere
Lachaise Cemetery, hurls his challenge, "A nous deux," to
the glittering Paris beneath h i s feet. He is re-enacting
a Napoleonic posture. Camus' s c e n e is a complete reversal
in meaning. In La Peste where h e utilizes almost identical
imagery, the same preoccupation w i t h death and suffering
dominate. Rieux and Rambert strand beneath the Monument to
the Dead which overlooks the sea. and the plague-infested
8
city. Pestilence, not famine, lies beneath them. The
beauty of the earth has been d e n i e d them by an intervening
obligation to correct human suffering.
Ironically, it was Camus' d e f e n s e of the poor and the
destitute which indirectly f o r c e d him to leave his native
Rene Barthe (Le Deere Z e r o de l'Ecriture [Paris, 1953],
p. 107) describes this style as " un style de l'absence"
which turns its back on "l'artisanat du style."
8La Peste. p. 167.
15
Algeria he loved so much. The reactionary political author
ities refused to take action and instead punished him by
making it impossible for him to find work. He was then
obliged to live in France where he considered himself an
exile. His personal experience with the blindness and
stupidity of a governmental administration which refuses to
see a tragic evil is again reflected in La Peste and becomes
an important part of the action.
These events in his life are all directly related to
his love of external nature because they all conspire to
deprive him of it and force him into the political life of
men which necessarily rejects such a sentiment. It is the
collectivity of men which, in almost every one of his short
stories and novels, is a powerful force isolating his in
dividuals from the beauty of the natural world. In
L'Etranqer. La Peste and L'Exil et le Rovaume this inter
posing force is clearly delineated.
Like himself, Camus' poor people are those who enjoy
nature by partaking of the joys of the sun and the sea along
with their concomitant dangers. Meursault and Marie, like
Janine in La Femme Adultere. are relatively poor and enjoy
the simple pleasures of nature. Even Tarrou, Rambert and
Rieux, although not poor, have come from poverty or have
16
been regenerated by a strong sense of responsibility towards
human suffering. The judges, lawyers and city officials,
whom Camus portrays as hypocritical, overbearing "patri
cians" and word jugglers, have no relationship with natural
beauty. In his novels and short stories one never sees them
partaking of the simplest pleasures in nature, such as the
sun, the sea and the springtime flowers. Moreover, they
refuse to accept the threats that the natural world imposes
upon them from without. Just as the officials of the Alger
ian civil administration refused to see the Kabylian famine,
so do their fictional counterparts in L'Etranaer and La
Peste refuse to accept any influence that the natural world
may exert on human affairs. They live in fine houses
sheltered from heat, wind, rain, cold and hunger. Their
ideas, like their bodies, are sheltered and will admit
nothing from without. In a word, they are, for Camus,
hermetic.
If the rich "patricians" are presented as despicable,
then the poor old people who populate Camus' works become
all the more pathetic because they have been deprived of
the joyous world of the senses— the only one for an Alger
ian. No more beaches, no more sun, no more strolls among
the flowers, but instead a silent resignation towards death
17
is their lot. In old age the rich have their comforts, the
politicians their influence, and the intellectuals their
books, but for the old laborer there remains nothing. Per
haps Meursault's early death was a blessing since old age
would have cut him off from the natural world, the only one
where he was truly happy. The life of the Algerian, like
that of the desert flower, is brief but intense:
Un ouvrier de trente ans a deja joue de toutes ses
cartes. II attend la fin entre sa femme et ses enfants.
Les bonheurs ont ete brusques et sans merci. De meme
sa vie. Et l1on comprend alors qu'il soit ne de ce
pays ou tout est donne pour etre retire. Dans cette
abondance et cette profusion, la vie prend la courbe
des grandes passions, soudaines, exigeantes, genereuses.
Elle n'est pas a construire, mais a bruler. II ne
s'agit pas alors de reflechir et de devenir meilleurs.
La notion d'enfer, par exemple, n'est ici qu'une aimable
plaisanterie.^
Youth is the only consolation for the poor Algerian who
knows neither joys within himself nor in his house but only
a momentary flowering within nature. Old age, conjugated
by poverty, becomes for him a death within life: "tout ici
respire l'horreur de mourir dans un pays qui invite a la
vie" {p. 63). Life is lived only in the present tense, a
perpetual present, which acknowledges tomorrow only with a
bitter lucidity: Meursault has already been suggested in
9"L'Ete & Alger," Hacaa, p. 59.
18
L’Envers et L'Endroit.
Senility, like poverty, is the "anti-nature," that
which drives the beautiful pagan back into the stone and
brick shell of a man-made world. Whoever has lived in
southern latitudes recognizes Camus' world immediately: the
wild exuberance of the dance impossible in a northern
country, the surrender of the self to the voluptuous life
of the senses which is taken for granted, the accelerated
metabolism of all that draws breath or has roots fixed to
the earth.
Madame de StaSl developed a north-south dichotomy which
still applies, and more intensely so, to the art of Camus.
Gide in Les Nourritures Terrestres. like Stendhal, Was se
duced by the Mediterranean life, but these writers were
«
North Europeans who viewed this world as foreigners; Camus
was a North African who viewed France as a foreigner.
The "patricians" and intellectuals in Camus' short
stories and novels belong to what may be called the "inner-
directed" way of life which posits self-control, ambition
and rationality; his poor, however, are "outer-directed" by
their adherence to the external world of nature and by their
urge to fulfill animal necessities. It is these "patrician"
judges, lawyers and priests in Camus’ works who represent
the northern, European ethic in an alien country, yet it is
they who impose their authority upon the poor, the real
natives of Algeria. Most of these "patricians," in fact,
were born in France or educated there; they belong to a
well-organized world of men and ideas, not to the uncondi
tional love of nature and the world of the senses. Evi
dently such a division of Camus' characters is an over
simplification, but it is implicit and suggested in all of
his major works. France and Algeria are quite often anta
gonistic in his works, not so much because of politics but
because of antagonistic ways of feeling and living. Such a
duality is a traditional subject in Latin American litera
ture which opposes the energetic, ambitious German or Pied
montese colonist to the indolent and sensual native whom he
soon dominates. A Frenchman would find Camus' intentions
much more difficult to understand than a Mexican or a Chi
lean whose countries bear such a close resemblance to the
North African coast. The western shore of Mexico duplicates
quite acpurately the nature described in L1Envers et
L'Endroit. Noces. L'Ete and in Camus' fiction; the same
attitude towards life and, above all, the same poverty
dominate the landscape. According to Camus, even the
harshness of the landscape is reflected in the faces of the
20
poor:
A force d'indifference et d'insensibilite, il arrive
gu'un visage rejoigne la grandeur minerale d'un paysage.
Comme certains paysans d'Espagne arrivent a ressembler
aux oliviers de leurs terres, ainsi les visages de
Giotto, depouilles des ombres derisoires ou l'ame se
manifesto, finissent par rejoindre la Toscane elle-meme.10
The half paralyzed grandmother in L'Envers et L'Endroit. the
mothers of Rieux and Meursault, like the pathetic inmates of
the asylum for the aged, the senile old men in La Peste.
people Camus' world like so many cinders on the desert; the
splendid sun which had once tanned their skin has now
shriveled it. For the pagan, senility is the death of the
natural world within himself; when the senses die, the
beauty of the landscape must also die.
10"Le Desert," Noces. p. 81.
CHAPTER II
TOMBS AND LANDSCAPES
It is through the eyes of poverty, sickness and death
that Camus' landscapes burst forth. This trio which gave
natural beauty its contrasting value is no less important
for him than claustrophobia. Rarely has an author expressed
such a dread of claustration in every conceivable fashion:
all that seeks to cut man off from the clear sky is unbear
able, even an overcast atmosphere. Camus describes no
happiness indoors. Prisons, hospitals, crowded city streets
press in upon him with boredom, disease and finally death.
Indoors for him literally meant suffocation? he had tubercu
losis and was confined for several years to a hospital bed.
Although Camus discusses his personal privation quite
frequently in L1Envers et L'Endroit. he scarcely ever men
tions his sickness, and in fact he disliked those who
"attributed his art to his respiratory system,"^ perhaps
^C f. Chapter I, n. 3.
21
22
because the subject was so repellent to him. When one con
siders the frequency of direct and indirect references to
suffocation, this remark appears like an understatement:
Meme plus tard, quand une grave maladie m'ota provi-
soirement la force de vie qui, en moi, transfigurait
tout, malgre les infirmites invisibles et les nouvelles
faiblesses que j'y trouvais, je pus connaitre la peur
et le decouragement, jamais l'amertume. Cette maladie
sans doute ajoutait d'autres entraves, et les plus
dures, a celles qui etaient deja les miennes. Elle
favorisait finalement cette liberte du coeur, cette
legere distance a l'egard des interets humains qui m'a
toujours preserve du ressentiment.2
This small "distance with respect to human interests" takes
on interesting overtones in relation to Meursault’s silent
indifference to the world of men, his almost total lack of
resentment, and his hypersensitivity to the natural world.
Many scholars have seen in Camus' sickness the birth of the
absurd, yet sickness helped create in him an intense love of
a nature of which he was deprived.
Camus' attitude towards his own sickness is reflected
when death is evoked. Sickness is a partial death and
consciousness of death for him intensifies indifference to
the world of men:
La divine disponibilite du condamne a mort devant
qui s'ouvrent les portes de la prison par une certaine
2,1 Preface.” L'Envers et L’Endroit. p. 19.
23
petite aube, cet incroyable desinteressement a l'egard
de tout, sauf de la flamme pure de la vie.3
Although this etat d'ame could illustrate the death of
Meursault as well as that of Julien Sorel, its roots lie
deep in Camus' own struggle for life. When he was an im
pressionable youth of seventeen he was stricken by tubercu
losis for the first time but was quite hopeful of eventual
recovery. Twelve years later, however, when the course of
the disease appeared arrested, he was again stricken. He
was then living in wartime France. The enemy consisted not
only of disease, but of a police state. Disease and total
itarianism were later to appear in La Peste. a monumental
novel of suffering which was to win him the Nobel Prize. A
Christian, condemned to death, repudiates this world by
embracing the next, but the pagan, like Camus, intensifies
his passion for the ephemeral beauty of the sensible world
precisely because it is transitory. Sickness for him was a
despicable enemy which threatened his consciousness of life
and death:
C'est un remede contre la mort. Elle y prepare. Elle
cree un apprentissage dont le premier stade est l'at-
tendrissement sur soi-meme. Elle appuie l'homme dans
son grand effort qui est de se derober a la certitude
.Myths, Sigyphs, p. 83.
de mourir tout entier.
Consciousness of death gives life its true value; it removes
all superfluous interest in the society of men, and seeks
instead "the pure flame of life." For one who writes from
his heart and soul, such a dreadful sickness must become the
very basis for perception of life and hence for literary
creation— the most humble flower becomes a miracle for him
who soon must die; he loves that flower all the more in
tensely because it will continue to bloom when he is dead;
he is like the honeybee who loves a flower because it is of
an earth older and wiser than he, "une mouche ephemere nait
a neuf heures du matin dans les grands jours d'ete, pour
mourir a cinq heures du soir."^ Camus' art was born of his
affliction as well as of his genius.
Camus' attitude toward sickness bears particular rele
vancy to Hans Castorp in the Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann.
The wife of this author also suffered from tuberculosis.
His Castorp, however, learned to love his disease with an
^"Le Vent e i Djemila," Noces. p. 39.
^"Je sais seulement que ce ciel durera plus que moi.
Et qu'appellerais-je eternite sinon ce qui continuera apres
ma mort?" Noces. p. 67.
^Stendhal, Le Rouge et Le Noir (Paris, 1953), p. 454.
25
"attendrissement sur soi-meme." In the sanatorium he loses
consciousness of death, hence consciousness of life; sick
ness of the body is joined to sickness of the soul when he
finds in his affliction a new sensual and aesthetic pleas
ure. In this respect Mann creates a character whose mind
is perverted by his body, the exact opposite of Camus'
healthy outlook. Mann and Camus thought alike about this
problem, although each dealt with it differently.
Proust, who suffered from a very similar affliction,
created "indoor" people who lived sheltered lives, just as
he did; the famous cork-lined room would be worse than a
prison for Camus who says "Je n'ai jamais pu m'abandonner
a ce gu'on appelle la vie d'interieur (qui est si souvent
le contraire de la vie interieure)."7 Likewise, Proust's
hero, Marcel, desires Albertine because she has renounced
the outdoors and has accepted his sickly love of claustra-
tion, the very opposite of Meursault, who finds Marie most
attractive on the beach.
A crippling disease determines experience and ultimate
ly the manner of perception by the affective self. The will
and the intelligence react to these, however, with the
7"Preface," L'Envers et L'Endroit. p. 18.
26
result that thinking has been conditioned. The body, then,
in Camus' case, is just as profound a source for his art as
his intelligence:
L'effort concentre de la marche, l1air dans les poumons
comme un fer rouge ou un rasoir affile— tout entier dans
cette application et ce surpassement qui s'efforcent a
trioiftpher de la pente— comme une connaissance de soi
par le corps. Le corps, vrai chemin de la culture, il
nous montre nos limites.®
It may be said that sickness awakens in a person a
consciousness of the body which otherwise would remain dor
mant in him, thus the exigencies of nature imposed upon
Camus by his sickness made him aware of nature in a way that
the strong and the healthy would ignore. When sickness
precedes consciousness, as in the case of a child, then
consciousness molds affectivity:
Le jugement du corps vaut bien celui de 1'esprit et le
corps recule devant 1'aneantissement. Nous prenons
1'habitude de vivre avant d'acquerir celle de penser.
This primary influence, then, is so strong that only after
conscious reflection is the infirm person capable of observ
ing that his interests, likes and dislikes, cannot be those
of the healthy. When Camus creates from the heart, he is
®Carnets. p. 90.
9Le Mvthe de Sisvphe. p. 20.
27
necessarily obliged to reveal his direct experiences. The
struggle for breath, the conscious effort to resist suffoca
tion is obviously a devastating experience. Every work of
Camus' describes directly or indirectly, even in purely
literary metaphors, respiratory images, which almost all his
critics have mentioned. The act of breathing, then, became
for him more than an unconscious physiological function
because it passed to the symbolic struggle for life, reali
zation of the self, and integration within the natural
world: "Que d'heures passees a ecraser les absinthes, a
caresser les ruines, a tenter d'accorder ma respiration aux
10
soupirs tumultueux du monde." In this passage "respira
tion" implies "my life, my struggle to apprehend the world
and to take my place in it." Likewise the "tumultuous sighs
of the world" is an anthropomorphic metaphor equated with
his consciousness of respiration: to learn to breathe is to
learn to live in harmony with the world in the way a singer
studies breathing in order to free the notes from his chest;
when Camus says "I learned to breathe, I integrated myself
and I created myself" (p. 17) these words could apply to the
Noces a Tipasa," Noces. p. 17.
28
singer and to an athlete11 equally, although here the impli
cation is much more profound; one identifies oneself physi
cally, not intellectually, with the world by the simple act
of breathing. How poetic and alive are the images "crushing
the absinths" and "caressing the ruins." The appropriate
action applies to each substance, as if the flowers’ very
nature suggested squeezing them in the palm of the hand
while the flat surface of the stones suggested stroking
them— a tactile union with nature, but how profound, how
alive, to identify the world by means of the fingertips, by
the palm of the hand, for in so doing one also identifies
oneself. To melt into the beauty of the world is to live;
but to do so it is necessary to look upon the world with the
fresh simplicity of a child and to understand it like a wise
man. There is no distance between the flowers and the
hands, nor between perceived and perceiver, but an immediate
union between the two, as if both had fused into one— there
12
is a mysticism Of the body as well as of the spirit. How
■^Camus enjoyed soccer and boxing before sickness pre
vented all athletic exertion.
1 P
ACRoger Quillot, La Mer et Les Prisons. Essai sur
Albert Camus, p. 56. "Le caractfere mystique de ce vocabu-
laire de fievre ne saurait nous tromper. II n'est ici de
mystique que charnelle."
29
unlike Camus' pantheistic love of nature is that of the
Romantics whose landscapes, always before the eyes, disap
pear in time and distance; they may have seen and heard the
forests, but they never took off their gloves nor did they
feel the surf and the sun on their naked backs. The vibran
cy of Camus' passage could have been written by a Lazarus,
who, just released from the exile of the tomb, found life
for the first time. Intense union with nature has led to
pantheistic ecstasy.
Who is the deadliest enemy, the "anti-nature" of
Camus' world? Suffocation. It is a form of starvation or
of death by thirst but more ironic; one dies from lack of
that which surrounds the body every moment of mortal exis
tence; it is a starving nian with no mouth who sits at a
banquet tabie, a thirsty man with a glass of water just
beyond his reach; in a word, it is the punishment of Tanta
lus . It is a divorce between the body and the air sur
rounding it; the body becomes a hermetic prison which tries
to break out of itself, to open itself up, to reach out of
itself, to offer itself up to the life-giving air outside
itself. Death by suffocation is the impossibility of com
municating physically with the world; it is also the insep
arable half of claustrophobia— the walls of a large room
move together, growing smaller as they do so, until the
victim is pressed into an airtight cubicle, a "malconfort"
13
with no opening: matter has thus replaced air. A man in
a tiny cell does not experience the claustrophobia of a man
drowning in a swimming pool: prison presses against his
skin. Absolute claustration, then, is a form of suffoca
tion; both are the two sides to the same coin.
Claustration for Camus is a denial of the natural world
from which the individual is alienated physically with the
ultimate result that he feels imprisoned within his own
body. His situation, moreover, is absurd precisely because
his sensual perception is meaningless: when a man is im
prisoned within a tiny, black, hermetic cubicle, the five
senses cease to exist for him. Although he is aware that he
possesses them he has become a faceless man, one with two
backs of a head. Deprive one of the senses and one becomes
precisely that man, as Condillac would have claimed.
Claustrophobia depends upon consciousness of real or
13
The human body does not breathe only through the
lungs but also through the pores in the skin. The Renais
sance Popes for their entertainment painted children in gold
who died literally of suffocation. The encapsulation of the
body by matter which then results in suffocation is indi
rectly related to the more rapid death by asphyxiation.
31
imaginary claustration and therefore has a stronger psycho
logical effect than claustration by itself: a prisoner who
had known only his black, soundless cell from infancy would
feel no sense of deprivation; just the reverse, however,
would result if a mountain climber were placed in such a
cell. Claustrophobia, therefore, is a consciousness of a
restriction imposed upon the freedom of the body by an out
side force, hence the claustrophobe may react by a love of
the outdoors as well as by a dread of the indoors. His
pathological condition becomes for him a struggle for liber
ty and even a form of the will to live.
14
For Poe who, like Camus, suffered from poverty and
r
claustration, claustrophobia predominates rather than the
compensating love of external nature. His gothic horror
stories proliferate in unfortunate victims buried alive,
drownings, collapsing walls, all the vicarious forms of
suffocation so popular in the Gothic novel. Premature
Burial, The Fall of the House of Usher. A Cask of Amonti-
14Carnets. 1939-1942, p. 161:
"Poe et les quatre conditions du bonheur:
1. La vie en plein air
2. L'amour d'un etre
3. Le detachement de toute ambition
4. La creation."
32
llaflQ, The Black Cat. The Pit and the Pendulum. The Descent
into the Maelstrom, and The Mascrue of the Red Death leave
the reader literally breathless.. It is doubtful if any
author has more thoroughly explored claustrophobia than he
by hiding it behind the unlikely; his is a model of this
genre. Camus, on the other hand, is always discreet,
always incorporates his entombments subtly as part of a
lived reality.
His first fictional publication, "L'Ironie" in L1Envers
et L'Endroit. is really an autobiographical description of
his unhappy family life in Algiers and his approach is
thoroughly realistic. His half-dead grandmother, his over
worked charwoman mother, and his senile uncle form the
pitiful world of those who, buried alive, await death behind
walls. The grandmother who "was in her corner like a dog"^
has accepted claustration like a sick animal which seeks
refuge. She looks for the quiet of the tomb: "she always
puts out the light when she is alone. She likes to stay in
the darkness" (p. 43). She never goes outside but appears
"motionless, at the window" (p. 52). Camus reacts to this
voluntary claustration by fear and revulsion. She becomes
15
"L'Ironie," L'Envers et L'Endroit. p. 38.
33
for him a symbol of the "anti-nature," of death in life.
Her behavior thus appears to contribute to his claustro
phobia. His subsequent sickness also reinforced such a
fear. Curiously Camus rarely mentions the omnipresent
walls, yet their presence is felt in every line. His style
is direct and simple, as if its apparent nakedness contrib
uted to the poverty of the scene. A few short sentences,
however, bring about a literary tour de force;
Dans le bleu du ciel, on devinait le froid tout pail-
lete de jaune. Le cimetiere dominait la ville et on
pouvait voir le beau soleil transparent tomber sur la
baie tremblante de lumi&re, comme une levre humide.
(p. 54)
After fifteen pages of muted understatements a few
lines of poetic prose stand out like diamonds. During the
fifteen pages the reader never was taken out of the tomb-
like atmosphere of this short story until those few lines
jerked him outside for the first breath of fresh air. Their
jubilation jumps out of the text like a sudden leap from the
tomb into the sunshine. Camus thus contrasts a muted,
stifled style in describing poverty, sickness, senility,
loneliness and claustration with the poetic prose of his
"out-door" style.
Fifteen pages of the "style of claustration" repeat
over and over the mood of dejection in order to create an
asphyxiating monotony. "Elle s'alita un jour et reclama le
medecin" and "Elle mourut une heure aprfes" (p. 53) suggest,
by their brevity, a style of "respiratory spasm" which adds
to the theme of claustration and its attendant evils. The
few lines which come as an unexpected yet logically devel
oped climax put everything in its proper place; the narra
tion now has equilibrium: the few lines of poetic prose
balance just exactly the fifteen pages of journalistic
prose; the fifteen pages of claustration and despair are
balanced by the few lines given to the landscape and to
jubilation. Colors, like sunlight and distance, appear for
the first and only time as the only sensual pleasures. By
a dazzling interpenetration of qualities the "coldness" of
the "blue sky" is "sprinkled with yellow." Cold and warm
colors thus balance each other while the "bay trembling with
light" reaches out its "humid lips" so invitingly; Camus
uses an anthropomorphic image to recall the joy of life.
The sea appears as a call to life and love.
The mood of this story is contained more by the style
and composition rather than by the psychology of the charac
ters or the narrator's comments upon them. It is precisely
what is unsaid, yet alluded to by a changing mood, that is
so important. The progressive disintegration of the old
grandmother and the repressive atmosphere of despair are
described in the matter-of-fact way of a narrator who
appears to hide a sordidness of which he was particularly
aware. We know that her suffering tyrannized the family and
that once he even had a "ferocious hatred for that old lady
and thought of slapping her with all his might" (p. 42),
since her attitude was quite often more than he could bear.
The last few lines of poetic prose reveal a joyous sense of
release. The "beautiful sunlight" which falls on the "bay
trembling with light" really says "Thank heavens, at last
she is dead and her suffering at an end!" Her burial coin
cides with a great emotional release which is expressed by
a beautiful panorama. Likewise the physical elevation of
the scene corresponds to an emotional elevation. The
shifting mood of the narrator, with ironic tenderness,
describes an ugly fate under a beautiful sun: "After all,
the sun warms our bones anyway" (p. 54).
The grandmother's death in "L'Ironie" serves as a model
which Camus will later transpose to that of the mother in
L'Etranaer.^ This short story could almost serve as an
1ft s /
°"Cette maniere d'absence, d'epaisse transparence qui
fait toute l'etrangete de Meursault, nous la trouvons deja
dans cette mere bizarrement silencieuse." Roger Quillot,
36
introduction to the novel since the narrative style and
imagery are derived from a source common to both. After the
death of his mother, Meursault's remark "It isn't my fault"
(p. 10) betrays a similar indifference mixed with regret.
Camus1 grandmother becomes the mother who dies again and
again in his novels and plays. Never once does he take the
mother out of her death-cell and into the sunshine, because
she prefers to "sit in the corner like a dog" with the
lights turned out; she awaits death within the tomb. This
is what literally happens in the "L1Envers et L'Endroit,"
the last short story in the volume of the same name.
An old woman, obviously a fictional variation of the
real grandmother in "L'Ironie," has just spent her life
savings on a splendid tomb she visits every Sunday after
noon. It was her "only holiday and her only distraction"
17
(p. 120). She spends hours inside it praying in order to
La Mer et Les Prisons, p. 33.
^7The poet Kahlil Gibran, who never knew Camus, yet
shared with him a common love of the Mediterranean, expres
ses an identical revulsion to claustration:
You shall not fold your wings that you
may pass through doors, nor bend your
heads that they strike not against a ceiling
nor fear to breathe lest walls should crack
and fall down.
You shall not dwell in tombs made by
find the "secret schemes of Providence" (p. 121) until
finally, on All Saints' Day, when she finds the door strewn
with violets, she realizes that she is dead to the eyes of
the world. She has embraced a living death.
For Camus the mother is a symbol of death, not a symbol
of life. Because of her love of death and confinement she
drives her suffocating child out into the sun and fresh air.
Were he to stay, her morbid fascination would devour him as
the cat did her kittens in "Entre Oui et Non," and were he
18
to return after an absence she might drown him. Claustra
tion and claustrophobia are the reverse of the natural world
and of life itself; they are the black half of L1Envers et
the dead for the living.
(The Prophet [New York, 1955], p. 33)
18
This is the theme of Le Malentendu which is discussed
in a separate chapter under this title.
CHAPTER III
A BEAUTIFUL NATURE RESTORES
For the dying grandmother as well as for the old woman
in love with the tomb, religion is a futile consolation
which knows no joy, no love of life, only sickness and
despair; it is a religion born in the death cell and ending
in the tomb.^ It belongs inseparably to poverty, despair,
and claustration, never to joyous thanks, hope, and love of
the natural world. For Camus it is another weapon of
claustration; it is indoors and the enemy, a morbid love
which imprisons life inside the tomb. In "L'Ironie" reli
gion was merely a senseless mechanical repetition, but in
^■"C'est une pauvre religion que Camus a connue dans son
entourage, tout* entiere liee a la peur de la mort. Les
jeunes, les adultes ne croient guere: ils vivent, ils ont
le present, l'avenir. Sans doute, la vieille infirme avait-
elle pense de meme: la foi, c'est l1affaire des malades,
des vieillards, des veuves; on verra plus tard. Le temps de
croire est venu. A mesure que le fosse qui separe insensi-
blement les vivants et les vieillards s'est creuse, elle
s'est donne h. Dieu. Camus sait tout ce qu'il y a de deri-
soire et d'emouvant dans un pareille foi." (Quillot, La Mer
et.iiga. pyig38
39
"L'Envers et L'Endroit" it becomes a maleficent force draw
ing the old woman into the tomb: religion has intensified
claustration. These two for him are inseparable and com
plementary. He exploits the literal meaning of the latter:
claustration is the act of confining to a cloister. Camus'
Christianity is always cold and dark, an appendage of a
European way of life which he instinctively dreads. Such a
septentrional religion of the tombs has no place under the
2
exuberance of the African sun.
Since the tomb symbolism in "L1Envers et L'Endroit" is
an intensification of the claustration first developed in
"L'Ironie," it follows also that release into the beauty of
the external world will be all the more joyful. In order to
permit a discussion of this subject, the following passage
pertaining to it is quoted below in its entirety:
Et voici que je reviens sur ces choses, ce jardin de
1'autre cote de la fenetre, je n'en vois que les murs.
Et ces quelques feuillages ou coule la lumiere. Plus
haut, c'est encore les feuillages. Plus haut, c'est le
soleil. Mais de toute cette jubilation de l'air que
l'on sent au-dehors, de toute cette joie epandue sur le
monde, je ne perpois que des ombres de ramures qui
jouent sur mes rideaux blancs. Cinq rayons de soleil
aussi qui deversent patiemment dans la piece un parfum
d'herbes sechees. Une brise, et les ombres s'animent
^This is the theme of the "Renegat" which is discussed
in the chapter devoted to L'Exil et Le Rovaume.
40
sur le rideau. Qu'un nuage couvre puis decouvre le
soleil, et de 1'ombre emerge le jaune eclatant de ce
vase de mimosas. II suffit: une seule lueur nais-
sante, me voila rempli d'une joie confuse et etourdis-
sante. C'est un apres-midi de janvier qui me met ainsi
en face de l'envers du monde. Mais le froid reste au
fond de 1'air. Partout une pellicule de soleil qui
craquerait sous l'ongle, mais qui revet toutes choses
d'un eternel sourire.3
This poem in prose, like that of "L'Ironie," opposes a
rapturous love of nature to the previous scene of the en
tombment. This juxtaposition of opposites creates a bitter
sweet ensemble when the two passages are considered as a
whole. Beauty and joy, therefore, are not purely gratui
tous, but a release from suffering. The old woman in the
tomb represents the bleak future and the sunlight through
the window evokes the beautiful present. A morbid contem
plation is relieved by the awakening of a joyous sensual
perception of the here and now; equilibrium is achieved. By
juxtaposing two opposing scenes, Camus has also created an
eternal image of life and death. Such images speak an
inner dialogue without resorting to abstractions; the use
of words, therefore, is subordinate to the imagery.
As in "L'Ironie," contrasting narrative styles indicate
3"L'Envers et L'Endroit," L1Envers et L'Endroit. pp.
121-122. This passage is identical, except for a few word
changes, to a passage in tho Carnets. 1935-1937, pp. 20-21.
41
a change in mood: the tender irony used to describe the old
woman cedes to the lyrical style of the passage quoted
above. Likewise the vocabulary shifts from the informative
to the poetic.
The role of claustration in both the scene of the tomb
and that of the window is described with great art and
careful composition. The old woman meditating within her
tomb was unaware that she was "dead to the eyes of the
world." On All Saints' Day, however, she saw the door to
the tomb "piously sprinkled with violets." She became
aware of the real nature of her condition. It is the flow
ers and their particular significance that awaken her.
Thus, by a single soft and lovely image a harsh and unex
pected self-knowledge is acquired: she now realizes that
she had voluntarily entombed herself; she can see herself
through the eyes of the living.
The old woman is now out of her tomb and in the sun.
It is outside her tomb, not within it, that she has acquired
a self-knowledge provided by living men and not by God; her
hours spent in it had revealed no truth to her. The scene
ends when Camus says "and now I hark back to things," thus
returning to his immediate reality: the awakening of the
old woman thus precedes that of the author to his immediate
42
reality. One awakening precedes anbther. This movement is
a masterful transition which occurs by stages rather than
all at one time.
Cmus evidently places himself in a room behind a win-
dwo. The view, however, is blocked: "I see only walls."
He seeks release from his suggested claustration behind the
window which looks out upon another wall. Then his eyes
begin to look up, seeking the freedom of the natural world:
"And the scant foliage from which the light flows," adds
light which becomes a liquid substance and flows over the
leaves. His glance continues to rise until he sees the sun.
A high point is reached with the "jubilation of the air" in
spite of the white curtains which block his view. The
dancing shadows of the branches on them, however, hint at
the nature beyond. A few rays of the liquid sun pour into
the room a "perfume" of dried grass— thus by a synaesthesia,
or interpenetration of qualities, light and odor are re
lated. Everything becomes alive, even the shadows on the
curtain; life is regained and with it a "confused and dazz
ling joy." Again with the "film of light which could crack
under my fingernail" light has finally become a solid,
brittle substance, almost like a flake of gold leaf. One
thinks of the myth of Danae and Zeus which Camus seems to
43
have transposed here. Zeus, who came to her in a "golden
rain," is really the sun, and he is her liberation. Like
wise, sunlight is referred to as gold and also as a liquid.
Claustration has thus been transcended; the scene has
shifted from the pitiful old woman who bought her tomb to
the sunlight which liberates Camus from his tiny room.
In "Entre Oui et Non" Camus describes his mother. Like
his grandmother, she too was a prisoner of the miserable
little slum apartment which appears throughout L1Envers et
L'Endroit. Her deafness has added a new dimension to the
crushing world of claustration, that of failure to communi-
4
cate. She has become deadened and impervious to the world:
"The indifference of this strange mother 1 There is only
that immense solitude of the world which for me is equal to
5
it." Within the tomb the senses are numbed and perish.
Loneliness and indifference become inevitable. Likewise, a
tiny detail, perceived in detached immediacy, relieves the
tomb-like atmosphere— "the opportunity of a tree in-the
4,1 The first essay, for example, contains a description
of three failures to communicate which announces the theme
of separation in his mature work." Philip Thody, Albert
Camus. A Biographical Study (London, 1961), p. 18.
5"Entre Oui et Non," L'Envers et L'Endroit. p. 67.
44
landscape" (p. 59). The most commonplace living thing, no
matter how small or insignificant, becomes a treasured
object in such a repressive house; although the world of men
is often a dead one, a single tree restores life. His
metaphors have a sensual delicacy and imagination: "Gorge
d'etoiles, il fremit sous un souffle pur et les ailes
feutrees de la nuit battent lentement autour de moi" (p.
70). Here nature and man are fused; man and stars are
joined while night has become a bird with wings of felt.
Birds, which Camus loved dearly, become symbols of
freedom and nature. For the Greeks they were a soul-symbol
or a portent of the future, and for Camus they become free
agents which escape at will the sordid world of men. They
suggest the very opposite of claustration: "Dans les
6
battements secs des vols de pigeons" announces an elevation
in spirit like "J'y vois monter des gerbes d'oiseaux noirs
7
sur 1'horizon vert" and "L'envoi des pigeons comme un
/ 8
claquement de linge gui se deplie" or "des grappes de
6"Amour de Vivre," L*Envers et L'Endroit. p. 111.
7"L'Ete a Alger," Noces. p. 55.
8Carnets (Paris, 1940), p. 208.
45
* 9
pigeons se detachant de la vieille tour." Birds, one of
the few animal species he mentions, are characteristically
pictured as flying away from the earth. He describes them
10
with the poetic prose of a joyous elevation and a preci
sion of detail (one can almost hear their wings beating upon
reading "a flapping of unfolding sheets," so perfectly does
he evoke the sound). Birds belong to the fresh air which
is denied to the cloistered victims of L*Envers et L'En
droit.
The pessimism of L'Envers et L'Endroit is largely
caused by Camus' youthful experiences. Sickness, loneli
ness, despair and claustration which almost overpower his
communion with nature continue to contribute to the works
of his mature years. The denial of nature by what he con
siders the negative aspects of human life become the basis
for much of his following creative thinking. Likewise, an
improved health and a better environment explain the more
optimistic outlook found in his subsequent essays. Poverty,
g
"La Mort dans l'Ame," L1Envers et L'Endroit. p. 87.
10Camus also loved the singing of birds: "un merle
preluda brievement et aussitot, de toutes partes, des
chants d'oiseaux exploserent avec une force, une jubilation,
une joyeuse discordance, un ravissement infini." "Retour
a Tipasa," L'Ete. p. 156.
46
sickness, loneliness and claustration are replaced by an
almost pantheistic and ecstatic union with nature in Noces.
The memory of his unhappy life in the wretched apart
ment at Belcourt still persists during his brief sojourn in
Italy, but is seen in a much softer light which detachment
allowed him. When he visits the monastery of Fiesole, per
haps one of the most beautiful places in Italy, he is struck
by the "odeurs des lauriers" and the little court "gonflee
de fleurs rouges, de soleil, d'abeilles jaunes et noires."^
Inside, however, he visits the cells of the monks where each
table is decorated with a death's head. The familiar image
of claustration and poverty reappears before him, only this
time the literal, Latin derivation of claustration is vis
ualized. The old woman praying within her tomb whose door
is sprinkled with violets again appears but under more
12
pleasant circumstances. He sees once more his childhood
in which "An extreme degree of poverty is always attached
13
to the luxuriance and riches of the world." The humble
llMLe Desert," Noces. p. 89.
l^Camus visited Italy shortly before he wrote Noces.
The exact description of this scene of Fiesole also appears
in his Carnets.
^■3"Le Desert," Noces. p. 90.
47
life of the Franciscans, so like his own, also has its
recompenses:
Dans la vie des franciscains, enfermes entre des co-
lonnes et des fleurs et celle des jeunes gens de la
plage Padovani a Alger qui passent toute l'annee au
soleil, je sentais une resonance commune. S'ils se
depouillent, c’est pour une plus grande vie (et non
pour une autre vie) (p. 90)
Although Camus here seems blasphemous, it is because he
embraces the beauty of a landscape which for him has trans
cended religion. The view through the cell window, by
negating claustration and voluntary poverty, by erasing the
obligations of wealth and position, permits a free contem
plation of natural beauty. Fiesole thus exists for him in
a state of equilibrium between the world of men and the
world of nature. Its very location on the hill overlooking
Florence evokes previous scenes of the Bay of Algiers seen
from the cemetery and described in L1Envers et L'Endroit.
Stendhal and many other romantics also found inspiration
from this monastery. They did not, however, relate it in
timately to their personal experience.
Camus and Sartre are at opposite poles concerning
claustration and the opposing love of nature. The almost
complete exclusion of the external world and the voluntary
acceptance of claustration in most of Sartre's work ex
48
plains a fundamental difference between the two, a differ
ence which is just as important as the purely philosophical
arguments which later separated them. Huis Clos. for exam
ple, is probably the most perfectly constructed prison ever
presented on a French stage. It is imprisonment considered
as an absolute, as an eternal and not as a relative state.
The hotel room prison is hermetic and windowless but it is
not cut off from a beautiful and redeeming landscape;
rather, it is surrounded by similar prison cells and perhaps
even by a vacuum. It is not the apartment-prison of Bel-
court from which Camus was seeking to escape; it is more
frightening. Once the door to Sartre's prison opens, none
of the characters rushes out of it; they are incapable of
wanting to leave. For Sartre prison is in the mind, not in
the body.
The cell and the tomb scarcely appear in Noces or in
L'Ete. The last essay, "La Mer au plus Pres," in L1Ete.
however, again recreates the familiar dichotomy between
claustration and enjoyment of nature but under entirely
different circumstances. This essay was written after Camus
had sailed to South America in 1953 and therefore is a work
of his mature period. He describes a rhapsodic love of the
sea in a very daring poetic prose. In no other work does
he display such an unconditional love of space, distance,
and freedom, a "convoitise devant de nouveaux espaces vides
h. devorer" (p. 183) .14 The horizon is everywhere and the
movement of the ship is hastened by the driving wind when
suddenly his claustration appears:
Je mourais alors dans ma cellule metallique, je revais
de carnages, d'orgies. Sans espaces, point d1innocence
ni de liberte1 La prison pour qui ne peut respirer est
mort ou folie; qu'y faire sinon tuer et posseder?
The vastness of the sea thus clashes with the constraining
smallness of the ship's cabin. The unhappy experience of
claustration which he had described in L1Envers et L'En
droit has evolved here into a mature and quite philosophical
understanding. No longer is his reaction that of simple
revulsion but one of a positive outlook. Claustration here
is seen as a force leading to intoxication of the mind and
not merely as an agent which removes one from reality;
claustration has become a mobile in social behavior. "Kill
ing and possession" become the only avenues of escape for
those whom prison has denied "innocence and liberty." In
La Peste this becomes implicit in the moral degeneration
which follows as a result of claustration.
*^The mood of certain passages suggests that of Le
Bateau Ivre of Rimbaud.
CHAPTER IV
CITIES: NOISY TOMBS
Although Camus encloses the individual by means of
tombs and cells, these are but two of the methods he uses.
Cities and even an oppressive atmosphere are equally as
important. In the previous descriptions cities and the
weather have had little importance, but in others they play
a leading role. In several of his works, cities, prisons
and the weather all become means of isolating man from
nature. Camus discusses at length his views of cities and
nature in his essays and also his notebooks.
"La Mort dans L'Ame" in L1Envers et L'Endroit relates
his visit to Prague, a city where he was alone and almost
penniless: "dans ma chambre d'hotel, sans argent et sans
ardeur, reduit a mes miserables pensees" (p. 85). His mood
is one of intense dejedtion in this grey man-made world of
stones covered by a dark sky. In the room next to his a
man is found dead. Camus later uses this identical setting
as well as the image of the dead man in Le Malentendu.
50
51
Camus' mother and the grandmother described first in
L* Envers et L'Endroit will again appear in the play as Jan's
sister and mother, although they will be distorted for
dramatic reasons.
Vicenza, Palma, and Florence, all Mediterranean cities,
are not alien and ominous for Camus. He finds in them a
common bond with the North African world he knew and loved.
Unlike Prague and other cities separated from the Mediterra
nean Sea, they are open to nature and beauty.
Noces. which appears to be the most optimistic of
Camus' collected essays, describes only Mediterranean cities.
As a child he often visited Tipasa, a Roman ruin not far
from Belcourt, which he depicts poetically. It is the scene
of a joyous self-identification with nature and a release
from the world of men. His love of nature depends directly
upon the present state of Tipasa, a ruin open to the sun and
overgrown with lush vegetation. No longer is it a city but
a testimonial to the failure of man and the triumph of
nature. Tipasa has the present beauty that his squalid
Belcourt might have after having lain in ruin for a thousand
years under the sun: in Africa, cities, like empires and
religions, are transitory, almost like experiments; the
52
earth is older.^ Tipasa, for Camus, is a moment of youthful
exultation and not expressive of the regret found in Du
Bellay's treatment of ruins. In 1952, after having spent
many painful years in Europe, Camus returned to Tipasa. In
L'Ete. "Retour £ Tipasa" describes his search for the source
of his inspiration. The scene is more than one of nostalgia
or of beauty regained, but shows a mature understanding of
self and of nature. His return is symbolic, suggesting that
after having known the sufferings and triumphs of life among
men, one must return to the humble source of one's first
love; men in times of crisis seek consolation in nature.
Camus had fled "la nuit d'Europe, l'hiver des visages,"
where he had known "les barbeles, les tyrannies, la guerre,
les polices, les temps de revolte" (p. 148). Tipasa now
meant more to him for he saw it through the experience of
suffering. Here, as in almost all his works, he often
groups together prisons, cities, darkness, coldness and
political upheaval in the single image of Europe. After
many years his heart was still Algerian. Europe remained
1 A
"On l'a dit souvent, l'Africain ne connait pas le
temps, il n'a pas d'avenir, a peine de passe: n'a-t-il pas
lentement mais surement corrode les empires successivement
edifies sur son sol?" (Quillot, La Mer et Les Prisons, p.
51.)
53
an unfriendly world which claimed the life of the father he
never knew. For him the North European city is a necro
polis:
Aussi je m'efforce d'oublier, je marche dans nos villes
de fer et de feu, je souris bravement a la nuit, je
hele les orages, je serai fidele. J'ai oublie, en
verite: actif et sourd, desormais. Mais peut-etre un
jour, guand nous serons prets a mourir d'epuisement et
d'ignorance, pourrai-je renoncer a nos tombeaux criards,
pour aller m'etendre dans la vallee, sous la meme lu-
miere, et apprendre une derniere fois ce que je sais.
(p. 163)
It was war, politics, and duty to his fellow men which
obliged Camus to live in the "cities of iron and blood"
which imprisoned like "noisy tombs." His voluntary exile
from Algeria to France where he participated in the under
ground press, then his directorship of Combat. did not dull
his memory of sunlight and freedom. Paris was and still is
a necessity for most French writers. He became famous
there, but his fame denied him the immediate source of his
inspiration. Life in Northern Europe, moreover, was more
depressing to him than it would have been for a healthy
Mediterranean because there his health was put in jeopardy;
a cold, damp atmosphere represented for him not only an
aesthetic dislike but also a threat to his physical well
being. The weather determined his moods to a very great
degree:
54
Quand le soleil tape, j'ai envie d'aimer et d'embrasser,
de me couler dans des corps comme dans d£s lumieres, de
prendre un bain de chair et de soleil. Quand le monde
est gris, je suis melancolique et plein de tendresse.^
The city, he asserts, opposes man's humanity to man; it is
for him truly a "tombeau criard" more than it was for
Rousseau and the nineteenth-century romantics. One can'
find, however, in Camus a common filiation with Rousseau's
condemnation of civilization and above all a disgust for the
big city with its lust for wealth and poweif. Almost every
great novelist of the nineteenth century, from Balzac and
Dickens to Hardy exposed the cities' corrupting influence.
The destruction of whole cities, however, was not then a
commonplace occurrence, nor were starvation and concentra
tion camps. For Camus and other twentieth^century writers
the metropolis has become a nucleus of horfor which destroys
man's place in the natural world:
'Seule la ville moderne, ose ecrire Hegel, offre a
1'esprit le terrain ou il peut prendre conscience de
lui-meme." Nous vivons ainsi le temps des grandes
villes. Deliberement, le monde a ete ampute de ce
qui fait sa permanence: la nature, la mer, la col-
line, la meditation des soirs. II n'y a plus de
conscience que dans les rues, parce qu'il n'y a
d'histoire que dans les rues, tel est le decret. Et
a sa suite, nos oeuvres les plus significatives te-
moignent du meme parti pris. On cherche en vain les
2Carnets. 1937-1939, p. 86.
55
paysages dans la grande litterature europeenne depuis
Dostoievski. L'histoire n'explique ni 1*univers naturel
qui etait avant elle, ni la beaute qui est au-dessus
d'elle. Elle a done choisi de les ignorer.3
The city man, according to Camus, finally becomes a mole;
deaf and blind to the beauties of the natural world from
which he has separated himself, he lives in exile. In his
"noisy tomb" he acknowledges only the man-made values of
power and possession which poison his soul. Once every
generation he makes of his city a burning sepulchre, yet he
rebuilds it more solidly than before. He Welds the walls
of his prison around his body and becomes a shriveled worm
in a steel cocoon.
Camus' claustrophobia reaches its height in New York,
a city which overpowers its European cousins by the syste
matic exclusion of plant life and the triumph of stone;
A New York, certains jours, perdu au fond de ces puits
de pierre et d'acier ou errent des millions d'hommes,
je courais de l'un a 1'autre, sans en voir la fin,
epuise, jusqu'a ce que je ne fusse plus soutenu que
par la masse humaine qui cherchait son issue. J'etouf-
fais alors, ma panique allait crier, mais a chaque
fois, un appel lointain de remorqueurs venait me rap-
peler que cette ville, citerne seche, etait une ile,
et qu'a la pointe de la Battery 1'eau de mon bapteme ^
m'attendait, noire et pourrie, couverte de lieges creux.
3"L'Exil d'Helene," L'Ete. pp. 112-113.
La Mer au plus Pres," L'Ete. pp. 169-170.
56
His claustrophobia has become a panic, yet is this reaction
so unnatural? On the contrary, Camus is not driven by
aesthetic revulsion or moral disgust, rather his flight
springs from an innate, almost animal-like compulsion.
Humans do not feel claustrophobia to the degree animals do,
perhaps because out intelligence has modified a basic in
stinct, that of space. A tiger will generally become
neurotic or mad in captivity; it will measure out its life
by identical footsteps within its prison as humans often do
under similar circumstances, and it will bound out of its
prison at the first opportunity. Camus' dread of New York
appears to spring from just such an instinctive craving for
physical liberty.
Camus found inspiration in Moby Dick, which describes
the triumph of the animal world over man and the love of the
open sea. Like Ismael, he seeks identity with the sea, with
the "water of his baptism," however black it may be. But
the man-made world with its "banlieues fleuries de fer-
railles" and streets "plantees d'arbres de ciment" under a
sky like a "pansement h. peine rougi" (p. 168) is the triumph
of the cemetery over man; skyscrapers rise above him like
tombstones— everything has become mineral.^
5
It is such a world which repulsed the late architect,
Frank Lloyd Wright, whose condemnation of cities is similar
to that of Camus.
CHAPTER V
STONE: DESERTS AND CITIES
Camus saw in Oran the triumph of stone and the humilia
tion of man. Such a city for him is a desert since nothing
grows in either, and, like a desert, the modern metropolis
has a silence which rises above the din of millions of men—
one can find there a "solitude peuplee,”^ a "Lonely Crowd,"
where reigns the emptiness of the desert and where men are
alone yet not alone. On the desert two men who cross each
other will generally stop and talk, but in large cities men
2
are strangers to each other; their very numbers appear to
deny their humanity. Camus sees in cities men who are as
indifferent to each other as the desert is to them. Man can
disappear as easily in the metropolis as in the desert,
perhaps more easily, because he is absorbed by the human
swarm: "Descartes, ayant a mediter, choisit son desert:
^-"Le Minotaure," L'Ete. p. 15.
Les solitudes reunissent ceux que la societe separe."
"Preface," L1Envers et L'Endroit. p. 24.
58
59
la ville la plus commer9ante de son epoque. [Amsterdam] II
y trouve sa solitude ... "5 Amsterdam, which would later
become the site for La Chute, represents the kind of city
Camus disliked most— "des villes riches et hideuses, bSties
4
de pierre et de brumes," but it was Oran which was to re
appear several years later in La Peste. Many of the de
scriptions in "Le Minotaure" are identical to those found in
the novel. It is significant that the essays served as a
point of departure for Camus' large fiction works even after
a lapse of many years. Oran was for him a man-made desert
where "le caillou est roi" and where plant life was almost
non-existent. "Ce qui, ailleurs, tire sa poesie du vegetal,
prend ici un visage de pierre."5 For him it was a city,
deprived of its soul, which had ossified under the burning
sun: "Si l'on peut definir le desert un lieu sans ame ou
le ciel est seul roi, alors Oran attend ses prophetes" (p.
31).
His titles, "Le Minotaure" and "La Pierre d'Ariane,"
suggest the theme of claustration and exile which dominate
3"Le Minotaure," L'Ete. p. 16.
4"Retour a Tipasa," L 'Ete. p. 162.
5"Le Minotaure," L'Ete. p. 30.
La Peste. Modern man, according to Camus, has rebuilt the
ancient labyrinth in the form of modern Oran where one
wanders through the cement and stone streets the way the
Cretans did through those of Gnossus— a mineral world where
one could be lost and a prisoner at the same time. Dust,
which covers everything, is blown down from a "ciel mineral"
which is as hard as stone. Likewise, the landscape, one of
the most beautiful in the world, is completely mineral.
Within the city itself; the proliferation of stone monuments
suggests a population which has ossified; man has become
that which surrounds him. In Le Mythe de Sisvphe. in his
chapter on Don Juan, Camus describes the petrification of
human warmth which relates to the mineral asperity of cities
and deserts:
Que signifie d'autre ce commandeur de pierre, cette
froide statue mise en branle pour punir le sang et le
courage qui ont ose penser? Tous les pouvoirs de la
Raison eternelle, de l'ordre, de la morale universelle,
toute la grandeur etrangere d'un Dieu accessible a la
colere, se resume en lui. (p. 104)
For Camus, "cette pierre gigantesque et sans ame" (p. 104)
is a denial of human life by an inhuman deity, which instead
of driving Don Juan into Hell, will imprison him "dans une
cellule de ces monast&res espagnols perdus sur une colline"
(p. 105). Although the context is not related to the scene
61
described in L'Ete. the role of petrification and claustra
tion is similar; human warmth and liberty are destroyed in
an inhuman mineral world. This theme which also runs
throughout La Peste achieves its zenith in "Le Renegat" with
the complete triumph of the mineral world over man and his
imprisonment within it. It is such a world which Camus
resists consciously in an effort to refuse the half-life of
those who are unaware of their imprisonment:
Dans la ville, et a certaines heures, pourtant, quelle
tentation de passer a l'ennemii quelle tentation de
s'identifier a ces pierres, de se confondre avec cet
univers brulant et impassible qui defie l'histoire et
ses agitations'. Cela est vain sans doute. Mais il y
a dans chaque homme un instinct profond qui n'est ni
celui de la destruction, ni celui de la creation. II
s'agit seulement de ne ressembler a rien.^
It seems so easy, according to Camus, to exchange a fragile
humanity for the inhuman and insensitive containment of
stone, to become like the mineral landscape itself (pp. 62-
63). For a North African the barren stone which denies life
is quite depressing and a serious economic problem which
Camus described in his newspaper articles. The aridity of
such a barren land has led to one famine after another, of
which that of Kabylia was the most devastating.
6"Le Minotaure," L'Ete. p. 61.
In "Le Minotaure" Camus briefly mentions the myth of
Orpheus and Eurydice which later appears as one of the most
dramatic and gripping scenes in La Peste. This myth, like
that of the Minotaur, again centers upon entombment within
the stony underworld. Stones had a particular fascination
for Camus. The "Minotaure" in L'Ete was written in 1939,
the year before Camus undertook Le Mvthe de Sisvphe. In
"Le Minotaure" he describes images which resemble the pun
ishment of Sisyphus— the struggle to push heavy stones up a
high hill. Oran in 1939 undertook the vast project of con-
♦
structing a modern harbor by transforming "la plus lumineuse
des baies en un port gigantesque" (p. 51) which entailed
mining great quantities of stone for the project from the
high hills surrounding the bay. Camus observed the scene
from a great distance. The vast construction machinery, the
"locomotives pareilles h. des jouets" (p. 52) and the count
less men on the immense hill reminded him of the construc
tion of the Tower of Babel by Brueghel the Elder. The
Biblical account and the Greek myth are quite different,
but in each case man is overcome by stone: "L'homme,
d'ailleurs, n'est la que pour faire mesurer la grandeur
inhumaine du chantier" (p. 52). Man is made insignificant
by his attempt to reduce the mass of the great hill to
63
rubble: "Jour et nuit, un peuple de fourmis s'activent sur
la carcasse fumante de la montagne." The mineral world
dominates these little Myrmidons who "entassent des amas de
cailloux le long de la cote" (p. 54). Years later, in
L-'Exil et le Rovaume. Camus incorporated these tableaux of
struggling humanity in "La Pierre qui Pousse."
Stone and iron make of Camus' cities an inhuman prison
which finally crushes humanity and drives man to murder and
suicide. The poverty and flagrant misuse of justice
spawned within these cities appear first in the essays.
His subsequent fiction not only draws on them for inspira
tion, as we have shown, but intensifies all the evils he
7
first delineated. His attitude, years after the composi
tion of his early essays, confirms his unending dislike of
the metropolis in spite of the fame and affluence which it
brought to him:
Lorsque la pauvrete se conjugue avec cette vie sans
ciel ni espoir qu'en arrivant a l'age d'homme j'ai
decouverte dans les horribles faubourgs de nos villes,
^"De 1937 a 1953, il n'est guere pour Camus que deux
problemes, le suicide et le muertre, qu'on ramenerait aise-
ment k 1'unite. II n'est aussi que quelques themes qui vont
par couples: la prison ou l'echafaud et la mer ou le so
leil, la solitude ou l'exil et 1'amour ou la fraternite;
la passion et 11 indifference, 11 innocence et la morale, la
demesure et les limites." La Mer et Les Prisons, p. 265.
64
alors 1'injustice derniere, et la plus revoltante, est
consommee: 11 faut tout faire, en effet, pour que ces
horames echappent a la double humiliation de la misere
et de la laideur. Ne pauvre, dans un quartier ouvrier,
je ne savais pourtant pas ce qu'etait le vrai malheur
avant de connaitre nos banlieues froides. Meme 1'ex
treme misere arabe ne peut s'y comparer, sous la dif
ference des ciels. Mais une fois qu'on a connu les
faubourgs industriels, on se sent a jamais souille je
crois, et responsable de leur existence.8
Camus thus succeeded in attaching his individual experience
with nature to a community of men whose fate was more unkind
than his own. Unlike Sartre's view of the natural world,
which is negative and quite unique, Camus' belongs intimate
ly to the great majority of modern men for whom his senti
ments have a poignant relevancy; the sordid poverty once
imprisoned within Zola's Paris now flees to the beaches and
mountains in the twentieth century. This flight from the
city has almost become a perennial ritual; as man's cities
grow with their cement walls and leaden skies, so too does
his quest for natural beauty.
8"Preface," L’Envers ot L'Endroit. pp. 16-17.
CHAPTER VI
LAND, SEA AND SUN: EARTH, WATER AND FIRE
The Teutons found their gods in the dark forests and in
the mists, but the Mediterraneans found theirs in the blue
sea and in the bright face of the sun, a sun which for Camus
was like a god; he measured his joy, hope, despair, love and
hate by its rays; it was for him both lucidity and blind
ness, understanding and madness, strength and weakness; it
was the measure of everything, from its negation in La
Chute to its triumph in "Le Renegat." Camus was a solar
man.
His universe is heliocentric, and his moods vary with
the light: "Une lumi&re naissait. Je le sais maintenant:
j'etais pret pour le bonheur."^ The light of dawn brought
his joy of awakening, the hope of a warmth which would
promise a cure for his sick body. The sun has drawn him
like a magnet and holds him fast as if he were a planet
^■"La Mort Dans L'Ame," L1 Envers et L'Endroit. p. 95.
65
%
66
whirling around it:
J'ai tout le ciel sur la face et ce tournoiement des
journees, il me semble que je pourrais le suivre sans
cesse; immobile, tournoyant avec elles. (p. 96)
In these few lines Camus has identified himself with the
cosmos, certainly not with Pascal's, but with the rhythm of
solar days and nights, with the ebb and flow of life dic
tated by the Sun God— these words could have easily been
said by a sun worshipper many millenniums ago. Today the
sun is still a god in Algeria; it regulates man by its
presence or absence, its rhythms become those of the Alger
ians who withstand it at dawn or dusk but hide from it at
noon and flee from it towards the sea in summer. It can
bring forth a sudden plenitude of flowers but its excesses
create deserts whose stones are too hot to touch in the
daytime, yet frigid at night. The Algerian sun is a brutal
lover who imposes his passions by extremes and without ten
derness .
"Noces a Tipasa" is an ecstatic hymn to the love of
the earth, an overflowing poem of joyous sensuality whose
Gods are the sea, the sky and the sun. It is without doubt
the happiest work of Camus, for it coincides with the brief
lull before the storm of World War II which swept him up
and left him an exile in Europe. This essay is a marriage
67
with the love of the world, an unconditional and spontaneous
outpouring of youth Which remains quite unique among his
essays. It is a pagan world with a wild exuberance which
assaults all the senses at once:
Au printemps, Tipasa est habitee par les dieux et les
dieux parlent dans le soleil et l'odeur des absinthes,
la mer cuirassee d'argent, le ciel bleu ecru, les
ruines couvertes de fleurs et la lumiere a gros bouil
lons dans les amas de pierres. A certaines heures, la
campagne est noire de soleil. Les yeux tentent vaine-
ment de saisir autre chose que des gouttes de lumiere
et de couleurs qui tremblent au bord des cils. L'odeur
volumineuse des plantes aromatiques racle la gorge et
suffoque dans la chaleur enorme.^
Camus1 ruins are very unlike those of Du Bellay and the
"Graveyard" school of nineteenth-century England— no regrets
and no didactic posturing on the tombstone, but instead, a
sudden entrance into a material world which overwhelms by
its density; everything described can be seen, felt, heard
or smelled. Camus brings to life a sensual earth which
"splits open like a ripe fruit."
"The gods speak in the sun"; their dialogue with the
sea, the sun and the flowers is intelligible, not a mystery
of half-disclosed secrets nor the suggestion of a distant
divinity enveloped within dark forests, but the proclamation
o *
Noces a Tipasa," Noces. pp. 13-14.
68
of a presence which is felt all at once. Such a landscape
does not beckon us ever onward towards the revelation of an
inner truth just beyond the horizon; rather, it demands a
cruel lucidity under a sun which hides nothing, denies
nothing, but devours everything. On the rubble the light
has become a fiery substance, an incandescent "bubble," a
tiny ball of vapor seized from the surface of the sun. Such
a sun has the attributes of matter; it can be felt and seen,
sometimes even heard. Camus refers to it almost always as
either a liquid or a solid; for him it is an element the way
it was for the ancient Greeks. -
"A certaines heures [noon], la campagne est noire de
3
soleil" is a very accurate and precise statement which is
3
Consider this sentence in relation to the following
description of St. Paul's sudden blindness on the road to
Damascus:
"Crash 1
A brilliance so bright
The noon blanked black
Overhead where the sun was;
Intense radiance unwombed;
One lasting flash,
One fast unfaceable spasm."
(Brother Antoninus, The Hazards of Holiness [Doubleday,
1963]; quoted by Peter Davison in "New Poetry," Atlantic.
December 1963, p. 83.)
This description of St. Paul's sun blindness, consid
ered only in a physiological sense, parallels that of Meur-
sault and the Renegade. This reversal of ocular perception,
moreover, is a common occurrence in Mediterranean countries.
69
neither a poetic distortion nor a metaphor, but a physio
logical truth; the eyes cannot withstand the great intensity
of the light and have become momentarily blind. The reflec
tion from the "steel-jacketed sea" and rocky desert are as
blinding as snow is in the Arctic. A maximum intensity of
light, such as that described here, exceeds the visual
capacity of the eye and produces a reversal of perception;
one "sees" blackness. Camus thus is describing a physio
logical phenomenon objectively, and is not using metaphors
to produce a purely literary effect. The eyes become so
4
overwhelmed by light that they can perceive only "des
gouttes de lumiere et de couleurs qui tremblent au bord des
cils." Again this imagery might appear to be based upon
poetic metaphors; however, the language is derived from
experience: "des gouttes de lumi&re" most likely refers to
drops of sweat refulgent with light and hanging on the eye
lashes . The landscape seen through these fiery beads be
comes a shimmering mass of colors which tremble like tiny
prisms. The entire scene, then, depends upon an accurate
perception which is related to the reader in a very objec-
^W. M. Frohock, "Camus: Image, Influence and Sensi
tivity," Yale French Studies. 2:91-99, 1949.
tive manner; Camus' language is born from the image, not
from the word. The reader sees the scene through Camus' own
eyes at the moment he observed the scene. The landscape,
like the sun, presses upon the eyeballs; there is no dis
tance between the observer and the nature before him, rather
the entire scene is thrust at him immediately. Camus is not
the spectator of a distant landscape which moves away from
him, rather he is inundated by it. On the other hand, the
romantic panorama depends upon a vast distance created by a
haze which envelops the horizon, an horizon which becomes a
beckoning mystery. Details and colors are absorbed by a
haze which creates distance and also the suggestion of the
unknown; the immediate proximity, however, is clear and
defined, for it appears in a little zone around the onlook
er. Space, for the romantic, is measured by the atmosphere;
he creates the landscapes of the Barbizon school. Camus,
on the other hand, sees with the vision of a Van Gogh; light
and colors are alive, trembling in the shimmering light,
ready to jump off their canvas surface. There is no dis
tance; the whole landscape pushes forward all at once; the
background and the foreground have become one in the crys
talline air. Likewise, in the Algerian desert the clarity
of the atmosphere gives no indication of distance; the
71
horizon could be within arm's reach or twenty miles away.
Thus the landscape reveals all its qualities at the same
5
time; even the "odeur volumineuse des plantes," like the
atmosphere, does not beckon one towards a hidden fragrance,
but "rasps the throat and suffocates in the vast heat": a
strong perfume, like a violent light, is unbearable. It is
just such a light which will overcome Meursault.
When Camus puts the reader "sous le soleil qui nous
chauffe un seul cote de visage,"^ he is suggesting a lunar
landscape where objects are scorched on the sunny side and
frozen on the shadowy side: it is as if the absence of an
atmosphere exaggerated both heat and cold by preventing any
delicate transitions. Camus' desert world is an "either or"
world of violent and brutal extremes with no nuances: the
ecstasy of youth cedes to the misery of senility as night
does to day: that which is given will soon be taken away:
if one is rich in the enjoyment of a pagan life then depri
vation of sensual joys is all the more painful:
5"Mieux qu'aucun autre pays, il invite a 1'approfondis-
sement d'une experience qu'il parait cependant livrer toute.
enti&re a la premiere fois. C'est qu'elle est d'abord pro
digue de poesie pour mieux cacher sa verite" ("Le Desert,"
Noces. p. 82).
6"Noces k Tipasa," Eases., p. 15.
72
II faut sans doute vivre longtemps a Alger pour comprendre
ce que peut avoir de dessechant un exces de biens natu-
rels. II n'y a rien ici pour qui voudrait apprendre,
s'eduquer ou devenir meilleur. Ce pays est sans logons.
II ne promet ni ne fait entrevoir. II se contente de
donner, mais a profusion. II est tout entier livre aux
yeux et on le connait des 1'instant ou l'on en jouit.
Ses plaisirs n'ont pas de remedes et ses joies restent
sans espoirs. Ce qu'il exige, ce sont des ames clair-
voyantes, c'est-a-dire sans consolation. II demande
qu’on fasse un acte de lucidite comme on fait un acte
de foi. Singulier pays qui donne a l'homme gu'il
nourrit a la fois sa splendeur et sa misere.
Algeria is a land which, like the sun, "warms you on
one side of the face." It gives with one hand and takes
away with the other, it lavishes immediate pleasure but
denies the future; it is the statue of Janus. If the sun
has fashioned the landscape in its image, so then has it
also fashioned the Algerian. Such a person, according to
Camus, must enjoy life without consolation, that is, without
the promise of a future life, with no hope beyond the immed
iate present. Yet it is precisely this refusal which gives
value to the present which has become life itself; one
lives within one's allotted time, one does not project one-
8
self beyond it. The fully lived moment, then, becomes an
^"L'Ete a Alger," Noces. p. 48.
^Robert Champigny, in Sur un Heros Paien (Paris, 1959),
relates this concept to the behavior of Meursault throughout
this study.
73
absolute and it is this same omnipresent moment which enters
every description of nature.
One sees a landscape not only with the eyes but with
the mind which places that landscape within the context of a
particular attitude towards life. Camus succeeded in under
standing Hellenic nature because he understood the Hellenic
humanism which contained it. His thesis, Hellenisme et
Christianisme. Plotin et Saint Augustine, a solid scholarly
work, written while he was also writing his early essays,
defends the Hellenic view of nature. In his essays he thus
asserts that the pre-Christian love of nature also sharpened
the love of ephemeral beauty, a tragic beauty which excludes
anything alien to it, which lives only by and for itself:
Peu de gens comprennent qu'il y a un refus qui n'a
rien de commun avec le renoncement. Que signifient ici
les mots d'avenir, de mieux-etre, de situation? Que
signifie le progres du coeur? Si je refuse obstinement
tous les "plus tard" du monde, c'est qu’il s'agit aussi
bien de ne pas renoncer a ma richesse presente. II ne
me plait pas de croire que la mort ouvre sur une autre
vie. Elle est pour moi une porte fermee.^
One must accept the full weight of one's own existence,
Camus continues. As in Sartre, no redemption can deliver
man from his terrible responsibility. The natural world,
^"Le Vent a Djemila," Noces, p. 37.
74
then, appears entirely as itself, not as a reflection of
some higher order which would relegate it to a subservient
position; a landscape thus hints at nothing beyond itself,
rather it affirms a sensual beauty which refuses death—
"Tout ce qui est perissable desire durer."^® Man thus sees
himself subject to the natural order of the world, not apart
from it; he then shares a common bond with the most perish
able flower; neither has transcendence. In an indifferent
universe man's conscious acceptance of a mortality without
consolation can give great value to the most insignificant
creation of the natural world. Camus1 union with nature
becomes a form of neo-pantheism, which, however ecstatic it
may be, always implies a reduction of man to the natural
world; one loves an indifferent beauty which can suddenly
become empty:
Entre ce ciel et ces visages tournees vers lui, rien
ou accrocher une mythologie, une litterature, une
ethique ou une religion, mais des pierres, la chair,
des etoiles et ces verites que la main peut toucher.^
Camus has embraced the desert, he has accepted its cruel
lucidity, without illusions and without hope. Thus for his
^"Le Minotaure," L'Ete, p. 50.
11"L'Ete h Alger," Noces, p. 66.
fictional characters, "le pays natal est celui qui les nie"
(p. 68). All that is hope or consolation becomes self-
deception for such men— "Vanity of vanities, all is vain.
My fingers caress the stones which become burning and t i n e
flower I grasp has thorns." When man has exhausted his
natural wealth, when his eyes are too feeble to see the
beauty of the flower and his hand too palsied to pluck it,
then his suffering is indeed bitter: "Dans l'ete d'Algerie,
j'apprends qu'une seule chose est plus tragique que la
souffranee et e'est la vie d'un homme heureux" (p. 68).
Such a man is Meursault; his lucidity is tragic.
If a love of the natural world becomes absolute then so
too does revulsion of death. Camus, by his modern paganism,
loves the world of the senses with the intensity of a Ron-
12
sard. He shares more with him than with Chateaubriand.
Like Ronsard, he too believes in the right to the joy of the
senses and the refusal of death, the almost feverish embrace
of the fugitive moment and a contempt for the Christian
denial of the senses. But consciousness of death is bitter,
12 v
"A tout prendre, nous sommes infiniment plus pres du
XVIe siecle frangais que du XlXe. La Renaissance reprenait
le vieil hymne a la vie, vie du corps et de 1'esprit, qui
gonflait les poitrines des patres de l'Hellade." (La Mer et
Les Prisons, p. 47.)
76
promises nothing and denies everything, and it is this con
sciousness which assaults the most rapturous love of the
earth. Camus unites love and death more closely than do the
romantics because he exaggerates the love of the former and
the dread of the latter; love and death play an uneasy duet
together:
Et que la pierre que le soleil chauffe, ou les cypres
que le ciel decouvert agrandit, limitent le seul monde
ou "avoir raison" prend un sens: la nature sans hom
ines. Le monde m'annihile. II me porte jusqu'au bout.
II me nie sans colere. Et moi, consentant et vaincu,
je m’achemine vers une sagesse ou tout est deja con-
quis— si les larmes ne me montaient aux yeux et si ce
gros sanglot de poesie qui me gonfle le coeur ne me
faisait oublier la verite du monde.
In such a natural world which denies man "without anger,"
his position within it becomes "absurd." His attempted
communication with it becomes another expression of the
pathetic fallacy; man identifies himself with that which is
totally indifferent to his presence.14 Camus, unlike the
romantics, does not mask his anxiety behind a comforting
13
Carnets. p. 74 and also in Noces, p. 97.
14Frohock, "Camus: Image, Influence and Sensitivity,"
p. 91, considers that the metaphors Camus uses to describe
nature are forms of the pathetic fallacy: "Their mechanism
is again the personification of a natural element and again
involves an unusual application of the pathetic fallacy.
Once more the general theme is the contact of a natural
element on a human epidermis."
77
religiosity, but accepts the full force of such a notion.
The pantheistic union with nature, so inherent in his out
look upon life, is but a moment of joy which the return of
lucidity recognizes as an impossible longing. Man is alien
ated from nature precisely because of his awareness of its
indifference towards him and in spite of the momentary
pleasure which it brings him. This impossibility of commu
nication is then but another form of the absurd which Camus
investigates in Le Mvthe de Sisvphe. Love of nature awakens
a bitter revelation in which "un homme est toujours la proie
de ses verite's" (p. 50) .
The love of this world is most bearable when its beauty
quickens the pulse and inebriates the senses, when its
material presence overcomes bitter reflection:
Au bout de quelques pas, les absinthes nous prennent
a la gorge. Leur laine grise couvre les ruines a perte
de vue. Leur essence fermente sous la chaleur, et de
la terre au soleil monte sur toute l'etendue du monde
un alcool genereux qui fait vaciller le soleil.^
The odor of the flowers is inhaled like the drink made
from them and the sun wavers in the sky. Such is a commun-
15"Noces a Tipasa," p. 15. In Carnets (Paris, 1940),
p. 213, Camus defines the sense of smell: "Je suis, dit il,
un olfactif. Et il n'y a pas d'art qui s'adresse a ce sens.
II n'y a que la vie."
ion with nature which seizes the body by altering the sen
ses, and which overcomes all reflection by drawing every
fiber of one's being into the presence of nature. Every
thing moves, everything is alive, contours shimmer, the
horizon undulates, and the whole world is absorbed in a
Dionysiac ecstasy. Ruins, which suggest the ultimate fate
of man's civilized endeavor, are obscured, overgrown by the
"laine grise" of the triumphant wormwood. Camus' descrip
tion of the scene has such a spontaneous instancy that one
could imagine his writing it while at the scene itself. A
great joy is ignorant of the future and the past: Camus
feels union with nature at the instant he is involved in it;
reflection brings a bitter lucidity; the moment alone is
beauty. This is quite the reverse of a Christian ethic
which often places joy in contemplation rather than in par
ticipation. The romantic nature lover, regardless of his
beliefs, likewise contemplates but does not participate and
thus he often appears strangely distant from the scene it
self. A reflection which draws the mind away from the
sensual joy is not a happy one for Camus. The same wormwood
flowers, when considered objectively, no longer inebriate,
they suggest the passing of life, a traditional theme to
which Camus lends great expressiveness:
79
Tout a l'heure, quand je me jetterai dans les absinthes
pour me faire entrer leur parfum dans le corps, j’aurai
conscience, contre tous les prejuges, d'accomplir une
verite qui est celle du soleil et sera aussi celle de
ma mort. Dans un sens, c'est bien ma vie que je joue
ici ... (p. 20)
The flowers here do not take Camus by surprise, rather he
makes a conscious effort to "absorb their perfume into his
body": his act is accompanied by an awareness of the
transitory nature of the scene and his mortality; life and
death are again joined in an uneasy duet; Death has seated
himself at the banquet table just as he did in the medieval
allegories.
Camus1 transition from a voluptuous physical partici
pation to a sober rational awareness is typically rapid but
psychologically realistic. Throughout these early essays he
creates a series of alternations between the life of the
senses and the life of the mind, a dynamic equilibrium be
tween sensation and intellect. This results in a style
which is never monotonous, but suggests instead the inten
sity of a lived reality.
In the short passage above, the "truth which is that
of the sun and will also be that of my death" suggests a
bitter outlook which becomes a dominant theme in Le Mvthe
de Sisvphe; the awareness of death can suddenly alienate a
person from his surroundings so that the world itself seems
absurd.^ Everything then appears empty, yet this point is
not reached in the passage above, only intimated.
l^Cf. Le Mythe de Sisyphe. p. 83.
CHAPTER VII
PANTHEISTIC UNION AND THE
REVELATION OF THE ABSURD
Philosophical discussion is not relegated to Le Mvthe
de Sisvphe alone, but permeates many of Camus' short essays
in which a lyrical mood cedes to speculation upon the mean
ing of life and death. Each essay has a distinct mood which
alternates with that of the preceding. Consciousness of
death which opposes integration of the self within the
natural world appears in "Le Vent a Djemila" in greater
detail than in his other essays. Awareness of suffering,
death and isolation form the keynote:
Je veux porter ma lucidite jusqu1au bout et regarder ma
fin avec toute la profusion de ma jalousie et de mon
horreur.l C'est dans la mesure ou je me separe du monde
que j'ai peur de la mort, dans la mesure ou je m1attache
"J1attends Dieu avec gourmandise." (Arthur Rimbaud,
Une Saison en Enfer [Paris, 1954], p. 221). By its irony,
this sentence suggests a revolt similar to Camus' against
the Christian ethic. Suffering, injustice and death for
Camus' L'Homme Revolte form his indictment against Christi
anity.
81
82
au sort des hommes qui vivent, au lieu de contempler le
ciel qui dure, creer des morts conscientes, c'est dirai-
nuer la distance qui nous separe du monde, et entrer
sans joie dans 1'accomplissement, conscient des images
exaltes d'un monde & jamais perdu.2
This passage suggests a certain nostalgia, a longing
for early childhood when one lives the beauties of nature
without being aware of them. Before the dawn of rational
consciousness, neither the natural world nor the reality of
death has become an object of contemplation. One's integra
tion with the natural order is then complete. Growing up,
in a sense, implies an alienation from nature because one
accepts society, one "attaches oneself to the destiny of
living men." The bitter irony of the first sentence of the
passage reveals an unhappy acceptance of suffering tinged
with the spirit of revolt. In the following sentence the
theme of separation from the natural world suggests a tragic
inevitability; the pantheistic union is broken when one is
aware of no longer belonging to nature. Because of this
bitter awareness man stands alone among all other forms of
life:
Si j'etais arbre parmi les arbres, chat parmi les
animaux, cette vie aurait un sens ou plut6t ce probl&me
n'en aurait point car je ferais partie de ce monde. Je
2Le Vent a Diemila, pp. 41-42.
83
serais ce monde auquel je m'oppose maintenant par toute
ma conscience et par toute mon exigence de familiarite.3
The problems mentioned briefly in Noces, as in the
other essays, are taken up again and fully developed in Le
Mvthe de Sisvphe. Camus does not impose academic boundaries
upon his thinking, but creates organically; he experiences,
then observes his experiences objectively. This is above
all true in the case of the absurd which for him is a tragic
sentiment born from experiences, not from theories. His
absurd does not serve merely as a point of departure for a
philosophical discourse, rather it becomes the marrow of
subsequent behavior, quite the opposite of Roquentin's
experience in La Nausee. In Sartre's novel the primacy of
philosophical coherency outweighs the experience which
dominates every page of Camus' work. Roquentin, moreover,
observes the absurdity of human existence within the society
of men but not within the elemental cosmos which anguishes
Camus. For Roquentin the natural world is exemplified by
the huge roots of the walnut tree which menace his well
being. For Camus, on the other hand, alienation from the
natural world is perhaps more devastating than alienation
^Le Mvthe de Sisvphe, p. 74.
84
from the world of men; man’s position within the cosmos then
becomes absurd, not merely his relation to society. His
humanity is put in jeopardy by a material universe which
denies him a position of authority and respect:
Un degre plus bas et voici l'etrangete: s'apercevoir
que le monde est "epais," entrevoir l i quel point une
pierre est etrang&re, nous est irreductible, avec quelle
intensite la nature, un paysage peut nous nier. Au fond
de toute beaute git quelque chose d'inhumain et ces
collines, la douceur du ciel, ces dessins d'arbres,
voici qu'k la minute m£me, ils perdent le sens illusoire
dont nous les revdtions, desormais plus lointains qu'un
paradis perdu. L'hostilite primitive du monde, a tra-
vers les millenaires, remonte vers nous. (p. 28)
It is only by habit and self-deception, he continues, that
the natural world can be reduced to human intelligibility.
The inhuman indifference of the cosmos resides within the
*
beauty of "those hills, the gentleness of the sky, the
outlines of the trees." Man has become a stranger within
the universe. The rose was not made for man, he might say,
but independently of him and indifferent to his love of it.
Camus, in this respect, is the direct opposite of the roman
tics for whom beauty leads to a direct union with God:
Chateaubriand and Lamartine could feel that the beauty of
the world corresponded directly to their heartfelt desires
and that appreciation of this beauty was in itself a certain
form of redemption, an awareness of divine grace. Thei*r
85
ecstatic union with natural heauty became for them an asser
tion of their position within the cosmos, but for Camus love
of natural beauty, in this instance, teeters before the
presence of the absurd. The natural world cannot become a
genuine object of affection, as it did for the romantics,
%
but remains forever beyond one's grasp. Such a love, which
is constantly aware of the deepest implications of the
pathetic fallacy, requires lucidity and courage; one can
love only without object and without limitations; one must
love with no expectations of anything beyond the immediate
experience. Beauty suggests nothing beyond itself; it has
become freed of metaphysical direction and stands alone, not
as an ideal of contemplation, but as a material reality
which transcends man. The beauty of nature does not lead
to an eternal life, it denies it: "I know only that this
sky will last longer than I. And what should I call eter-
4
nity but that which will continue after my death?"
Camus does not project his image onto the sky, rather
it is the sky which reveals his mortality to him. The
romantics found their union with nature by subordinating the
natural world to their own metaphysical beliefs. Nature for
^"L'Ete a Alger," Noces, p. 67.
86
them could be considered a mirror of the soul in which they
saw a divine eternity, but for Camus nature is no mirror;
it is simply itself. Nature has become freed from all hopes
and illusions. For him, man lives within nature, partakes
of its gifts and its refusals, but he must never ask for
anything more than is given:
L'exaltation du divers, de la quantity, en particu-
lier de la vie des sens et de 1'abandon aux mouvements
profonds n'est legitime que si l'on fait la preuve de
son desinteressement & l'egard de l'objet.^
The most insignificant object in nature thus assumes an
independent life which appears freed from conventions. The
cliche' so common to mediocre writers never appears in his
descriptions of nature: since each object is viewed as an
experience it assumes a unique and autonomous position—
hence an intensity of expression which is characteristic of
all of Camus' perceptions of the natural world. He de
scribes natural beauty not as one who appears familiar with
it, which might tend to reduce it to ready-made cliches, but
as a stranger who perceives it for the first time. The
object thus becomes alive because its perception coincides
with its birth in the eyes of the perceiver. This "newness"
5Carnets, p. 193.
87
is reinforced by a description which refuses to oblige the
image to explain a situation. The image therefore does not
become a means to an end but appears completely alone and is
sustained by its own importance. Finally it becomes its own
truth and its own justifications
Penser, ce n'est pas unifier, rendre famili&re l'appa-
rence sous le visage d'un grand principe. Penser, c'est
reapprendre h. voir, diriger sa conscience, faire de
chague image un lieu privilegi£. Autrement dit, la
ph£nomenologie se refuse h. expliquer le monde, elle veut
etre seulement une description du vecu.6
The phenomenology of Husserl which Camus here relates
to the absurd is not treated as part of a philosophical
system, rather it depends upon a refusal to perceive the
natural world by means of any system. No metaphysical
matrix, no causality imprisons the perceived object by means
of a system which necessarily must act as an intermediary
between the perceived and the perceiver; no such deformation
is possible. Even the humblest object in nature is thus
invested with an individual life, a vitality all its own.
The above quotation has far-reaching implications which
afe often incorporated within modern literature of the ab
surd. The phenomenology of Husserl which Camus considers
Le Mvthe de Sisvphe, p. 63.
88
has an indirect bearing upon verbal evocation. For example,
the word "tree" is an abstraction which represents all
different kinds of trees without really indicating any spe
cific one. Such a word, then, represents a rational syn
thesis rather than a real perception; one never really sees
a "tree." Likewise one does not see an "oak" which, like
the word "tree" also depends upon a rational synthesis; one
sees instead a particular combination and shape of leaves
and branches supported by a trunk. The words "tree" and
"oak," to a certain degree, are then artificial creations of
the mind which serve as imperfect intermediaries between the
real experience of perception and the intellectual grasp of
that perception. If every individual tree in the world,
however, had a unique name, and if we were capable of re
membering some of them, then the relation between word and
image would be extremely accurate. This is possible for
the many tourists who have seen the "General Grant" sequoia
tree, a unique specimen, which because of its size and
beauty no longer is a "tree" but exists independently from
all others in its own right. Likewise "Vaillantif" was not
just a "horse," but an individual endowed with the heroism
of his master.
Obviously such a direct evocation by individual names
89
is impossible in literature. To attempt to do so would be a
reversal of the synthesizing process of language, as seman--
ticists maintain, and a return to primitive languages. One
cannot but regret, however, the loss of poetic evocation,
inherent in such languages; the etymologies of the simplest
words reveal a profound and often poetic grasp of reality.
How then does Camus renovate perception? Why are his
descriptions so vibrantly alive? His healthy skepticism of
words and his quest for truth help answer these questions.
For him a "tree" is not just a tree, but an experience which
7
has become inseparable from his life. The least image,
therefore, becomes unique, since it is isolated in space
and time, free of all contingency, alive in the mind of the
beholder. Ultimately, Camus makes of the image an absolute.
This is not merely consistent with the phenomenology just
described, but springs more directly from lived experience
whose primacy transcends reflective analysis. One could
just as easily suggest that Camus uses this phenomenology in
"Tout cela [love of nature] est senti d'une maniere
extraordinairement intense; c'est une vie qui anime le
monde; le spectateur se mele a la danse orgiaque." (Robert
de Luppe, Albert Camus [Paris, 1951], p. 109.) Although
Germaine Bree and Robert Champigny mention this point, M.
de Luppe analyzes it more thoroughly.
90
the Mvthe de Sisvphe as a means of describing what he has
already created in his essays.
Intensity of experiencing the natural world is also
one of the attributes of pantheism and is quite inseparable
from it. Objects within nature thus are not comprehended
rationally but emotionally and intuitively since they are
the abode of living gods. The belief in these gods condi
tions perception. The pantheist does not observe the earth,
the sea and the sun objectively as created entities, but
feels them as incarnations of particular divinities which
arouse his love or fear and thus are more directly involved
with his whole being, not his rational speculation alone.
Such subjectivity promotes much more intense experience than
impersonal observation can, and in this respect, shares a
close bond with artistic creation. Camus thus seizes the
subjective essence of pantheism which lends vitality to his
prose, and in this respect, he is much closer to Ronsard in
the sixteenth century than to Chateaubriand in the nine
teenth. Multitudes of writers in the past have alluded to
the Greek gods which more often than not become vehicles of
a superficial and pedantic erudition. Camus, however, re
creates the inward essence of Hellenic pantheism. Noces
and much of L'Ete reflect a profoundly Greek and pagan
91
inspiration which bears little resemblance to the Christian
sources of European literature and thus these essays become
quite striking to the European nourished by traditional
thinking— especially when Europe is pictured as a dark and
remote continent.
Only when experience of nature is marked by genuine
love is identification possible without appearing maudlin or
contrived; one becomes, in a certain sense, the nature which
one loves; the distance between subject and object no longer
exists so that a perfect union is created. Such a marriage
between earth and self characterizes all of Camus' ec.rly
essays and attests to a new mode of describing nature. The
natural image no longer serves as a vehicle for the delicate
introspection which extends from Rousseau to Barres but
instead exists independently as an object of intense love.
For Camus the image suggests nothing outside itself; it is
not a means to an end which leads to a particular etat
d'ame. rather it is independent because it is sufficient
unto itself. The image thus immerses the beholder all the
more profoundly in it. Likewise its description depends
upon metaphors and similes only in order to attain perfect
clarity and a precision which give it a unique evocative
power. When Camus describes the noon sun by referring to
92
himself as "la tete retentissante des cymbales du soleil et
0
des couleurs" he is really describing the sun as a physical
presence which he feels, rather than as an object which he
contemplates. The synesthesia of light, sound and color
exists purely as a means of recreating the experienced sen
sation of the sun as accurately as possible. Likewise, the
poetic imagination evident in this quotation concentrates
upon the image rather than upon an etat d'ame. The romantic
would contemplate the natural world, thus establishing a
subject-object relationship which serves as a point of de
parture for his revery. Camus, however, eliminates this
revery by accentuating the effect nature has upon him, and
in this respect, his relationship to it is closer, so close
that he did not see in it merely a reflection of his own
inner life; nature, on the contrary, by its very intensity,
9
appears to have absorbed the inner life. In his fiction,
®"Noces h. Tipasa," p. 21. The image of the cymbales du
soleil is amplified in L'Etranger and will be discussed at
length.
^Germaine Bree first made this contention by claiming
that Camus "eliminated large zones of human experience from
his universe; he also eliminated the vast realm of psycho
logical analysis. Complexities in human motivation and
subtle shades of feeling have little place in his universe
which is stripped to the fundamental." (Camus [New Bruns
wick, 1959], p. 82.) On the following page, she suggests
especially L1 Stranger and L’Exil et le Rovaume. he goes one
step further by portraying an overwhelming and hostile na
ture which reveals and even determines the thinking of the
main characters. In "Le Renegat," one of the short stories
in L'Exil et le Rovaume. the sun not only determines the
fatal action, as it did in L1Etranaer. but directly leads to
the protagonist's religious conversion from Christianity to
a cruel and barbaric worship of the sun. Identification
with nature thus has become absolute, even on a metaphysical
level. This is quite the opposite of romantics for whom the
natural image never became an absolute worshipped for its
own sake, but instead was a manifestation of a divine will
outside and beyond the object itself. The image, therefore,
was denied independence by serving as an ontological proof
of the existence of God since it acted indirectly, like a
catalyst, upon the-observer. This intermediary role, al
ready manifest in Plato and later in medieval Christianity,
became an essential attribute of the romantic contemplation
the absolutism and simplicity of nature: "Camus' North
Africa itself is made up of simple components, carrying a
weight of emotion and significance and thus becoming direct
ly symbolic and expressive of an inner life that balks at
the language of self-analysis. Freud and his followers have
no place at all in his universe."
of nature. This belief rendered the natural world stable
and comprehensible. This is most evident in the English
Lake School and in Lamartine, for whom a stable natural
world coincided with a secure religious belief. Melancholia
was a relative, not an absolute state. In Camus, on the
other hand, melancholia is not denied just because it is no
longer fashionable in literature, but because the intensity
of his images overpowers it. For the romantics melancholia
was man-made, born within them, and delineated by subtle
transitional zones of delicate shading, then imposed upon a
nature suitable to reflect this inner state. Camus, on the
other hand, portrays himself as literally crushed between
the clashing "cymbals of the sun," overcome by a nature
which he recognizes as the only reality and upon which he
therefore cannot easily superimpose a subjective state. The
Algeria which he describes as composed of indifferent and
pitiless absolutes likewise coincides with a pantheistic
love of the earth which sees nothing beyond itself, and for
which death is an absolute, not a gateway to another world.
The romantics who claimed identity with the natural world
did not fall entirely prey to the pathetic fallacy because
their religious beliefs incorporated this world within a
greater universe; the finite image drew them upwards towards
95
an infinite perfection which lay beyond. Love of nature
united them with God who bestowed upon them an immortality,
while for Camus such a love joined man and nature in a
transitory union. For him the strength and beauty of nature
dominates the weakness and ugliness of man; nature is eter
nal and man transitory. His love of nature accentuates his
mortality, yet for him such a love is intense because it is
transitory. The least image, therefore, becomes important
within time since it leads to no eternity outside of itself.
This image imprisoned within the moment becomes intense
precisely because of the attempt to amplify the moment, to
make of it an eternity which absorbs the self. When the
moment ends the bubble bursts and nothing is left. In this
respect the image belongs also to the psychology of love.
CHAPTER VIII
LOVE AND LANDSCAPES
Camus, in Le Mvthe de Sisvphe. creates a Don Juan who
again and again falls in love with a different woman, yet
finds each affair a complete experience lacking nothing. He
loves often but he loves profoundly: "'Enfin? non, dit-il,
mais une fois de plus.' Pourquoi faudrait-il aimer rarement
pour aimer beaucoup?"1 Unlike the Don Juan of Moli&re, he
loses himself completely and rapturously within each affair.
He is not a cynic, nor does he use his love to placate his
vanity or insult religion, but to realize a supreme earthly
happiness. Camus loves nature with the same ardor that his
Don Juan devotes to women? the love of women and of nature
in his works are as closely allied as in the Greek pastorals
or in the bucolic poetry of the Renaissance. The relation
ship between these two forms of love is as ancient as the
myth of Aphrodite and as modern as the annual rite of flesh
*Le Mvthe de Sisvphe. p. 76.
96
97
and sun upon the beaches. Such a bond indicates less an
aesthetic unity than an underlying emotional outlook. Let
us consider the following analysis of Don Juan's love in
relation to Camus' sentiment of nature:
Ces visages chaleureux ou emerveilles, il les parcourt,
les engrange et les brule. Le temps marche avec lui.
L'homme absurde est celui qui ne se separe pas du temps.
Don Juan ne pense pas a "collectionner" les femmes. II
en epuise le nombre et avec elles ses chances de vie.
Collectionner, c'est etre capable de vivre son passe.
Mais lui refuse le regret, cette autre forme de l'espoir.
II ne sait pas regarder les portraits. (p. 101)
Camus' love of nature, like Don Juan's for women, is not
"separate from time." For both, the moment is made an
eternity which absorbs the subjective self. The beauty of
nature, like that of women, is not "collected" but experi
enced as a constantly changing series. The nature lover
likewise does not "live off his past"; he knows no nostal
gia, no regret, no Proustian attempt to make a sentimental
journey into memory. The face of the beloved is as radiant
ana smiling as the Algerian sun, and like it, promises
2
nothing in the future. The lover feels no "regret, that
other form of hope" before the image of the childhood
^The liaison between Camus' women and his love of
nature will be analyzed in succeeding chapters on each work
of fiction.
98
sweetheart because he has forgotten her in a succession of
affairs. Likewise the landscapes of childhood are not
evoked sentimentally. Don Juan and Camus the nature lover
"do not look at portraits." In a word, they do not love by
absences but by presences. The nineteenth-century romantic
in this respect is the antithesis of Camus' modern Algerian,
who like Meursault in prison scarcely dwells upon his Marie.
This is just the reverse of Fabrice del Dongo's intense love
for Clelia which takes place under identical situations.
Camus' Don Juan is an inconstant, random lover for whom
3
"seduction is a natural state" and in whom sensuality and
emotions complement each other: he is an epicurean. Since
he is by nature polygamous, his changing infatuations pre
vent longing, and longing feeds upon separation from a
unique love. The implications of this are quite far-reach
ing. For Tristan and for Eugenie Grandet the beloved be
came an intense remembrance overcoming time and distance.
Such a love by absences depends upon a future which materi
alizes in a Liebestod. Evidently such a rbmantic love is
the impossible quest of an intangible image which the lover
holds before himself. In a sense, he is really hypnotized
3Le Mvthe de Sisvphe. p. 100.
99
by it; romantic love, like religious love, derives its
strength from an exclusion of all that distracts from it.
The state of love, like the state of hypnotism, is a con
centration of attention which paralyzes all distracting
movement in the lover by rendering him incapable of per
ceiving it. The present, then, is negated in favor of a
distant future which implies a perpetual becoming.
Such a psychology of love is directly transposed to
the romantic landscape. The forest, flowers and lakes, like
love, do not constitute an "eternal present" but seek to
evoke the image of a beloved who is usually separated from
the lover by a great distance or death. In Lamartine's Le
Lac, all of nature becomes as intangible as the lamented
Mme. Charles; even the gentle undulations of the lake lead
only to an impossible past. In this case love sublimates
nature, making it ethereal, just as mists make it intangi
ble. The face of the beloved glows from beneath the melan
choly wavelets and sighs with the gentle wind in the cy
presses .
The weather of romantic love belongs to such a land
scape. Clouds, mists, and rain suggest a changing and in
determinate weather, which like a gentle melancholy awaits
fulfillment in the future. It is a weather of becoming. of
100
longing and absences, of gentle fluctuations corresponding
to the lover's moods, not of being. Like romantic love,
this weather inspires revery. Such is a European love born
of forests, lakes and shifting ocean tides.
Camus' Algerian love is born from a bright sun on
dazzling beaches and a constant weather which i s . and does
not become. His landscapes of love are devoid of clouds
just as they are devoid of shifting sentiments. Love, like
his sea and sun, is simple, curiously uncomplicated by a
devious romantic fatality or by changing moods. This con
stancy is quite surprising; in his early novels love is
essentially the same as in his last.
Don Juan's love, like Camus' landscapes, is a call
to life, not a call to death as it generally was for the
true romantic. The physical vitality of the earth corres
ponds to a carnal attraction. His love is like that of
Antaeus, who drew his strength from contact with the earth;
such a love is healthy and direct, not a thwarted passion
like Heathcliff's, which, turning to a bitter rancor, cor-
4
responds to a landscape thrashed and deformed by the winds.
4"Heathcliff, dans les Hauts de Hurlevent. tuerait la
terre entiere pour posseder Cathie ... " L*Homme Revolte,
p.13.
101
For Eugenie Grandet love was an endless hibernation. Her
love corresponds to the cold and forbidding landscape which
encloses her. Likewise the dead landscape of the "Fall of
the House of Usher" corresponds to dead love. Few are the
novels which do not create "love-landscapes," in fact the
abundance of many mediocre romantic novels has all too
easily led to a stereotyped nature. This is also happening
with contemporary fiction; Heathcliff on the craggy heights
has been replaced by the bronzed Apollo on the beaches.
When Camus, however, allies sunshine and feminine beauty he
is not affecting a style but evoking Hellenic love and
beauty:
Alors je pensais desesperement a ma ville, au bord de
la Mediterranee, au soirs d'ete que j'aime tant, tres
doux dans la lumiere verte et pleine de femmes jeunes
et belles.^
This "love-landscape" of pretty girls and beaches reveals a
nostalgia of an almost naive simplicity and sensuality which
contrasts strongly with that of the romantics. There is no
postured longing for an aethereal and transcendental love
but only for a presence experienced by the senses. For the
romantic, love often became a disembodied longing after
5"La Mort dans L'Ame," L1Envers et L'Endroit. p. 95.
itself, hence a longing for an etat d'ame characterized by a
persistent heart-ache; for him nostalgia of love was mixed
with regret and guilt (Des Grieux and Adolphe). His nos
talgia found expression in appropriately unhappy landscapes.
For Camus the "love-landscape" comes into being instantly,
expressing an intense and simple happiness: "une lumifere
naissait. Je le sais maintenant: j'etais pret pour le
bonheur" (p. 95). Happiness is a simplicity which ignores
self-analysis. The spontaneity of this sentence reveals an
innate and not a studied self-identification with nature;
one feels beauty and one loves happily and completely. The
vague religiosity and longing of the romantic gave issue
only to an incomplete love; his was a love sickness, not a
consummation of a simple happiness. Camus' pagan love was
born as simply and as naturally as the sunlight which
brought his happiness; the epicurean would partake of love
in an identical way. The transcendental passion of the
romantics often prevented the simple and intense happiness
which Camus experienced here:
Au sortir du tumulte des parfums et du soleil, dans
l1air maintenant refraichi par le soir, l1esprit s'y
calmant, le corps detendu goutant le silence interieur
qui nait de 1'amour satisfait. Je m'etais assis sur
un banc. Je regardais la campagne s'arrondir avec le
jour. J'etais repu. Au-dessus de moi, un grenadier
laissait pendre les boutons de ses fleurs, clos et
103
coteles comme de petits poings fermes gui contiendraient
tout l'espoir du printemps.6
Characteristic of Camus' communion with nature and of the
climate of Algeria, this mood comes at eventide, not during
the overwhelming brightness of noon evoked by the "tumult of
perfumes and sunlight." This synesthesia of light and odor
strikes us by its originality. His mood of contentment is
in complete harmony with the natural setting. Nothing is
lacking; love and happiness are complete; even the future
contains in the "little fists" of the buds a natural beauty
yet to come. In his fiction the love between man and woman
often reflects this same inner climate. His characters love
s
according to the weather; they are never at variance with
it. The oppressive European gloom alluded to everywhere in
Le Malentendu stifles and deforms love, replacing it by
indifference and calculated murder; the "love landscapes" of
Camus demand a climate for love, an unfailing liaison be
tween love of woman and love of the earth; never do we find
in his works a happy romance under a sullen sky nor a
frustrated romance under a happy sky. His heroines feel
the shadow of Persephone upon themselves, and like her,
®"Noces k Tipasa," pp. 24-25.
104
their love is an expression of the seasons. Theirs is a
love which flowers in springtime then hibernates and goes
into exile during the wintry blast. The seasonal death of
nature, dark prisons and pestilential cities always frus
trate love between man and woman in his works; never does
the loved one appear in hell but is outside, waiting and in
7
exile. k'Stranger, La P e a t s , L1Etat de siege. Le Malen-
% 8
tendu. "La Femme Adultere" and even La Chute attest to this
consistent treatment of love.
The myth of Persephone curiously explains Camus' atti
tude toward romantic love and love of nature. Both loves
sustain each other and both are chthonian. For him love
can only exist under the warm sun, not in the underground
prison of the dead. When Hades carried Persephone down into
Hell, her mother, Demeter, commanded all of nature to sicken
and die. Hermes, Persephone's lover, then brought her back
from hell and into the arms of her mother who restored
7
Mane, however, does descend into Meursault's hell,
his prison, but only briefly. The significance of this act
is not antagonistic to the contention already made, and will
be discussed in the chapter devoted to L'Etranger.
®Clamence shares only a debauched and carnal relation
ship with women, and in this respect he knows no genuine
love at all. The significance of this will be discussed in
the chapter devoted to La Chute.
105
nature to its former splendor. Hades, however, had obliged
her to eat a pomegranate seed which would force her to
return to hell every winter. Allegorically, then, the
Greeks saw in the periodical change of the seasons an ex
pression of love and suffering. Winter was the time of
exile, of suffering and deprivation of love and the bounty
of nature. For them spring was a felicitous regeneration of
both. Love and nature were thus allied in an harmonious
ensemble. Likewise, for Camus a "lo^e-nature" ensemble
coincides with the Greek myth: his earth is as timeless as
that of the Greeks, but his hell belongs to the twentieth
century; prisons (L'Etranger) and pestilential prison-cities
(La Peste) are amplifications of the mythological Hell of
the Greeks. War, intentional famines, bureaucracy, and
claustration create the twentieth-century climate for exile
and separation of loved ones.
All of this springs from Camus' personal experience.
During the war, when he was happily married to his second
wife, his sickness forced him to leave her and undergo a
9
rest cure in an isolated farm in the Massif Central. His
g
The suffering of this forced separation was aggravated
by Camus' intense dislike for the neighboring city of Lyons
which he was obliged to visit: "A mon avis, si l'enfer
106
activity in the clandestine press also obliged many expedi
ent separations in order to avoid arrest by the German
authorities. This unhappy situation appears to be directly
transcribed in that of Rambert in La Peste. as well as in
analogous situations in the same work and in the others
already mentioned.
The early essays already prologue the love-nature
ensemble which later found its culmination in Camus1 wartime
experience and his subsequent works. The unhappy experience
of Prague which he described in L1Envers et L'Endroit is
implied later in Le Malentendu. For him Prague is a gloomy
European capital shut in upon itself and like Lyons it is
suggestive of the mythological hell. The climate of death
prevails. His scene of the dead man in the hotel from "La
Mort dans L'Ame" becomes for him the meaning of that city,
which, like hell, is dark, stifling and lonely. No communi
cation with the external world is possible. Its leaden
atmosphere overcomes the young writer; no personal happiness
can conquer it. In this city closed in upon itself, Camus
existait, il devait ressembler h. ces rues interminables et
grises ou tout le monde etait habille de noir" (Preface of
the Poetry of Rene Leyaud [Paris, 1948], p. 10). In this
case, as in his works, deprivation of the beloved corres
ponds directly to the oppressive environment.
107
experiences a mood of isolation. In this respect his joy
and his gloom are not autogenous, but rather reflections of
the environment. Such a reaction requires an extreme sensi
tivity to one's surroundings rather than to one's ideas and
purposes— a trait inherent in all genuine lovers of nature.
Camus' attitude is thus not ideational or an act of the
will, but an involuntary response to conditions beyond his
control. The "negative" landscape, then, determines his
mood and he becomes like it— imprisoned and alone. A
"positive" landscape, on the other hand, which beckons with
sunlight and warmth, makes him like it— free and one with
the world.10
10Albert Maquet (The Invincible Summer [New York,
1958], p. 66), comments upon the "prison" cities and happi
ness: "It is clear that the young North African, when he
calls up the vision of happiness, sees it always in the sun
light. This theme, which the first essay of Noces and also
the essay L1Envers et L'Endroit before it, expressed in the
opposition between the 'historical cities' and the walled
cities, shut in upon themselves, privileged places, the
seaside towns, open to the purest light, this theme which
the adventure L'Etranger weaves so powerfully, here attests
its permanence at the center of the artist's thought."
Maquet's insight is supported by the following quotation we
have taken from "L'Ete a Alger" in Noces. p. 49: "Ce sont
souvent des amours secretes, celles qu'on partage avec un
ville. Des cites comme Paris, Prague, et meme Florence sont
renfermees sur elles-memes et limitent ainsi le monde qui
leur est propre. Mais Alger, et avec elle certains milieux
privilegies comme les villes sur la mer, s'ouvre dans le
ciel comme une bouche ou une blessure."
CHAPTER IX
LANGUAGE, LANDSCAPES AND EXILE
The breakdown of communication between the individual
and society, between different societies and even within the
individual psyche itself, is a dominant theme in modern
literature, above all in Camus and Sartre. In the case of
the latter, communication with nature is non-existent, but
in Camus a breakdown of this communication parallels and
even precipitates the destruction of the relationship be
tween individuals and between them and society. When the
natural world imprisons a character in a hostile landscape
he becomes cut off from spiritual communion with his fellow
men. This form of isolation is prevalent in all of his
fiction and underlies a basic trait in Camus' feelings
towards man and the world which is too deeply ingrained to
be ideational. His earliest essays clearly indicate this
isolation which finds its most intense expression in L'Exil
et Le Royaume. his last collection of short stories.
"Exile" for him has a comprehensive meaning of diverse
108
109
manifestations— exile from romantic love ("La Femme Adul-
t&re"), from spiritual communion ("Le Renegat"), from youth
and beauty ("Les Muets"), from the community of men
("L'Hote"), and from art and society ("Jonas"). Only in the
last story, "La Pierre qui Pousse," is exile negated by
communication with the outside world.
Isolation, claustration, spiritual impotence and frus
tration are for Camus attributes of the word "exile." Like
wise, the words "solitary" and "solidarity" as used in
"Jonas" are antonyms explaining "exile" and "Kingdom."
Solidarity among men becomes coincidental with solidarity
between the individual and the natural world. Ultimately,
"solidarity" is the "Kingdom" of man and the world in which
happiness and harmony prevail.
The word "exile" is obviously a primary ingredient in
the sentiment of the absurd Camus illustrates in Le Mythe
de Sisvphe. an absurd already felt in L1Envers et L'Endroit
although not yet crystallized in an objective explanation
but felt as a keen personal experience. It is only a short
step from the mood of "La Mort dans L'Ame" to the absurd of
Le Mythe de Sisvphe. Again it is personal experience rather
than learned knowledge which relates the two.
In "La Mort dans L'Ame" Camus describes a purely
110
personal experience. In Prague he is literally in exile
but not merely because of political boundaries but because
of language, customs and loneliness. He cannot read the
menu at a restaurant, and when he does choose a dish by
chance, its taste is revolting. He can speak with no one
until the waiter summons an ugly prostitute with whom he
converses in broken German. This is the direct experience
of isolation by means of a foreign language, a form of exile
which Camus exploits to the maximum many years later in
"L'Hote" and "Le Renegat." In these short stories the ex
ternal world and the climate are oppressive. Exile becomes
total. This is certainly no coincidence because such a use
of language is always consistent and plays a dominant role
in his aesthetic creation. A language which is thus com
pletely "foreign" becomes for him a series of incomprehen
sible sounds. All communication is lost. Words have become
a means of non-communication and as such are a weapon of
fatality and of the absurd; within the sound of speech there
hides a deadly silence which alienates man from his fellow
beings and ultimately destroys his self-identity. This use
is a l l the more effective because it is always attached to
a negative landscape; absurd words devolve upon an absurd
landscape, the incommunicability of the spoken word con-
Ill
tributes to the separation of the self from the landscape.
By considering briefly this use of "language-land
scapes" within C a m u s ' novels and short stories, one can
conclude that this theme becomes too evident to be consid
ered coincidental, but instead serves to create an over
powering mood. It is quite significant that in L*Etranaer.
"L'H6te" and "Le Renegat" all communication between the
French-speaking protagonists and the Arab-speaking natives
is almost non-existent; scarcely is ever a word exchanged
between these two groups. This non-communication of lan
guage is not static, however; it always develops into an
emotional crescendo which directly parallels the revelation
of a hostile landscape.
In L1Etranaer Raymond, a pimp, breaks off with his
Arab mistress in a brutal manner. Her brother and a friend
seek revenge on the fatal beach where the shooting will take
place. They approach Meursault and Raymond, who engages one
of them in fisticuffs and beats him down into the sand. The
Arab then attacks him with a knife and succeeds in cutting
his arm and his cheek. Not a word is exchanged between the
Arabs and the Frenchmen. The appearance of the Arabs paral
lels the arrival of the oppressive midday sun, thus a hos
tile nature has joined forces with an equally hostile
112
humanity. The Arabs then become agents of this negative
landscape; their silent confrontation with the Frenchmen
unleashes the first crisis, a prologue to the greater vio
lence which culminates in the fatal shooting. Meursault,
now armed with the pistol which he is afraid to entrust to
his hot-tempered friend, is almost in a faint because of
the now unbearable sun and lurches blindly toward a cool
stream which will assuage his thirst and his heat prostra
tion. The Arab appears blocking his path; he has drawn his
knife and opposes Meursault's advance as implacably as the
withering sun. He is the weapon of the sun and has de
scended from it. Meursault shoots him. Not a word is ex
changed .
During Meursault's trial and imprisonment, no word is
exchanged between Arabs and Frenchmen. No Arabs are ever
called upon as witnesses nor is the mistress who precipita
ted the fatality. The dead Arab remains nameless, a major
literary tour de force: imagine a murder trial in which
the victim is never named.
The first part of L1Etranaer ends with murder upon a
beach. The alliance of the sun and the Arab is bound by
absolute silence; an absurd silence of incommunicability
which ends with the pistol shot. Thereafter, during the
113
trial and imprisonment, Meursault's head is never bared to
the sun; it will beat down on him only as he walks towards
the guillotine. He will remain claustrated first in the
courtroom, then in the prison until the day of his death.
This deprivation of nature, like the oppressive overabun
dance of it during the first part of the novel, parallels
Meursault's impossibility to Communicate with the society
which imprisons him. Although he speaks the same words as
his jailors and judges, he does not speak their language;
all communication between them is rendered impossible by
alien ways of thinking and feeling. In a word, L'Etranaer
describes death resulting from the alliance of a deadly
nature and the impossibility to communicate.
This alliance is again central to "L'Hote" although
death never happens within the narration itself but is
alluded to as a very likely denouement. The elementary
teacher inhabits a vast and hostile desert where he attempts
to teach French culture and civilization to the poverty-
stricken children of the Berbers. His schoolhouse is locat
ed on a hill overlooking the vast desolation below. He is
completely alone and it is winter; snow covers the ground.
As in L'Etranaer. the fatality is prepared by an inimical
weather, which in this work alienates man from nature by
114
frigidity rather than by heat. Balducci, a gendarme and old
friend of the teacher, has led to the schoolhouse a mute
i
Berber with a rope around his neck, like a dog on a leash.
He explains to Daru, the teacher, that the man had murdered
his cousin because of a quarrel and must be taken to the
city where he will be tried. Balducci, however, has just
been summoned elsewhere by a matter of great urgency and
j
asks Daru to take charge of the prisoner and lead him to the
police station miles away in the city. Daru considers the
request morally repugnant and accepts only because Balducci
is an old friend, not because he is an official representa
tive of law and order. When Balducci departs all conversa
tion in this short story ends; neither Daru nor his prisoner
can speak the other's language. Two silent men now occupy
a wretched schoolhouse lost in the vast and brooding deso
lation of the Algerian desert; the incommunicability of men
has joined the barren silence of the landscape.
The Berber is docile and does not attempt to escape.
The kindly Daru removes his bonds and feeds him. They
spend the night in the same empty silence. Daru pities his
prisoner, gives him food and money, then shows him the road
away from the city towards freedom. The Berber, however,
because of incomprehension, turns around and follows the
115
road towards the city and almost certain punishment. When
Daru returns to his schoolhouse he sees scrawled in a
childish handwriting on the blackboard "you handed over our
brother, you will pay." Daru is now completely alone on the
frigid wasteland. He has lost his pupils, who have now
become as hostile as the landscape. The reader supposes
that he will soon be killed, a situation analogous to
thousands like it in which the innocent were recently killed
in Algeria because of hatred born of incomprehension. Daru
has thus alienated his compatriots and the natives by a
single kind and courageous gesture.^ He is now rejected by
the city which represents the culture and authority of his
kinsmen and also by the desert which represents the alien
life of the Berbers for whom he acted so unselfishly. He
now inhabits a no-man's-land where immanent death is cer
tain. Humanity has become as hostile and deadly as the
desert. In L1Etranaer the city is representative of an
incomprehension which kills Meursault and in "L'Hote" the
1"Judged externally, his action is paradoxical, judged
internally, his action is irreproachable. This isolated
action, in the midst of warring ideologies and static poli
cies, suddenly interjects the force of sanity and humanity
into an otherwise hopeless and unhappy moment in history"
(Thomas Hanna, The Lvrical Existentialists [New York, 1962],
p. 271) .
116
desert portends imminent death; cities are deserts and both
are enemies of life.
"Le Renegat" is an intense concentration of almost
everything that Camus abhorred and is even more cruel than
La Peste because it refuses any redemption through action.
All the negative aspects of man and nature become absolutes,
and in this respect this short story is extremely signifi
cant as a means of understanding Camus' aesthetic creation.
The Renegade, who remains nameless, is a proud and stubborn
youth who struggles to become a Catholic missionary in spite
of the opposition of his Protestant parents. His motives
are false, he dreams only of his own glory and not of God's.
He does not know himself. After his ordainment, he clan
destinely leaves the monastery for Taghaza, a city of salt
lost in the center of the desert. Its inhabitants are cruel
pagans who use slaves to laboriously extract the valuable
salt from their mine. When the Renegade arrives they mock
him brutally, hitting him every time he speaks. Signifi
cantly, he had never learned a word of the language of
Taghfiza nor anything about its customs before his arrival
there. His priestly words disguise thinly the babble of a
lunatic. For them the European world of Christ and redemp
tion does not exist. Incomprehension has become absolute;
117
nothing is shared. The inhabitants of the city recruit him
into the ranks of the slaves by cutting out his tongue and
castrating him. He lives like an animal in a prison cell
carved out of salt. His exile has accordingly become abso
lute; he is as amputated from communion with the beauty of
nature as from the life of men. The natives convert him to
their sun-worship which he accepts as unconditionally as he
had once accepted Christ. His conversion is immediate and
unconditional, and to demonstrate his new faith in the
religion of his captors, he murders the new priest who had
been sent to Taghaza to replace him. Symbolically he kills
the only person capable of understanding him or showing him
charity. His captors reply to his zeal by stuffing salt in
his mouth.
Incomprehension and incommunicability have thus become
2
intensified into absolutes. The sun has driven the Rene
gade and Meursault both to murder, but the latter, however,
resists its negative influence as long as possible and cedes
to its murderous intent only after it had destroyed his
^Germaine Bree in Camus. p. 65, calls this "The Black
Sun of Death" and explains its importance in his early un
published novel, La Mort Heureuse. upon which L1Etranaer is
based.
118
reason. The Renegade does not resist it but cedes effort
lessly to its influence and finally embraces its lethal
intent in ecstatic worship. The loss of rationality and the
destruction of the subjective self by the sun are thus not
static, but a progression. Meursault is overwhelmed for
only an instant, the Renegade is permanently crippled by it.
At the end of his life, Meursault understands himself and
the world. His suffering has contributed to his growth; his
last moments are filled with the peaceful harmony which only
self-knowledge of himself and the world can bring. The
Renegade, however, flounders in a mad and servile worship of
the deity which has destroyed his reason. He has willingly
become a tongueless, sexless slave, incapable of willing his
freedom or his sanity. Meursault was not understood because
of the blindness of the society which condemns him, converse
ly the Renegade is well understood by a society which sees
in him a false prophet. The former speaks the words but not
the language of his own society; the latter speaks neither
the language of the native society nor any language whatso
ever. He is reduced to a senseless inner dialogue which
attests to his failure. The triumph of the sun is absolute;
all lucidity and communication are destroyed.
In Camus' fictional works this destruction of lucidity
119
and communication exists in a progression from one work to
another, a progression always accompanied by increasingly
negative natural images; the destruction of the human ele
ment is thus always related to the natural order. In his
fiction he develops in great detail the dominant themes of
his early essays: poverty, disease, claustration, depriva
tion of love, incommunicability, all in relation to nega
tive landscapes. In the subsequent chapters devoted to each
work of fiction these themes will be developed in detail.
Here it is necessary to mention a few of them only in order
to show the filiation between his essays and his fiction.
Since "Le Renegat" represents the apex of all Camus consid
ered negative, this work has strong roots even in the first
essays. His creation is thus organic; one work grows out of
another even though the works appear totally unrelated. For
this reason it is extremely difficult to understand his last
fictional work without reference to the first. In this
respect, Camus disguises his personal experiences in his
fiction by revitalizing them and making them universal.
In "La Mort dans L'Ame," written when he was twenty-
two, Camus describes his loneliness and poverty in a foreign
city, where a strange language and customs have isolated
him. The setting is most significant— a caveau. or cellar,
120
so popular for restaurants and night clubs in Europe. This
immediately calls to mind Camus' extreme claustrophobia—
the following events, then, cannot help but be unhappy. He
entered it unwillingly and only because he was poor and it
appeared to be a very cheap restaurant. His impossibility
to communicate is accompanied by a revolting dinner and an
ugly prostitute who sits at his table, a scene almost iden
tical to one in La Chute. All these elements are intensi
fied in "Le Renegat."
The Renegade crouches in his cell carved out of salt—
the triumph of the mineral world over man. His captors
throw a few grains of wheat on the floor before him. He
eats them, then gouges in the salt floor a small hole in
which he buries his excrement. One of the witch doctor's
female slaves enters, spreads her legs, and like an animal,
invites his carnal embrace. Without hesitation he accepts,
thus breaking his vow of chastity, and is subsequently
castrated. When his babble becomes offensive his tongue is
cut out, and his mutilation is complete. This brutality,
however, is transcended by an allegorical meaning. Because
the Renegade had previously accepted continence, the depri
vation of his sexuality could be considered a punishment for
breaking his vow. The cutting out of his tongue, likewise,
121
could be considered a punishment for the vain words of a
false prophet. Most significant, however, is the fact that
deprivation of sexual relations and incommunicability are
the principal attributes of claustration. The Renegade,
therefore, because of his mutilation, bears permanently the
scars and attributes of claustration even were he to escape.
He will suffer forever the mark of his captivity in his
flesh and in his mind; he has lost his lucidity and finds
refuge in the prison of his mad hatred. His degradation is
absolute.
The negative themes in "La Mort dans L'Ame" progress
directly, then, to "Le Renegat" but indirectly through his
other works. The frustration of natural love by claustra
tion in L'Etranaer becomes absolute in the later work. The
breakdown of marital relationships by murder in Le Malen-
tendu and by monomania in "Jonas" are both caused indirectly
be claustration. In La Peste. "La Femme Adultere" and
"L'Hote" it also prevents sexual relationships. Since
claustration in itself is death of the natural world it is
also a death of fertility— again the myth of Persephone
which appears all the more true since Camus' prisons, like
that of Persephone, so often are underground. It is the
Greek myths, not Freud, who have become an integral part of
122
his creation.
1 1 Le Renegat" also suggests a progression towards an
absolute breakdown of Franco-Algerian relations, a dominant
theme in Camus' political thinking, which finds a reflection
in his aesthetic creation. In L'Etranger. conceived before
World War II, this relationship is apolitical and describes
only incommunicability. In "L'Hote," written during the
height of the Algerian war, incommunicability precedes
imminent violence, and in "Le Renegat," written during the
same period, this violence is materialized. Although none
of these works is political in nature, each reflects current
events indirectly. In the last two stories the landscape
reflects the mood of the indigenous population— sullen, cold
and hostile in "L'Hote," openly brutal and inhuman in "Le
Renegat."
In the positive landscape, as one could expect, Camus
creates a felicitous liaison between the subjective self and
the surroundings rather than the reverse, which we have just
discussed. In this respect his landscapes are "psychologi
cal," regardless of their material reality. Their changing
moods do not merely reflect his own, but to a great extent
they determine them— Camus does not choose a particular
landscape which agrees with his mood, as one could suspect
123
Barres of doing; rather, his landscapes appear to absorb
him intellectually and spiritually. The resultant pantheis
tic union is thus involuntary and cannot be suspected of
artificiality. In his early essays, so lyrical and sponta
neous, he often appears almost unconscious of this union
which occupies his poetic prose. His art, however, is con
scious, articulate and always consistent in respect to
nature. In these essays communication in all its diversity
is always strengthened by a positive landscape. The feli
citous union coincides with complete communication among
peoples. Human solidarity is born of a happy landscape,
just as incommunicability is born of a hostile landscape.
Camus is thus unfailingly consistent in allying psychologi
cal climate with natural beauty.
CHAPTER X
MEDITERRANEAN LANDSCAPES AND PSYCHES
In L1Envers et L'Endroit and in Noces Camus describes
the warm Mediterranean cities and landscapes he loved so
well. The Tuscan cities of Florence and Vicenza, as well as
Palma, are not foreign to him; he feels an innate kinship
with them and their people; his soul expands in happiness.
This is all the more significant because Camus spoke only a
few words of Italian. The language barrier has been tran
scended by natural beauty and a way of life in harmony with
that beauty. In these essays he never even mentions his
inability to speak the language of the natives nor the
attendant problems. His sense of solidarity with Mediter
ranean landscapes and peoples appears innate and intuitive,
in spite of national and linguistic barriers. This conten
tion is not a supposition because this same innate attrac
tion appears consistently throughout his works. Solidarity
for him is Mediterranean and Latin, not European or Arabic.
In Tuscany his loneliness is assuaged and almost
124
125
absorbed by the natural beauty of Vicenza:
Mais la flute aigre et tendre des cigales, le parfum
d'eaux et d'etoiles qu'on rencontre dans les nuits de
septembre, les chemins odorants parmi les lentisgues
et les roseaux, autant de signes d’amour pour qui est
force d'etre seul.^
This lyrical enumeration creates a "love-landscape" which
dispels the gloom he had experienced in Prague and suggests
harmony between man and nature. His loneliness is thus
gentle and relative because of his kinship with a beautiful
landscape, not the absolute isolation later described in the
hostile desert. The Latin motto which Camus quotes in the
same work could as well be his own: "In magnificentia
naturae resurgit spiritus" (p. 98). This inscription which
he found on the fronton of a villa quite accurately de
scribes the return of his enjoyment of life after his de
pressing visit to Prague. Solidarity is born with a change
in landscapes:
Bien sur, je n'avais pas change, je n'etais seulement
plus seul. A Prague, j'etouffais entre dfes murs. Ici,
j'etais devant le monde, et projete autour de moi, je
peuplais l'univers de formes semblables a moi. (p. 98)
The inhabitants of Vicenza, then, are perceived directly
according to Camus1 mood, which in turn is determined by the
^■"La Mort dans L'Ame," p. 97.
126
landscape. These inhabitants are seen subjectively as in
tegral with it. Not only does he consider that they are
physically related to it, but psychologically as well. The
following quotation, already used in describing this physi
cal bond (Cf. p. 20), also describes the psychological
traits which Camus shared with all Mediterraneans:
A force d'indifference et d'insensibilite, il arrive
qu'un visage rejoigne la grandeur minerale d'un paysage.
Comme certains paysans d'Espagne arrivent a ressembler
aux oliviers de leur terres, ainsi les visages de Giotto,
depouilles des ombres derisoires ou l'ame se manifeste,
finissent par rejoindre la Toscane elle-meme dans la
seule le?on dont elle est prodigue: un exercice de la
passion au detriment de 1'emotion, un melange d'ascese
et de jouissances, une resonance commune a la terre et
a l'homme, par quoi l'homme, comme la terre, se definit
a mi-chemin entre la misere et l1amour.
"Passion to the detriment of emotion" and a "mixture of
asceticism and enjoyment" like "poverty" and "love" evoke a
common way of life which Camus shared on the opposite side
of the Mediterranean in Algiers. In his subsequent fiction
this psychological type reappears in Meursault, Tarrou,
Rambert, Rieux to a lesser degree, Jan, and Maria. It is
the Mediterranean psyche born of the landscape with which
Camus feels an innate communion. The psyche of the Arabs
and of the North Europeans remains as alien to him as do the
^"Le Desert," Noces. p. 81.
127
respective landscapes:
Je pourrais parler des longues plaines de Silesie,
impitoyables et ingrates. Je les ai traversees au
petit jour. Un vol pesant d'oiseaux passait dans le
matin brumeux et gras au-dessus des terres gluantes.
J'aimai aussi la Moravie tendre et grave, ses loin-
tains purs, ses chemins hordes de pruniers aux fruits
aigres. Mais je gardais au fond de moi 1'etourdisse-
ment de ceux qui ont trop regarde dans une crevasse
sans fond.3
Although Camus claims that he "also liked Moravia" his mood
of dejection belies his feeling of communion with the Cen
tral European landscape. This same mood prevails in Le
Malentendu. whose atmosphere again appears in La Chute.
For Camus Central Europe was a place of exile and suffering;
Clamence finds masochistic expatriation further north in
Amsterdam, and Jan his senseless death in Prague.
The far south, the Algerian desert, is just as hostile
to love and identification with nature. The ruins of
Djemila, a dead city isolated in the Algerian desert, is a
meridional prison city in which Camus feels a bitter union
with nature. The cold dampness of Europe is replaced by
the dessicating sterility of the desert, "Le Vent k Dje
mila" is one of Camus' most significant essays because he
■*"La Mort dans L'Ame," p. 94. This landscape later
reappears in Le Malentendu.
128
describes the triumph of the desert over man, a theme later
exploited in La Peste. "L'Hote," "Le Renegat," and "La Femme
Adult&re." In La Peste the fiery desert winds lash the city
of Oran at the height of the plague, in "L'Hote" a cold and
sterile desolation accompanies a tragic misunderstanding,
and in "La Femme Adult&re" the same desolation accompanies
a barren and wasted love. In "Le Renegat" an ardent and
perverted zeal accompanies the fiery brutality of the de
sert. In each of these fictional works, as in L'Etranaer.
it is the characters with a Mediterranean psyche who are
treated most sympathetically and those with a European
psyche who are the most repugnant.
Camus was a Mediterranean in the most profound sense,
perhaps even more so than Oaudet or Marcel Pagnol. The
influence of nationality and language for him were somewhat
less important than his self-identification with Mediterra
nean life; by origin he was almost as Spanish as French and
he even had a rather Spanish physiognomy. The Franco-
Algerian crisis threatened to put his national allegiance
in jeopardy; he shared two loves when it was not politically
expedient to do so. Like many Algerians, his mixed ethnic
origin and national allegiance were less important to him
than an elemental loyalty to the clear sky and shining
129
beaches of his childhood. The Mediterranean was the nucleus
from which his thinking grew, a harmonious center from which
his creation unfolded:
J'admire qu'on puisse trouver au bord de la Mediterranee
des certitudes et des regies de vie, qu'on y satisfasse
sa raison et un sens social. Car enfin, ce qui me frap-
pait alors ce n'etait pas un monde fait a la mesure de
l'homme— mais que se refermait sur l'homme. Non, si le
language de ces pays s'accordait a ce qui resonnait pro-
fondement en moi, ce n'est pas parce qu'il repondait a
mes questions, mais parce qu'il les rendait inutiles.4
"Certainties" and "rules of living" will remain for him
a memory which he will never forget, a theme which con
stantly reappears in all his works: Meursault in prison,
Tarrqu and Rieux within the city of the plague, Maria in
the deadly inn, Clamence in his vile Amsterdam bar, will
all remember nostalgically the warm certitudes of the Medi
terranean. Their salvation is contained in such a memory:
his characters who have never lived on the shores of a warm
sea experience no redemption by a love of life and love of
life is what they so often betray.
Camus' world, like that of the ancient Greeks, is
limited to the Mediterranean shore. That which lies beyond
becomes a no-man's-land for him also. Such a world remains
4"Amour de Vivre," L1Envers et L'Endroit. p. 13.
130
while civilizations and religions spring up and then wither.
His eternal Mediterranean is more sure of itself and of its
ancient tradition than of political and religious change.
He identifies himself innately with this natural order which
is "not made to the measure of man" but which "encloses
him"— he is thus absorbed by natural beauty and a way of
life in harmony with that beauty. His anguishing questions
are overwhelmed and invalidated, made "useless" by a felici
tous plenitude— again a certain nostalgic love of the place
of his origin. Camus rarely enjoyed foreign experiences as
did Malraux or Hemingway; he was an unwilling expatriate
driven from his homeland first by a global war, then by a
civil war. He thus did not love and enjoy the Tuscan cities
5
or Palma because they introduced him to a new and foreign
way of life, but because they did not seem alien to him;
they were sister-cities of his native Algiers. He likewise
generalizes the North European cities by relegating them to
an ambience of gloom and despair, and thus opposes them en
masse to his Mediterranean cities. Significantly, after his
5,1 II y a une certaine aisance dans la joie qui definit
la vraie civilisation. Et le peuple espagnol est un des
rares en Europe qui soit civilises" (note, L1Envers et
L'Endroit. p. 106).
131
youthful travels and his subsequent commitment to the dark
and desperate struggles against an enemy occupation, the
prison cities dominate his works. The happy and harmonious
Mediterranean villas become for him a nostalgic memory as
they do for his unhappy protagonists. Certain essays in
L 1 Envers et L'Endroit. HsSSS., and L'Ete. are the happiest he
ever wrote and will remain for him a source of joy and in
spiration in troubled times. "Retour a Tipasa," written
after the war when Camus in his maturity could consider his
youth which ended upon a painful political commitment, is
filled with a nostalgia for a way of life which has become
a memory:
En ce lieu, en effet, il y a plus de vingt ans, j'ai
passe des matinees entieres a errer parmi les ruines,
a respirer les absinthes, a me chauffer contre les
pierres, a decouvrir les petites roses, vite effeuil-
lees, qui survivent au printemps. A midi seu.lement,
a l'heure ou les cigales elles-memes se taisaient,
assommees, je fuyais devant 1'avide flamboiement d'une
lumiere qui devorait tout. La nuit, parfois, je dor-
mais les yeux ouverts sous un ciel ruisselant d'etoiles.
Je vivais alors. (pp. 145-146)
Clamence, who like Camus at this time, lived resentfully in
a Northern metropolis and was about the same age, will re
call his brief sojourn in the Mediterranean with the same
desperate nostalgia. It is Clamence's visit to Greece which
remains the happiest moment of his life. In "Retour a
132
Tipasa," as in La Chute, one cannot help but think of
Dante's damned souls, who in hell remembered poignantly
their earthly happiness. For Camus, hell was the dark and
teeming European metropolis smothered under the soot from
its chimneys, and his heaven, like that of Dante and the
Olympus of the Greeks, glistened under the sun; Camus shares
a common love with the ancients.
In the above quotation, as in the Tipasa of Noces. he
progresses from the ecstasy of a pantheistic union with the
flowers and the warm stones through the "avid flames of
noon" and finally comes to rest with "open eyes under a sky
trickling with stars": the cycle of the Algerian day is
complete;^ Camus recollects not a detached experience within
nature, but instead incorporates experiences into a whole;
the recollection of a day and a night at Tipasa sums up a
way of life forever gone.
What is the Tipasa which he revisits? It is a cold,
December desolation, smothered under an incessant drizzle
and imprisoned by barbed wire: it is not the springtime
exuberance of his youth; this Tipasa which he revisits is
f .
wThis cycle is a dominant theme in L1Etranaer. and in
this respect, Meursault's life is evolved from Camus' per
sonal experience.
also what has become of his own life; its winter corresponds
to that of his own life; lost youth is a paradise imprisoned
by time and likewise Tipasa is surrounded by barbed wire;
he cannot ever revisit his past; it lives only as a memory.
Camus is thus like an Orpheus vainly seeking to liberate his
youthful love from darkness and death. A personal experi
ence has risen like a myth to the level of universality.
CHAPTER XI
TRAVEL, THE ABSURD AND THE BEAUTY OF NATURE
"Amour de Vivre," one of his earliest essays, tightly
links the psychology of foreign experience to the psychology
of self-exploration, and as such indicates an effort of
growth and expansion, an effort to comprehend the world by
sharpening one's sensibilities. Likewise the natural world,
no less than that of men, depends upon this psychology. The
following passage is quoted in its entirety because of its
relevancy:
Sans les cafes et les journaux, il serait difficile
de voyager. Une feuille imprimee dans notre langue, un
lieu oti le soir nous tentons de coudoyer des hommes,
nous permet de mimer dans un geste familier l'homme que
nous etions chez nous, et qui, A distance, nous parait
si etranger. Car ce qui fait le prix du voyage, c'est
la peur. II brise en nous une sorte de decor interieur.
II n'est plus possible de tricher— de se masquer derrifere
des heures de bureau et de chantier (ces heures contre
lesquelles nous protestons si fort et qui nous d£fendent
si sfirement contre la souffrance d'etre seul). C'est
ainsi que j'ai toujours envie d'ecrire des romans oh mes
heros diraient: "Qu'est ce que je deviendrais sans mes
heures de bureau?"1 ou encore: "Ma femme est morte, mais
^rand, in La Peste. quite accurately reflects this
mentality.
par bonheur, j'ai un gros paquet d'expeditions a rediger
pour demain." Le voyage nous ote ce refuge. Loin des
notres/de notre langue, arraches a tous nos appuis,
prives de nos masques (on ne connait pas le tarif des '
tramways et tout est comme ca) nous sommes tou€ ehtiers
k la surface de nous memes. Mais aussi, a nous sentir; ;
l'ame malade, nous rendons a chaque &tre, §1 chaque bb-
jet, sa valeur de miracle. Une femme qui danse sans
penser, une bouteille sur une table, apercue derriere
un rideau: chaque image devient un symbole. La vie
nous semble s'y refleter tout entiere, dans la mesure
ou notre vie a ce moment s'y resume. Sensible a tous
les dons comment dire les ivresses contradictoires que
nous pouvons gouter (jusqu'a celle de la lucidite). Et
jamais peut-etre un pays, sinon la Mediterranee, ne m'a
porte a la fois si loin et si pres de moi-meme.2
This experience, so close to that of Roquentin in La Nausee.
also has far-reaching implications: Camus, like Sartre,
applies this sentiment of alienation and exile to the per
ception of life, and like Roquentin, he shatters the prison
of habit by a willingness to accept the world uncondition
ally as an experience, by refusing all preconceived rational
explanations. Travel engenders the sentiment of the absurd,
which, in this instance, is entirely positive. Camus' psy
chology of travel is not merely a prerequisite for experi
encing foreign peoples and new landscapes, but a necessity
for perceiving familiar landscapes as well. In Noces and
L'Ete landscapes appear as if seen for the first time; they
2"Amour de Vivre," pp. 108-110.
136
are as fresh as the moment he experiences them. Such a
means of perceiving the world, moreover, is an act of cour
age i w * must refuse a morale de confort. a psvcholocrie
d1edification; one must be willing to become naked and
alone, unsupported-by theories and systems, and as sensitive
as only,a child can.be.
Camus willingly accepts the "fear" of the unknown which
“$ives value to a.trip" by smashing the inner decor of
habit. His fear is essentially voluntary, and because of
this, it is a refusal to wear the armor of habits. By
shedding this armor, the subjective self is left tender and
defenseless to the new milieu? the oyster out of its shell
perceives the wondrous ocean for the first time— but in so
doing becomes a defenseless prey. A youthful revolt against
the cocoon of habit is also a refusal to accept the stagna
tion of old age, an urge to multiply experiences until one
is no longer able.^
3See Maquet, The Invincible Summer, p. 31. "As the
humdrum daily routine, with its habits and techniques,
weaves about us a soft cocoon, we sink into a lethargy
blindly leading us to death, and the objective responsive
ness to our own existence becomes abolished. Travel drags
us out of this ambush, inconsiderately snatches us away from
the comfort and torpor in which we are entombed."
^This theme of quantitative experience is developed in
Le Mythe de Sisvohe. Don Juan, the actor, the conqueror and
137
This extreme and tenacious sensitivity is precisely
what explains Camus' revulsion by Prague, Paris and Amster
dam. The newness, hence strangeness, of these cities ap
pears total to him. The "inner decor" is so completely
broken that all sense of communication with the natural and
the human world is subsequently destroyed. Each object then
is given its "value of a miracle," and is seen independent
of previous experience. That object, however, in this in
stance is repellent— the overcast sky, the filth, and the
poverty of the people— which forces them to accept such a
disjointed life. Camus thus became keenly aware of a degra
dation which the inhabitants of these cities were inured to.
Travel almost always causes one to make comparisons. He has
risen to the "surface of himself": he has become free and
detached, ready to seek life, and is willing to accept suf
fering; his perception by means of the absurd is thus a two-
edged sword.
The last sentence of the passage, "Et jamais peut-etre
un pays, sinon la Mediterranee, ne m'a port! k la fois si
loin et si prfes de moi-m&ne," is a summation of particular
the artist, all variants of the absurd man, exploit this
theme to the maximum.
138
significance. Travel abroad has given the young writer a
vantage point to judge objectively the life he had previous
ly taken for granted; the breaking of old habits by new cir
cumstances forces one to reflect upon those habits. The
former way of life is no longer accepted gratuitously, but
is considered objectively; by becoming a memory, it becomes
an integral part of the self. Camus is thus "far" from
himself, yet "near" himself; the disruption of a known way
of life imprisons him within himself but memory of that life
restores his feeling of communion with the world. This
rather Proustian sensitivity explains the vibrant poignancy
of "Retour a Tipasa," the passionate desire to relive a life
taken for granted and now turned to dust. The happy memor-
ies of his youth are what he holds dearest to himself.
Accordingly, L'Etrancer must be seen in this light.
Meursault is a young man who, before his disaster, takes his
simple life for granted. He has no memory. He has never
traveled. His life is divided between the onerous "office
hours" and the beach. His subsequent imprisonment and con
demnation are like a voyage into a strange country where
everything is alien to him. The absurd "fear" breaks his
"inner decor." It is through his suffering that he pro
gresses towards a harmonious understanding of himself and *
139
the world. The prison, like a foreign country, like Prague,
forces him to remember and it is through memory that he
transcends his suffering.
The dominant theme of the passage is essentially a
"prise de conscience," an awakening of the subjective self
to its environment and hence to its relationship with that
environment. The sentiment of the absurd is born, and with
it a divestiture of the self resulting in a resonant
emptiness. The inner being thus is in the uneasy position
of no longer being able to impose itself upon the outside
/
world? the reverse occurs— the outside world suddenly ap
pears to engulf the self. Causality, hence subject-object
relations disappear. Everything becomes vivid and immedi
ate, larger than life. The vacuum is filled. The birth of
the absurd is closely akin in this instance to the classical
religious conversion. Psychologically the process is simi
lar although the results are the opposite; the consciousness
of this world and not the next is born. In this respect,
Camus' absurd and his pantheism spring from a common exper
ience: both display an ecstasy which is an intensification
of an experience by the removal of an interfering rational
ism. One literally "stands outside" of one's self; one is
140
5
"on the surface" of oneself. Such an experience is always
intense because it is pure, i.e., everything foreign to it
has disappeared. This intensity, moreover, is concomitant
upon a focusing of perception upon a single object which
then acquires its "value of a miracle." Such is also the
psychology of love— the absorption of the subjective self by
the be'loved.
The psychological study of foreign travel which Camus
wrote at an early age will later become an expression of the
absurd which dominates the Mvthe de Sisvphe. Camus con-
g
stantly reinterprets his reactions. The following passage
^This literal meaning of ecstasy is evoked poetically
in "Le Desert" (Noces); "Ce qu'il faut dire ici, c'est
cette entree de l'homme dans les fetes de la terre et de la
verite. Car h cette minute, comme le neophyte ses derniers
voiles, il abandonne devant son dieu la petite monnaie de
sa personalite." (p. 94)
"Des millions d'yeux, je le savais, ont contemple ce
paysage et pour moi, il etait comme le premier sourire du
ciel. II me mettait hors de moi au sens profond du terme."
(p. 96)
60ne can consider the following passage from Le Mythe
de Sisyphe apart from its philosophical context and as an
image of claustration: "Des hommes aussi secretent de
l'inhumain. Dans certaines heures de lucidite, 1'aspect
mecanique de leur gestes, leur pantomime privee de sens rend
stupide tout ce qui les entoure. Un homme parle au tele
phone derriere une cloison vitree; on ne l'entend pas, mais
on voit sa mimique sans portee: on se demande pourquoi il
vit." (p. 29) Incommunicability is thus engendered direct-
141
from Le Mythe de Sisvphe evolves from that in "Amour de
Vivre" by crystallizing a particular experience:
II arrive que les decors s'ecroulent. Lever, tramway,
quatre heures de bureau ou d'usine, repas, tramway,
quarte heures de travail, repas, sommeil et lundi
mardi mercredi jeudi vendredi et samedi sur le meme
rythme, cette route se suit aisement la plupart du
temps. Un jour seulement, le "pourquoi" s'el&ve et
tout commence dans cette lassitude teintee d'etonne-
ment. "Commence," ceci est important. La lassitude
est a la fin des actes d'une vie machinale, mais elle
inaugure en meme temps le mouvement de la conscience.
(p. 27)
The absurd in this instance is not born from the stimulus of
foreign travel but from a stifled existence which has become
so monotonous that unconsciousness of it is no longer pos
sible. Habit has become frozen in a deadly cycle which
crushes the "inner decor." By this "lassitude tinted with
astonishment" the self is suddenly divorced from its en
vironment and no longer lives the life it leads; the self no
longer adheres to its environment by commitment and feels
morally and spiritually divorced from it. A sentiment of
ly by isolation of the self from the outside, a character
istic of all claustration. The pantomime which might sug
gest the slapstick humor of the silent cinema can also sug
gest a painful reminiscence of Camus' personal life— the
deafness of his mother; for her all actions would appear
absurd. The image of the telephone booth reappears trans
formed in "Jonas" in which the artist is completely isolated
from contact with the outside.
142
unwilling bondage is born simultaneously; the self is now
conscious of being made a slave by circumstances and yet
being made intellectually free of them. The new being
floats in an uneasy ambivalence, on the "surface of it
self." A new consciousness has performed a cruel dichotomy
upon the self by "amputating it from what constituted it's
permanence" (previously quoted from L'Ete. p. 112). Since
one's participation in the world now appears artificial and
meaningless, the self has grown, but at the expense of
happiness: "Mais qu'est-ce que le bonheur sinon le simple
a 7
accord entre un etre et l'existence qu'il mena?" Unhappi
ness born from a new awareness next creates a mood of re
volt. The absurd man is painfully aware of his disjointed
existence, of the discord between his thoughts and his
actions, of what he is and what he should be. He has ceased
to believe in the human collectivity composed of the un
enlightened. The city for him has become a desert. His
ensuing revolt against the evil falseness of the world is an
attempt to realize himself by reconciling the opposing inner
and outer forces which cause his suffering. Caligula's
atrocities, Meursault's anger toward the prison chaplain,
7"Le Desert," fias&S., p. 93.
143
Tarrou's revolt Against his father, Janine's love of the
starry night, and all of Les Justes may be seen in this
■
light. Significantly, it is not peasants who revolt, but
i
disenfranchised cjity dwellers. This fact is important be
cause it depends partially upon the sentiment of nature.
These passages from "Amour de Vivre" and Le Mvthe de
Sisvphe must be Considered also from this point of view.
It is the white Collar office worker and the factory hand
who experience the absurd, an absurd born from deprivation
of natural beauty. They are city dwellers, and of all those
confined within the city, their lives are the most circum
scribed by senseless habit. It is they who have the least
liberty, who live rather claustrated lives and who are the
most isolated from the natural world. Consequently, they
become the most likely citizens to experience the absurd.
The young Camus was also one of these men. In Algeria he
suffered from a succession of dull office and factory jobs
before he became a journalist. His experience is directly
reflected in the lives of Meursault and Grand. In the case
of the former, the week-ends on the beach relieve the
claustration of the office, but this is impossible in the
case of Grand, who, imprisoned in a pestilential city, can
only dream of his "beautiful girl" riding a "chestnut mare"
in "the Bois de Boulogne." Camus' experiences which relive
in his fiction, moreover, are universally representative of
the twentieth-century man, generally either a factory or
office worker, occasionally a distinguished professional or
business man. Almost all, however, are "indoor men." It is
they who long for the Alpine slopes to climb up or ski down
upon and the flat beaches of sand and sea where they warm
their pallid bodies under the sun, then cool them off in the
water. The average man of our time is imprisoned in a world
of his own making. His annual migrations, moreover, attest
to a dissatisfaction with his customary life; money and
leisure become means of revolting against the emptiness of
a senseless routine of living. In previous centuries, when
most people were peasants, there was no need for such a
frenetic escape. The whims of nature, upon which their
lives depended, were to them suspect or hostile. They
viewed the man-made world as a buttress against the ravages
of nature; their puny cities were walled off not only be
cause of human enemies, but because of wolves. Moreover,
they loved the beauty of nature only as an innate part of
their lives. Modern man loves nature by a nostalgic des
peration born of deprivation. The human element now has
become all-powerful, even to the detriment of the natural
145
world. Man seeks to conserve nature in state parks because
his very numbers threaten to flatten the forests and fill
up the plains. He is crushed under his own weight; his
annual increment threatens him with starvation, and his
technological progress promises him instant obliteration.
Modern man thus faces death because of his biological in
crease and because of his intellect. His permanence is
precarious. He does not have the unconscious wisdom of the
forest, where nature exists in constant harmony: its cycles
are not those of the office worker. It destroys only to
recreate and recreates only to destroy; the balance of
nature is an eternal self-perpetuation. Like the Phoenix,
it springs from its ashes, and like Persephone, it dies
only to be reborn. Unlike the Greeks, we have no myths
because we are alienated from the natural world and no myth
is born within a sophisticated metropolis.
Modern man’s quest of the beaches and the mountain
peaks would appear senseless to a medieval peasant, but in
our time communion with nature has become an urgency. We
have made a slave of nature and no one can revere a slave.
We have stolen its secrets and exploited its bounty, but we
understand it less than ever; we have killed its mysteries
and replaced them by equations. We have outdone Ahab; we
146
have devoured the white whale, the last proud vestige of an
unconquerable nature; we have replaced the American bison by
the cow. Our extinct wildlife testifies to the barbarity of
a being who kills neither because of hunger nor danger, but
for the sake of killing— man is the only predatory animal
who hunts on a full stomach. Our pesticides have silenced
the warbling of birds. Our dams and granaries barricade us
from drought and hunger. The tractor has rendered the mule
obsolete. We exult in our accomplishment.
We, like Ahab, have outdone ourselves; we have burned
our hands in an atomic fire. We do not have the wisdom to
realize that we have only discovered a secret of nature,
that we did not create it. We have less wisdom than the
sorcerer1s apprentice who at least did not claim to have
invented magic. In our time we are much less afraid of. the
ravages of the natural world than of our own; we are more
dangerous to ourselves than hunger or pestilence; the growth
of global wars thus coincides with the enslavement of na
ture. We must seek our salvation in the equilibrium of
nature:
La Nature est toujours lei, pourtant, Elle oppose ses
ciels calmes et ses raisons a la folie des hommes.
Jusqu'cL ce que l'atome prenne feu lui aussi et que
l'histoire s'ach&ve dans le triomphe de la raison et
l'agonie de l'esp&ce.8
8l,L'Exile d'Hel&ne," L'Ete. p. 115.
CHAPTER X^I
HELLENISM AND NATURE
The Greeks saw in nature gods whose whims brought feast
or famine, joy or sorrow. These gods, however, came in the
guise of men. Nature was explicable in human terms and thus
man's relationship with the deities was uninhibited; they
were above him but not out of reach. Likewise, the Hellenic
spirit enjoyed a harmonious relationship with the natural
world while respecting its limitations. It is precisely
because of them, moreover, that harmony was possible. Mod
ern man, Camus explains, rejects all limitations. Techno
logical progress, by its very definition, must refuse ac
ceptance of any limitation; it must continue to steal the
fire of Prometheus or perish. Sinae all technological pro
gress depends upon dissatisfaction of present achievement,
then progress constantly becomes obsolete and valueless.
It builds palaces in the future while repudiating the simple
dwelling of today; time and change for the modern man have
replaced the eternal nature gods of the Greeks, who could
148
149
identify themselves with a timeless nature, a perpetual
present which knows neither future nor past, and like it,
they were eternally youthful. Because they attached their
own continuance and replenishment to that of nature, the
future of the human race was considered assured.
Progress and its child, the machine, are the enemies of
the natural world. The machine, born of pure intelligence
and the utilization of natural phenomena, insulates man from
direct contact with nature. The modern city-bred camper, to
cite but one example, invades the forests with the most
modern of manufactured devices. The best chemists have
given him lotions to insulate his pallid body from the sun
and various factories have provided him with clever little
stoves, tents, electric shavers, etc. The modern camper,
then, never really leaves behind his man-made comforts when
he assaults the mountains, lakes and forests. Without
electricity, plumbing, the automobile and preventive medi
cine, we would all perish shortly; our technology, by be
coming more perfect, has also become stronger as our bodies
have become weaker. The Greeks were stronger than we; they
felt assured of their survival in spite of periodic pesti
lence and famine. Today, on the other hand, we accept
technological obliteration— a push of a button and we shall
150
all end. Perhaps the triumph of technology shall material
ize in the death of man:
Nous qui avons desorbite l'univers et 1'esprit rions de
cette menace. Nous allumons dans un ciel ivre les so-
liels que nous voulons.l
Technology is the incarnation of the man-made world, and as
such, it presupposes an objective, a realization of its
efforts: nature presupposes no such end because its self-
sufficient harmony invalidates change; the world-of man is
constant change and nature is eternal. It is by communion
with nature, rather than with the machine, that man will
discover his truest and most elemental relationship to the
world. The latter fascinates the intelligence but it cannot
fill man’s inner being. His relationship with it must be
objective and cannot be lyrical and personal. Were he to so
consider the machine he would worship his own creation and
indirectly, therefore, himself. Nature, which always re
mains alone and outside the individual, can absorb his being
by freeing him from himself. Times of crisis and an atten
dant discontent with the man-made world have historically
spurred on a return to nature from the time of Virgil to the
present. Paradoxically, the urban nature lover may enjoy
1"L'Exil d'Hel&ne," L'Ete. p. 95.
151
a more profound and personal communion with nature than with
his fellow city dwellers; as mechanized urban life grows in
sizd, it becomes more and more impersonal while communion
with nature remains as personal as ever.
Camus' attitude toward nature is that of the city
dweller, who, dissatisfied with urban life, nostalgically
loves the sunny beaches and oceans. As a mature man in
*
"Retour i i Tipasa," he is only too aware that his most in
tense communion with nature belonged to his youth, before
the city and its commitments had engulfed him. According
ly, his young fictional heroes enjoy a direct and almost
unconscious love of nature while his more mature heroes,
committed to urban life, evoke it nostalgically and there
fore consciously. Meursault and Tarrou belong to the former
category, Rieux and Janine to the latter.
Country people are almost totally absent from his
fiction, unlike that of Giono, who shares a similar intense
love of nature. The rare exception appears in the form of
the Moslem shepherd in "L'Hote." Significantly he is name
less and silent, for he remains part of the indigenous Al
gerian population which Camus attaches to the landscape.
He represents, in a sense, the disturbing presence of an
invisible man, one whom the urban population refuses to see.
152
His is the silence and emptiness of the desert which con
trasts so sharply with the excited babble of the city; he
has the self-containment of a desert rock, and like it, he
can be roused to the passionate white heat of murder under
a boiling sun, yet cooled to a numb passivity by the frigi
dity of night. He reflects the mineral landscape, a land-
scape without the stability of verdure. It is this wretched
Berber who invades the life of Daru. Symbolically, then,
the hostile, unforgiving sterility of the desert in the per
son of the shepherd invades the lives of men. "L'Hote" is
briefly the negative triumph of the desert over the pro
ductivity of man; a negation of all values, a return to the
barren isolation of an earth without life; 1 1 solitaire" has
conquered 1 1 solidaire."
The Algerian shepherd in "L'Hote" is representative of
a harsh and cruel communion with nature. His life, like his
passions, exists in a precarious relationship with a nature
which threatens to destroy him. "L'Hote" grew from Camus'
early description of the famine in Kabylia. Extremes of
character, like flash floods and droughts, according to
Camus, grow out of the desert. The Algerian peasant does
not represent an eternal stability, synonymous with his
European counterpart. The absence of the latter in Camus
153
also coincides with an instability in nature. Among all
modern writers it is probably Tolstoy who creates the
strongest bond between the peasants and the earth. Their
union with nature ends in fruitfulness and not in the ster
ile and futile bondage of Camus1 Berber shepherds whose
labors are frequently denied by famine. Camus' nature is
as unpredictable as the desert; it "gives only to take
away," and because it does not correspond to the peasant's
efforts, it denies his stability. Nature rewards Platon
Karataev, on the other hand, in proportion to his efforts;
what he sows he shall reap; no drought intervenes. In
Tolstoy's world, therefore, cause corresponds to effect.
In Camus, as in Tolstoy, city life represents an arti
ficial and often dangerous instability, a human jungle where
it is possible by cleverness and trickery to receive more
than one gives. This is impossible for Tolstoy's peasants,
who like all peasants, cannot cheat nature; the agricultural
life for the Russian writer was thus the only honest one.
Cities for Camus, as for Balzac, Dickens, Hardy and
Tolstoy, to cite but a few, breed false values. Balzac was
among the first to show how these values were amplified by
obsessions which ended tragically in self-deception. Money
for the self-deceived becomes a quantitative abstraction.
154
Camus rarely exploits the falsity of monetary values which
perhaps stems from his personal indifference to it: "On
m'a toujours attribue, a tort ou a raison, la plus grande
* * 2
indifference a l'egard des questions d'argent." Self-
deception becomes dominant in La Peste but assumes a new
form— imperviousness to impending disaster. Meditation on
death is one of the dominant themes in the novel and the
refusal of the citizens of Oran to accept consciousness of
death ends in a holocaust. Self-deception in "Jonas"
depicts the tragic fate of an artist who is overcome by the
false values and distractions of the city. His self-
deception ends in artistic impotence.
In Balzac's time the city was not yet allied to a
powerful and dangerous technology. His Balthasar Claes in
La Recherche de l'Absolu. by failing to find the philoso
pher ' s stone, resembles a medieval alchemist; his aspira
tions ran counter to his achievements. Abstract calcula
tions had not yet found expression in concrete form. Modern
technology, however, has created a triumphant Claes; a
mathematical equation ends in the power of the atomic bomb;
we have found his philosopher's stone; we are able to
^"La Mort dans L'Ame," pp. 82-83.
1-55
transmute base metals into gold, coal into diamonds, matter
into energy. Our accomplishment, however, is another thing;
we have changed the riches of the earth into a bomb, matter-
into death; with Aladdin's lamp we have created a Pandora's
box in which we found the Bomb, the triumph of the great
university and the modern city. All does not end here,
however; now we build whole cities consecrated to the vic
tory of the atom over humanity. We are the servants of
death, yet we cower impotently before our invention. We
see in the metropolis a future necropolis. Our invention
dwarfs us; it grows as we shrink. Our university-inspired,
city-bred technology attests to our dwindling humanity:
L'humanite, aujourd'hui, n'a besoin et ne se soucie que
de techniques. Elle se revolte dans ses machines, elle
tient l'art et ce qu'il suppose pour un obstacle et un
signe de servitude. Ce qui caracterise Promethee, au
contraire, c'est qu'il ne peut separer la machine de
1'art.3
Art, like nature, is eternal; it refuses progress by re
flecting the timeless soul of man. The Greeks expressed
their technology in the form of art. Their architecture
was a fusion of intelligence and beauty, of the abstract
and the concrete. The fire of Prometheus warmed both body
3"Promethee aux Enfers," L'Ete. p. 82.
156
and soul; its light was one; ours, however, burns without
illuminating. Technology, according to Camus, has insulted
art and with it beauty. In our search for technological
power and in our belief in progress through historical pro
cess, he contends, we have exiled beauty. The disequilib
rium between man's material aspirations and his timeless
self has become complete. Separated from nature and living
in the hot-house of his technical progress, he has incubated
his own disaster. Camus directly observes modern life with
the "oeil frais" of Hellenic wisdom:
i
Nous avons exile la beaute, les Grecs ont pris des
armes pour elle. Premiere difference, mais qui vient
de loin. La pensee grecque s'est toujours retranchee
sur l'idee de limite. Elle n'a rien poussee a bout,
ni le sacre, ni la raison. Parce qu'elle n'a rien nie,
ni le sacre, ni la raison. Elle a fait la part de
tout, equilibrant 1'ombre par la lumiere. Notre
Europe, au contraire, lancee a la conquete de la to-
talite, est fille de la demesure. Elle nie la beaute,
comme elle nie tout ce qu'elle n'exalte pas. Et quoi-
que diversemeht, elle n'exalte qu'une seule chose, qui
est 1*empire futur de la raison. Elle recule dans sa
folie les limites eternelles et, & 1*instant d'obscures
Erynnies s'abattent sur elle et la dechirent. Nemesis
veille, deesse de la mesure, non de la vengeance. Tous
ceux qui depassent ia limite sont, par elle, impitoy-
ablement chaties.4
The ideal Hellenic man, then, was himself the center of the
universe rather than his conquests or his aspirations
4"L'Exil d'Helene," L'Ete. pp. 108-109.
157
extending into the future; he did not worship his own accom
plishment but revered a timeless harmony with the natural
order of the world. His recognition of his limitations
protected him from folly and obliged him to reflect upon his
elemental, unadorned self, rather than upon self-aggrandize
ment. Only the timeless, balanced Hellenic man made natural
beauty integral with his life. By refusing the vanity of
seeking to crush the natural order he succeeded in living
harmoniously with it. Modern man, Camus claims, lives in a
vacuum of his own making:
Nous avons conquis a notre tour, deplace les bornes,
maitrise le ciel et la terre. Notre raison a fait le
vide. Enfin seuls, nous achevons notre empire sur un
desert. Quelle imagination aurions-nous done pour cet
equilibre superieur ou la nature balan?ait l'histoire,
la beaute, le bien, et qui apportait la musique des
nombres jusque dans la tragedie du sang? Nous tournons
le dos a la nature, nous avons honte de la beaute.
Nos miserables tragedies trainent une odeur de bureau
et le sang dont elle ruisselent a couleur d'encre
grasse.5 (p. Ill)
5Thomas Hanna, in The Lvrical Existentialists (New
York, 1962), with a profound insight, interprets Camus'
attitude toward nature in a chapter significantly entitled
"The Endogamous Cocoon": "Slowly and inexorably we have
civilized ourselves with words and concepts and ideals which
are but the recapitulation on our own images and works. We
have thus spun about ourselves with ever tighter strands
the cocoon of modern culture, a cocoon in which men are lost
within themselves and within their own dreams and failings.
The proud achievements of Modernity have been created of a
culture which is endogamous and a poetry which is incestu
158
Modern tragedy has broken the liaison with nature which ex
tended from the Greeks up to Shakespeare and Calderon, and
thus tragedy has lost much of its vitality, a theme which
Camus developed in L1Homme Revolte. The title "L'Exil
d'Helene" indicates the exile of Helen imprisoned behind the
besieged walls of Troy, and by derivation, the exile of
Hellenic equilibrium between man and the world. This short
essay, written in 1948, sketches many of the major themes of
L1Homme Revoltd which followed four years later and in which
he discussed the fate of the Hellenic ideal of equilibrium.
In L*Homme Revolte Camus asserts that Christianity and
Marxism are both allied by a belief in evolution through
historical process, which opposes progress, hence futurity,
to the timeless harmony between man and nature. Historical
process, he maintains, thus seeks to subordinate the natural
order to the dictates of a man-made world:
ous. And it is within this ingrown culture that the pathos
and the poison of an unhappy society fester and spread.
Our present time suffers under a restricted vision which
can no longer know the measure of man, his stature, and his
place in this world. Man has no measure but himself, and
thus he has no measure at all. He is lost and confused.
If one is a believer in evolution and human progress, then
it must be confessed that the crowning event in this age,
which so prides itself on its science, is man's discovery
of his own nothingness (pp. 187-188).
159
On apereoit mieux cette coupure en soulignant
l'hostilite des pensees historiques a l'egard de la
nature, consideree par elles coirane un objet, non de
contemplation, mais de transformation. Pour les
chretiens comme pour les marxistes, il faut maitriser
la nature. Les Grecs sont d'avis qu'il vaut mieux
lui obeir. L'amour antique du cosmos est ignore des
premiers chretiens qui, du reste, attendaient avec
impatience une fin du monde imminente .. . 6
Harmony between man and nature, which "constitutes man's
permanence," he continues, has been betrayed first by
Christianity, then later by the Nordic spirit:
Le bel equilibre de l'humain et de la nature, le con-
sentement de l'homme au monde, qui souleve et fait
resplendir toute la pensee antique, a ete brise, au
profit de l'histoire, par le christianisme d'abord.
L'entree, dans cette histoire, des peuples nordiques
qui n'ont ]oas une tradition d'amitie avec le monde,
a precipite ce mouvement. A partir du moment ou la
divinite du Christ est niee, ou, par les soins de
l'ideologie allemande, il ne symbolise plus que l'homme
dieu, la notion de mediation disparait, un monde judi-
aque ressuscite. Le dieu implacable des armees regne
a nouveau, toute beaute est insultee comme source de
jouissances oisives, la nature elle-meme est asservie.
(p. 236)
6L'Homme Revolte, p. 235.
CHAPTER XIII
EQUILIBRIUM, HARMONY AND LIMITATION:
THE SEA
Camus' love of Hellenic equilibrium is not a vain nos
talgia or an attempt to resuscitate a dead philosophy.
Rather, it bears particular relevancy to the failings of
modern man. The Hellenic ideal posited man's attempt to
duplicate the internal harmony of nature itself. This
ideal, according to Camus, is a conscious effort to acquire
the unconscious wisdom of the natural order. The balance
of nature is self-regulating? it prevents any excess which
would destroy it. Nowhere is this more apparent than in
the primeval forest. It is the most harmonious and self-
sufficient natural phenomenon on the earth's surface. Its
teeming wildlife exists always in just the correct propor
tions by a perpetual self-correction, as does its vegeta
tion. It governs itself by imposing limitations upon all
its inhabitants as does Nemesis upon the human order. Un
like man, it seeks no harmony because it is harmony. Such
160
161
a forest is alien to Camus.1 The landscape of his youth
alternated between the desert and the sea.
For Camus the sea is a virgin forest. It is an eternal
constancy and beside it the Algerian seeks his regeneration.
Its stability relieves the violent fluctuations of the de
sert? it is cool when the desert is warm and warm when the
desert is hot; it tempers the brutal aridity of the desert
as it softens the lives of men. Its bountiful and eternal
harvests oppose the random and precarious agriculture of
2
the desert; xt xs the mother of all life, it provides for
human wants and assuages suffering. For Camus the happy
life exists only on the Mediterranean shore; any other life
is an exile from beauty, truth and happiness. In all his
fiction the Mediterranean seashore is a happy union between
earth and sea and between man and the world. His inland
cities are imprisoned in Hell and they do not stand before
the limitless free expansion of the sea like his coastal
^In only one work, "La Pierre qui Pousse," written
shortly before his death, does such a forest appear.
2"As in traditional religious and mythic symbolism,
then in Camus' works the sea bears the attributes of the
mother; it signifies fertility, life, freedom, love, sexu
ality, and regeneration." (Carl A. Viggiani, "Camus'
L1 Stranger." PMLA. 71:873, 1956.)
162
cities. Death is always the password in these prison
cities; the dead city of Djemila dies again in pestilential
Oran and the Prague of L‘Envers et L'Endroit solicits murder
in Le Malentendu. When Meursault, Tarrou and Rieux swim in
the sea after experiencing suffering and crisis they are
re-enacting an ancient rite; they wash away bitter memories
in a symbolic ablution. Unconsciously they seek salvation
by the sea and to reestablish an ancient harmony as old as
man. Their search springs directly from Noces. written many
years before his novels: "Cette union que souhaitait Plo-
tin, quoi d'etrange a la retrouver sur la terre? L'Unite
3
s'exprime ici en termes de soleil et de mer." The sun is
fire, the sea is water and the beach is the felicitous union
between the two; it is the salvation of the body; as one
quenches thirst with water so does one extinguish fire with
water. In the Algerian summer the fiery desert wind invades
the cities, and by making them as livid as the desert it
self, drives humanity into the cool relief of the sea. The
cities, at certain hours, become deserts: both are mineral
and both radiate the incandescence of the sun.
Earth, air, fire and water, the four alchemical
3"L'Ete a Alger," Noces. p. 66.
163
elements of the ancient Greeks, assume a literal relevancy
in the Mediterranean. Camus' treatment of nature is entire
ly in accord with their thought, which is derived from ob
servation of the same eternal nature he experienced. Camus,
like them, considered the natural world to be composed of
these elements. Taken separately, each is absolute, a
deadly absolute hostile to life: the earth entombs, fire
cremates, water drowns, and the wind inundates by tempests
or parches by drought. The desert for him is the triumph
of the earth which has become absolute. Its empire is min
eral, its refusal of life is congealed in stone. Winter
rains and summer sun will never fructify its stony face—
the desert is a bitter paradox which refuses what it needs
the most and denies everything. The metropolis is a man-
made desert of stone and brick in which subterranean pas
sages, bomb shelters and cellars mimic the Hell of the
Greeks. The modern city of men, according to Camus, re
sembles an anthill, a humble digging in the desert; but the
Egyptians, by the shape of their pyramids, fashioned the
most enduring anthills.
The Algerian desert stares up at the sun directly, and
unshaded by vegetation, it burns at noon and freezes at
midnight; it exalts and it despairs. It is an unfaithful
164
lover who reflects the borrowed passion of the sun and the
frigidity of night because it is without warmth, yet Camus
writes of it:
Etant ne dans ce desert, je ne puis songer en tout cas
a en parler comme un visiteur. Est-ce qu'on fait la
nomenclature des charmes d'une femme tres aimee?^
His desert, in separating and isolating the four ele
ments, purifies them: its cloudless sky is an eternal blue,
as constant as the sea, and its sun is never hidden. The
European landscape consequently appears alien to him with
its pallid, relative sun, its misty, fickle atmosphere and
its long winter. For him the interpenetration of the four
elements makes of Europe a strange and hostile continent.
The constant temperature of the sea is the constancy
of life itself and a refusal of the negative desert. In the
sea there is no death, there is but life, which, feeding
off itself in an endless cycle, absorbs death, it is the
mother of all life for it refuses none, not even man, the
most evolved land animal, who finds in it the most elemental
union with nature. It washes away his recent memories of
land by reducing him to a primeval nudity in which prince
and pauper are one. As in an ancient rite of ablution,
4 * *
"Guide Pour Les Villes Sans Passe," L1Ete. p. 96.
165
Camus finds salvation in the sea:
Et il entra dans 11eau et il lava sur sa peau les
images noires et grima$antes qu'y avait laissees le
monde. Soudain l’odeur de sa peau renaissait pour
lui dans le jeu de ses muscles. Jamais peut-etre il
n'avait autant senti son accord avec le monde, sa
course accordee a celle du soleil. A cette heure ou
la nuit debordait d'etoiles, ses gestes se dessi-
naient sur le grand visage muet du ciel. S1il bouge
ce bjras, il dessine l'espace qui separe cet astre
brillant de celui qui semble disparaitre par moments,
il entraine dans son elan des gerbes d'etoiles, des
traines de nues. Ainsi 11eau du ciel battue par son
bras et autour de lui, la ville comme un manteau de
coquillages resplendissants.5
A solitary person immersed in the limitless expanse of a
foreign element, Camus feels no loneliness. He has fled the
5Carnets. August 1937, p. 62. Ten years later this
identical scene reappears in La Peste. Tarrou and Rieux
have momentarily fled from the pestilential city of Oran to
the beach where the nocturnal waters cleanse them of the
city's horror; the dichotomy between nature and man has be
come intensified. The Carnets thus reveal in this instance,
as in many others, Camus' creative process: his images pre
cede narration and it is from them that his creation
evolves. Born from personal experience, they are the truest
source of his fiction which integrates them within a greater
context, thus giving them universality.
The personal experience of the preceding passage is
almost duplicated in’ the following taken from Thomas Wolfe,
A Stone. A Leaf. A Door (New York, 1941), p. 113. Since
neither knew the works of the other, it is a universal theme
which unites them: "He was washed in the great river of
night, in the Gangers tides of redemption. His bitter wound
was for the moment healed in him: he turned his face up
ward to the proud and tender stars which made him a God and
a grain of dust, the brother of eternal beauty and the son
of death— alone, alone."
166
populated isolation, of the cities to find perfect communion
g
with the sea where he experiences solitude, not loneliness.
In the water his muscles come alive by swimming. His com
munion with the sea is not a placid observation but an
active participation, a muscular integration. This is quite
new in literature: the nineteenth-century romantics from
Chateaubriand to Barres were without muscles. In typical
paintings of the period we see the nature lover indolently
sprawled under a tree while contemplating nature and enter
taining his reveries? no muscular activity distracted his
self-absorption nor any physical effort arising from inti
mate contact with nature. It took him a century to divest
himself of clothes and sick dreams before plunging into the
sea.
Camus' day is the solar day, "sa course accordee a
celle du soleil." Night flows over him like a gentle tide,
covering everything yet also revealing everything; it is
transparent, yet profound.
S'il bouge ce bras, il dessine l'espace qui separe cet
astre brillant de celui qui semble disparaitre par mo
ments, il entraine dans son elan des gerbes d'etoiles,
des traines de nues.
'*
^"Les solitudes reunissent ceux que la societe separe."
("Preface," L'Envers et L'Endroit. p. 24.)
167
By touching the stars with his fingertips, Camus overcomes
distance, draws the universe towards him, and becomes its
center, the reverse of Pascal's anguishing "Traite des Deux
Infinis." The sea and the stars are comprehended by tactil-
ity, which in this passage is poetry in prose.
The jubilation of the preceding passage is born direct
ly from the crystalline air of the Algerian desert which
renders all distances deceptive. The horizon extends in a
limitless expanse, making the farthest objects appear close
and thus obliging one to judge their distance by their size,
hence by a conscious effort. Camus' tactile intimacy with
the stars, therefore, is an accurate visual description
which reveals a poetic vitality in the following passage:
La nuit, la lune fait des dunes blanches. Un peu
auparavent, le soir accuse toutes les couleurs, les
fonce et les rend plus violentes. La mer est outre-
mer, la route rouge, sang caille, la plage jaune.
Tout disparait avec le soleil vert, et les dunes
ruissellent de lune. Nuits de bonheur sans mesure
sous une pluie d'etoiles. Ce qu'on presse contre soi
est-ce un corps ou la nuit tiede? Et cette nuit
d'orage ou les eclairs couraient le long des dunes,
palissaient, mettaient sur le sable et dans les yeux
des lueurs oranges ou blanchatres. Ce sont des noces
inoubliables.7
As in Van Gogh, his colors are pure, sometimes clashing, and
7CflFP168
often scintillate by their intensity. His pantheistic union
with the night is consummated in the "nuit tifede" which he
"holds against" his bosom. The brilliant moon and star
light, characteristically described in liquid terms, render
everything visible. This is quite significant in consider
ing his descriptions of noon in which the intense sun is
0
blinding. The night is a limitless, free expansion of the
self toward infinite distances. Noon is an imprisonment.
Consider the same dunes Camus describes at midday:
Dans le pleine chaleur sur les dunes immenses, le
monde se resserre et se limite. C'est une cage de
chaleur et de sang. II ne va pas plus loin que mon
corps. Mais qu'un ane braie au loin, les dunes, le
desert, le ciel regoivent leur distance. Elle est
infinie.9
The same nocturnal dunes become unrecognizable at midday.
The cleavage between night and day. has become absolute and
no delicate transition binds them. Each has its own life
and its own psychology. Night for Camus is infinite vision
which is almost telescopic in its amplification and clarity.
With the death of day no dazzling sunlight blinds his eyes
to the stars and the universe. Night is a revelation; one
8Cf. "Noces I t Tipasa," p. 13. "A certaines heures la
campagne est noire de soleil."
9Carnets. 1939-1942, p. 245.
169
surrenders the myopic vision of noon and the immediacy which
it discloses to the infinite vision and wisdom of the stars.
As in the Bible, revelation comes to all of Camus' charac
ters at night. For them it is a fulfillment, an understand
ing of their lives in the world, the reestablishment of all
inner harmony, a time for contemplation after the activity
of day. Meursault, Tarrou, Rieux, Daru, and above all
Janine, find redemption in the tides of night. Symbolical
ly, the Renegade never regains his sanity and his inner har
mony because his prison prevents him from looking upward
toward the stars; he is condemned to eternal ignorance and
madness by the midday sun. Night, like the sea, reveals an
infinite wisdom but blindness, murder and madness strike
down Camus' characters at noon. The revelation of the Magi
and the blindness of Paul on the road to Damascus^ have a
distant echo in his fiction; the Bible and Camus share a
common landscape which is as eternal as religious wisdom.
Noon restricts, imprisons its victims within a "cage
of heat and blood" which "extends no further than [one's]
body" while night liberates. Camus reveals his most in
tense fear and revulsion in this metaphor; this "cage"
^•®Cf. Chapter VI, p. 68, note 3.
170
encloses him like an incandescent iron maiden; he is drowned
in blood and suffocated by heat, both of which press against
his skin. There is nothing outside of himself, no libera
tion. How paradoxical and yet how true that in a vast
desert Camus could experience the most intense claustro
phobia— also the most ironic reversal of effects. With the
distant braying of an ass his self-composure is restored;
on the desert, sound, like nocturnal vision, is infinite and
infinity replenishes the claustrophobe.
The two passages describing the dunes, although not
appearing together, can be considered an ensemble, a duo
between night and day. Each alternates between infinity
and proximity. In the first, infinite distance becomes an
ecstatic intimacy, in the second, infinite distance becomes
imprisoned in the hell of a tormented body. Both are oppo
sites, yet each balances the other; the freedom and redemp
tion of night balances the imprisonment and suffering of
noon. Night and day for Camus are like Yin and Yang. The
constant sea lies always between them and it limits the
extremes of both. "C'est le grand libertinage de la nature
et de la mer qui m'accapare tout entier,"^ he writes in
^"Noces a Tipasa," p. 16,
171
Noces. For him the return to the sea is also the return to
the ancient harmony between mind and body and between nature
and man:
Pour la premiere fois depuis deux mille ans, le corps a
ete mis nu sur des plages. Depuis vingt siecles les
hommes se sont attaches a rendre decentes 11 insolence
et la naivete grecques, a diminuer la chair et compli-
quer 1'habit. Aujourd'hui et par-dessus cette histoire,
la course des jeunes gens sur les plages de la Mediter-
ranee rejoint les gestes magnifiques des athletes de
Delos. Et a vivre ainsi pres des corps et par le corps,
on s'aper?oit qu'il a ses nuances, sa vie et, pour
hasarder un non-sens, une psychologie, qui lui est
propre.i2
Modern man has thus severed the roots of his recent Christ
ian and ascetic past by reestablishing contact with an an
cient Hellenic ideal. His return to the beach, moreover, is
indicative of an instinctive resentment against his over
civilized and over-mechanized urban life. The twentieth
century also witnesses the return of athletics as a national
diversion. Modern man, whose daily life is so unlike that
of the ancient Greeks, now finds it necessary to accept some
of their customs. The "nuances" and "life" of the body as
well as its "psychology," which Camus mentions above, are
not foundless: intellectual concentration, whether it be
religious or technological, separates the mind from the
12"L'Ete a Alger," pp. 51-52.
172
body, and above all, progress does so by rendering muscular
effort obsolete. As in Proust, the mind of modern man is
always awake yet his body is asleep; insomnia is a war be
tween mind and body, a war in which the former threatens to
engulf the latter. For the ancient Greeks the mind and the
I
body did not exist independently of each other, rather one
contributed to the other; the dance, for them, was a con
crete expression of thought. The importance of the mind
was balanced by that of the body. "II me faut ecrire comme
13
il me faut nager, parce que mon corps l'exige," claims
Camus, thus equating his physical self with his intellectual
self.
The ancient rite of fertility beside the sea is con
summated anew in the writings of Camus. Aphrodite is reborn
on the Algerian seashore from the union of sea froth and
sand. Today she is blatantly advertised in beauty pageants,
unthinkable a century ago, and has conquered modern occiden
tal society. She was a nostalgic dream in Diderot's Supple
ment au Vovage de Bougainville, but today has become so
commonplace that her charms are unashamedly exploited.
Today our summer shores are populated with swarms of her
13Carnets. p. 25.
173
imitators who spring up from the warm sand like flowers:
Deja pourtant, le soleil, le vent leger, la blancheur
des asphodeles, le bleu cru du ciel, tout laisse ima-
giner l'ete, la jeuness doree qui couvre alors la
plage, les longues heures sur le sable et la douceur
subite des soirs. Chaque annee, sur ces rivacjes, c'est
une nouvelle moisson de filles fleurs. Apparement,
elles n'ont qu'une saison. L'annee suivante, d'autres
corolles chaleureuses les remplacent qui, l'ete d'avant,
etaient encore des petites filles aux corps durs comme
des bourgeons. A onze heures du matin, descendant du
plateau, toute cette jeune chair, a peine vetue d'etoffes
bariolees, deferle sur le sable comme une vague multi
colore .
The life cycle of the maidens on the beach is also that of
flowers, one of the most ancient poetic symbols. Both come
with the spring and depart with autumn and are replaced by
a new "harvest" the following year. The "little girls with
bodies as hard as buds" suggests that the following year
they will flower into a soft and feminine maturity. This
scene is quite reminiscent of Proust's A L1Ombre des Jeunes
Filles en Fleur.
The gentle eroticism of this description is allied to
that of the natural order; the "filles fleurs" are a har
monious liaison between man's biological urge to reproduce
and that of all nature. Free love is implicit in the naive
and unadorned femininity which pullulates upon the beaches.
^4"Le Minotaure," pp. 57-58.
Marie, Maria and Janine are the children of these "filles
fleurs." In them there is no conflict between sensual and
spiritual love, rather an assured sense of fulfillment.
They are typical of the eternal Mediterranean women who
extend from the days of Homer up to the present. By estab
lishing the home and children they pacify the anarchy of
man's polygamous instinct, thus allying reproduction to the
social order; theirs is an innate wisdom. The ancient
sanctity of their motherhood obliges man to accept responsi
bility, to build into the future, and to conciliate himself
with society. The cult of motherhood, born in the Mediter
ranean, appears in many of Camus' women. The natural love
of Marie seeks a maturity in marriage from which a home and
children will issue, but Meursault refuses this. Maria,
who is a mature Marie, struggles in vain to oblige her hus
band to act openly towards his mother who later kills him.
Were he to do so, he would have been spared and she would
have thus been able to establish a home and have children.
Could it be that both Meursault and Jan were punished for
not listening to the women who loved them? Camus says
nothing about this. Conversely, his Mediterranean women
oppose his continental European women. Marthe is a symbol
of frustrated femininity and motherhood; she is an old maid
175
as incapable of love as the prostitutes of Amsterdam in La
Chute. By her ruthless murders she is no less cynical than
those who sell their charms. Both are childless and desire
to remain so. Camus thus creates two opposing extremes,
each a deformation of femininity, and both are the antithe
sis of his Mediterranean woman.
For Camus genuine love is literally born on the beach,
where poverty is not betrayed nor riches affirmed; rags and
silk are replaced by uniform swim suits which reveal more of
the body than they hide, and thus the social veneer is
peeled off with clothes; a democracy born of the flesh
governs since social hierarchy is hidden by nudity. The
poor are no longer poor nor do the rich remain rich; the
15
tan of the banker is identical to that of the beachcomber;
16
the riches of nature join those whom society separates.
l^Camus makes an amusing analogy between suntan and
houses: "Le port est domine par le jeu de cubes blancs de
la Kasbah. Quand on est au niveau de l'eau, sur le fond
blanc cru de la ville arabe, les corps deroulent une frise
cuivree. Et, a mesure qu'on avance dans le mois d'aout et
que le soleil grandit, le blanc des maisons se fait plus
aveuglant et les peaux prennent une chaleur plus sombre.
Comment alors ne pas s'identifier k ce dialogue de la pierre
et de la chair k la mesure du soleil et des maisons?"
("L'Ete k Alger," p. 53.)
^"On comprend alors que pour une heure, un mois, un
an, ces rivages peuvent se preter a la liberte. Ils ac-
cueillent, pele-mele, et sans les regarder, le moine, le
176
The wisdom of the feeble and aged is overwhelmed by the
brash insouciance of insolent young bodies. The seashore
defeats the old and powerful but elects the young and beau
tiful; the ugly who ostentatiously display affluence in the
cities cede to the beautiful whom society condemns to pov
erty. Camus was poor but for him "la mer et le soleil ne
coutent rien."^ The squalid tenement home of his youth
prevented any amorous inclinations but the beach liberated
them by becoming a palace where the shame of his poverty
did not exist. For him, as for all victims of the city
slums, night on the beach had the privacy of an empty pal
ace .
Camus makes of love an assertion of "life, liberty, and
the pursuit of happiness." Love is an expression of life in
quest of itself, thus it is indirectly a revolt against
disease, poverty and death. Such a statement might appear
to be a generalization; however, Camus' attitude toward love
sprang from his own struggle for life and happiness. His
early essays emphasize this attitude. His subsequent fic
tion, even during his maturity, is an intensification of
fonctionnaire ou le conquerant" ("Le Minotaure," p. 65).
17,1 Preface," L'Envers et L'Endroit. p. 15.
177
this youthful attitude. The following passages taken from
his Carnets could well be a sketch for a love scene between
Meursault and Marie:
Cela ne commence pas dans 1'amour mais dans le desir
de vivre. L'amour est-il si loin lorsque, dans la
grande maison carree au-dessus de la merf les deux corps
se rejoignent et se pressent apres etre montes dans le
vent et que, du fond de 1'horizon, la respiration sourde
de la mer monte jusqu'a cette chambre isolee dans le
monde? Nuit merveilleuse ou l'espoir d'amour ne se
separe pas de la pluie, du ciel et des silences de la
terre. Juste equilibre de deux etres unis par l'exteri-
eur et rendus semblables par une commune indifference a
tout ce qui n'est pas ce moment dans le monde.18
Love, then, proceeds from the thirst for life and communion
19
with nature. The sea breeze joins the lovers who together
had "climbed up into the wind." They are not cut off from
nature, rather the "muted respiration of the sea" has also
accompanied them up to the "bedroom isolated from the
world," where they are surrounded by the wind which links
them to the sea. This sentence, moreover, asserts the
defeat of Camus' intense claustrophobia by the consciousness
18Carnets. 1939-1942, p. 196.
i
^8,,Les sens et le monde— les desirs se confondent. Et
dans ce corps, que je retiens contre moi, je tiens aussi
cette joie etrange qui descend du ciel vers la mer" (Carnets.
1935-1937, p. 36). Here eroticism is directly linked to
love of nature; the union of two bodies parallels that of
the sky and the sea.
of the natural world; the "edge of the horizon" is always
there, a constant remembrance and a landmark which like the
"rain," the "sky" and the "silences of the earth" joins the
lovers from without; the beach reaches up to their room with
fingers of wind. The gentle, tender, seaside night of love
and life is a moment, poised on the scales of time and
nature, a "perfect equilibrium," a fusion by love of two
beings into one. Such an equilibrium is a "moment privi-
leaie" which stands almost outside of time.
CHAPTER XIV
A VOLATILE EQUILIBRIUM: THE SUN
Equilibrium, whether it be philosophical or a visual
image, fascinated Camus. He exploited all of its possibil
ities in his essays and in his natural images. Such an
equilibrium is always a precarious balance, not just an
"either or," but often an "all or nothing," a delicate
vacillation between two hostile extremes. In L1Homme Re
volte. written late in his career, he exploits the precar
ious equilibrium between master and slave; if the master
transgresses the natural human rights of the slave, then
the slave reaches a point where he has no other course but
to revolt. Murder is the response to the broken equilib
rium; the slave, by his refusal to acquiesce to absolute
dominion, must proceed beyond the "point of no return"
which forces him to revolt. The master-slave relationship,
then, in order to exist, must be relative, not absolute,
for relativity is the basis of all equilibrium in both human
affairs and in nature, according to Camus. In the dominion
179
180
of nature, the Algerian sun holds sway over the landscape
as it does over the lives of men; its empire is absolute
and despotic, no clouds or rains contest its authority.
All men obey its harsh dictates.
The balance of nature in the primeval forest has a
slow, almost imperceptible and timeless rhythm, but in
Algeria nature vacillates between extremes. The delicate
pastel shades of the forest flowers become an explosion of
pure colors. Spring in Paris is a suggestion, in Algeria
it is a loud affirmation. The fulcrum between winter and
summer is spring, which in Algeria is short because it is
violent:
Le Printemps a Paris: une promesse ou un bouton de
marronnier et le coeur chavire. A Alger, le passage
est plus brusque. Ce n'est pas un bouton de rose.
C'est mille boutons de rose qui, un matin, nous suffo-
quent. Et ce n'est pas la qualite subtile d1une emo
tion wui nous traverse, mais l'enorme et denombrable
afflux de mille parfums et mille couleurs eclatants.
Ce n'est pas la sensibilite qui s'affirme mais le
corps qui subit un assaut.^
The desert flowers are born after a rain and die within a
week, but their life, like that of Achilles, is brilliant
and far more dazzling and intense than that of the soft-hued
^ • Carnets. 1939-1942, p. 176. This dichotomy of cli
mates reappears in Le Malentendu.
181
woodland flowers. Life literally hinges upon a momentary
* # / 2
rain: "Mais dejci la saison tremble et l'ete bascule."
i
The seasons, like night and day, love and suffering, life
and death, exist in a delicate land precarious balance which
inspired Camus. Nowhere is it better seen than in "Les
Quand j'habitais Alger, patientais toujours dans
l'hiver parce que je savais 'en une nuit, une seule
nuit froideet pure de fevri , les amandiers de la
vallee des Consuls se couvri ient de fleurs blanches.
qu'il fallait pour preparer le fruit. (p. 73)
"One night, a single cold and pure night of February" is a
fulcrum on which the "season tfembles." The balance of
nature is a perfect equilibrium in which the delicate almond
flowers resist the "rains and winds" from the ocean just
long enough to fulfill their function. Delicacy, fragility
and smallness exactly balance power, strength and immensity.
Hope, love and fertility have thus triumphed over the op
posing forces of despair, death and destruction. Camus
draws his strength from the image of the almond flowers
which he opposes to "cette Eurppe toute pleine de son
Amandiers," a short essay in Lj£££i
Je m'emerveillais de voir en ite cette neige fragile
resister h. toutes les pluies et au vent de la mer.
Chaque annee, pourtant, elle persistait, juste ce
2, , L'Et4 k Alger," p. 70.
182
malheur." They symbolize for him "la terre d'election ou
la contemplation et le courage peuvent s'equilibrer" (p. 74)
— again an image of forces balancing each other; not only
does his imagery exploit the latent meanings of equilibrium,
but so do many of his metaphors. In Algeria all life tee
ters precariously on the brink of death. The almond flow
ers, like youth and beauty, wither in an hour. Death is the
dark side of the scales, life the bright side. Their rela
tionship is casual, yet brutal as in L'Envers et L'Endroit.
The sun is their fulcrum. Night and day, like fructifica
tion and dessication, hinge upon it. The solar day is gene
sis and apocalypse compressed into a microcosm:
Les dunes devant la mer— la petite aube tiede et les
corps nus devant les premieres vagues encore noires et
ameres. L'eau est lourde a porter. Le corps s'y re-
trempe et court sur la plage dans les premiers rayons
de soleil. Tous les matins d'ete sur les plages ont
l'air d'etre les premiers du monde. Tous les soirs
d'ete prennent un visage de solennelle fin du monde.
Les soirs sur la mer etaient sans mesure. Les journees
de soleil sur les dunes etaient ecrasantes. A deux
heures de 1'apres-midi, cent metres de marche sur le
sable brulant donnent l'ivresse. On va tomber tout a
l'heure, Ce soleil va tuer.3
The sea and the beach, dawn and evening, the beginning
3Carnets. 1939-1942, p. 232. This passage appears to
be a sketch for a large portion of L'Etranaer and resumes
the solar effects on the beach.
183
and the end, life and death, are squeezed into this small
passage. Everything has become an absolute and everything
hangs upon the sun. It has become a god; it gives and takes
away; life and death, like dawn and dusk, accompany its
course through the sky. Of all objects in nature the sun
is the only one whose direct view is unbearable. To stare
at it is to stare into the face of a living god who punishes
by blindness. At noon the sun reverses itself, it becomes
the black Sun God of blindness, madness and death; the sun
of Camus is also that of Oedipus.
Noon is the absolute dominion of the sun. The sea and
the sand reflect its blinding effulgence. ,"A certaines
4
heures la campagne est noire de soleil" and its light
force d'epaisseur, coagule l'univers et ses formes dans un
eblouissement obscur."5 The sun at noon, like a torrential
rain, drives man and beast indoors or into the shadows; all
life hides from the "crushing weight" of its downpour. The
streets and the beaches are deserted. To walk on the dunes
at midday is quite analogous to swimming alone in the middle
of an ocean; one can be killed by the element which sur-
4Cf. p. 67.
5"L'Enigme," p. 124.
184
rounds oneself; one "drowns" in the "cage of heat and
6
blood." "This sun is going to kill" and it does in
L1Etrancer and "Le Renegat." Its zenith is also the climax
of a tragedy:
La chaleur sur les quais— Enorme, eerasante, elle
coupe la respiration. Odeurs volumineuses de goudron
qui raclent la gorge. L'aneantissement et le gout de
la mort. Le vrai climat de la tragedie et non la
nuit, selon le p r e j u g e . 7
The zenith of this funereal sun is literally and figurative-
g
ly a "point mort." When the piston of a locomotive reaches
its high point, then stops there, the entire mechanism can
not be started, and in a sense, it is jammed. Camus applies
this principle visually to the solar day. At the zenith of
its trajectory the sun appears to stop. Directly overhead,
in the center of the immensity which surrounds it, the sun
seems momentarily motionless before choosing its course of
descent; like a ball thrown into the air, it reaches an apex
6Cf. p. 112.
7Carnets. 1935-1937, pp. 35-36.
8"Position des organes d'un mecanisme ou la force
motrice se trouve momentanement normale a la trajectoire de
son point d'application, et dans laquelle une machine a
1'arret serait dans 1'impossibilite de se mettre seule en
mouvement." Claude et Paul Auge, Nouveau Petit Larousse.
1953.
185
which is a temporary immobility: "II semblait que la mati
nee se fut fixee, le soleil arrete pour un instant incalcu-
9
lable." Such an impression is based upon a visual logic;
at dawn and dusk the horizon serves as a reference point for
the sun, which then appears to move quite rapidly, but at
noon the sun is farthest from the horizon.
When the sun comes to a halt then so does movement,
sound and life— a deceptive calm before a tempest of flames.
At noon the world catches fire. Phaeton has lost control
of the reins and the run-away sun scorches the home of the
Muses, shrinks the rivers and turns the springs into steam.
At noon Jove strikes dead Phaeton, who falls aflame into
the river Eridanus and the chariot of the sun plunges into
the sea: for Camus, as for the Greeks, noon was a daily
disaster.
^"Retour i t Tipasa," p. 155.
CHAPTER XV
SILENCE AND THE SUN
The ancient cult of the Sun-God is dimly and ironically
re-enacted on the modern beaches where he is still
... intarissable de force et de lumiere, insatiable
lui-meme, devorant une k une, des mois durant, les
victimes offertes en croix sur la plage a l'heure
funebre de midi.^
Eight years after he wrote this, the Renegade became a real
sacrifice to the Sun-God.
At noon, when the Sun-God beholds all, he exacts si
lence from all:
Tombes de la cime du ciel, des flots de soleil re-
bondissement brutalement sur la campagne autour de
nous. Tout se tait devant ce fracas et le Luberon,
la-bas, n'est qu'un enorme bloc de silence que j'ecoute
* ' a - ?
sans repit.^
When the Sun-God speaks through his rays, everything remains
silent; synesthesia of sound and light could be interpreted
i
here as a personification. His dominion is absolute during
^"Retour a Tipasa," p. 152.
^"L'Enigme," p. 123.
186
187
the longest day of the year and he is correspondingly re
duced to impotence during the shortest day, which celebrates
the birth of Christ, his antithesis.
Silence has become a substance, an "enorme bloc," not
an absence or an emptiness. In "Le Vent h. Djemila" it con
tains emptiness like a vase:
Ce qu'il faut dire d'abord, c'est qu'il y regnait un
grand silence et sans felure— quelque chose comme
l'equilibre d'une balance. Des cris d'oiseaux, le son
feutre de la flute a trois trous, un pietinement de
chevres, des rumeurs venues du ciel, autant de bruits
qui faisaient le silence et la desolation de ces
lieux. (p. 31)
Silence is integral, sound breaks it. The metaphor "break
ing silence" is thus given new life by a poetic treatment.
Like the sun at noon, silence also has the "balance of a
scale": its equilibrium depends upon harmony, not caco
phony which would "shatter" it, just as the tiniest movement
would upset the equilibrium of the midday sun. The "son
feutre de la flute a trois trous," and the "pietinement de
chevres" suggest a Hellenic landscape, perhaps even an
ancient Greek myth. This passage reappears almost untouched
in L'Etranaer. as do many segments of the essays, but in
that work, the meaning of the imagery is greatly intensi
fied. In this respect, Camus' fiction is a reordering and
reintegration of his past experience in a complete and
crystallized expression: Meursault breaks again the "in
tegral" silence of Djemila by a pistol shot, the most vio
lent expression of man-made noise. "J'ai compris que
j'avais detruit l'equilibre du jour, le silence exceptionnel
d'un plage ou j'avais ete heureux" (p. 88). Meursault, like
Julien Sorel who shoots Madame de Renal in church, also
produces a sound which is "like that of no instrument."
Both protagonists resemble their authors; both evolve from
an intensification of youthful experiences. A fictional
narrative essentially is an attempt to create an ordered
whole, a complete world in which nothing is missing and
which therefore has the density of concentrated experience.
This world thus absorbs from every source a multitude of
experiences and images which become a part of a whole and
are no longer independent and unrelated. All fiction, in a
sense, is more perfect, more real, whole and intelligible
than the heterogeneous source of its inspiration. The
separate, unrelated incident thus becomes part of a totality
which gives it the intensity of greater meaning. For the
author, fiction is a second life which can more truly re
semble his inner being than his public life. This may be
true of L'Etranaer. which is a summation and a concentration
of Camus 1 essays.
189
In the Carnets.(1935-1937) Camus describes an experi
ence which resumes for him the meaning of the wild desola
tion of the Algerian interior. The strange silence of
Meursault is already implicit in this passage written many
years before the composition of L1Etranaer;
II s'enfongait tous les jours dans la montagne et en
revenait muet, les cheveux pleins d'herbes et couvert
des egratinures de toute une journee. Et chaque fois
c'etait la meme conquete sans seduction. II flechissait
peu a peu la resistance de ce pays hostile. II arrivait
a se faire semblable a ces nuages ronds et blancs der-
riere 1'unique sapin qui se detachait sur une crete,
semblable a ces champs d'epilobes rosatres, de sorbiers
et de campanules. II s'integrait a ce monde aromatique
et rocheux. Parvenu au lointain sommet, devant le
paysage immense soudain decouvert, ce n'etait pas
l'apaisement de 1'amour qui naissait en lui, mais une
sorte de pacte interieur qu'il concluait avec cette na
ture etrangere, la treve qui s'etablit entre deux vi
sages durs et farouches, l'intimite de deux adversaires
et non 1'abandon de deux amis. (pp. 60-61)
"He came back wordless" describes the strange silence of a
pantheistic union; the words of man do not violate the
sounds of nature. Silence is integral, complete, contain
ing, reveals and betrays nothing because one confides every
thing in it. Words belong to the human collectivity, not to
an empty landscape; silence, not speech, joins man and na
ture. There reigns throughout L1Etranger an intensification
of this same silence. In Meursault it affirms his inner
pact with nature and his non-participation in the world of
190
men; it is a silence which says more than words. In the
human collectivity he is an absence, yet becomes a fullness
in the world of nature which he resembles like the "round,
3
white clouds." Nature has absorbed him, making him like
the "aromatic and rocky world" and exacts from him the
tribute and homage of silence. Meursault, like the young
Camus of this passage, is filled with an empty resonance.
A shift in scenery coincides with a shifting attitude:
when Camus reaches a "far away crest" from which he views
the "immense countryside" the spell of the pantheistic union
is broken; the crest corresponds to a new understanding. He
views the infinity before him not with a love, in which he
3Roger QuiHot, in La Mer et Les Prisons, p. 84, quotes
the first of Baudelaire's poems in prose which evokes a
striking portrait of Meursault. The use of clouds is also
similar to that of the passage just quoted:
"Qui aimes-tu le mieux, homme enigmatique, dis, ton
pere, ta mere, ta soeur ou ton frere?
— Je n'ai ni pere ni mere ni soeur ni frere.
— Tes amis?
— Vous vous servez la d'une parole dont le sens m'est
reste jusqu'a ce jour inconnu.
— Ta patrie?
— J'ignore sous quelle latitude elle est situee.
— La beaute?
— Je l'aimerais volontiers deesse et immortelle.
— L'or?
— Je le hais comme vous haissez Dieu.
— Et qu'aimes-tu done, extraordinaire etranger?
— J'aime les nuages— les nuages qui passent la-bas,
les merveilleux nuages."
191
would lose himself, but as an "adversary." His "inner pact"
4
becomes an uneasy "truce" born in the heart of silence.
His self-awareness is the source of a precarious equilibrium
between man and nature, between two opposing forces. Camus
uneasily observes himself as he observes the immensity which
now appears to resist him. Within a paragraph identifica
tion cedes to opposition. Each is an absolute and absolutes
are unstable, with the result that equilibrium and constancy
are temporary and illusory. Pleasure and pain, joy and
sorrow, like life and death, exist only in a pure and vola-
tile state. The affirmation of one immediately gives birth
to its negation. One laughs on one side of the mouth and
weeps with the other, like Gargantua at the birth of
Pantagruel.^
Pantheistic union is born from the sensual perception
4,1 ... un silence enferme dans sa bouche" fCarnets.
1937-1939, p. 102). This fragment could be the source for
'lie Renegat," in which the missionary is tongueless. Sym
bolically, as in all genuine pantheistic union, man reacts
to nature by silence in Camus' works.
^"Aussi cette vie sensuelle, issue pourtant d'une
liberation, a-t-elle un gout de mort; la joie se raele a
l'amertume. Ce 'balancement' de la vie a la mort compose
les quatre recits de Noces" (Robert de Luppe, Albert Camus,
p. Ill).
192
of an image which, by absorbing the subjective self, becomes
omnipotent. All emotions thus do not originate from within,
but from without and are accordingly sacrificed to the
grandeur of the image. Pantheistic ecstasy is thus not a
solution to problems of the self but an escape from it.6
One is delivered from the self as if by a strong drug, al
cohol, or a trance. The image becomes hypnotic; distance
between subject and object disappears as it absorbs the
entire attention of the subjective self. Finally the image,
by becoming as ephemeral as an hallucination, leaves the
self curiously empty, divested and unaware of itself, unable
to explore its own secrets. By melting into the image, one
fuses spirit and matter and is no longer able to distinguish
them. Pushed to its furthest degree, pantheistic union ends
in mindlessness; one becomes a tree or a stone, and ceases
7
to be human.
."Si 1'image, chez Camus, n'est point source de deliv-
rance interieure, c'est que, loin de renvoyer a lui-meme
celui qui la per?oit, elle le deracine. Le voyageur de
Camus porte son attention sur 1'image, mais, de cet acte, ne
retient que l'effet exterieur; sa 'presence au monde' est
une projection hors de lui-meme; il s'echappe pour devenir
cet objet— un arbre ou une colline" (Luppe, pp. 114-115).
7Jean-Paul Sartre, "Explication de L'Etranaer.1 1 NRF.
12:101, 1947, suggests that the sentiment of exile springs
from the fact that "man is not the world." Sartre quotes
193
Pantheistic union is as transitory as a mirage, or in
this case, clouds. A puff of wind or a slight noise and the
trance is broken. Nothing remains. The "inner decor" is
broken. After man stands "outside" himself in ecstatic
union with nature his return to himself leaves him strangely
empty and defenseless; he must consider himself alone and
unsupported by the external world. Since pantheistic union
with nature is impossible for Camus in a metropolis, he
therefore feels empty, alone and forced to live entirely
within himself. Paris, Prague and Amsterdam, seen in this
light, take on a new meaning. Could these cities be so ab
horrent to him because he resented having to search for
inner peace entirely within himself? Is not La Chute a long
meditation of a man whose entire attention becomes focused
on himself and who finds that self unbearable? The happy
Greek isles for Clamence are a remembrance while the present
in grey Amsterdam has become a voluntary prison. Camus'
the following passage taken from the Mvthe de Sisvphei "Si
j'etais arbre parmi les arbres, chat parmi les animaux,
cette vie aurait un sens ou plutot ce probleme n'en aurait
point car je ferais partie de ce monde. Je serais ce monde
auquel je m'oppose maintenant par toute ma conscience et
par toute mon exigence de familiarite." (Cf. pp. 82-83)
194
0
years of sickness and claustration, his deprivation of
natural beauty, could thus testify to an unwillingness to
live within the self.
8 /
Mais pauvrete, maladie, solitude: nous prenons
conscience de notre eternite. II faut qu'on nous pousse
dans nos derniers retranchements. C'est exactement cela,
ni plus, ni moins" (Carnets. 1935-1937, p. 17).
CHAPTER XVI
THE OPEN SEA: A RHAPSODY
Only in 1953, when Camus had reached fame and maturity,
did the deep sea appear for the first and last time in his
works. In that year he took an extended cruise halfway
around the world in an attempt to regain his health after a
serious relapse which had prevented him from completing his
literary projects. A vivid, day-by-day account of this
cruise composes "La Mer au Plus Pr&s." His prose is notice
ably more ecstatic and rhapsodic than in any of his other
essays or in his fiction.^ The absence of the open sea
which he loved so intensely is quite conspicuous in his
other works. One can only speculate on this. Perhaps his
early Mediterranean crossing (1940) left him with a bad
memory because of unpleasant weather or because his poverty
^Stephen Ullmann, in The Image in the Modern French
Novel (Cambridge, England, 1960), pp. 242-243, considers
that this work is "studded with daring images, very differ
ent in texture from earlier metaphors on similar themes"
and calls these metaphors "flashes of surrealist vision."
195
196
had restricted him to the steerage. In any event, his
familiarity with the open sea was meagre and his fictional
characters correspondingly contemplate the distant horizon
of the sea while never venturing beyond the beaches.
The ocean no longer retains "la permanence d'une mer
toujours egale" of "Le Minotaure" (p. 32), because it has
replaced the gentle coastal wavelets of the Mediterranean by
the huge swells of the mid-Atlantic. The coast with its
"magnifigue anarchie humaine" (p. 32) has disappeared and
with it the duality of land and sea. The seashore in all
his Algerian essays is the point of equilibrium between
these opposites, and thus it represents a conciliation be
tween the interests of nature and man who partakes of the
surf without being alienated from the land which is his
natural habitat— his feet always touch bottom. Such is not
the case in "La Mer au Plus Pres." This essay is a repudia
tion of a land which odiously oppressed Camus. Mew York,
from which he embarked on his ocean voyage, was for him an
unbearable foreign city, the antithesis of his native
Algiers. His claustrophobia was acute, touching upon
2
panic. The depressing filth of the New York waterfront
2Cf. p. 39.
197
was for him a travesty on the shining Algerian beaches which
joined land and sea in a felicitous union. The opposition
between the repulsiveness of the man-made world and the
attractiveness of the natural world of the ocean reaches a
climax in New York from which he flees rather than departs.
His previous despair has swung over to an exultant joy, a
violent alternation of mood so characteristic of all his
writing.
The Horizon and Liberty
With the disappearance of land the reign of the ocean
begins, and with it the entrance into a different world.
Everything becomes flat. The horizon is 360 degrees of
unbroken latitude and longitude; it has become absolute and
so has his sense of freedom. The stifling claustrophobia
of New York has become but a memory. Liberty for Camus is
always lateral; in the clear air the ubiquitous and distant
horizon appears within arm's length. It beckons forever
forward, not upward. Taken symbolically, it is the measure
of human aspiration: philosophically it represents unlimit-
3
ed freedom, unlimited choice and endless experience. In
3
Leo Hertel, "Albert Camus' offener Horizont," Books
Abroad. Spring 1954, p. 184. Mr. Hertel discusses the
Le Mvthe de Sisvphe his Don Juan, his actor and his conquer
or, as well as his artist, all move laterally through dis
tance, time, and life itself. The endless and thus absolute
horizon for them is symbolically the only possible condition
for life. When the horizon gathers itself up, encircles and
rushes in upon them it crushes their lives; the tomb is the
eternal denial of the open horizon which is life itself.
Are not Meursault, Clamence, Daru, the Renegade, Tarrou,
Janine, as well as Jan and his family, in short, all of the
suffering humanity of Camus, deprived of this horizon? They
end up imprisoned behind man-made barriers or behind the
natural barrier of pestilence. For them death is a wall
which bars them from the horizon. They are the antithesis
of Dostoyevski's heroes who move vertically through dis
tance, time and life. For them the wall liberates them from
the horizon, frees their bodies from their souls which are
drawn upward through the world into heaven. For them, death
is an awakening, but for Camus it is the end of life; death
is a wall on the horizon which one may never trespass.
In Saint Exupery the horizon attains great importance
literally and figuratively. For him, as for'Camus, it is
philosophical implications of the open horizon.
199
equated with freedom, happiness and beauty, but within a
different context. The horizon is gained and lost with
every take-off and landing of his airplane. Climbing into
the sky is also the conquest of the horizon which grows with
the increase in altitude: at a great height the horizon
becomes infinite and the aviator includes everything within
his casual glance. As the size of earthly objects and dis
tances decreases so does the elation of Saint Exupery in
crease; he reigns over the world as no king does. Night and
fog reverse his mood; the horizon is denied and with it all
safety; one becomes lost in the air as one becomes lost m
a black sea or in the center of a desert. In Vol de Nuit
and Courrier Sud the pilots are "flying blind"; they can see
no further than the interior of the cockpit within which
they are literally imprisoned, claustrated by the air
through which they move at a vertiginous and deadly speed.
The air, like the sea, has become in this instance an alien
element which threatens life. Symbolically the lost aviator
"drowns" in the air. Both Saint Exupery and Camus thus ex
perienced claustrophobia, but for entirely different reasons
and in entirely different contexts. For Camus it was born
from poverty, sickness, and confinement to a hospital ward,
but for Saint Exupery it was confinement within a cockpit
which at any instant could become a flaming coffin. In the
open sea and at a great altitude the horizon encircles one
with unbroken regularity, giving one a visual centrality;
one appears to be at the center of the earth's surface, at
the center of a saucer, since no object contradicts this
visual deception. For the sailor and aviator alike death is
gravity, and gravity sucks one downward into the grave or
into the waves. The sea for the drowning man, like the
earth for the falling aviator, appears to rush up from all
points of the compass. The victim and his death are sym
bolically at the center of the compass— all forward motion
is denied when the periphery moves onward towards the cen
ter, and the center of a wheel, like the center of a cy
clone, is motionless. The horizon and the joyous movement
towards it thus is denied by a feeling of immobility. On
the open sea, as in the air, the same unbroken horizon
surrounds one regardless of speed because there is no visual
reference point by which one can judge either distance or
speed. One can never look back and claim to have covered a
certain distance; one always is surrounded by the same
horizon regardless of speed. One is always the center of
everything. Immobility and centrality, moreover, are strong
delusions composing claustrophobia, which in this case be-
201
comes paradoxically amplified by a limitless expanse. Iron
ically, it is on the open sea that Camus experiences an
intense claustrophobia within his cabin, which he calls a
"cellule m£tallique."^ This claustrophobia is also closely
akin to his experience in the vast, empty sand dunes where
he felt imprisoned within a "cage of heat and blood." In
both places emptiness and the infinite horizon contrast
violently with the immediate surroundings; the ship's cabin
and the desert heat thus appear to negate the expanse of the
horizon. In both cases, however, this paradoxical fear for
the claustrophobe depends upon the delusion of feeling him
self to be the center of the horizon which moves inward; the
knowledge of a limitless horizon towards which he may move
in any direction is overcome by the imaginary fear of being
swallowed up. The claustrophobe ultimately imagines the
impossibility of all outward movement and activity; he is
afraid of becoming the object of constricting forces. In
death one becomes completely an object, a recipient of
action, time and decay, and no longer an active agent.
Clasutrophobia, then, is psychologically a fear of a certain
form of death, and fear, like all emotions, resists reason.
4Cf. p. 49.
202
Movement and Life
"La Mer au Plus Prfes" contains only one short but in
tense description of claustrophobia which we found necessary
to explain in detail; the rest of this essay abounds in a
joyous liberty of movement in space and time which can
accurately be called rhapsodic; the sotto voce expression
of his earlier period has given way to an uninhibited exul
tation, a complete surrender of the self to the rapture of
a vivid experience. No habitual meditation on death appears
unexpectedly to lend a bitter-sweet taste to this joy or
distract him from it. Correspondingly the poetic prose is
not restrained by a sober style but flows freely, as if by
the force of a kinetic energy which matches the speed of
the ship driven before the wind:
Nous passons les portes d'Hercule, la pointe ou mourut
Antee. Au dela, 1'Ocean est partout, nous doublons d'un
seul bord Horn et Bonne Esperance, les meridiens epou-
sent les latitudes, le Pacifique boit 1'Atlantique.
Aussitot, le cap sur Vancouver, nous fongons lentement
vers les mers du Sud. A quelques encablures, Paques,
la Desolation et les Hebrides defilent en convoi devant
nous. Un matin, brusquement, les mouettes disparais-
sent. Nous sommes loin de toute terre, et seuls, avec
nos voiles et nos machines, (pp. 173-174)
Image follows image as one ocean follows another in rapid,
fleeing succession. By this poetic enumeration Camus is
everywhere at once; he embraces immense distance on a global
scale; time becomes the vehicle of motion. The ocean does
not separate continents but joins them by a common denomina
tor. "Les meridiens epousent les latitudes"— vertical
direction joins lateral direction in an expansive movement;
"Le Pacifique boit 1'Atlantique"~one ocean melts into
another. All movement is correspondingly flowing, not a
series of stops and starts. Likewise, distant places do not
oppose each other but are joined by the forward surge of the
ship, which seems to skim over the waves. Everything is
harmonious and seems almost of one substance; air and water,
like time and distance, interpenetrate each other and seem
to fuse into motion. The islands "defilent en convoi de-
vant nous," and like the passing coastline, serve as land
marks which suggest the continuous and uninhibited speed of
the ship. Claustrophobia is vanquished. Suddenly, in the
last short sentence, the land disappears and with it the
impression of speed, distance, and time; Camus is alone
"avec nos voiles et nos machines." All motion ends with
this sentence, which quite appropriately ends the passage;
on the high seas the lack of any landmark and the unbroken
horizon turn the outward gaze inward; the word "seuls" is a
reversal of the rest of the passage, which evoked solidarity
with nature. The open sea disorients, often leads to
204
mutiny, but not the intelligible coastal waters which join
land to an unknown vastness; the coast for Camus is "soli
darity" but the open sea for him is often "1'horizon sans
hommes" and "le silence et l'angoisse des eaux primitives"
,(p. 175).
Camus describes a sea which is alive and always moving.
The images, like the verbs in the following passage, are
vibrant with energy:
Les^eaux sont lourdes, ecailleuses, couvertes de baves
fraiches. De temps en temps, les vagues jappent contre
l'etrave; une ecume amere et onctueuse, salive des
dieux, coule le long du bois jusque dans l'eau ou elle
s'eparpille en dessins mourants et renaissants, pelage
de quelque vache bleue et blanche, bete fourbue, qui
derive encore longtemps derriere notre sillage. (p. 171)
The wake of the ship is not just a turbulence caused by an
object nor a mechanical reaction, but the movement of life.
The living waters are "scaly" and "covered with fresh
froth" suggesting an animate being, the "hide of some blue
and white cow" which trails the ship like an "exhausted
beast." The ocean is comprehended by a sense of life whose
natural expression is motion; "nous filons sur une mer
claire et musclee" (p. 182). These zoomorphic images are
not just a poetic device but suggest a vast and profound
truth which surpasses the concrete images themselves. For
the animist, everything has life. All natural objects are
so endowed, whether they be streams, mountains or trees.
There is no death, no absence of an animating spirit. For
the primeval soul death was not an absence of life but a
change of living forms. Modern, rational man invented total
death and with it he made dead objects of the natural won
ders which formerly the primitive beheld in awe. The poet,
however, is able to seize intuitively the sense of life
which invests nature. The passage just quoted is really a
poem in prose and appears to corroborate this contention.
Camus thus seeks to evoke an ubiquitous sense of life. What
else suggests it more than the sea? Aphrodite was also born
of this "bitter and unctuous sea-froth," this "saliva of the
gods." The tears of love and the sweat of noon share with
the sea the taste of salt. The sea is the affirmation of
all life as the desert is the affirmation of death, yet both
are wastelands; the sea, the source of all life, is as alien
to man, the land animal, as is the desert. A distinguished
contemporary poet sees a common bond in these opposites:
As places of freedom and solitude the sea and the
desert are symbolically the same. In other respects,
however, they are opposites. For example, the desert
is the dried-up place, i.e. the place where life has
ended, the Omega of temporal existence . . . The sea,
on the other hand, is the Alpha of existence, the
symbol of potentiality.^
The sea and the desert both suggest uninhibited freedom by a
beckoning horizontal expanse. The flat horizon tempts the
forward surge of mind and body which conversely, mountainous
terrain inhibits, suggesting instead vertical ascent often
symbolically associated with exhilaration and triumph;
Mount Olympus and the Mountain of Purgatory depend upon a
common psychological reaction to all mountains; their pyra
midal shape draws optical attention upwards toward the peak
which appears to concentrate the energy of the earth in an
upward thrust into the sky. Visually the earth by its con
centrated mass appears to overcome the sky; when one is
surrounded by mountains the horizon and the sky no longer
dominate as they do on the desert or in the ocean. The
almost total absence of mountains in Camus' work may thus
attest to his love of flat surfaces where the horizon domi
nates .
The force of the air is the wind, which like an invis
ible wing, sweeps over the earth's surface joining sea froth
and desert sand in a perpetual flight to the horizon. Like
5W. H. Auden, The Enchased Flood or the Romantic Icono
graphy of the Sea (London, 1951), p. 27.
207
the sun, the wind is for Camus life and also death. The
furious death-wind tearing through the ruins of Djemila and
half burying the city in a blast of stinging sand becomes
the wind of life and freedom in "La Mer au Plus Pres." The
ocean breeze carries the ship before it as it holds aloft
the sea-gulls:
Depuis le depart, des mouettes suivent notre navire,
sans effort apparent, sans presque battre de l'aile.
Leur belle navigation rectiligne s'appuie a peine sur
la brise. Tout d'un coup, un plouf brutal au niveau
des cuisines jette une alarme gourmande parmi les
oiseaux, saccage leur beau vol et enflamme un brasier
d'ailes blanches. Les mouettes tournoient follement
en tout sens puis, sans rien perdre de leur vitesse,
quittent l’une apres 1'autre la melee pour piquer vers
la mer. Quelques secondes apres, les voila de nouveau
reunis sur l'eau, basse-cour disputeuse que nous lais-
sons derriere nous, nichee au creux de la houle qui
effeuille la manne des detritus. (pp. 171-172)
This is the longest passage in Camus' works devoted to birds
whom he loved so dearly. More significantly, it also joins
the beauty of poetry to the precision of science. The first
two sentences, by the beauty of their description, contain
the ancient longing for freedom and union with the wind.
The sea gulls, by transcending gravity with "no apparent
effort," solicit in man the primeval desire to become one
of them, as if by standing on a wind-blown hill, with his
arms outstretched, he could sprout feathers and feel his
feet leaving the earth. For uncivilized man feathers are
sacred and birds are a reincarnation of the soul. Levita
tion among the Christians, like the Papal dove, express this
same love in a different form; gravity and with it base and
lowly earthly attractions are transcended by spiritual as
cension. By these two sentences Camus attains a psychologi
cal and spiritual universality inherent in all peoples and
times: ancient man considered the flight of birds only as
a spiritual quest of freedom and purity since flight was
denied him. Modern man, however, who has materialized it
in a literal sense, has lost its spiritual and aesthetic
implications; he has taken birds for granted and considers
himself to be the author of flight. Viewed in this light,
the airplane is but an artificial bird. Would man ever have
thought of fabricating the airplane had he never seen a
bird? History suggests that the response would be negative.
The modern sailplane copies quite accurately the anatomy of
the sea gull.
Camus glances upward into the wind filled with life.
The effortless, soaring flight of the gulls which "hardly
flap their wings" and "barely lean on the breeze" suggests
the most beautiful and intriguing conquest of gravity. They
hang in the wind, as if they had fallen upwards into the
sky; the gravity of the earth appears to have reversed
itself. Their "rectilinear navigation," moreover, is a con
cise description which applies only to this particular type
of soaring bird. A short scientific explanation provided
by bird-watchers will help explain the accuracy of this term
and give it more relevancy: the flight of sea gulls depends
almost entirely upon the ocean wind currents; it has been
determined that they can remain aloft effortlessly only by
catching under their wings the wind which is deflected up
wards by the crest of waves. Like the albatross, they
follow the furrows and crests in a straight line. Their
gull-wings were created solely for this purpose because they
pocket in their hollow the ascending air currents. The
flight of soaring land birds, however, is never "rectilin
ear" ; they circle constantly because the rising air currents
on which they ride are radiated from hot surfaces and al
ways rise in a circular motion. Without this sea wind
neither the albatross nor the pelican would be able to take
off because their wings lack the muscular strength to do so;
like sailing ships, they can also become becalmed. In such
a situation kind sailors would often rescue them by carrying
them up to the crow's nest from whence these birds could
spread their wings and fly. The grotesqueness of the alba
tross becalmed at sea or scarcely able to move on land
210
became for Baudelaire a poetic image; the earth for this
bird, like the poet, is an alien element, but aloft it
becomes a living union of the sea and the wind. Its "recti
linear navigation" for the sailor indicates the presence of
land and hope. For Coleridge the killing of the albatross
may have had a literal as well as allegorical meaning;** the
sailor who killed it also killed the wind and remained
becalmed far out at sea where no albatross could guide his
landward course.
The first two sentences of the preceding passage
describe visual direction upwards while the remainder
describes a descent, a fluctuation between sky and earth so
characteristic of Camus' essays and characters. Once soar
ing, as if motionless, the gulls suddenly plummet, "set
ablaze a brasier of white wings" whose movement flickers in
the sunlight. The poetic elevation of the beginning of the
passage and near the end the picturesque and precise evoca
tion of the "quarrelsome farm-yard . . . nesting in the
^Germaine Bree attaches the allegorical meaning of this
act to the scene of the shooting in L1Etranaer:
Meursault's "crime" recalls that of Coleridge's Ancient
Mariner. Like the ancient mariner, Meursault has trans
gressed a natural, not a human law. Eventually, what
frees Meursault (as it frees the ancient mariner) is the
awareness of the beauty, and therefore, the sacredness of
all living things. (Camus. p. 112, note.)
211
hollow of the swell" reveals a great range of tone and
feeling.
Like all true artists, Camus possessed a sharpened
perception which revealed a beauty of which most people
would remain unconscious. In this respect the artist, like
the scientist, commands a perception which appears clair
voyant and simple: both are capable of remarking the ob
vious which when revealed to the beholder once unaware of
it, strikes him with great force. In this sense, a discov
ery, like the revelation of truth, resounds with the beauty
of simplicity, and reaches a note of intensity and univer
sality. Such is true of the following:
La nuit ne tombe pas sur la mer. Du fond des eaux,
cju'un soleil deja noye noircit peu a peu de ses cendres
epaisses, elle monte au contraire vers le ciel encore
pale. (p. 176)
These two short sentences do not contain the beauty of
ornamentation, rather that of a revelation: anyone who has
sailed across the ocean is obliged to ask himself "Why
didn't I notice this striking effect of light?"
The Sea and Liebestod
The essay ends in a dialogue with the sea, a dialogue
of life with death which attains the pure expression of
lyric poetry:
212
Certaines nuits dont la douceur se prolonge, oui,
cela aide k mourir de savoir qu'elles reviendront apres
nous sur la terre et la mer. Grande mer, toujours
labouree, toujours vierge, ma religion avec la nuit!
Elle nous lave et nous rassasie dans ses sillons
steriles, elle nous libere et nous tient debout. A
chaque vague, une promesse toujours la meme. Que dit
la vague? Si je devais mourir, entoure de montagnes
froides, ignore du monde, renie par les miens, a bout
de forces enfin, la mer, au dernier moment, emplirait
ma cellule, viendrait me soutenir au dessus de moi-meme
et m'aider a mourir sans haine. (pp. 187-188)
Here night does not oppose the brevity of man's days
but envelops and absorbs him by the immensity of time and
space. Night on the sea is a matrix from which Camus be
comes momentarily separated by life but towards which he
returns upon death, and death by the nocturnal sea comes as
a gentle certainty which relieves the uncertainty and
anguish of man's life. This first sentence reveals an
"easeful death" which is not really a death at all but an
absorption of the self by nature. Pantheistic union has
become absolute: Camus appears to have dissolved his sub
stance in the immensity of the sea and of night, as if by
losing his individual life he now shares that of an eternal
nature. His pantheism almost borders upon mysticism; he
gives up his small life to gain a greater one, that of
nature itself which "would sustain [him] above [himself] and
help [him] die without hatred." Although he covets not the
Christian Kingdom of Heaven, the kingdom of nature holds for
him a mystic love; Camus does not transcend the senses to
rise toward a fleshless heaven; rather, he transcends by
means of them into the eternity of the sea and of the night.
By going one step further, one could suggest that his loves
and passions would become those of the elements; pantheism,
like mysticism, also alludes to a transformation of the
self. The intensity of the love he bears for this nature
underlies much of his philosophical and religious thought.
Like a poet, Camus is a lover, and it is this love which
transforms him and which he projects upon the natural world.
As in "Noces a Tipasa," love binds him to the earth by a
spiritual and physical union; two substances, like two
minds, become one. The bitter afterthought of an indiffer
ent nature which would repudiate his love does not proceed
from his ecstasy, as it does in "Noces a Tipasa," to become
a painful consciousness of death. Love and death are not
in opposition as they are in his previous essays; Camus has
created in this passage a moving Liebestod. Its form bears
a certain similarity to Ophelia's Liebestod in Hamletr death
by drowning is gentle and neither violent nor painful.
The dark waters of night which "would fill [his] cell"
no longer terrify him but pacify his anguish. The intensity
214
of his love is so great that it transcends his innate claus
trophobia. In no other work does Camus react in this way to
such a dreaded fear. His love thus suggests an intensity
which cannot be found elsewhere. His hope of "dying without
hatred" reveals in him a lover, not a hater. In all of his
works hatred, whether it be masked by a ritual indifference
as in L1Etrancer or brutally exposed as in "Le Renegat," is
always portrayed as a spiritual degradation. The deaths of
Meursault, Tarrou, like the impending murder of Daru, are
redeemed by love and marred by no spirit of vengeance. The
justification of hatred by vengeance, moreover, is a senti
ment not only alien to his temperament but one which he
portrays as particularly degrading and vicious. Camus,
moreover, never was moved by a spirit of righteous vengeance
in spite of the injustices done against him in Algeria and
later in France. "Mourir sans haine" thus reveals an under
lying consistency in all his works.
The ancient rite of ablution in the sea reappears in
its most intense form in the second and third sentences
which become the ecstatic crescendo of the passage. The
"great sea, always plowed, always virgin" with its "sterile
furrows" uses fertility images to describe man's transitory
passage over it and his inability to violate its sanctity.
Likewise, man who is washed and satiated in the "furrows"
is compared to a seed, and like a seed, he is covered over
by an immensity to which he affixes himself and from which
he will blossom "upright." His "religion with the night,"
the dark sea, encloses him like a womb and also like a tomb;
the cradle and the grave are united by an ancient image.7
The womb symbol long precedes Freudian psychology. Ophelia,
who drowns under similar circumstances, loses her rational
ity and returns to the mentality of a small child; her
drowning in the stream could be interpreted by Freudians as
an unconscious death-wish for reunion with a dead mother as
well as with a dead father. Likewise, the ancient Buddhist
saying, "The dewdrop falls into the shining sea," contains
a similar image. The dewdrop represents the individual and
the sea represents the cosmos towards which he returns and
in which he will dissolve upon death. The finite particle
and the infinite expanse share a concise explanation of the
death of Fabien the aviator in Vol de Nuit by Saint Exupery.
^"L1ocean, double symbole, est a la fois le lieu de
11aneantissement et de la reconciliation. II apaise, h. sa
maniere, la soif puissante des ames vouees au mepris
d'elles-memes et des autres, la soif de ne plus etre" (L1Hom
me Revolte, p. 111).
216
The natural setting and mood are almost identical to Camus'
use of them in this passage. The aviator is lost in dense
clouds at night and is running out of fuel. He flies up
above them and into the starlight under which his tiny
airplane glistens briefly. Through a hole in the clouds he
sees the reflected light of the ocean. He knows that he is
doomed. The motor fails, and he falls to his death like a
"dewdrop."
Alone, on the high seas, "surrounded by cold mountains,
unknown to the world, and "forsaken by his loved ones" Camus,
like Fabien, experiences a solitude joined to solidarity.
"Solitaire" and "solidaire," key words not expressed here
but representative of his thinking, form a felicitous liai
son as they do in the last page of L'Etranaer. Again, Camus
reflects a mood shared by Thomas Wolfe:
He was washed in the great river of night, in the Ganges
tides of redemption . . . a God and a grain of dust, the
brother of eternal beauty and the son of death— alone,
alone.8
"Solitary" and "solidarity," in Camus as in Wolfe, appear
joined in a union which touches upon a mystic love and such
a love has its paradoxes; one feels alone and yet not alone
®Cf. p. 165, note 5.
at the same time; one senses solidarity and its absence
simultaneously in the same way. Such a love both drains and
m
fills; one experiences the curious empty resonance of the
lover. The image of the beloved surrounds and sustains him,
yet remains always beyond his grasp; he is as if possessed.
Camus loves the sea as Tristan loves Isolde; the love of the
sea and romantic love have always been closely allied: both
possess and engulf the lover and both are consummated in a
Liebestod. The subjective self dies so that it may be re
born to live again in the beloved; death becomes a union and
not a separation, for in life such a love feeds upon ab
sence and the hope of reunion which extend infinitely into
the future; the endless horizon of the sea is like the
future for the lover. Death is a denial of the future and
of this love, yet also it is a consummation of both; the
future becomes the present when death joins Tristan and
Isolde. Death by love and death by the sea are but differ
ent forms of drowning; in both cases the subjective self is
engulfed and absorbed by the image of the beloved. Like the
sea, such a love is fathomless, since the beloved does not
represent a restricting force in the eyes of the lover but
a liberation of his soul; paradoxically he feels most free
when he is swallowed up by his love; Tristan in his madness
218
feels free upon making himself a slave of love. Likewise
Camus, when evoking his drowning in the ship's cabin, feels
strangely buoyant; the sea, like love, will "sustain" him
"above himself." Death by drowning, like a romantic fatal
ity, is thus expressed in the form of a paradox.
Psychologically the nocturnal sea appears to replace
for Camus a romantic love which most writers would lavish
upon the beloved. In fact, in all of Camus' works, his
passionate love of nature in its most minute and sensitive
detail appears to outweigh his rather summary treatment of
romantic love. In L'Etranaer Meursault's attraction for
Marie is casual; she has become for him a part of the nat
ural setting of the sea, the sun and the beach to which he
devotes much more attention. The deprivation of natural
beauty coincides with the deprivation of love as it also
does in La Peste. In this novel, however, Rambert refuses
to leave the pestilential city and rejoin his beloved when
he has the opportunity to do so; he sacrifices romantic love
for his commitment to suffering humanity as Camus did during
the war. Jan's love for Maria in Le Malentendu is likewise
sacrificed for his false commitment to his mother. Jonas
by his futile obsession becomes incapable of loving his
wife. Death frustrates Caligula's incestuous love for his
sister Drusilla. Romantic love in all Camus' works, then,
is frustrated by an impasse or by indifference. In this
respect "La Femme Adult&re" is the most significant. In
this work alone a character consciously prefers the love of
nature to that of a person.
CHAPTER XVII
EROTICISM AND NATURE
Camus' habitual description of the sea and the earth
in anthropomorphic imagery frequently has erotic undertones.
In "L'Ironie" death, resentment and sorrow dominate. One
short clause alone alludes to a feminine fertility symbol
which is contained in the sea: "— the beautiful transparent
sun" falls on the "bay trembling with light, like a humid
lip" (p. 54). In yoces this image is amplified: "the thick
plants with the violet, yellow and red flowers descend
towards the first rocks which the sea sucks with a noise of
kissing."^- Erotic imagery reaches its most intense expres
sion in the life-giving rain:
A la meme epoque pourtant, les caroubiers mettent une
odeur d'amour sur toute 1'Algerie. Le soir ou apres la
pluie, la terre entiere, son ventre mouille d'une semence
au par furn d1amande amere, repose pour s'etre donnee tout
l'ete au soleil.^
^"Noces c i Tipasa," p. 15.
^"L'Ete £ Alger," p. 70. Camus evoked this image with
220
221
In this passage eroticism and the fertility of the earth are
inextricably intertwined. Like a mistress, the earth gives
itself to the sky, whose rain joins both in a symbolic act
3
of fertility. The desert, like a "beloved woman" becomes
alive under the rain and gives birth to the flowers Camus
loved so much. Accordingly, anthropocentric imagery reaches
a polarity in the erotic description quoted above; the land
scape appears invested with a human life. Human fertility
is attached to the natural cycle; the sky embraces the
mother earth as man embraces woman and thus the world is
symbolically comprehended as an extension of his physical
functions. Again the basis of this description springs from
Greek mythology; the sun and the sky gods are masculine and
the earth goddesses are feminine. The weather gods ferti
lize the earth but do not bear life, and likewise in violent
a still more intense eroticism in the Carnets (1937-1939)
shortly before writing Noces; "Dans le chemin de Sidi-
Brahim, aprfes la pluie, l'odeur d'amourdescend des carou-
liers, lourde et oppressante, pesant de tout son poids
d'eau. Puis le soleil pompant toute l'eau, dans les cou-
leurs k nouveau eclatantes, l'odeur d1amour devient legere,
h peine sensible aux narines. Et c'est comme une maitresses
avec qui l'on sort dans la rue, aprfes tout un aprfes-midi
4touffant, et qui vous regarde, epaule contre epaule, parmi
les lumiferes et la foule." (p. 91)
3"Guide pour les Villes Sans Passe," p. 96.
222
moods, they destroy its fertility by floods and droughts.
In almost all ancient cultures this masculine-feminine
duality is identical and is of particular relevance to
Camus' attitude towards nature; like the ancient weather
gods, his sun and sky exert a masculine influence upon the
mother earth; they dominate and the earth submits whether
their moods be harsh or tender. Characteristically he
unites the sky and the sun to the earth by metaphors of
liquidity; sunlight.flows or falls down upon the earth like
rain. He alludes to the masculinity of these elements by
retaining them in their ancient context as weather gods.
In northern countries the sun is universally held to be a
fructifier, but in southern latitudes it often becomes a
death-god. Considered in this light, the desert then rep
resents for Camus a femininity which has been killed by an
overbearing masculine force. As a result, he refers to the
sun and the atmosphere in non-human terms because they deny
life. Freudian psychology, however, might claim that Camus'
dead father whom he never knew reappears in the sun. The
fact that he refuses to personify it or to refer to it in
anthropomorphic images seems to make it appear as strange
and distant as his dead father. The opposite treatment of
the sea and the earth which would correspond to the
predominantly maternal influence exerted on him might appear
to lend credence to such a theory. Mr. Viggiani considers
that "the mother, the absent or dead father who appears in
9
a variety of disguises, and the son constitute the matrix of
4
Camus' fictional world," Mr. Viggiani provides an inter
esting explanation of L'Etranaer bv Freudian arialysis. He
claims, however, that the masculine-feminine duality in this
work was created by an "unconscious association" (p. 874)
and not by a conscious artistic effort. Such a conclusion,
typical of a Freudian psychology, is essentially a denial
of aesthetic creation; the artist is one who renders the
unconscious comprehensible, and therefore he is necessarily
objective; the artist may draw from his unconscious, but
must never be possessed by it or his art would cease to
exist. In this respect, Freudian analysis implies incompe
tency on the part of the artist by suggesting that he is
unaware of the effect he has created. His art is viewed as
if it were that of a child. Such a condescending and pa
tronizing attitude, moreover, ignores the intentions of the
artist and thereby is offensive to him. This is above all
^"Camus' L1 Etranaer.1 1 PMIA. 71:873, 1956.
224
true in Camus' fiction. Few modern novels appear as art
fully and as consciously composed as L'Etranaer. Camus
loved and understood Greek mythology, which reappears in a
modern guise in his works; his creation springs from an
ancient and universal source and not from unconscious suf
fering. He does, however, exploit personal experience by
elevating it to a meaningful universality; like all artists,
he transcends experience by using it, not by submitting to
c
it.
Camus, in discussing Greece and Rome in his Carnets.
mentions "Arne grecque et intelligence romaine."5 Such a
term might easily apply to himself as well. His pantheistic
love of nature is Greek, yet this love is balanced by a
Roman intelligence. He observes himself, he takes his
pulse, not because of self-infatuation but in order to
arrive at a greater understanding. He is aware that his
love of nature often overpowers his love of humanity:
"Jeune, on adhere mieux k un paysage qu'a un homme" (p. 48).
He is likewise aware that identification of the self with
an indifferent natural world can lead to a loss of human
personality: "Et moi je me sens partout semblable k cette
5Carnets. 1935-1937, p. 101.
image inhumaine duraonde qui est ma propre vie."6 This last
quotation, which Camus wrote as a youth, bears particular
relevance to his way of feeling and thus to his fictional
works. Before a hostile or "inhuman" landscape he feels
"inhuman." He is aware that at moments he unconsciously
shares its nature, because its influence has overpowered
him. Meursault and the Renegade thus surrender their
humanity to the sun which drives them to murder. The mute
Berber in "L'Hote" has long since surrendered to the silent
desolation of the desert. Clamence.and Jan's mother surren
der to the cold and dark cities of Europe, as does Cottard
in La Peste to evil and corruption in a pestilential city.
Beautiful landscapes correspondingly restore to Camus his
sense of humanity. He almost always describes them in
anthropomorphic imagery. Since the erotic landscape is the
most anthropocentric of all, it also elicits a sentiment of
solidarity between man and nature. This is the basis for
"La Femme Adultere"; Janine surrenders herself to the mascu
line gods of the sky and of the night which replace the
tired and indifferent human love of her husband.
6Carnets. 1937-1939, p. 81
226
I
In summarizing Camus' attitude toward nature as seen in
his essays and his notebooks, we must assert the magnitude
of their effect on European readers. An African landscape
dazzles in the vibrancy of his original and sincere por
trayal. Algeria the homeland not only captivates the reader
in its own right but reveals the depth and universality of
a great man of our time. Not only Europeans, but all peo
ples understand through him a country which previously had
been popularized only by the foreign visitor. Like Saint-
John Perse, Camus brought to French readers new landscapes
and a fresh point of view. Like him, Camus also attained
universality by the directness of truth and beauty. Few
writers of nature have ever evoked so successfully such
simple landscapes, and even fewer have succeeded in describ
ing them with such an infinite variety. In his works they
appear in a magnitude which binds the particular to the
universal, the incident to the general activity of men.
Although Camus1 intense and loyal commitment to the
world of men has often been praised, too little has been
said about his other equally loyal commitment to the world
of nature. He was possessed equally by two loves which
often appear to oppose each other, yet which really support
each other; both loves spring from a common loyalty to the
world. The sacrifice of one for the other, moreover, would
lead ultimately to a betrayal of both; man and the natural
world must exist together or not at all. Camus restores to
our time the ancient wisdom of the Greeks which now more
than ever is of great relevance. He is the mediator between
the changing man-made world and the eternal world of nature;
he balances historical and social processes which seek har
mony between man and the cosmos. Like many past writers,
he cautions against modern man's involvement with himself
in a world of his own making, yet he does so in an original
manner which is poetic in its form. The splendor of the
natural world stands outside of history, outside of progress
and beyond time; by betraying its permanence man also be
trays his own; he risks living blindly within himself,
subject only to his own whims. As wars continue to replace
pestilence and cities devour the countryside at a faster
rate, Camus' concern becomes more timely; ultimately man
may become so burdened by the oppressive weight of his very
numbers that he will be obliged to contemplate old paintings
of landscapes should he want to behold streams, forests and
meadows under a clear, smokeless sky. The day may come
when steel, concrete and asphalt will so cover the globe
that a grove of trees will draw people like a shrine. In
the present century man stands on the peak of Everest and
descends to the bottom of the ocean; he can claim that his
feet have straddled every square foot of the earth's sur
face; he has forgotten, however, that his accomplishment
threatens to make a triviality of the earth's secrets and
mysteries. Nature will be known by man, and once known by
him, it will soon become his household slave.
As the mathematics of Malthus cautioned man against the
dangers of his increment, so then does Camus' love of nature
caution against man's infatuation with himself. If it may
be said that Camus knew the pain of a great love for nature,
then it must also be said that he shares this love with a
humanity which needs it.
His love of nature is part of his innermost being; he
neither separates it from himself by making of it an object
to be possessed and exploited nor does he enjoy it as a
passing experience. His landscapes are permanent and con
stitute his most fundamental relationships to the world. He
is as loyal to them as he is to his own origins; he never
seeks the thrill of a natural beauty alien to the one he has
already known; in fact, his fiction shows us a man who is
looking for a lost landscape which he bears within himself
like a memory. Meursault, Tarrou, and Maria will all remain
229
faithful to the landscapes of their innocence and their
7
happiness. They never grow weary of the one eternal land
scape of which they feel instinctively a part and which is
the strength of their being. The joyous union of sand, sea
and sun never fails to regenerate them, restore their tran
quillity in times of suffering, or to return to them the
"permanence which constitutes their being." Their single
landscape is the source of their past, their memory and
also the promise of their future.
7
"Camus' imagery is always drawn from the ruins of
Tipasa, sun on rock, or the Mediterranean, the sea. When
removed from his element, visiting Prague or the Scandina
vian countries, Camus becomes lost, bewildered. Whereas
Gide experiences everything in the plural, Camus experiences
things in the singular. His solar experience is one of
destitution and denudation. His is a 'proletarian1 rela
tionship to the world, the relationship of someone who has
nothing and whose contact with objects is'not expressed in
terms of having. Camus1 domain is being ..." (Serge
Dubrovsky, "The Ethics of Albert Camus," translated by
Sandra Mueller and Jean-Marc Vary, Preuves. 16:45, October
1960.
PART II
CHAPTER XVIII
L'ETRANGER: PATRICE MEURSAULT,
A PROTOTYPE
Few modern novels have enjoyed such a meteoric and
permanent success as L'Etranoer. Consequently analyses and
interpretations have followed at a rate which has not de
clined since the first publication. The role of nature has
therefore been quite thoroughly discussed by Camus scholars.
i
We are thus obliged to consider each important study and
i
!
also tp relate divergent conclusions.
Since L1Etranoer was Camus' first successful work which
brought him fame, his previous novelistic endeavors are
relevant and will help clarify certain subjects of argumen
tation in this novel. Whi^le Camus was completing his
License at the age of twenty-two he was also undertaking the
i
composition of his first flovel La Vie Heureuse. His person
al experiences enter direptly into this unpublished work, as
!
well as the philosophical themes which he exposed in his
i
thesis. His early life at Belcourt, his mother, his first
231
232
travels abroad, poverty, sickness, philosophy and love of
nature all become subjects, and to a certain degree, appear
to compete for attention. Like many burgeoning writers, he
sought to say too much at one time; he had not yet found his
natural pace. During the course of the writing, La vie Heu-
reuse became La Mort Heureuse. which still remains an unpub
lished manuscript to which Germaine Bree had access. Many
of its themes are developed successfully in later works.^
One could say that the novel represents an unhappy ensemble
composed of brilliant fragments, and it is these fragments
which Camus will incorporate successfuly in later works.
2
Patrice Mersault, the protagonist of La Mort Heureuse.
l"To say that this first proliferation of La Vie Heu
reuse contained in embryo all Camus' future work would be
an exaggeration, but it does constitute a matrix where, in
themes at least, his future works originated. His first
three published works were nourished by La Vie Heureuse; two
of its themes, the 'world of poverty'— with the figure of
his mother at the center— and the beauty of North Africa,
were to find expression in two books of personal essays,
L'Envers et L'Endroit and HaQBfl., and Meursault, the hero of
the novel L1Etranoer. was a new and lesser role for the
Mersault of La Vie Heureuse though with one exception these
two heroes actually show little resemblance." (Germaine
Bree, Camus, p. 64.)
^Did Camus intend this name to suggest mer + sauter?
In none of his writings does he discuss the latent meanings
of the names of his characters. Readers and critics are
obliged to guess. In L'Etranoer does the name Meursault
suggest meurt + sauter?
233
like his successor in L1Etranger. is a poor office worker in
Algiers. Unlike him, however, Patrice deliberately plots
the murder of a certain Zagreus, which he accomplishes in
cold blood. The latter is a personification of all the
forces which prevent human integration within the natural
world. He embodies physical dissolution and an antipathy
to the life of the senses. He represents a crippling force
because he himself is crippled, "infirme-ampute des deux
* 3
jambes— paralyse d'un cote." In short, he is the enemy
against which Camus was fighting desperately at the time he
was composing the novel— disease and the incapacity to enjoy
the beauties of nature. Camus' own desperate struggle and
love of life is reflected in the following passage:
On m'aide a faire mes besoins. On me lave. On
m'essuie. Je suis a peu pres sourd. Eh bien, je ne
ferai jamais un geste pour abreger une vie a laquelle
je crois tant. J1accepterais pire encore. D'etre
aveugle et sans aucune sensibilite— d'etre muet et
sans contact avec 1'exterieur-pourvu seulement que je
sente en moi cette flamme sombre qui est en moi vivant—
remerciant encore la vie pour m'avoir permis de bru-
ler. (p. 94)
The revulsion of sensorial deprivation is described ironi-
^Carnets (1937-1939), p. 94. Embryonic sketches of
most of his later publications also appear in this early
part of the Carnets. Certain passages appear almost intact
even in La Chute.
cally in the following passage, also taken from the Carnets I
and written during the same period:
L*aveugle qui sort la nuit entre une heure et quatre
heures avec un autre ami aveugle. Parce qu111s sont
surs de ne rencontrer personne dans les rues. S1ils
rencontrent un reverb&re, ils peuvent rire & leur aise.
Ils rient. Tandis que le jour, il y a la pitie qui les
emp&che de rire.
Ecrire, dit cet aveugle. Mais ga n'interesse per
sonne. Ce qui interesse dans un livre, c'est la marque
d'une existence pathetique. Et nos vies ne sont jamais
pathetiques. (pp. 117-118)
The depressing experience of Prague first described in j
L'Envers et L'Endroit reappears in La Mort Heureuse. but is
eliminated in L'Etranoer. whose "decor" is entirely Alger
ian. This transposition reveals an aesthetic process typi
cal of Camus: the death of the man in the hotel in Prague
4
which so moved him in the essay reappears in a slightly
changed but less convincing form in La Mort Heureuse. The
4"Dans le hall, le personnel chuchotait. Je montai
rapidement les etages pour me trouver plus vite en face de
ce que j'attendais. C'etais bien cela. La porte de la
chambre etait a demi ouverte, de sorte que l'on voyait
seulement un grand mur peint en bleu. Mais la lumi&re sourde
dont j1ai parle plus haut projetait sur cet ecran 11 ombre
d'un mort etendu sur le lit et celle d'un policier montant
la garde devant le corps. Les deux ombres se coupaient a
angle droit. Cette lumi&re me bouleversa. Elle etait
authentique, une vraie lumiere de vie, d'apres-midi de vie,
une lumiere qui fait qu'on s'apergoit qu'on vit." (pp. 91-
93)
235
same theme has not disappeared, however, hut becomes central
to Le Malentendu: Jan, who meets his doom in his mother's |
inn, appears to descend from the nameless corpse in the ;
essay. A complete and separate fiction has thus evolved
slowly from a poignant personal experience through several
i
preceding works.
j
Money plays a dominant role in the life of Patrice '
Mersault who murders for it so that he can lift himself out j
of the squalor of poverty:
Et le temps, c'est le besoin d'argent qui nous le
vole. Le temps s'achete. Tout s'achfete. Etre riche,
c'est avoir du temps pour etre heureux quand on est j
digne de l'etre.
Money, then, can liberate Patrice from the grinding routine !
of office work and allow him to enjoy the freedom of the
|
beaches. Considering Camus' own poverty, it is surprising
that this theme appears so rarely. In Le Malentendu. how
ever, murder for money again becomes central. In both works
wealth is not desired as a thing in itself or as a means to
power but as an avenue of escape into the world of nature.
The philosophical and metaphysical implications of
suicide are discussed at great length in Le Mvthe de Sisv-
5Carnets. p. 97.
236
phe. This theme enters indirectly into almost all of Camus1
larger works in which the hero appears marked for death.
Meursault, in L*Stranger appears so indifferent to the
threat of imminent death that one could say he lets himself
be killed in a ritualistic sacrifice. Nancy Minnigoe, the
protagonist of Requiem pour une Nonne.6 desires a death
which will relieve her anguish. By making his imperial
authority a subject of hatred and fear, Caligula knows that
he will be murdered. Kalieyev in Les Justes feels justified
in assassinating the Czar only if he knows that his own life
will also be forfeited— a life for a life. The missionary
in "Le Renegat" secretly covets martyrdom as a means to
power but is instead mutilated. Tarrou in La Peste as well
as Jan in Le Malentendu appear to be vaguely conscious of
courting their own deaths. By his mad and desperate acts
I
Cottard in La Peste deliberately attempts to provoke his
death at the hands of the police. Diego in L'Etat de Sifege
willingly offers to sacrifice himself to the plague. Sui
cide is thus called upon indirectly in these works; the
®M. E, Coindreau translated the novel by Faulkner which
Camus adapted for the stage. Camus also wrote a very pene
trating and profound preface for this adaptation.
Camus draws its \
rible punishment;
537
protagonist provokes the murderous instincts of others who
immolate him. Again the Greek mythology which so inspired
igor from a self-sacrifice aware of hor-
both Prometheus and Sisyphus also provoked
their own eternal suffering.
In almost all of the works mentioned above, suicidal
tendencies are balanced by a profound love of nature which
intervenes and acts as a restraining force to bind the pro
tagonist to life; love of nature becomes an expression of
the love of life itself. Patrice Mersault, like his name
sake in L1Etranaer. draws his inner resources from the love
!
of nature during moments of extreme anguish. Kalieyev in
his lucid desperation evokes the warm summer sunshine which
will someday relijeve the bleakness of the Russian winter.
Diego awaits the sea breeze which will blow away the plague,
and Tarrou remembers the beaches of Oran where he was happy.
The Renegade implores the heavens for the assuaging rain of
his native Auvergne. Jan, however, is unaware of his im
pending doom and therefore does not evoke past experiences
of nature which Would relieve his anxiety about death. By
j
entering the darl^ claustrated world of his mother he appears
to have voluntarily forsaken his past love of nature.
Caligula, in his lucid madness, evokes the landscapes of
TJd
Nocea before Scipion: love of nature in these works, then,
assuages personal grief but still remains impotent before
*
the dark urge of self-destruction.
As in L'Etranaer. the protagonist reaches self-under
standing by experiencing the changing moods of the solar
day; the blinding madness of noon cedes to the placid wisdan
of night. Camus' protagonists are separated from the nat
ural world by suffering and exile but return to it with a
new self-awareness. The cycle of the solar day also corres-
ponds to different levels of lucidity. Patrice Mersault:s
death is a symbolic reintegration within the cosmos. By
* 7
"The pattern followed seems, to have been furnished in
part by Plotinus. For Plotinus, all beings have fallen fron
a state of participation in the source of all being, and are
attempting through various stages of participation to returr
to this source. Mersault seems to go through the three es
sential stages of the procession from the physical to the
intellectual and the spiritual levels of awareness." (Ger
maine Bree, Camus. p. 67.) Camus thoroughly understood
Plotinus, whom he examined in his thesis. These three le
vels of awareness appear in La Vida es Sueno by Calderon.
In this play, Segismundo, like Meursault, progresses from a
low level of awareness to wisdom and spiritual awareness.
Both experience liberty and claustration in similar manner.
Although Camus never mentions this play in his Carnets. he
showed his love of Calderon by adapting this play as well
as La Devocion a La Cruz for the French stage. It is doubt
ful if Calderon inspired L1Etranaer. Plotinus, however,
may have inspired both authors independently of each other.
239
0
his "descents vers le soleil et la mort" death is joined
9
to the love of nature. This poetic image also reveals
undertones of Hellenic religion and philosophy; at his death
man symbolically returns to the source of all life and ener
gy in the universe. Many years later Camus again took up
jthis solar theme in "Le Ren£gat."
!
i
L1Etranoer— Who Is Meursault?
In the essays Camus speaks to the reader directly; his
jprose uses a carefully balanced and modulated rhetoric whicli
!
often reaches poetic elevation. Camus the man reveals him
self to the reader. Such is not the case in his novels; he
addresses us indirectly through a character who narrates the
jentire story. The first person acquires autonomy and auto-
i
nomy gives life and credibility to fictional characters.
The entire narration is contained in this character. Camus
'so successfully disguises himself in this first person that
at times he appears completely hidden. He thinks, feels
!
8Caraftfca> p- 64-
i
®"For what is it to die but to stand naked in the wind
and to melt into the sun?" (Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet, p.
81.) Although Camus never knew this poet, a close similar
ity of feeling and understanding binds them. Many of Camus'
poetic images as well as viewpoints correspond directly to
those of Gibran.
and lives vicariously through this magical "I" to such a
degree that he appears to touch through another's fingertips
and thinks with another1s thoughts. The author has melted
into the character which he presents us. Few narrative
forms challenge a novelist's ability more than this. Meur
sault as a first person is a violent rupture from the care
fully postured and self-infatuated "I" of the Romantics.
In a word, Camus was a master of mimicry. This talent can
not be underestimated, since his short stories and novels
exploit it so profoundly. The "I" of Meursault, moreover,
is as different from that of Clamence or the Renegade as
night is from day; each one of Camus' first persons is com
pletely autonomous and unrelated to the other. The resul
tant transposition of omniscience from the author to his
character necessitates a careful and hesitant scrutiny by
the reader who is thus obliged to search for the author1s
intentions indirectly through his creation rather than
directly from the author himself. As a result the meaning
of the work is often hotly disputed. This is the case of
L'Etranoer.
This recit is neither a dramatic monologue nor a con
fession, two genres which dominated most narrations in the
first person during the last century. Camus' theatrical
talent of mimicry has created the most untheatrical of
characters who does not appear to descend from these two
traditional genres. Meursault thus came as a surprise to
the average French reader. The traditional "I" in most
narrations appeared as a thinly disguised author who often
sought to impress by his eloquence, reason and rhetoric.
Frequently.this style ended in verbal gymnastics and a self-
conscious grimacing before the reader. The traditional "I"
had become a literary tradition and as such was often di
vorced from reality. Meursault, who never seeks to impress
by his eloquence and rhetoric, is thus "a-literary." He
comes alive directly to the reader through his own person
ality and is not filtered through the omniscience of the
author. Camus' style in this masterpiece could thus be
called truly transparent and perhaps "porous," to use the
language of Sartre. This style, so brilliantly originated
in Diderot's Contes Philosophiques in the eighteenth cen
tury, has thus been taken up again in the twentieth and
exploited in a modern context.
Since the natural world is seen entirely through the
eyes of Meursault, it is therefore obligatory to consider
him as a person. The role nature plays in his life is con
sequently seen indirectly. This presents problems of
242
interpretation which have continued to fascinate critics and
scholars since the first publication of the novel. Recent
scholarly studies show that certain problems have multi
plied; posterity has not yet fixed interpretation in a defi
nite mold. Although some may claim that this division of
thought alludes to ambiguity on the part of the author, it
also testifies to the undying interest and continued need
for reinterpretation always accorded to a great work of art.
Although Le Mvthe de Sisvohe is generally conceded by
most scholars to be a philosophical explanation of L1Etran-
ger. it is not the only one. This philosophical work out
lines a Meursault from an abstract and theoretical point of
view rather than from social, economic or literary consider-
10
ations. The Mvthe de Sisvohe. moreover, was born from
personal experience rather than from abstractions and the
desire to create a coherent and unified system. Concrete
images rather than abstract symbols form the basis of ex
perience which is then interpreted intuitively rather than
analytically in this work. The Carnets show that L*Etranoer
10"In comparison with traditional philosophers, Camus
travels light; he uses only the amount of philosophy he can
live with, and he lives with only the philosophy which can
be so used. All else is secondary." (Hanna, The Lvrical
Existentialists. p. 211.)
243
was not composed from an ideological skeleton but was as
sembled from hundreds of little scenes and images. Meta
phors, sentences and paragraphs of separate little incidents
which later reappear intact in this novel were written many
years before Camus had yet conceived of a novelistic scaf
folding. Certain sections of L1Envers et L'Endroit and
Noces likewise reappear in this fashion. L'Etranger. then,
unifies these particles of past experience into a coherent
whole which becomes a fictional world. His subsequent
novels are likewise assembled from humble origins and placed
within the framework of an aesthetic whole. His comments
upon L1Etranoer are disarmingly simple but reveal his most
profound intentions:
Meursault pour moi n'est done pas une epave, mais un
homme pauvre et un amoureux du soleil qui ne laisse pas
d'ombres. Loin qui'il soit prive de toute sensibilite,
une passion profonde, parce que tacite, l'anime, la
passion de l'absolu et de la verite. II s'agit d'une
verite encore negative, la verite d'etre et de sentir,
mais par laquelle nulle conquete sur le monde ne sera
jamais possible.^
What strikes the reader most directly in L1Etranger
Preface of L'Etranger (Gallimard, 1955), p. ii. Ger
maine Bree interprets this quotation as an explanation of
Meursault's silence: "That is why, until the very end,
Meursault is the man who answers but never asks a question,
and all his answers alarm a society which cannot bear to
look at the truth." (Camus. p. Ill)
244
after reading the Bsaavs is the tone of Meursault, who nar
rates his fate in such flat and unadorned little sentences
composed of equally short monosyllabic words. The reader
thus has the curious sensation that the style no longer
forces him to reach up to the lofty and eloquent heights of
a self-conscious prose but instead to patronize a supposedly
clumsy and blunt a-literary style. Such a reaction of con
descension is extremely deceptive, and, in a sense, attests
to the creative genius of Camus; Meursault is profound not
by what he says but by what he does not say: he is perhaps
a man composed of silences and absences.
Meursault appears to contain the unornamented silence
12
of a wxse child. The simplicity and candor of the opening
sentences, "aujourd'hui maman est morte. Ou peut-etre hier,
je ne sais pas" suggests the reactions of a calm and indif-
l^Camus sees Meursault as rather representative of
Algerians of his own social class: "Dans les cinemas de
quartier, 'k Alger, on vend quelque-fois des pastilles de
menthe qui portent, grave en rouge, tout ce qui est neces-
saire k la naissance de I1amour. 1. des questions:
"Quand m'epouserez-vous?"; "m'aimez-vous?"; 2. des repon
ses: "A la folie"; "au printemps." Apres avoir prepare le
terrain, on les passe k sa voisine qui repond de mSme ou se
borne k faire la bdte. A Belcourt, on a vu des mariages se
conclure ainsi et des vies entieres s'engager sur une
echange de bonbons a la menthe. Et ceci depeint bien le
peuple enfant de ce pays." ("L'Ete a Alger, pp. 58-59)
245
ferent child. His comment upon the "sentiments distingues"
reveal a lucidity which refuses to accept the falseness of
social pretension; his "cela ne veut rien dire" contains the
objectivity of age and wisdom. Like a child, he is incap
able of cynicism. He is spontaneous, he lives only in the
present tense; his sentences are all islands, little bits
of experience juxtaposed without thought of continuity in
time or causality. Meursault is aware of social convention
as a child is; he knows the rules of society from without
but not from within. Like a child he is amoral but not im-
13
moral like an adult. He is incapable of falseness. In
former literatures the "wise-child" generally was a "dieu
cache," a Joas who brought down to earth a heavenly impera
tive. Meursault, however, is exactly the opposite, for he
represents not divine law but natural law. He has already
13Robert Champigny, Sur Un Heros Paien. pp. 44-50, was
the first critic to view Meursault from this point of view.
M. Champigny, however, considers him not from a literary
viewpoint but analyzes him as if he were a living person.
"II a les vertus de l'enfance et non ses vices, ce vice par
exemple de singerie qui fait de 1'enfant un pre-adulte" (p.
44). "J'ai note cpie 11 insatisfaction romantique, le sens
de l'infini, le desir de l'infini, le sentiment d'une in
commensurability entre le subjectif et l'objectif, le sens
de la subjectivite comme myst&re fondamental, tout cela,
qui est eminement romantique, n'est aucunement le fait de
Meursault" (p. 50).
246
accepted the natural order of the cosmos totally but uncon
sciously. Before his death, however, he evolves to a higher
level of awareness and accepts the natural order conscious
ly.
The beginning of Meursault's narration discloses a
"child-man" who lives harmoniously within himself and within
society. He suffers from no longings; his being is never
projected into the future because he finds satisfaction
with himself as he is. Ambition, social position and money
are irrelevant to him. He accepts his daily bondage to the
office where he works as a necessary evil. In a word, he
lacks nothing and he is happy.
Meursault is polite but indifferent to his friends and
to his mistress because they do not really occupy his being.
What then does possess him entirely? It is the love of
nature, the frequent and uninhibited communion with the sun,
the beach and the surf. Meursault is a modern pagan like
the multitude Camus described in "L'Ete h. Alger." His
"childishness" mixed with lucidity, moreover, is a mark of
the ancient Greek pagan who in our world might appear
almost as strange as he. Meursault's lack of inferiority,
his immersion in the present, in short, his pagan character
istics are precisely those which enable him to embrace the
247
natural world so completely. He is "unified from without";
he is not "inner directed" by a social consciousness, but
"outer-directed" towards the beaches and the sun.
He is poor, has a senseless job which pays little and
he comes from humble origins. The poverty Camus describes
in L1Envers et L'Endroit is also that of Meursault, who
unlike his predecessor in La Mort Heureuse. has no interest
in wealth beyond the fulfillment of his simplest necessi
ties. The beaches are his avenue of escape.
Meursault's passivity before the social order is so
great that he could best be described as phlegmatic. He
neither censures nor combats the abuses which besiege him
everywhere; he finally appears to become the willing accom
plice of those who promise his immolation. His friendships
are likewise passive and unpreferential; he makes friends .
not necessarily with people of similar social and economic
origins or intellectual tastes, but with those who simply
happen to cross his path. He befriends Raymond, the pro
curer, simply because they share the same apartment house.
Likewise he meets Marie while he is swimming. His friend
ships sure thus accidental, casual, and not a profound bond
of confidences and shared joys. His casual friends like
him because he does not impose himself and is a good listen
248
er. In short, Meursault makes friends casually and sponta
neously as does a child.
The Re-enactment of an Ancient Sacrifice
Meursault is a multitude; he embodies a host of young
Algerians of humble origin who love only the simplest pleas
ures in life. His passivity allows him to pass unnoticed,
he never intrudes, imposes himself upon others, or attracts
attention to himself deliberately. A Mr. Anybody, he be
comes part of the throng. He is an invisible man.
Meursault is also an outsider, an unbeliever and non
participant in the social ethic and is like a foreigner to
a strange country who, for convenience, adopts the customs
of its inhabitants. In this respect he is a potential vic
tim awaiting sacrifice; his spontaneity and candor, above
all his honesty, leave him defenseless and open to an im
placable social mechanism. Perhaps he is the "only Christ
we deserve" as Camus claims.
A brief scrutiny of the ancient rite of the sacrificial
goat is relevant to the fate of Meursault. In primitive
societies a goat or lamb was attached to a post and would
thus attract a dangerous predator who was ravaging the human
settlement. When the lion or the wolf, as the case may be,
pounced on the sacrif
kill him. Later, thi
and eventually became
primitive religions,
the sacrificial beast
similar characteristi
249
icial animal, the hunters would then
s event was sublimated to the dance
a symbolic and mythic re-enactment in
The innocence and defenselessness of
thus became transferred to a human of
cs whose ritualistic immolation per
formed the function of a mass exorcism. Considered in this
light, L'Etrancer is a timeless novel which originates from
a pre-war Algeria not yet committed to political turmoil.
Meursault continues to remain invisible after the fate
ful shooting and throughout his trial. First the judge,
i
then the prosecuting ^ttorney seek in vain to solicit from
j
him a conventional an£ superficial contrition. Ironically,
neither the dead Arab's name nor his survivors are ever
mentioned during the trial, which, because of this, makes a
mockery of justice. Ijfeursault is tried and condemned only
because he fails to display a conventional grief at the
death of his mother. The prosecuting attorney cleverly
j
alleges his indifference to her as a sign of ruthless cal
culation. During the!trial the attorney makes of Meursault's
numb indifference a sign of callous brutality. Judges,
lawyers, journalists ^nd jurors perceive him only from
without. They blindly obey the imperative of their mythic
250
function which necessitates their unconsciousness. Before
the world Meursault lives and dies an invisible man.
Who then can perceive Meursault as he really is? Only
14
the reader, the only witness to the fatal shooting. This
clever stylistic device, moreover, is a literary tour de
force which indirectly involves the reader in the action.
The latter thus assumes the role of a secret witness who
alone knows the whole truth. This is extremely important,
since the reader then can become aware of Meursault's per
sonal facets which are invisible to those around him. In
fact, Meursault speaks two distinct languages, one for the
world and another which he reserves for the reader to whom
he introduces his natural world, his sole passionate love.
The muted understatements which he carefully allocates to
others contrast violently with the poetic prose which he
reserves for the beauty of nature.^-5 The style of Noces
"Notons egalement que le meurtre, a part Meursault,
n'a qu'un seul temoin: le lecteur. Ce fait aura son im
portance dans la suite: la complicite entre ce lecteur et
le narrateur y gagnera, au procfes, car elle s'opposera a
1'ignorance de tous les autres." (M. G. Barrier, L'Art du
Recit dans L'Etranoer [Paris, 1962], p. 91.)
*5This contention was first upheld and proven by Sar
tre's penetrating "Explication de L'Etranger" then amplified
brilliantly by Stephen Ullman, The Image in the Modern
French Novel in a chapter entitled "The Two Styles of Camus"
251
reappears brilliantly in many pages of L'Etranaer. The
juxtaposition of two apparently contradictory and anti
thetical styles of narration might appear to detract from
the credibility of Meursault as a fictional narrator.
Camus, however, integrates them so artfully that one is
scarcely aware of this masterful stylistic device; the
narration drives the reader onward at such a pace that a
shift in styles can pass almost unnoticed. An inner coher
ency also is central to this stylistic device. The neutral,
conversational, style which Meursault displays before the
world indicates a profound disinterest, while the passages
of poetic prose indicate a strong personal involvement with
nature. As a result the reader alone knows a Meursault who
loves the grandeur of the natural world with a keen sensi-
tivity.
The Relationship of Stvle to
Image and Perception in L'.Etranger
L1Etranaer is not a novel which explains the events
composing it, rather it presents them. Accordingly, Meur
sault never judges but he obliges the readers to judge.
Le Mvthe de Sisyphe. on the other hand, is a philosophical
work which quite accurately describes Meursault's inner
being. Considered in this light, both works are two halves
252
of a coin. In the Carnets Camus succinctly summarizes his
novelistic approach to the relationship of concrete images
to philosophy: "Les sentiments, les images multiplient la
philosophie par dix" (1939-1942, p. 250). Several years
earlier, when he began the composition of L'Etranaer. he
wrote: "Un roman n'est jamais qu'une philosophie en
16
images." The narration of Meursault, then, limits itself
17
to "describing what it refuses to explain."
Meursault explains nothing but describes everything;
he registers things and events which he presents forcibly
and directly. Camus the author does not intervene between
his character and the reader by a novelistic third person.
This stylistic device is becoming more and more popular in
contemporary fiction; the author as commentator dies so that
his character may acquire a total autonomy.
Imagery is entirely contained within style which Camus
has enlarged to great dimensions. He accurately and cate
gorically asserts that "toute unite qui n'est pas de style
18
est une mutilation." Style becomes a vehicle for all
16Alaer Republicain. October 20, 1938.
17Le Mvthe de Sisvphe. p. 64.
18L'Homme Revolte, p. 334.
253
literary creation:
S'^il faut pousser tree loin la stylisation, puiscju'elle
resume l1intervention de l'homme et de la volonte de
correction que 1'artiste apporte dams la reproduction
du reel, il convient cependant qu'elle reste invisible
pour que la revendication qui donne naissance a 1'art
soit traduite dans sa tension la plus extreme. Le
grand style est la stylisation invisible, c'est-a-dire
incarnee. (p. 335)
The style of L'stranger is so invisible that one could
aptly call it a "style without style" which hides the great
est coherency behind a mask of formlessness. Considered in
this light, L'Etranger is one of the first great "anti-
novels" so increasingly popular in our time. In Le Mvthe
de Sisvohe Camus relates this invisible- style to existen
tialist phenomenology: "L1oeuvre absurde exige un artiste
conscient de ces limites et un art ou le concret ne signifie
rien de plus que lui-meme" (p. 132). Great writers, he con
tinues, write "en images plutdt qu'en raisonnements" (p.
136), thus they oppose directly the "romanciers a th&se."
When Camus states that "la creation c'est le grand mime"
(p. 128), he is also quite accurately describing L'Etranaer.
The fact that Camus so successfully embodies existen
tialist phenomenology and aesthetic processes in the single
person of an a-literary office employee is quite astounding
and a major tour de force in literature; it is precisely
because Meursault is what he is that he embodies existen
tialist thought so successfully. No one would appear a more
i
unlikely protagonist than he for a narration in the first
person, and yet no other characterization could substitute
for him. Meursault, who hears and sees everything but ex
plains nothing, reaches the reader more directly than any
other character could. For example, when he sees the beach,
he presents his visual image of it directly to us without
the interfering intervention of any explanation. In this
way concrete images acquire the reality and power of a lived
rather than an interpreted experience. The world of things
is presented in an opaque density which is felt continually
throughout the novel. The very lack of inferiority in
Meursault reinforces this opacity whose presence becomes at
times overwhelming. The power and the magnitude of the
natural world surges through Meursault's direct evocation.
Moreover, the presence of nature as a force which is felt
is indispensable to an understanding of the novel according
to Camus' intentions.
An Active Nature and a Passive Man
In the world of men and before the natural order Meur
sault characteristically appears as a witness whose presence
255
seems pallid in comparison to the objects and events which
he records. Although he lives within his body and his
senses, he never describes himself physically to the reader;
he is a faceless, invisible man. He thus represents a
photographic technique which is essentially passive by its
refusal to interpret visual events or to relegate any action
to a coherent whole. Essentially he appears as an imperson
al mechanism which hears, sees and feels every object which
i
i
crosses his path; he does not choose, he subordinates noth
ing within a hierarchy of values. Space and time are re
stricted to "here" and "now." A landscape painter composing!
a painting is obliged to deform reality in order to make it
correspond to his subjective vision; a photographer, how
ever, records a segment of reality exactly as it is. Meur
sault registers everything with the passivity and imperson
ality of a camera; he deforms no event in order to make it
conform to an inner coherency. If he appears throughout the
narration as a passive person, then nature, in contrast to
19
him, appears all the more ^active. Camus exploits this
19
The natural world thus no longer serves as a decor or
backdrop for the action but instead is the source of the
action. This tendency is quite new in literature and breaks
off abruptly from the Romantic tradition.
relationship so thoroughly that every scene between Meur
sault and nature must be seen in this respect.
Nature acts and Meursault reacts; he is an object and
it is a subject. His integration within the natural world
is so absolute that it determines his thoughts and actions.
The sun which beats down on him unmercifully during the
burial of his mother finally drives him^to murder. The
fatal shooting can only be described as his reaction to an
unbearable presence. When he testifies that he murdered
"because of the sun" he is really claiming that he was the
victim of exceptional circumstances. His lawyer's failure
to capitalize on this and the prosecuting attorney's insis
tence upon him as an active agent of evil are what cause
his downfall. If the novel is considered in a mythic con
text, then one could also suggest that the society which
kills him is an unconscious ally of the fatal sun; the im
personal and inhuman sun which initiates the action is re
placed by the implacable and equally inhuman mechanism of a
bureaucracy which condemns him to death; society thus exe
cutes the design proposed by nature. Seen in this light,
the social order has lost its humanity and acquires the
impersonality of the natural order. Meursault's very con
demnation thus affirms in him a belief of it as an imperson-
257
al force not held together by human values. If the social
order had demonstrated human qualities in dealing with him,
it is quite likely that he would have been provoked into
contemplation of a new ethic. Because it does not, however,
he dies a stranger to ethical values.
This active-passive polarity dominant in L1Etranaer
reappears in Camus' subsequent works. Calicrula. written at
almost the same time as L1Stranger. might be described as
20
the opposite half of this novel. Caligula is a completely
active agent who exerts his will upon the human collectivity
which reacts to him. Essentially he seeks to assume the
blind absurdity and destructive force of the universe which
he imposes upon the complacent ignorance and indifference of
the social order. When he says "C'est moi qui remplace la
20
"Compte tenu des multiples vocations d'A. Camus,
ferons-nous de 11Etranaer le dernier volet d'un tryptique
dyonisien, qui comprendrait Noces et Caligula? Ou, au con-
traire, allons-nous l'associer au Mythe de Sisyohe et au
Malentendu dans une trilogie absurde? A s'en tenir aux
apparences, la seconde formule meriterait de l'emporter.
"En fait, il n'est rien de plus arbitraire que ce
type de classification. Elies supposent une absolue con-
formite de l'ordre de conception et de l'ordre de publica
tion, et impliquent que 1'oeuvre exprime d'une mani&re
directe l'etat d'esprit de 1'auteur. Or les livres de Camus
doivent assez peu aux 'eclairs de 11 inspiration' et sont le
fruit d'une lente maturation et d'une 'fidelite quotidi-
enne.'" (Quillot, p. 81)
peste" (Act IV, scene viii), he is affirming his role as an
agent of the cosmos. Society reacts to him by murder just
as Meursault reacts to the sun. The missionary in "Le
Renegat" also murders because of the sun, as did Meursault,
but his loss of lucidity is not temporary but permanent; he
has been converted to the lethal sun; his mutilation can
also be considered as a symbol of this conversion. In La
Peste. the cosmic order disrupts human solidarity and sta
bility as does Caligula. The human collectivity, by oppos
ing the plague, reacts heroically to it. In Le Malentendu.
the mother and sister murder the son because they too are
reacting to a stifling existence from which they struggle
to escape. The consistent use of this active-passive polar
ity obliges one to conclude that Camus considers violence
and murder as a reaction to implacable and inhuman forces.
This role is essentially Hellenic in outlook, for it also
coincides with the conception of classical tragedy.
A Man Crucified bv the Sun
Fatality in L1Etrancer is as carefully prepared and as
irrevocable as in a great tragedy. Unrelated events slowly
and imperceptibly converge to ensnare the protagonist.
Meursault's condemnation to death was suggested even in the
259
opening pages of the novel.
Death belongs to light, not to darkness. Meursault
first sees the coffin of his mother in the late afternoon.
In spite of his extreme fatigue after traveling a great
distance in an uncomfortable bus in the brutal Algerian
heat, the glaring light of the vigil is never dimmed. Arti
ficial light is then replaced by the inhuman funereal sun
which bears down upon the hearse. The body of his mother is
never once allowed to remain in a comforting darkness—
except after the burial. Meursault shoots the Arab under
the sun and he himself will finally be executed under it in
the public square. In a word, the dead, the murdered, and
those qpndemned to die are brilliantly and brutally illumi
nated under a sun which witnesses death. Every source and
mention of light, no matter how insignificant in appearance,
contributes to the fatality. We shall briefly sketch these
details.
A few fragments reveal a host of relevant facts. Con
sider the following three sentences which describe Meursault
before the body of his mother: "La pi&ce etait pleine d'une
belle lumifere de fin d'apr&s-midi. Deux frelons bourdon-
naient contre la verriere. Et je sentais le sommeil me
260
21
gagner" (p. 15). "The beautiful light of late afternoon"
is the first mention Meursault makes of something which de
finitely pleases him— ironically, in the room of his dead
mother. This short description suggests a man who appreci
ates beauty, and perhaps more important, it also suggests
that he finds the later afternoon and the ensuing evening a
relief from the unbearable midday sun. We know from Camus'
essays, moreover, that dawn, evening and night, those parts
of the solar day when the sun does not dominate, correspond
to relaxation and pleasure. The second sentence is particu-
21"cette fascination qu'exerce sur lui le detail con-
cret, de la chose qui, simplement, est lk. on la retrouve
dans L1Envers et L'Endroit." (Barrier, p. 39) M. Barrier
quotes two very interesting passages from L1Envers et L'En
droit which support his contention: "Elle (la mkre) se
tasse alors sur une chaise et, les yeux vagues, se perd
dans la poursuite d'une rainure de parquet. ... Tout est lk,
done rien. Sa vie, ses interSts, ses enfants se bornent k
fetre lk, d'une presence trop naturelle pour Stre sentie."
("Entre Oui et Non," p. 65)
"Sans y pr&ter attention, 1'esprit creux, je perdis quelques
temps k lire le mode d'emploi d'une pkte k raser dont
j'usais d'ailleurs depuis un mois." ("La Mort dans L'Ame,"
p. 90)
In the above passages the blank staring and the
senseless reading indicates a visual attention accompanied
by a mental absence, a lack of "la vie interieure," so com
mon in everyone's life. Such scenes as these appear
throughout L * Etranoer.
261
larly significant. The "two hornets [which] were buzzing
against the window pane" very precisely fixes the light con
ditions inside the room and without; we know that the room
is darker than the outdoors. The blind urge of the insects
in their impossible effort to fly towards the setting sun
alludes also to the influence of the sun. The last sentence
appears completely disassociated from the image of the two
hornets, yet is completely dependent upon it; characteristi
cally Meursault uses no connectives and causatives but jux
taposes related events. If he had been explaining to us he
would have said: "The day is ending and I am very tired
after my trip. The two hornets I see buzzing against the
window pane brings to mind that it is dark in here and per
haps I can sleep a little bit. Since my day is also accord
ed to the cycle of the solar day, the two hornets tell me
that it is time for me to sleep." Meursault's ascetic style
of narration and economy of words reveals much. The begin
ning of the novel shows us a man absorbed by precise detail.
The minute, description of the sun which initiates the tra
gedy thus does not surprise the reader. One could also
consider that his physical condition adds another dimension
to his narration; any man who has undergone such a crushing
fatigue consciously seeks repose. As Meursault grows more
262
and more tired then so do more and more obstacles oppose his
sleep. Fatigue is a very dominant mobile in the fatality
and contributes directly to it. This mobile also combines
with a hostile nature. Meursault knows that he is quite
dominated by his physical functions. He futilely explains
to the judge after the shooting that he "had such a dispo
sition that [his] physical needs often interfered with [his]
sentiments" (p. 94). Here again Camus appears to have
drawn from the personal experience of his long sickness. A
weakness and easily induced fatigue resulting from tubercu
losis appears reflected in Meursault, who, like Camus, is
hypersensitive to light. During the long vigil, Meursault's
fatigue and hypersensitivity to light become more apparent:
Le soir etait tombe brusquement. Tres vite, la nuit
s'etait epaissie au-dessus de la verriere. Le con
cierge a tourne le commutateur et j'ai ete aveugle par
1'eclaboussement soudain de la lumiere. (p. 16)“
Night falls rapidly in southern latitudes. No sooner is it
dark outside than the daylight is replaced by the glaring
artificial light; no delicate transition has taken place.
22
"The first intimation we have of his hypersensitivity
is in connection with artificial light; when he is keeping
watch over his mother's coffin, the light is switched on,
and he is blinded." (Ullman, p. 247)
In his fatigue Meursault is condemned to a glaring light in
much the same way as are the infernal inmates in Huia clos.
This use of artificial light in Sartre's play also coincides
with Camus’ use of it in L’Etrangey. This play can quite
accurately be interpreted according to police procedures.
Suspects who do not know each other are often detained in a
room so that after a certain time they will confess their
crimes to each other. The room contains a hidden micro
phone which permits the authorities to hear every word.
The glaring overhead light in the play, moreover, far pre-
4
dates its use in modern brain-washing techniques; police
officials in Europe and in America have occasionally ques
tioned suspects by obliging them to stand erect under a
brilliant lamp until they collapse from fatigue. They are
then lifted up and obliged to stand up again until they
confess. This use of artificial light is also suggested in
L1Etranaer when Meursault is questioned by the judge;
II m'a re?u dans une piece tendue de rideaux, il avait
sur son bureau une seule lampe qui eclairait le fauteuil
ou il m'a fait asseoir pendant que lui-meme restait dans
1'ombre, (p. 92)
The blinding sunlight of the killing is thus transferred to
the artificial light of the judge's chamber. In this fash
ion the role of the sun is also transferred to the judge;
the social mechanism thus realizes the fatality which the
23
sun initiated.
The judge's use of light had already been prepared at
the asylum by the concierge during the vigil:
Je lui ai demande si on pouvait eteindre une des lampes..
L'eclat de la lumifere sur les murs blancs me fatiguait.
Il m'a dit que ce n'etait pas possible. L'installation
etait ainsi faite: c'etait tout ou rien. (p. 17)
The white light on the white walls is evidently quite
unbearable; white on white dominates, a use of light which
will later appear, greatly intensified, in "Le Renegat."
What strikes the reader in the above description is the
impersonality of the light; the concierge is unable to turn
off an individual bulb since thfe wiring, for reasons of
economy, has no separate switches. The impersonality of the
lamplight thus coincides with the impersonality of the sun.
After Meursault became drowsy and almost asleep, after his
eyes had had the short time necessary to adjust to darkness,
the light wakes him up by a brilliance which is greater than
23
Viggiani, p. 879, mentions this and shows how this
alliance is developed during the trial by the prosecuting
attorney, who with his postured rhetoric proclaims in his
address to the jurors: "J'en ferai la preuve, Messieurs,
et je la ferai doublement. Sous 1'aveuglante clarte des
faits d'abord et ensuite dans l'eclairage sombre que me
fournira la psychologic de cette ame criminelle." (p. 140)
265
before:
C'est un frolement qui m'a reveille. D'avoir ferme
les yeux, la pi&ce m'a paru encore plus eclatante de
blancheur. Devant moi, il n'y avait pas une ombre et
chaque objet, chaque angle, toutes les courbes se des-
sinaient avec une purete blessante pour les yeux. (p. 18)
The light is so intense that a photographic "overexpo
sure" has resulted. Meursault's sudden and irritating
awakening now becomes quite unbearable. First the absurd
impossibility of turning off some of the lights surprised
and irritated him; he was caught off guard. Then after he
had almost fallen asleep he was quickly awakened by a mur
muring which came as a censure. Surprise and irritation
thus combine to afflict him. This little scene, moreover,
carefully prepares that of the fatal shooting when intensity
of light and fatigue drive him to murder.
Meursault*s rude and irritating awakening in the asylum
quite logically corresponds to a change in language; his
narration is no longer so neutral. The "eclatante blancheur"
and the "purete blessante pour les yeux" are rather vivid
phrases which contrast with his previous flat and staccato
monologue. The light is not passive; Meursault is; he is
obliged to remain under the blinding glare because of a
social custom which is meaningless to him. The lamplight
which is "wounding" him will be transferred to the vastly
266
more powerful sun of the killing which will literally "cut
into him."
His fatigue now takes on a new dimension. We can see
in this passage that his language becomes increasingly more
florid and gripping as he becomes more tired. His flat
monotones and short sentences do not correspond to fatigue,
as one could previously suppose, but to his normal state.
During the fatal shooting, when exhaustion, coupled with
thirst and heat prostration, becomes acute, so then does his
poetic prose also reach a zenith. This parallelism becomes
more and more intense as he is drawn into the fatality. The
two separate styles of narration composing this parallelism
thus perform a specific function which could not be achieved
by conventional means. We suggest that these two styles are
24
not gratuitous, as Sartre claims.
^^Sartre comments upon the two distinct styles of nar
ration in L1Etranaer. but he attributes them to Camus' own
forms of personal expression rather than to a specific
novelistic use which achieves an effect impossible by con
ventional means: "Nous savons deja que M. Camus a un autre
style, un style de ceremonie. Mais, en outre, dans L1Etran-
qer meme, il hausse parfois le ton; la phrase reprend alors
un debit plus large, continu. ... A travers le recit es-
souffle de Meursault, j'apercois en transparence une prose
poetique plus large qui le soustend et qui doit etre le
mode d'expression personnel de M. Camus." ("Explication
de L'Etranger." p. 113) Mr. Ullman brilliantly disproves
the weakness of Sartre's contention, which could best be
, ■
267
The novelistic use of time sequences contributes to the
development of the fatality and is indirectly related to the
25
role of nature. Although Camus' use of tenses is too
complex to analyze in detail within this study, it will be
necessary to outline some of the effects he achieved through
this use.
Meursault is in prison when he begins the narration.
He is therefore obliged to sustain everything within memory.
The first half of the book which discloses the problem
presently under discussion has the form of a diary and gives
the curious impression that Meursault is immersed both in
the moment of writing and in the moment when the action
26
takes place. His memory of the double affliction of
fatigue and a hostile nature is thus particularly vivid; in
a sense he relives his experiences so strongly that the past
described as an oversight.
P ^
“ Barrier has produced the most detailed analysis yet
published of tenses in the novel.
26"En fait Meursault essaie d'adapter deux perspec
tives: il essaie de se placer h la fois dans le moment ou .
il ecrit, ou parle, et dans le moment ou s1est passe ce
dont il parle." (Champigny, p. 147)
27
has become present and he really lives them. This psycho
logical reaction becomes most intense in his descriptions of
the fatality which overcomes him. He remembers his fatigue
so intensely that he lives it and hence his verbal expres
sion shows a psychological change. Since he is most strong
ly affected by a hostile nature when he is fatigued, his
awareness of it grows as his physical resistance diminishes.
For this reason natural phenomena become intensified sub
jectively, as we have seen in the use of light, to such a
degree that his inherent passivity and lethargy are broken.
He then becomes actively and consciously a writer by attemp-i
ting to describe this fatality in a more literary prose.
The tone and the style of the narration thus change as
Meursault, in his dark prison cell, feels again the blinding
light and heat of the fatality. Accordingly, the tempo and
tone of the narration change, and the description of the
fatality becomes longer and much more detailed. This also
shows that he is trying to convince the reader of the
reality of his tragedy. During his trial, on the other
27"Nous n'avons nullement 1'impression en lisant
'aujourd'hui maman est morte* ... que Meursault est en train
de revivre en evenement, mais bien qu'il est en train de
le vivre." (Barrier, p. 26)
269
hand, his numb passivity seizes him and before the prosecut
ing attorney's verbal onslaught he can only say, "It's be
cause of the sun." Considered in this fashion, the use of
poetic prose is not at all poetic but illustrative. Meur-
sault's style is always founded on a concrete image or sen
sation, moreover, and therefore his language is really pre
cise and accurate. Camus thus has achieved a striking
psychological verisimilitude; he paints for us a certain
nature as felt by an individual whose characteristics are
cleverly revealed to us by narrative style. In his essays
Camus generally used precisely the opposite stylistic de
vice: long passages of poetic prose were often followed by
28
an ironical and brutal understatement.
The glaring artificial light which blinds Meursault in
the asylum also serves another function; it reveals unmerci
fully the pitiful old inmates who attend the wake:
Ce qui me frappait dans leurs visages, c'est que je ne
voyais pas leurs yeux, mais seulement une lueur sans
4clat au milieu d'un nid de rides. (p. 18)
^®It is interesting to mention Stendhal, who achieved
a masterful stylistic effect by doing precisely the opposite
of what Camus did in L'Etranaer: all the scenes concerning
the fatality in Le Rouge et Le Noir are marked by darkness,
immobility and silence. Motion, light and sound accordingly
describe jubilation and emotional release. Conversely, the
understatement dominates in scenes pertaining to the fatal
ity.
This artificial light, like the sunlight, is pitiless in its
revelation. Meursault's mother only a short time before was
one of the living-dead who are now seated before her coffin:
claustrated within the depressing asylum and deprived of her
youthful faculties, she was as if already dead and her death
came for her as a deliverance. Although it is natural to
weep from the untimely death of a loved one with whom one
shared life intimately, it is much less natural to weep for
the death of a person like Meursault's mother; she reflects
the description of the death of Camus' own grandmother in
L'Envers et L'Endroit. The same pitiful group assembled
before the coffin and brutally illuminated by the electric
lights will presently attend the funeral under the even more
cruel brilliance of the Algerian sun. When Meursault re
marks "J'ai eu un moment 1'impression ridicule qu'ils
etaient let pour me juger" (p. 19) he is vaguely conscious of
the role they expect him to play. Since they were friends
of Mme. Meursault and await an imminent death as she did,
they expect to see love and grief written on his face. Like
all old people living under such circumstances, they are
emotionally dependent upon the least sign of love from a
child or relative. When Meursault fails to show any grief
he thus has already convicted himself in their eyes: not
271
only does this group announce his forthcoming trial but the
aged director acts as a witness who lies and helps convict
him.
The following morning, daybreak comes as a pleasant
relief for Meursault: "C'etait une belle journee qui se
preparait" and "Je respirais l'odeur de la terre fraiche et
je n'avais plus sammeil" (p. 22). His remarks not only show
his love of dawn, a characteristic in all of Camus' works,
but also accentuate his indifference towards his mother.
Since Meursault's daily life cycle is accorded to that of
the solar day, dawn gives him a renewed vitality; like
Antaeus, he draws his strength from contact with the earth.
His pleasure is short-lived when the sunlight and the
heat become more and more intense. During the long proces
sion towards the cemetery he gains a new insight:
A travers les lignes de cypres qui menaient aux collines
pres du ciel, cette terre rousse et verte, ces maisons
rares et bien dessinees, je comprenais maman. Le soir,
dans ce pays, devait etre comme une treve melancolique.
Aujourd'hui, le soleil debordant qui faisait tressaillir
le paysage le rendait inhumain et deprimant. (p. 26)
Very significantly, Meursault now understands his mother as
related to the landscape.
The heat and the sunlight become more and more oppres
sive as Meursault in his black clothes sweats profusely.
272
The following dialogue between him and one of the employees
of the undertaker is particularly interesting:
Je lui ai dit: "Comment?" II a repete en montrant le
ciel: "£a tape." J'ai dit: "Oui." Un peu aprfcs, il
m'a demands: "C'est votre m&re qui est la?" J'ai en
core dit: "Oui." "Elle etait vieille?" J'ai repondu
"Comme ga ... " (p. 26)
Such a dialogue is quite obviously rather empty and
without much meaning; no exchange of ideas has taken place,
29
the answer is contained in the question. Evidently the
employee wished to fulfill his official capacity of consol
ing the mourners by simply beginning a conversation in an
attempt to relieve the silence. The mention of the weather
in such cases always serves as a good means of introduction.
This short dialogue evokes a silence and an emptiness; it
suggests by these means far more than the literal meaning
of the words; it is interesting because of what it alludes
to: the reader can vicariously feel the presence of the sun
in this passage. One senses, in fact, that the oppressive
heat has imposed a silence upon the pitiful group of mourn
ers. The dialogue is, then, a futile attempt to break this
^Barrier comments upon this passage by observing that
"au style direct les repliques sont presque toujours annon-
cees meme quand les echanges se multiplient." (p. 14)
273
silence which asserts all the more strongly the presence of
sun and death. The short, senseless questioning and answer
ing literally radiates heat. Of particular interest is the
banal word 1 1 tape.M For the first time a vernacular expres
sion introduces an image which Camus applies literally to
succeeding passages devoted to the sun. It will "push/1
"beat down upon," "stifle" and "crush" Meursault on the
fatal beach. Camus thus has reversed the traditional Euro
pean and Romantic burial which occurs in the fog or in the
rain.
The mother must be buried quickly, within one day, as
is normal in hot countries where putrefaction of the flesh
takes place rapidly. As a result, the period of mourning
is very short, and in the case of Meursault, a cruel parody.
Perez, the aged director, casually mentions the necessity
for a prompt burial which indicates a lack of tact bordering
on brutality but which does not disturb Meursault in the
least (pp. 15-16). During the procession to the cemetery
this allusion to physical corruption under a boiling sun is
again made:
J'etais un peu perdu entre le ciel bleu et blanc et la
monotonie de ces couleurs, noir gluant du goudron ou-
vert, noir terne des habits, noir laque de la voiture.
Tout cela, le soleil,. l'odeur de cuir et de crottin de
la voiture, celle du vernis et celle de l'encens, la
274
fatique d'une nuit d'insomnie, me troublait le regard
et les idees. (p. 28)30
The intensity of the sun is so great that it appears to melt
everything and blacken everything by its heat; the tar on
the road, the hearse, the suffering humanity, even the
driver's hat of "cuir bouilli” seem viscous and coagulated
by the heat. Finally Perez, who was "perdu dans une nuee
de chaleur" and unable to keep up with the procession,
faints like a "pantin disloqu£." By so doing he announces
Meursault's forthcoming heat prostration on the fatal beach.
During the burial, Meursault notices "la terre couleur de
sang qui roulait sur la biere de maman, la chair blanche des
racines qui s'y melaient ... " (p. 29). The earth itself
assumes the anthropomorphic characteristics of the dead
^"Le soleil funeraire du debut n'est visiblement que
la condition d'un engluement de la matiere: sueur des vi
sages ou amollissement du goudron sur la route torride ou
va le convoi, tout est une image d'un milieu poisseux;
Meursault ne se decolle pas plus du soleil que les rites
eux-memes, et le feu solaire a pour fonction d'eclairer et
engluer l'absurde de la scfene. Sur la plage, autre figure
du soleil: celui-lli ne liquefie pas, il durcit, il trans
forme toute mati&re en metal, la mer en epee, le sable en
acier, le geste en meurtre: le soleil est arme, lame, tri
angle, mutilation, oppose k la chair sourde et molle de
l'homme. Et dans la salle d'assises ou Meursault est juge,
voici enfin le soleil sec, un soleil-poussiere, le rayon
vetuste de l'hypogee." (Roland Barthes, "Bulletin du Club
du Meilleur Livre," Club. 12:7, April 1954.)
275
mother who has now become "blood colored earth" and "white
flesh of the roots." Meursault then returns to his own
little life without an afterthought.
In the next few days before the fatal shooting he con
tinues to live exactly as he had before his mother's death.
He appears to have lost all memory of it, so intensely is he
absorbed in his daily life. Only by the experience of
31
claustration in prison will he acquire a memory. Not only
is he deprived of this faculty but he is also without imagi
nation. The combination of these two characteristics is
important. Those who live totally within the senses and
within the natural world have no need for these faculties,
since the beauty of nature renders them unnecessary; memory
and imagination, in fact, would detract from a genuine pan
theistic union. Romantic literature, however, abounds in
these characteristics. Imagination, according to Montaigne,
is indicative of boredom, inactivity and daydreaming. In
prison, however, enforced inactivity and boredom lead to
memory and imagination as they finally do in Meursault's
case. Before his imprisonment, he leads a very active life
^Rachel Bespaloff, "Le Monde du Condamne a Mort,"
Esprit. 2, January 1950.
276
in spite of his laconic style of narration which would lead
32
one to suppose the contrary. Camus presents us a fort
night in the daily life of Meursault so that we may observe
his normal state. In this way we can contrast his behavior
under duress with his normal behavior.
After the burial, Saturday, which is included in the
leave of absence granted him by his boss, is spent at the
beach where he meets Marie Cordona, a former office worker
in his company. She is smiling and beautiful, evoking
Camus' descriptions of the girls in "L’Ete k Alger." Her
random encounter is as pleasant as the sea of which she
seems a part. Meursault does not seek her company yet; she
represents for him the zenith of his short happy life of
casual but intense love. His attraction to her is that of
an adolescent who knows only the joys of the flesh and the
moment:
32"Que nous offre le recit, a part ce dimanche? Meur
sault enterre sa mere, retrouve une ancienne collegue de
bureau qui devient sa maitresse, va se baigner, repoit les
confidences pittoresques de ses voisins de palier, assiste a
une scene de menage chez l'un d'eux, va passer le dimanche
au bord de la mer. En dix-huit jours (c'est la duree reelle
de la premiere partie que nous revele l1analyse de la chro
nologic des moments de narration) y-a-t-il beaucoup de gens
qui connaissent cette variete?" (Barrier, p. 33) No other
scholar appears to have made this striking observation.
277
J'avals tout le ciel dans les yeux et il etait bleu et
dore. Sous ma nuque, je sentais le ventre de Marie
battre doucement. Nous sommes restes longtemps sur la
bouee, & moitie endormis. Quand le soleil est devenu
trop £orty elle a plonge et je l'ai suivie. Je l'ai
rattrapee, j'ai passe ma main autour de sa taille et
nous avons nage ensemble, (pp. 32-33)
Le film etait drole par moments et puis vraiment trop
b£te. Elle avait sa jambe contre la mienne. Je lui
caressais les seins. Vers la fin de la seance, je l'ai
embrassee, maig mal. En sortanty elle est venue chez
moi. (p. 33)
Marie, the sea and the sun almost appear to fuse into a
naive and pagan ecstasy which will soon disappear.
Meursault's hypersensitivity to light reappears briefly
but sufficiently to keep the reader aware of it. His de
scription of the city light is almost photographic:
Les lampes de la rue se sont alors allumees brusquement
et elles ont fait p&lir les premieres etoiles qui mon-
taient dans la nuit. J'ai senti mes yeux se fatiguer
l i regarder ainsi les trottoirs avec leur chargement
d'hommes et de lumieres. Les lampes faisaient luire
le pave mouille, et les tramways, ! i intervalles regu-
liers, mettaient leurs reflets sur des cheveux brillants,
^Meursault's behavior, so typical of many people's,
closely parallels that of a friend of Camus described in
Noces: "Mon camarade Vincent, qui est tonnelier et champion
de brasse junior, a une vue des choses encore plus claire.
II boit quand il a soif, s'il desire une femme cherche a
coucher avec,^ et l'epouserait s'il l'aimait (ga n'est pas
encore arrive) . Ensuite, il dit toujours: "£a va mieux>" —
ce qui resume avec vigueur l'apologie qu'on pourrait faire
de la satiete." ("L'Ete a Alger," p. 52, quoted also in
Quillot, p. 87.)
278
un sourire ou un bracelet d'argent, (p. 38)^4
The sensitivity of the first sentence is almost poetic in
mood; again an acute precision of detail succeeds in creat
ing a certain effect. The following sentences in the pas
sage duplicates verbally a visual impression often used in
photography. More important, however, is the fact that
Meursault's eyes are sensitive to a reflected light, as they
were during the wake by "1'eclat de la lumiere sur les murs
blancs." The theme of reflected light, moreover, becomes
climactic on the fatal beach when the blinding reflection
of the Arab's knife precipitates the murder. Direct light
ing, therefore does not have for him the irritating effect
of an intense reflection. This use is extremely logical,
however, since Meursault, like anybody else, can avoid
staring at direct lighting, whether it be the sun or a light
bulb, but cannot very easily avoid the multiple reflections
of indirect lighting from both vertical and horizontal sur
faces. Camus' mastery of lighting details could truly be
^Camus' own sensitivity to artificial light appears in
a description of a boxing match in "Le Minotaure." He re
marks that the ring is "violemment eclairee" (p. 34) and
that the addition of a spotlight produces a "lumifere aveu-
glante" (p. 35). He appears to have exaggerated this sensi
tivity in the creation of Meursault.
279
called photographic as well as novelistic.
A tiny but significant detail appears at the beginning
of the third chapter when Meursault is engaged in the boring
routine of his office work:
Le bureau donne sur la mer et nous avons perdu un mo
ment & regarder les cargos dans le port brulant de so
leil. (p. 40)
As in the passage quoted which describes Meursault and
Marie, the average Algerian prefers to spend his days at the
beach where he alternately enjoys the pleasures of the sun
and the se&, in a perfect equilibrium, so that he suffers
from an excess of neither; he tans himself under the sun
until he becomes hot and then plunges into, the sea to become
cool. This equilibrium is a daily cycle, an alternation
between the two antithetical elements of fire and water.
The interruption of this cycle is the factor which directly
precipitates the fatal shooting; seen in this light, the
quarrel becomes the means of preventing Meursault's in
stinctive return to the sea.
t
The following Saturday is a repetition of the previous
one spent with Marie but the beach scenes are expanded. A
rather childish game in the water is explained in detail.
This description makes Meursault appear quite human and ■
sympathetic to the reader:
280
Nous avons pris un autobus, et nous sommes alles a
quelques kilometres d'Alger, sur une plage reserree
entre des rochers et bordee de roseaux du cote de la
terre. Le soleil de quatre heures n*etait pas trop
chaud, mais l'eau etait tiede, avec de petites vagues
longues et paresseuses. Marie m'a appris un jeu. 11
fallait, en nageant, boire a la crete des vagues, ac-
cumuler dans sa bouche toute l'ecume et se mettre en-
suite sur le dos pour la projeter contre le ciel.
Cela faisait alors une dentelle mousseuse qui dispa-
raissait dans l'air ou me retombait en pluie tiede
sur le visage. Mais au bout de quelques temps, j'avais
la bouche brulee par l'amertume de sel. Marie m'a re
joint alors et s'est collee a moi dans l'eau. Elle a
mis sa bouche contre la mienne. Sa langue refraichis-
sait mes levres et nous nous sommes roules dans les
vagues pendant un moment. (p. 54)
This passage describes his happiest moments. He lives most
completely the innocent pleasures of a pagan life: sun, sea
and eroticism perfectly balance each other in a satiated
equilibrium. Light, water and flesh seem to interpenetrate
each other to form an ecstatic union.
The sea-foam spouted out by the lovers not only recalls
the myth of Aphrodite, but the foam, caught in the sun, is
a symbolic union of air, water and a living breath. The
afternoon sun is neither too hot nor the water too cold;
opposing extremes are absent; the temperature of the water,
which is also that of the body, suggests the fertility of
the sea which contains the two youthful bodies and appears
to draw them together. Their childish and naive game also
has perhaps another significance. Like children, the two
281
lovers are playing "whale."
After the happy hours at the beach, Meursault and Marie
pass the night together in his apartment. When he remarks
"J'avais laisse ma fenetre ouverte et c'etait bon de sentir
la nuit d'ete couler sur nos deux corps bruns" (pp. 54-55),
he is describing the ending of a perfect day in his lyrical
prose. The chapter then ends promptly and the cycle of
35
Meursault1s solar day is complete. Although the narrated
time of the novel takes place within approximately a year,
the use of time may also coincide symbolically with the
solar day; the action begins in the morning with the burial,
reaches a crisis at noon with the shooting, and ends with
36
lucidity and revelation in the evening.
The long description of Meursault's naive and rather
childish pleasure on the beach serves another function which
3 5 " N o u s constatons que, dans la premiere partie de
L1Etranaer. la liaison entre les chapitres se fait tout
nature1lement. Chacun d'eux se termine au soir (sauf le
sixieme). Dans le premier et le quatri&me, le narrateur
precise qu'il va se coucher. Ils commencent soit par le
reveil, un jour de conge (II et VI), soit par une allusion
de bureau (III, IV, V). Dans les deux cas, 1'enchainement
est assure avec le soir qui precede, de sorte que la mono-
tonie de cette existence uniforme s'en trouve soulignee.
(Barrier, p. 92)
36"C'est [le soleil] qui rythme I'ouvrage," (Quillot,
p. 86)
282
contributes indirectly to the fatality: his enjoyment is
almost too great; it portends an identical pleasure which
he seeks in vain to recapture the day of the killing. Dur
ing that fatal afternoon he is fatigued and the sun and the
sea for him no longer form a harmonious equilibrium, but a
smashing opposition. The balmy afternoon then becomes a
torrid suffering. In this respect the natural world appears
to plot here, as elsewhere, his downfall.
The fatal shooting occurs on Sunday of the following
week, exactly eight days after his afternoon at the beach
with Marie. Meursault spends an entire week involved in the
affairs of his neighbor and no description of nature or
contact with it intervenes. The reader, therefore, may
wonder why Camus did not juxtapose the happy and the tragic
beach scenes, why he did not alternate the former with the
latter directly instead of interposing an entire week. The
intervention of this period of time does not at all detract
from the fatality but contributes directly to it and gives
it greater vigor. It is necessary, therefore, to consider
the events in Meursault's week away from the beach in order
to clarify this contention.
Meursault becomes increasingly drawn into the sordid
and pathetic world of his neighbors without really wanting
283
to? his extreme passivity appears to be the cause; Raymond,
the pimp, finds in him a good listener who does not censure
his immoral behavior. After cruelly beating his mistress
whom he accuses of faithlessness, Raymond attracts the at
tention of the police who question him. Meursault lies to
them in order to save his friend. Another neighbor, Sala-
mano, a pitiful and lonely old man, delivers a brutal kick
ing to his equally pitiful dog, who then escapes from him.
37
Meursault listens compassionately to the old man's story.
In both scenes, then, events of a sadistic brutality have
taken place, and considered in this respect, they prepare
directly the violence of the fatal shooting on the beach.
During the burial scene, the reader was introduced to an
indifferent and inhuman sun and in Chapters IV, V and VI he
"^Salamano (dirty hand), like Raymond, is quite repre
hensible. We learn that he used to tyrannize his wife until
she died, whereupon he acquired a dog, his only friend, who
becomes the only available substitute for his cruelty.
Raymond's relationship to his mistress is a direct and in
tentional parallel: both men impose a brutal tyranny on
those who depend upon them.. This master-slave motif is
again introduced in La Chute when Clamence informs us that
he likes dogs because they "always forgive" (p. 142). In
L1Etranoer Salamano later cries over the disappearance of
the dog who was his only companion. This causes Meursault
to think of the loss of his mother, but he does not know
why. This scene very cleverly evokes a tiny vestige of
filial affection which remains in him.
284
is presented a cruel and sadistic humanity. In the. chapter
devoted to the shooting, the brutality of the sun is joined
directly to that of humanity. This union then becomes the
dramatic climax in the story. The reader is thus gradually
prepared for the substitution of the sun by the social mech
anism which realizes the fatality.
Meursault's involvement in the violent quarrels during
the week has left him tired on the morning of the shooting;
Marie remarks that he has a "t£te d'enterrement" and he is
scarcely disposed towards spending an entire day at the
beach. The brutal transition from darkness to a glaring
light, previously experienced during the wake, reappears in
a more violent form:
Dans la rue, c i cause de ma fatigue et aussi parce que
nous n'avions pas ouvert les persiennes, le jour, deja
tout plein de soleil, m'a frappe comme un gifle. Marie
sautait de joie et n'arretait pas de dire qu'il faisait
beau. (p. 72)
The sun presents itself as unexpectedly and as brutally as
a "slap in the face" from a friend; light is not only an
ocular disturbance, but a source of pain. The sun which has
already "filled" the sky suggests, moreover, that it was
awaiting him. The metaphorical use of "frappe comme un
gifle" not only alludes to Raymond's beating of the girl but
also portends the violence which will take place shortly.
285
Just as Meursault and Marie are about to get on the bus
bound for the beach, Raymond notices two Arabs standing to
gether. One of them is the brother of the mistress whom
Raymond had previously beaten. This Arab, in an attempt to
avenge his sister, will soon attack Raymond on the beach.
The other Arab is a friend of the brother. Their presence
is an ominous portent which also coincides with the increas
ing ferocity of the sun. The two Arabs appear allied to the
sun, and as messengers of death, their presence becomes more
and more menacing as the sun rises to its zenith. What is
particularly effective in the narration is that their role
is implied, never stated. Meursault's first view of them
in the early morning as he is about to depart is particular
ly interesting because of the implications:
J'ai vu un groupe d'Arabes adossees a la devanture du
bureau du tabac. Ils mous regardaient en silence, mais
h. leur maniere, ni plus ni moins que si nous etions des
pierres ou des arbres morts. (p. 73)
The Arabs appear to have been expecting them just as
the sun seems to have been lying in wait for Meursault.
Characteristically they are silent, and their vacuous,
feigned glance of non-recognition hides a scornful hatred.
By "seeing without seeing," they behold the Frenchmen as if
they were "stones or dead trees" and such a withering glance
286
appears to correspond also to the withering rays of the sun,
Meursault remarks "le bleu dejk dur du ciel" whose
metaphorical description of hardness becomes allied to the
stillness of "la mer immobile" (p. 74). Soon it is midday
and the trap is almost ready to spring. The sun gathers up
its weight and prepares to strike:
Le soleil tombait presque d'aplomb sur le sable et son
eclat sur la mer etait insoutenable. II n'y avait plus
personne sur la plage. Dans les cabanons qui bordaient
la mer, on entendait des bruits d'assiettes et de cou-
verts. On respirait a peine dans la chaleur de pierre
qui montait du sol ... Je ne pensais & rien parce que
j'etais a moitie endormi par ce soleil sur ma tete nue.
(pp. 78-79)
The sun which was "falling directly down" is not just a
rhetorical image; its presence is so intensely felt that
this expression almost has a literal significance. The sun
invests all of nature with its searing face; the brilliance
of reflected light from the sand reaches incandescence,
heat has even become "mineral." Of greater portent is the
fact that the sun has emptied the beach of witnesses who
could testify on behalf of Meursault. The clinking of
silverware and the clatter of dishes, a somewhat banal
image, suggests nevertheless a striking silence. The re
flected light from the beach combines with radiated heat to
put Meursault in "a cage of heat and blood," in which,
stifled and half-blind, he awaits the death-blow. The last
sentence is particularly striking: he is already half con
scious and unaware of his doom. Considered in a larger con
text, the quotation acquires the breadth of a great tragedy;
it is the poignant silence and emptiness of the stage on
which Macbeth awaits Macduff. Considered in this perspec
tive, the passage has the essential attributes of a tragic
fatality, a fatality expressed in concrete objects and sense
perception.
Red, the color of heat, madness and crucifixion, now
dominates: "Le sable surchauffe me semblait rouge mainte-
nant" (p. 80). "Nous restions cloues sous le soleil et
Raymond tenait serre son bras degouttant de sang" (p. 81).
The red incandescence of the beach corresponds to the color
of dripping blood. "Nailed under the sun," the two men are
described with the vocabulary normally allotted to a cruci-
38
fixion. Here the sun is a hammer, a percussive tool,
39
which soon becomes "ecrasant" (p. 82). The two men, not
38 »
"Sur la plage, l'homme, les bras en croix, crucifie
au soleil." (Carnets. 1939-1942, p. 161. Cf. ch. XVI, p.
165.)
"Partout une pellicule de soleil qui craquerait sous
l'ongle ... " "L'Envers et L'Endroit," p. 122, first de
scribes the "hardness" of sunlight in a positive manner.
knowing where they are going, stumble upon a little stream
beside which the two Arabs are lying. Not only do the lat
ter appear cool and comfortable, but indifferent to the
presence of their enemies. Because of their strategic po
sition, the reader is inclined to deduce that they are
guarding the water supply and are waiting for the two
Frenchmen to succumb to heat and thirst. The Arabs now
appear even more closely allied to the sun fatality. One of
them is playing a flute with three notes: "Pendant tout ce
temps, il n'y a plus eu que le soleil et ce silence, avec
le petit bruit de la source et les trois notes." Not only
does the flute indicate the relative comfort of its player,
40
but it also accentuates the hostile silence. On the same
page Meursault comments again on this sound: "On a encore
entendu le petit bruit d'eau et de flute au coeur du silence
et de la chaleur." The stream in the "heart of silence and
heat" appears to be centrally located; obviously the impor
tance of water in such a place and under such circumstances
is crucial. In this respect, the stream has a psychological
centrality.
^®In "Le Vent a Djemila," Camus had previously allied
the sound of the flute to a depressing landscape (p. 32).
289
The oppressive heat and light constrict and paralyze
movement. As nature itself seems to solidify into a dense
mass, so then does vital movement cease; everything stops:
Quand Raymond m'a donne son revolver, le soleil a
glisse dessus. Pourtant, nous sommes restes immo-
biles comme si tout s'etait referme autour de nous.
Nous nous regardions sans baisser les yeux et tout
s'arretait ici entre la mer, le sable et le soleil,
le double silence de la flute et de l'eau. (p. 84)
In the first sentence the clause "le soleil a glisse dessus"
cleverly suggests the brevity of the reflection as well as
the hardness of a metal object. Within the fatality this
tiny image serves an important purpose: the Arabs have seen
the glint of light on the pistol; the sun has betrayed the
presence of a weapon previously hidden and unknown to them.
They then retreat behind the rock. The following sentences
in the passage are particularly evocative: the landscape
has "closed around" the two Frenchmen and holds them mo
tionless. They are prisoners. One thinks of a great beast
of prey which poises just before delivering the death
. - 41
blow.
Raymond now departs and thus Meursault must face the
^Cocteau has made of such a suspension of movement a
cinematographical device which he uses to accentuate scenes
of crisis.
290
42
Arabs alone. The sun strikes, leaving him with "la tete
43
retentissante de soleil" (p. 248). Already described as
44
percussive, the sun becomes auditory; the cymbals also
AO
^tMThe critical point is reached when Meursault goes
out by himself for a walk on the beach and meets the Arab
who, a little earlier, had wounded Raymond with a knife.
So far, Meursault has been a passive onlooker in a drama
played out by others. Now he becomes its protagonist, and
it is of vital importance that his sensations should be de
scribed as accurately as possible since they alone can pro
vide a clue to his otherwise incomprehensible behavior."
(Ullman, p. 248)
43Frohock, pp. 95f, and I. Cruickshank, "Camus' Tech
nique in L'Stranger/' French Studies. 10:241-253, 1956, both
consider this image as well as the others in this chapter
"hallucinatory." We contend, however, that this is not
quite accurate. Meursault narrates his sensations in what
appears to be a poetic prose but which is really a precise
description of what he hears, feels and sees. Considered
from a physiological approach, moreover, Meursault's meta
phorical language describes his condition very precisely.
44We are particularly indebted to Mr. Ullman for his
original and penetrating analysis of this metaphor: "To
heighten the hallucinatory effect of the whole scene, Camus
introduces two short and arresting acoustic images: 'La
tete retentissante de soleil1 (p. 84); 'Je ne sentais plus
que les cymbales du soleil sur mon front' (p. 87). The
genesis of these two acoustic metaphors is interesting and
throws some light on the way the writer's mind works in
these matters. The two images, packed into one, already
occur in the early volume Noces: 'la tete retentissante des
cymbales du soleil et des couleurs' (p. 22). There they are
no more than a synaesthetic metaphor embedded in a neutral
context. In L1Etranger the two images are separated, and
the terseness which they thus achieve strengthens their im
pact; more important, they play a dynamic part in the con
verging attack of overpowering sensations which throw Meur
sault off his balance. The cymbal image in particular is
291
develop the reference to musical instruments initiated by
"la flute k trois trous." However, this use is ironic; the
subtle, delicate flute music accentuating the silence of the
scene contrasts with the loud ringing in Meursault's ears.
This "ringing" generally accompanies heat prostration.
The heat becomes so great that it is "penible aussi de
45
rester immobile sous la pluie aveuglante du ciel" (p. 84).
Now light has become liquid and Meursault vainly attempts to
flee from it as he would from a thunderstorm; opposites are
referred to by the same image: the sun becomes everything
and everything becomes the sun; finally it determines all
sensual perception.
A very important fact now becomes conspicuous because
admirably fitted to mark the culmination of the cumulative
process: 'Je ne sentais plus que les cymbales du soleil
sur mon front et, indistinctement, le glaive eclatant jailli
du couteau toujours en face de moi. Cette epee brulante
rongeait mes cils et fouillait mes yeux douloureux. C'est
alors que tout a vacille.' There is also an effective con
trast between the ringing inside Meursault's head and the
absolute silence of the early afternoon on the beach. Only
after firing the first shot does he begin to realize what he
has done, and it is characteristic of him that this reali
zation comes to him in purely physical terms: 'J'ai com-
pris que j'avais detruit l'equilibre du jour, le silence
exceptionnel d'une plage ou j'avais ete heureux.'" (pp. 250-
251)
^5Dante in the Divine Comedy likewise showers certain
sinners with liquid fire.
46
Meursault does not mention it. Where is the wind? The
slightest sea breeze for an imminent victim of heat prostra
tion would be a deliverance. Although Meursault remains
silent about it, we know that there is none at all; how
could he hear the clatter of dishes and silverware, like the
playing of the flute, at a considerable distance if there
were a wind? Also the violent optical distortions, de
scribed in following paragraphs, could not occur with a
wind: "mirages," which play an important role in the de
scription, are composed of air and water vapor which, radi
ating from a heated surface, refract light rays so that
optical distortion results. Even a slight wind prevents
these "mirages" by blowing away the radiated heat. A sea
breeze is normally strongest at the time of day the action
takes place. Camus thus has suppressed it in order to
heighten Meursault's suffering. The wind finally does come
as a "grand souffle chaud" (p. 85) and not as a cool, re
storing sea breeze. It becomes the fiery breath of the sun;
a secret weapon which sears Meursault: "La mer a charrie
un souffle epais et ardent" (p. 89). The victim has again
AC
^ To the best of our knowledge, this has not been
brought up previously in connection with this scene.
47
been caught off guard.
The sea no longer promises relief from the sun, but
described in zoomorphic images, appears to suffer from the
heat itself; its stabilizing effect has been overcome by the
sun: "Sur le sable, la mer haletait de toute la respiration
rapide et etouffee de ses petites vagues" (p. 85). General
ly referred to in calm respiratory images, the sea now gasps
for breath like an exhausted animal. It next loses its
liquidity— "la poussifere de mer" (p. 85), to finally resolve
itself into "un ocean de metal bouillant" (p. 86). For
Meursault, salvation by the sea has become an impossibility.
"Je sentais mon front se gonfler sous le soleil" (p.
85) is psychologically very accurate; the afflicted part of
the^body occupies the attention to such a degree that its
importance becomes magnified and thus corresponds to an
imagined increase in physical dimensions. Although comic
strips and cinema cartoons illustrate pain by this means,
its use is very ancient; many pre-Christian Germanic wood-
carvings depict an identical distortion.
Intense suffering from heat prostration reaches a zenith
47 The sirocco, which Camus appears to be describing
here, was first mentioned as a consciousness of death in
"Le Vent h Djemila."
294
in the following passage:
Et chaque fois que je sentais son grand souffle chaud
sur mon visage, je serrais les dents, je fermais les
poings dans les poches de mon pantalon ... mes ma-
choires se crispaient. (p. 85)
Meursault now appears to retract within his physical being,
to constrict and hold his limbs close to his body. The
"souffle chaud" bears down upon him like an icy wind; he is
describing a reaction common to intense cold, not heat;
nature has again reversed itself. This is entirely precise,
however, as this reaction commonly takes place just before
✓
a total collapse; the victim complains of the "cold" and
his teeth begin to chatter. Both intense heat and cold, by
exceeding the body's capacity to record them, overstep the
48
"threshold of pain" and thus they appear identical. The
reversal of ocular perception, previously described in
49
Noces. is now extended to tactility.
The sun, by acquiring the density of an opposing ob
ject, destroys the transparency of light: "Je me tendais
tout entier pour triompher du soleil et de cette ivresse
opaque qu'il me deversait" (p. 85). The intensity of
4®A blindfolded person will often identify ice as a
burning object.
49"La campagne est noire de soleil" (p. 13).
295
reflected light becomes so great that it literally pene-
50
trates and becomes incisive:
A chaque epee de lumiere jaillie du sable, d'un coquil-
lage blanchi ou d'un debris de verre ... (p. 85)
L'Arabe a tire son couteau qu'il m'a presente dans le
soleil. La lumifere a gicle sur l'acier et c'etait comme
une longue lame etincelante qui m'atteignait au front.
(p. 87)
Je ne sentais plus que ... la glaive eclatant jailli du
couteau toujours en face de moi. Cette epee brulante
rongeait mes cils et fouillait mes yeux douloureux.
(pp. 87-88)
The "sword of light" of the first passage thus solidifies
into a real, metallic blade in the second and third passa
ges. Light first becomes fragmented by the sea-shells, then
congeals into a solid, hard substance. The incisive quality
of light accordingly increases in each successive mention of
it: it is introduced in the first passage, reaches his
forehead in the second, then finally in the third it "gouged
[his] eyebrows and dug out his painful eyes." By reaching
a maximum intensity, sunlight directly precipitates the
shooting. The sweat in his eyes accompanies this use of
light and is also carefully prepared: " ... j*ai senti des
gouttes de sueur s'amasser dans mes sourcils" (p. 87). Five
50Cf. Barthes, p. 166, note 6.
296
sentences later the sweat blinds him: "Mes yeux etaient
aveugles derrifere ce rideau de larmes et de sel." Tears of
grief and the sweat of the brow are both composed 6f salt;
tragedy is expressed in terms of physical suffering. Meur-
sault, dazed and blinded by the sun, on the verge of col
lapse, thus fires the first shot at the reflected light from
the knife-blade, not at the Arab. Symbolically, he fires at
the sun itself; the Arab is the nameless agent of a burning
fatality. While the sun pushes Meursault from behind to
wards the Arab, its reflected light from the blade cuts into
him from in front. He has again been caught off guard. Now
he is trapped, imprisoned in a burning "cage of heat" and
thirst. He fires in desperation. On the appointed day of
his death, the sun will again send the reflected light from
another blade into his eyes.
The movement and the position of the sun are particu
larly relevant, as we demonstrated in the chapter on equi
librium.51
Le bruit des vagues etait encore plus paresseux, plus
etale qu'a midi. C'etait le meme soleil, la meme lu
miere sur le meme sable qui se prolongeait ici. II y
avait deja deux heures qu'elle avait jete l'ancre dans
un ocean de metal bouillant. (p. 86)
51Cf. pp. 179-185.
*
297
A cause de cette brulure que je ne pouvais plus suppor
ter , j'ai fait un mouvement en avant. Je savais que
c'etait stupide, que je ne me debarrasserais pas du
soleil en me deplagant d'un pas. (p. 87)
The first quotation depicts the illusion of solar immobility
at noon. The third sentence in this passage, by a very
vivid metaphor, dramatizes this immobility. The second pas
sage is a culmination of the first: the immobility of the
sun now appears so absolute that by a step forward Meursault
imagines he can also step away from it. He realizes, how
ever, that the sun is ubiquitous and omniscient. Like the
eye of God in Hugo's poem on Cain, the sun will follow him
everywhere, will envelop, constrain, motivate and witness
all his actions.
Although Mr. Ullman brilliantly described the metaphor-
* 52
ic use of "la tete retentissante des cymbales du soleil"
we wish to add a few pertinent details. The progression of
auditory impressions proceeds first from the ethereal musi-
cality of the flute, then to the percussive clamor of the
cymbals, and finally culminates in the violent detonation of
the pistol; the cymbals thus serve as a transition between
the "pure" musicality of the flute and the shots, which are
5^Cf. p. 291, note 43.
298
noise. A cymbal, moreover, because of its shape and color,
also suggests the form of the sun. Camus could not have
picked a more appropriate instrument.
The noise of the first shot awakens Meursault from the
trance which heat and blindness had cast upon him:
J'ai secoue le sueur et le soleil. J'ai compris que
j'avais detruit l'equilibre du jour, le silence excep-
tionnel d'une plage ou j'avais ete heureux. (p. 88)^3
54
As Mr. Ullman accurately points out, Meursault comprehends
his act physically. In the last line, however, he realizes
the full impact of the four shots he fires: "et c'etait
55
comme quatre coups brefs que je frappais sur la porte du
malheur." The act is now comprehended intellectually.56
Meursault observes a tiny detail which has a not in
considerable significance in the scene of the shooting.
Throughout the novel he always comments on people's cloth
ing; he never misses a detail, just as Camus the artist
never misses any. The clothes and the position of the Arab
53Cf. pp. 179-185.
54Cf. p. 291.
35Could Camus be alluding to the four "raps of fate" on
Beethoven's door which supposedly inspired his fifth sym
phony?
3®"His crime and his revelation are as one." (Bree,
p. 113)
299
with the knife heighten the visual intensity of the scene:
II etait seul. II reposait sur le dos, les mains sous
la nuque, le front dans les ombres du rocher, tout le
corps au soleil. Son bleu de c h a u f f e ^ fumait dans la
chaleur. (pp. 85-86)
While Meursault is stumbling forward, half-dazed from the
heat, towards the welcome relief of shade and cool water,
the Arab appears completely at his ease; the heat does not
seem to disturb him, since he does not even bother to move
into the shadow of the rock. Throughout the entire chapter
all colors progressed from red to yellow, then to the white
of the "coquillage blanc," and now finally to "bleu de
chauffe"; a hierarchy of intensity of colors has been skil
fully created; "red heat" progresses through "white heat"
and culminates in "blue heat"— that of a bunsen burner or an
acetylene torch. The coolest color thus becomes the hottest
color; visual perception has again experienced a reversal.
Considered in its entirety, the scene of the killing
very closely follows the pictorial imagery typical of Van
Gogh, whose stylization of color is also present in Noces.
as we have already indicated. The character and deeper
meaning of his painting, however, is much more closely
57This Arab is wearing the customary "djellabah," which
is almost always of a light blue color.
300
58
related to this scene in L'Etranger. Van Gogh not only
uses pure colors as does Camus, but he incorporates them
within a similar phenomenology; lines move, colors shimmer,
nothing is static, everything appears alive, even the most
inanimate objects. The same Mediterranean exuberance and
love of sensuality, and above all, the same hallucinatory
imagery dominate. Perhaps it is of interest to remark that
Van Gogh shot himself at noon in an open field.
In one short novel Camus has created a sun which re-
mains quite unique in French literature. Although Colette
and Giono are no less masterful artists of the natural
world, they belong to the gentle climate of another contin
ent which could not have inspired such a unique description.
The faithful reality of this rendition, moreover, has often
escaped critics who never directly experienced Camus' world.
Prison
The first few days Meursault spends in prison are
filled with questionings and technicalities. He is now
removed from his life in the natural world, but scarcely
58S. b . John ("Image and Symbol in the Work of Albert
Camus," Yale French Studies. 9:44, 1955) explains this
relationship in detail.
301
has time to reflect on his situation. When questioned by
the judge about the fatal shooting he remains silent, since
he is aware that the truth would not appear credible:
"Pourquoi avez-vous attendu entre le premier et le
second coup?" dit-il alors. Une fois de plus, j'ai
revu la plage rouge et j'ai senti sur mon front la
brulure du soleil. Mais cette fois, je n'ai rien
repondu. (p. 97)^9
Meursault does not remember in the conventional sense
(Latin, ££. + memorari: to be mindful of) but only as a
physical function, "organically," to such a degree that he
really feels the scene again. His constant interrogation
also has a psychological effect on him; he is now threatened
and becomes forced to remember so that in a sense he is
really learning to do so; during his former day-by-day life
■^This mutism of Meursault is what helps provoke his
condemnation by the legal machinery. Although his attitude
springs from a combination of disinterest coupled with a
certain malaise. the obtuseness of both his lawyer and the
judges prevents them from understanding the direct cause of
the shooting. When Meursault quietly utters in court "C'est
c i cause du soleil" he is making the most dramatic under
statement in the book: the reader compares the description
of the shooting with the few words spoken in the courtroom.
The legal machinery, moreover, uses a verbal and theatrical
demonstration which for Meursault is senseless. The image
thus clashes with its verbal rendition: "This discord be
tween the objective reality and the subjective image which
pretends to reproduce it is calculated to present us with
the futility of human justice. How honestly support a ver
dict when its very object escapes all exact definition?"
(Maquet, p. 58)
302
he had no need of a past which would have contributed little
to his simple existence. Now his suffering gives birth to
his memory, which is awareness of his past and himself.
This process is slow and corresponds to his adaptation to
prison life. Memory gradually becomes a psychological
necessity depending upon evocations of visual and tactile
imagery; Meursault relives his sensations. The present is
a dark prison cell. The future is the guillotine. The past
alone is a sunny beach filled with love:
Au debut de ma detention, pourtant, ce qui a ete le
plus dur, c'est que j'avais des pensees d'homme libre.
Par exemple, l'envie me prenait d'etre sur une plage
et de descendre vers la mer. A imaginer le bruit des
premieres vagues sous la plante de mes pieds, l1entree
du corps dans l'eau et la delivrance que j'y trouvais,
je sentais tout d'un coup combien les murs de ma prison
etaient rapproches. Mais cela dura quelques mois.
Ensuite, je n'avais que des pensees de prisonnier.
(p. 109)
The present is a half-death, the future certain death, the
past alone is life. Meursault's humble memories are a
poetic joy. Those who enjoy profoundly the simplest pleas
ures, even by memory alone, reveal a healthy attitude to
wards life. Conversely, those who complicate their enjoy
ment in the hope of surpassing it reveal an unhealthy men
tality, a perverted incapacity to enjoy beauty, hence they
become bitter. By mixing pleasure with pain they corrupt
303
the meaning of both. Meursault conforms to the first
attitude, Caligula to the second— again Camus opposes his
characters.
Meursault's memory and his imagination do not populate
his revery with unlikely or fantastic dreams, but instead
become efforts to relive the simplest joys of nature which
he recalls in the minutest detail. An extreme passivity
allows him to adapt himself to prison life so completely
that he loses his sense of claustrophobia. His inherently
strong will to live, however, does not take on a form of
hatred and rebellion, but instead adapts itself to the en
vironment and remains as strong as ever:
J'ai souvent pense que si l'on m'avait fait vivre dans
un tronc d'arbre sec, sans autre occupation que de
regafder la fleur du ciel au-dessus de ma tete, je m'y
serais peu h. peu habitue. J'aurais attendu des passages
d'oiseaux ou des rencontres de nuages comme j'attendais
ici les curieuses cravates de mon avocat et comme, dans
un autre monde, je patientais jusqu'au samedi pour
etreindre le corps de Marie. Or, a bien reflechir, je
n'etais pas dans un arbre sec. II y avait plus mal-
heureux que moi. C'etait d'ailleurs une idee de maman,
et elle le repetait souvent, qu'on finissait par
s'habituer a tout. (p. 110)
Before the shadow of death Meursault opposes "the flower of
the sky": his love of life is invincible because it can
adapt itself to changing conditions and thus avoids being
crushed. The poetic elevation of the first sentence relates
304
imagination, which has become more vivid by the evocation
of Saint Jerome's dwelling place composed of a hollow
trunk, to a triumphant thirst for life. The last three sen
tences show a rapid awakening to reality which is accom
panied by a very objective outlook. He now remembers his
mother and she will become increasingly important to him;
his life now begins to duplicate hers:
Je me suis souvenu alors de ce que disait l'infirmi&re
a 1'enterrement de maman, Non, il n'y avait pas d*issue
et personne ne peut imaginer ce que sont les soirs dans
les prisons, (p. 116)
Maman disait souvent qu'on n'est jamais tout a fait
malheureux. (p. 159)
On the last page of the novel Meursault finally understands
his mother's pitiful life; he relates her death at the
beginning of the novel to his own which will end it. By so
doing he appears to have grown in wisdom and to have lost
his youthful insouciance:
Pour la premifere fois depuis bien longtemps, j'ai pense
k maman. Il m'a semble que je comprenais pourquoi a la
fin d'une vie elle avait pris un "fiance"; pourquoi elle
avait joue k recommencer. La-bas, la-bas aussi, autour
de cet asile ou des vies s'eteignaient, le soir etait
comme une treve melancolique. Si pres de la mort, maman
devait s'y sentir liberee et prete a tout revivre.
Personne, personne n'avait le droit de pleurer sur elle.
Et moi aussi, je me suis senti pret a tout revivre.
(p. 171)
At last he has finally succeeded in understanding the
305
meaning of his life in relation to his mother's. In the
beginning of the narration, her friends drew a picture of an
old woman who still held on dearly to life, who had no reli
gious sentiments and who did not care about last rites or a
Christian burial. Meursault here suggests that she had once
loved the simple world of nature much as he did; she too
may have been a "happy pagan." Meursault's dialogue here
reveals the "empty resonance," that strange combination of
liberty and bondage, of life and imminent death, which so
vibrantly composes his thirst for life; at the moment of
death he feels ready to begin anew the existence he had
always known, to live again the same life he was about to
lose rather than to reject it in favor of the Kingdom of
Heaven.
Meursault's long voyage to self-understanding began
with his Odyssey of memory; "J'ai compris alors qu'un homme
qui n'aurait vecu qu'un seul jour pourrait sans peine vivre
cent ans dans une prison" (p. 113). Here life is contrasted
to prison; he is aware that for him it is a partial death
and that only through memory will he be able to experience
vicariously the joys he had once known directly.
From within his cell he notices every fragment of the
natural world which filters through the prison bars. First,
306
%
in the judge's chamber, he casually remarks the sunlights
"II etait deux heures de apr&s-midi et cette fois, son bu
reau etait plein d'une lumiere a peine tamisee par un ri-
deau de voile" (p. 95). Light now comes to him indirectly.
filtered and deformed. (Cf. Barthes, p. 244, note.) It is
by just such an indoor light that Meursault searches for the
image of his face:
Le jour finissait et c'etait l'heure dont je ne veux
pas parler, l'heure sans nam, ou les bruits du soir
montaient de tous les etages de la prison dans un cor
tege de silence. Je me suis approche de la lucarne
et, dans la derniere lumiere, j'ai contemple une fois
de plus mon image. (p. 115)
Twilight here is oppressive rather than pleasant, which is
unusual in Camus' solar day, Meursault, however, is allud
ing to his mother's depressing evenings in the asylum which
now suggest his own. For the "institutionalized" the natur
al world almost ceases to exist; Meursault's splendid solar
days are reduced to "1'alternance de la lumifere et de
1'ombre" (p. 114) and finally become all alike: "Pour moi,
c'etait sans cesse le m&me jour qui deferlait dans ma cel
lule et la m£me tache que je poursuivais" (p. 115).
His days have lost their individuality but his dawns
have also lost their innocence: dawn, which initiated the
day of the fatal shooting, now reappears in every successive
307
daybreak in prison: his executioners, at such a time on an
unknown day, will, in stocking feet, approach him when he is
asleep, pounce on him, and drag him out to the guillotine,
as is traditional in France. This time of day becomes a
moment of anguish just as its passing signifies for him
"twenty-four hours gained." The rising of the sun will thus
announce to him his death.
Meursault, however, refuses to hope for a possible
escape or a reprieve and it is precisely this refusal which
renders his last few days tolerable, preserves his lucidity,
and renders the remainder of his life so dear to him. The
prison window is his only access to the outside world, which
for him is his only deliverance. Accordingly, the sight of
the sea appears to correspond to the arrival of Marie; the
two always appear together, even when Meursault is in pri
son:
La prison etait tout en haut de la ville et, par une
petite fenetre, je pouvais voir la mer. C'est un jour
que j'etais agrippe aux barreaux, mon visage tendu vers
la lumifere, qu'un gardien est entre et m'a dit que
j'avais une visite. J'ai pense que c'etait Marie.
C'etait bien elle. (p. 104)
Previously, physical contact with the sea always announced
a carnal relationship with Marie. In the present situation
she, like the sea, becomes purely visual; Meursault, there
fore, enjoys only a partial relationship to both, which
nevertheless is a great pleasure for him. After his angry
encounter with the priest, who represents for him an alien
belief, he gains a new perspective of the meaning of his
life and he summarizes what Marie means to him:
Peut-etre, il y a bien longtemps, y avais-je cherche un
visage. Mais ce visage avait la couleur du soleil et
la flamme du desir: c'etait celui de Marie, (p. 167)
Meursault's daily itinerary is composed of shuffling
between the courtroom and his prison. He neither walks the
short distance between them in the open air nor does he ride
in an automobile, but is seated inside a police wagon which
has no access to the world outside. Never again will he
bare his head to the sun, except on the day of his execu
tion. Considered symbolically, he first does so under a
sun which sends "swords of light" into his eyes and "gouges
them out." Then, on the day of his death, he will repeat
this gesture before the sharp blade of the guillotine whose
presence coincides with that of the sun; thus the incisive
quality of light first referred to metaphorically will be
come a horrible reality. The kneeling posture of supplica
tion obligatory for this manner of execution is also sym
bolic; the victim mimics a praying attitude. The sun, by
appearing to exact humility from the victim, not only
309
witnesses his execution, as it did once before, but again
dominates the scene. During the day of the shooting, more
over, the redness of sand and rocks predicted the blood
dripping from Raymond's arm. This sanguine color reappears
in the fiery red flame which spouted from the pistol. On
the day of execution blood will again flow under the sun.
Camus then very artfully alludes to all of this rather than
exposing it directly which would be in bad taste and unneces
sarily brutal. •
The hermetic police wagon which encloses Meursault in
blackness, however, does not prevent his elan towards the
world outside. Familiar sounds reach him, and through them
he once again experiences the beautiful, simple world he
loves so well:
L'audience a ete levee. En sortant du palais de
justice pour monter dans la voiture, j'ai reconnu un
court instant l'odeur et la couleur du soir d'ete.
Dans l'obscurite de ma prison roulante, j'ai retrouve
un k un, comme du fond de ma fatigue, tous les bruits
familiers d'une ville que j'aimais et d’une certaine
heure ou il m'arrivait de me sentir content. Le cri
des vendeurs de journaux dans l'air dej& detendu, les
derniers oiseaux dans le square, l'appel des marchands
de sandwiches, la plainte des tramways dans les hauts
tournants de la ville et cette rumeur du ciel avant
que la nuit bascule sur le port, tout cela recomposait
pour moi un itineraire d'aveugle, que je connaissais
bien avant d'entrer en prison. (p. 137)
It is neither the breaking of the surf on the shore
310
nor the wind blowing across the dunes which he hears, but
the humble, everyday city noises which once he had taken for
granted. These are also the sounds of life, of the ordinary
citizens of whom he had been a brother and who are now re
turning home from work as he once had done. Now, confined
within his rolling prison, he again makes a familiar itin
erary, not towards an evening of pleasant relaxation, but
towards a prison cell which will open only to death. Meur-
60
sault has his "last mxle."
The poignancy of this scene is gripping;^ Meursault's
love of life is so intense that hearing, the one faculty
®°The "Bridge of Sighs" in Venice is a direct parallel
to this image.
®^By comparing the passage quoted above with the fol
lowing from Le Mvthe de Sisvohe. we can observe how Camus
uses identical imagery in a completely antithetical context:
"Il arrive que les decors s'ecroulent. Lever, tramway,
quatre heures de bureau ou d'usine, repas, tramway, quatre
heures de travail, repas, sommeil et lundi mardi mercredi
jeudi vendredi et samedi sur le meme rythme, cette route se
suit aisement la plupart du temps. Un jour seulement, le
'pourquoi' s'elfeve et tout commence dans cette lassitude
teintee d'etonnement. (p. 27; cf. our text, p. 125) The
"tramway" in Le Mvthe de Sisvphe suggests boredom and mono
tony but the same concrete image in L1Etranaer evokes a
poignant nostalgia. The typical workday which crushes by a
dull routine is also the same workday which Meursault covets
in the police wagon. Considered in relation to this pas
sage, he is incapable of asking questions of life, and be
cause of this incapacity, he longs vehemently for that which
he knows and loves.
311
remaining to him in this situation, seems to redeem the loss
of all the others.
In the death cell Meursault, without realizing it,
relives the image of Saint Jerome which he alluded to many
months before:^
On m'a change de cellule. De celle-ci, lorsque je suis
allonge, je vois le ciel et je ne vois que lui. Toutes
mes journees se passent h regarder sur mon visage le
declin des couleurs qui conduit le jour k la nuit.
(p. 152)63
In this posture he literally becomes the stranger Baudelaire
64
created in his prose poem which corroborates M. Quillot's
brilliant analogy. Like Baudelaire's stranger, Meursault in
this scene could also say "J'aime les nuages— les nuages qui
passent 1^-bas, les merveilleux nuages."
In the last moments of his life Meursault attains the
wisdom of the Greeks; he reconciles his life with the world;
the inner and the outer aspects of existence become one:
Comme si cette grande col&re m'avait purge du mal, vide
d'espoir, devant cette nuit chargee de signes et
d'etoiles, je m'ouvrais pour la premifere fois h. la
62Cf. p. 305.
c q
In La Peste the citizens of Oran, imprisoned within
their plague-ridden city, stare at the sky much as Meursault
does.
64Cf. p. 169.
3X2
tendre indifference du monde, De l'eprouver si pareil
k moi, si fraternal enfin, j'ai senti que j'avais ete
heureux, et que je l'etais encore, (p. 171)
He accepts his ritual execution as a natural death, no more,
no less. His lucidity is triumphant. His earthly life, the
only one he recognizes, is about to end. He can truly say
"I was happy." If "nothing is more tragic than the life of
65
a happy man" one can also say that his life was fortunate,
and that he also could have claimed:
Sentir ses liens avec une terre, son amour pour quelques
hommes, savoir qu'il est toujours un lieu ovi le coeur
trouvera son accord, voici dejk beaucoup de certitudes
pour une seule vie d'homme.66
65"Dans l'ete d'Algerie, j'apprends qu'une seule chose
est plus tragique que la souffrance et c'est la vie d'un
homme heureux." ("L'Ete k Alger," p. 68)
66"L'Ete k Alger," p. 66.
CHAPTER XIX
CALIGULA: NATURE TURNED UPSIDE DOWN
Camus' love of the theater was as strong as his love of
the sun and the sea of his native Algeria. His attention
alternated between the solitude of the beaches and the human
collectivity of the Theatre de L'Equioe. His theatrical
aspirations may explain his long residence in Paris, a
necessary Mecca for all young playwrights, but for him an
unlikable North European capital. Within a play nature
cannot be developed as in the denser form of a novel, but it
can be contained in the dialogue and can also become en
meshed within the plot.
The framework and genesis of Calicrula must first be
seen in perspective to Camus' other works in order for us to
gain a deeper insight into his intentions. Caligula, like
L1Stranger and Le Malentendu. falls into his pre-war period.
Even during the earliest part of his career, Camus never
^■"He [Caligula] is, in a way, a tragic counterpart of
Meursault . . ." (Philip Thody, Albert Camus [London, 1961],
p. 73.)
reinstated the same character or situation in a different
setting. Each work, however, alternates with another or
possibly with several others. Caligula and Meursault oppose
each other by an active-passive duality which almost reaches
a sadistic-masochistic opposition; Meursault becomes a ritu
alistic scapegoat, hence an object, and is treated as such
by the society which imprisons him; Caligula, however, im
poses his will upon the masses whom he treats as an object
of his contempt and despair. The action in both works is
initiated by the death of a member of the family; Meursaultb
mother corresponds to Caligula's sister, Drusilla, by oppo
sition rather than by similarity. The mother, exhausted by
senility and the progressive deprivation of her faculties,
dies a slow, natural death which is certainly no surprise to
Meursault. Drusilla, in the full blossom of her youth and
beauty, dies quickly and unexpectedly. Meursault according
ly reacts by indifference and Caligula by intense suffering.
If one could say that Meursault's tragedy springs from his
indifference towards his mother, then one could also say
that Caligula's tragedy springs from the passionate love of
2
his sister. Caligula appears to have coveted his own death
^"Je ne m'etonne que l'ltalie soit la terre des inces-
315
after that of his sister, but Meursault accepts his only
after his conviction becomes irrevocable. The latter was
born an absurd man, yet remains unconscious of his inherent
nature until after the trial, when he gains self-understand
ing; Caligula once was a model of stoic Roman virtues which
he immediately casts aside when his grief converts him to
the absurd.
Camus creates a narrated absurd in L * Etranaer and its
dramatic counterpart in Calicrula. He subordinates an under
lying philosophy to the exigencies of aesthetic creation:
L1Etrancer exploits the narrative possibilities of the
recit; dramatic form is likewise exploited in the play,
which presents the spectator with an active and willful
personification of the absurd. Meursault's passivity makes
him the least theatrical expression of philosophic ideas
while Caligula's aggressiveness makes him ideally suited for
tes, ou du moins, ce qui est plus significatif, des incestes
avoues. Car le chemin qui va de la beaute h. 11 immoralite
est tortueux, mais certain." ("Le Desert," Noces. pp. 91-
92.) Does Caligula parody the love goddess Venus because
she inspired in him such an incestuous and tragic love? The
answer would appear to be affirmative. Venus, moreover, is
the goddess of the sea, the symbol of liberty in Camus'
works. The tyrant, who systematically crushes his subjects
because of their all too human "frailty," their belief in
love, crushes even more cruelly his own human love.
316
this purpose.
Caligula first translates his grief into revolt against
the cosmic order which had deprived him of his greatest
love. He then resolutely determines to inflict his personal
suffering upon the masses, thereby to replace metaphysical
revolt by social upheaval. He will systematically destroy
accepted traditional values by acting out the absurd de
structiveness of the cosmos. Finally he will succeed in
arousing lucidity and courage within the torpid and cowardly
souls of his victims, but at the expense of his authority
and his life. His death is a form of negative martyrdom.
Meursault also is a negative hero, but society can gain no
self-awareness by his immolation. Caligula's mistake con
sists of his tyrannical effort to force his own inner reve
lation of the world upon his subjects; he vainly strives to
make mankind conform to his image of what it should be— an
attempt which is both inhuman and yet heroic.
By his passion for revolt, Caligula closely resembles
3
Rimbaud, and by his theatricality he resembles both Hamlet
and Lorenzaccio; through mimicry he seeks to arouse the
3"De 'l'archange blond1 de Charleville et de sa descen
dance, Caligula a herite une melancolique ferveur toute
charge de secrete vehemence." (Quillot, p. 67)
317
conscience of his victims as does Hamlet and his use of
4
ironic pedagogy is similar to that of Lorenzaccio. Also
like Anouilh's Antigone, and Pirandello's Henri IV, Caligula
is an iconoclast (p. 64).
Meursault accepts the world unconditionally and totally
hut Caligula finds it unbearable and insufficient. The
"tender indifference of the world" thus cedes to a "cruel
indifference of the world" in the play. The following pas
sage underlines Caligula's attitude toward the natural
order:
Ce monde, tel qu'il est fait, n'est pas supportable.
J'ai done besoin de la lune, ou du bonheur, ou de
1'immortalite, de quelque chose qui soit dement peut-
Stre, mais qui ne soit pas de ce. monde. (I, v)
Caligula could very easily exclaim as Baudelaire did:
"N' imports ou'. pourvu que ce soit hors de ce monde 1" He
thus expresses a refusal of the natural order of which he is
a part. He will make the moon the image of his thirst for
the impossible. As the action progresses it will grow in
size and brilliance. It will strike this divine "lunatic"
from within as the sun struck Meursault from without.
^"Le meme souci pedagogique se trouvait deja dans Lor
enzaccio. 'II faut que le monde sache un peu qui je suis et
qui il est.' Les personnages de Bindo et Tebaldeo font res-
pectivement pendant aux patriciens et I t Scipion." (Quillot,
p. 68)
318
Caesonia, whose attractions are meaningless to Caligu
la, is a pagan immersed in the love of this world and of the
flesh:
Je n'ai jamais eu d*autre dieu que mon corps, et c'est
ce dieu que je voudrais prier aujourd'hui pour que
Caxus me soit rendu. (I, vii)
Caligula is conscious only of the futile love of his dead
sister and therefore mistreats Caesonia as he does the
others.
He is conscious of himself and the image he presents to
the world throughout the play; he does not gain a new under
standing, as does Oedipus; he does, however, materialize
his dark and tragic mission in a "superior form of sui-
5
cide." Like Meursault, he embodies an absolute rather than
a relative attitude towards the world, but unlike him, his
lucidity is almost omniscient and becomes a tool for devour
ing his victims; he predicts their words before they speak
and their acts before they materialize. He outmaneuvers
everyone by his mental and verbal agility; his logic and his
wit are triumphant. His madness is really an excess of
logic, a too keen awareness of the human condition. Man,
for him as for Montaigne, is also a "badin de la farce."
5Thody, p. 74.
3X9
Nature brings him no relief, for it is nature against
which he revolts. Although appearing to confuse both the
natural and the human order, he seeks really to expose a
profound order inherent to both— the order of chaos: "Je
veux m£ler le ciel h. la mer, confondre laideur et beaute,
faire jaillir le rire de la souffrance" (I, xii). His is
also the classical, Hellenic revolt of "the world turned
upside down," a reversal of all values which then becomes a
new set of values. This became a popular theme during the
Renaissance and was incorporated in many plays and also in
painting. Shakespeare relied heavily on it in several plays
and Brueghel the Younger made it a subject of many of his
paintings. In antiquity it had a literal and social signi
ficance; the ritual Dionysiac orgies and the Roman Saturna
lia traditionally permitted, during a certain time of the
year, a literal reversal of social customs; murders went
unpunished and those condemned to death were freed. Ves
tiges of this social "safety-valve" remain in the Lenten
revelry of most Mediterranean countries. Caligula, seen in
this historical perspective, acts according to an easily
recognizable pattern; he seeks to expand the ordered chaos
of the Saturnalia to his entire reign and to impose its
pre£epts in an implacable manner. Camus, who was a thorough
320
scholar, was well aware of this ancient tradition which
serves as a factual and historical basis of the absurd in
corporated with the play; as a drama Caligula is within the
classical tradition and does not allude to a strictly con
temporary event.
When Caligula wishes to "mingle the sky and the sea"
he is invoking the cosmic force of Hecate, who sets the
elements in revolt against one another; they clash in
"thunder, lightning, or in rain" and human values pale be
fore the fear of death which Caligula, the personification
of a cosmic upheaval, places, like the "moment of truth,"
before his all too human subjects. He materializes on the
stage the last two lines of the quotation; he makes a gro
tesque parody of Venus, thus "confusing ugliness and beauty";
he forces Lepidus to laugh after he has just killed his son,
g
thus making "laughter break forth from suffering." If
Caligula's victims had acted with honesty and courage, his
bitter pedagogy would be meaningless; he thus provokes the
cowardly responses which he really does not wish. In this
^Caligula's exalted dialogue is reflected in Macbeth's
vain attempt to fight his fatality: "though the treasure/
Of nature's germens tumble all together/ Even till destruc
tion sicken" (IV, i).
321
respect his immolation elicits honesty and courage from his
formerly debased subjects. His death at their hands is an
affirmation of their valor. He becomes the martyr of the
absurd.
Like the sun in L1Etranger and the plague in La Peste.
Caligula catches the human collectivity off guard. His very
presence is synonymous with unexpected death, a death which
breaks all comforting habits, all familiar and comforting
rules of life. In this respect he succeeds in becoming a
natural force. Since he is able to predict the reactions
of his victims with alarming accuracy, he is never caught
off guard himself and his death comes exactly as he had
planned it. His fearlessness appears to contribute to his
omniscience; no one can deceive him; he seems to have ex
changed his humanity for the indifferent force of nature.
Like. Meursault just before his immolation, he displays
throughout the play the strange and exhilarating anticipa
tion of death. He remains completely out of reach of the
humanity which he affects but which has no effect on him.
His Dionysian exultation strongly suggests that of Nietz
sche1 s Superman, his anguish that of Kierkegaard.
322
A Bitter Lvrical Duet
Young Scipion alone reacts with courage and honesty to
the madness of Caligula, who thus respects him for these
qualities. The youth thereby relieves the cowardice of the
other characters and becomes the quasi-confidant of the
Emperor. Scipion, in fact, evokes the portrait of a younger
Caligula who had not yet been stricken by the cruel revela
tion of the absurd. These two Caligulas confront each other
in a bitter mock duet in which the youth chants the innocent
glories of nature which his Emperor knows intimately but
cruelly rejects.
Scipion announces his poem on nature to Caligula, who
asks him "ce qu'elle [lui] a fait," and Scipion candidly
retorts: "Elle me console de n'etre pas Cesar" (II, xiv).
Caligula, who has just killed Scipion's father, thus easily
is expecting such a retort and is not caught off guard. He
replies "II n'y a que la haine pour rendre les gens intel-
ligents." Scipion replies that he does not have the poem
on him but Caligula asks him if he remembers it. By the
tone of his domineering queries the Emperor parodies a
pedagogue. Throughout the scene Scipion restrains his
hatred which Caligula controls as does a cranky school
master an insolent boy who cannot remember his recitation.
323
Caligula seems to take the words out of his mouth as if he
were prompting him. The theatricality of this dialogue is
admirable. We thus find it necessary to present some ex
cerpts from this scene:
Le Jeune Scipion, toujours raidi et comme h regret.
J'y parlais d'un certain accord ...
Caligula, 1'interrompant. d'un ton absorb^.
... de la terre et du pied.
Le Jeune Scipion, surpris. h^site et continue.
Oui, c'est h peu prfes cela, et aussi de la ligne des
collines romaines et de cet apaisement fugitif et bou-
leversant qu'y ramfene le soir ...
Caligula
7
... du cri des martinets dans le ciel vert.
Le Jeune Scipion, s1 abandonnant un peu. Plus.
Oui, encore. Et de cette minute subtile ou le ciel
encore plein d'or brusquement bascule® et nous montre
en un instant son autre face, gorgee d'etoiles9 lui-
santes.
7"Dans le ciel doux, des martinets crient encore."
("Entre Oui et Non," p. 74); " ... la lumifere verte ... "
("La Mort dans L'Ame," p. 93); " ... 11 [le ciel] devenait
vert, c'etait le soir." (L'Etranger. p. 158); " ... etrange
lumiire verte ... " ("L'Ete," p. 57).
®" ... la nuit bascule sur le port ..." (L'Etranger.
p. 137); " ... l'ete bascule ... " ("L'Ete a Alger," p. 70).
®"Gorgee d'etoiles ... " ("Entre Oui et Non," p. 70).
324
Caligula
De cette odeur de fumee, d'arbres et d'eaux qui monte
alors de la terre vers la nuit.l°
Le Jeune Scipion, tout entier.
Le cri de cigales et la retombee des chaleurs, les
chiens, les roulements des derniers chars, les voix
des fermiers ...
Caligula
... et les chemins noyes d'ombre dans les lentisques
et les oliviers.H
Le Jeune Scipion
Oui, oui, c'est tout cela1 . Mais comment l'as-tu appris?
Caligula, pressant le ieune Scipion contre lui.
Je ne sais pas. Peut-etre parce que nous aimons les
memes verites.
Caligula's paternal gesture is purely feigned, although
Scipion now thinks he has struck a human note in the tyrant
who suddenly assumes a condescending and patronizing atti
tude by criticizing the poem didactically: "Tout cela
manque de sang": the young poet has been again caught off
guard. His Emperor then expounds on his despair, presenting
... 1'odeur de fumee qui monte de la terre ..."
(Carnets. 1939-1942, p. 195).
11" ... il y a des chemins parmi les lentisques et les
oliviers ... " ("L'Ete c i Alger," p. 55).
325
it like "true" poetry to his young "pupil":
Seul'. Ahi si du moins, au lieu de cette solitude em-
poisonnee de presences qui est la mienne, je pouvais
gouter le vraie, le silence et le tremblement d'un
arbre1
Caligula's suffering has thus killed in him his former love
of nature.
In this scene Scipion's poem is thus made to appear as
part of a well-known text which Caligula had once learned
and loved but which now seems insufficient beside his pre
sent anguish. The fact that he takes the words out of
Scipion's mouth to dash them to the ground also reveals that
he completely rejects his former simple and complete love of
nature; he parodies this defunct love, and thus part of him
self. Caligula is a man who kills the innocence of his
youth.
The beautiful and lyrical description of nature comes
directly from Noces and L'Envers et L'Endroit. Evening,
however, brings not peace and reconciliation, but a self-
conscious suffering. Camus uses the images most typical of
his style and manner of feeling nature— one almost senses
that Caligula is deriding Camus, his creator. This passage
may also reveal Camus' dislike for teaching, which he soon
abandoned, or a dislike for the school where he was a
326
student. This supposition has no basis in fact, however,
since he never mentions these experiences.
By cynically and bitterly ending the pseudo-lyrical
pedagogical duet, by denying any consolation in nature,
Caligula appears to condemn his former innocent and youthful
joys in nature. His scorn, however, reveals an acute sensi-i
tivity and the bitter rejection of a man who defiles what he
12
loves intensely. Many years later this same rejection
appears in the middle-aged Jean Baptiste Clamence, who like
Caligula reveals an acute hypersensitivity and an almost
masochistic pleasure in isolating himself from a beautiful
natural world.
The moon, which Caligula coveted in Act I, reappears
in Act 111* but in a changed form. It was not visible at
the beginning of the play, but now it makes a triumphant
appearance. Thus it alludes to the passage of time within
the play. In this scene Caligula's gestures conflict with
12
"He is shown from the very beginning as a man who
becomes cruel through an excess of sensitivity rather than
through a lack of it . . (Thody, p. 68). Caligula's hate
is but misdirected love; he loves only what his subjects
should be, hence he hates what they are. Meursault loves
the world as it is. He cannot hate because he. knows no
ideal; Caligula cannot love because he knows only the ideal.
Since nature is the real world, and not an ideal, Meursault
is a man made to love it, Caligula a man made to condemn it.
327
his verbal description, just as his words clashed with his
sentiments in the scene previously analyzed:
Caligula, touiours occupe h rouair ses onales du pied.
Ce vernis ne vaut rien. Mais pour en revenir k la lune,
c'dtait pendant une belle nuit d'aoflt.
(Hdlicon se d^tourne avec ddpit et se tait. immobile.)
Elle a fait quelgues fa?ons. J'etais dejk couche.
Elle etait d'abord toute sanglante, au dessus de 1'hori
zon. Puis elle a commence k monter, de plus en plus
leg&re, avec une rapidite croissante. Plus elle mon-
tait, plus elle devenait claire. Elle est devenue
comme un lac d'eau laiteuse au milieu de cette nuit .
pleine de froissement d'etoiles. Elle est arrivee
alors dans la chaleur, douce, legere et nue. Elle a
franchi le seuil de la chambre et avec sa lenteur sure,
est arrivee jusqu'a mon lit, s'y est coulde et m'a
inonde de ses sourires et de son eclat.— Decidement,
ce vernis ne vaut rien. Mais tu vois, Helicon, je
puis dire sans me vanter que je l'ai eue. (Ill, iii)
The moon and Caligula's madness rise together. As he
paints his toenails he describes for us a seductive moon
which "crosses his threshold," stops "at [his] bed," and
sheds its "smiles" on him. What is this lunatic's moon, or
rather who is it? Not openly, but quietly and late at night
it enters his chamber as Drusilla must have done. Perhaps
they embraced under its beams. The moon's is a dead, re
flected light and Drusilla is dead. Is not this frightening
moon really the phantom, the reflected light of his dead
sister? Are not all moon deities feminine and does not
328
Hecate wreak havoc upon mortals? Perhaps Selene is more
dangerous: Caligula bitterly experiences Endymion's rap
ture. Theocritus explains the Emperor's mad behavior:
Endymion the shepherd,
As his flock he guarded,
She, the Moon, Selene,
Saw him, loved him, sought him,
Coming down from heaven
to the glade on Latmus
kissed him, lay beside him.
Blessed his fortune.
Evermore he slumbers,
Tossing not nor turning,
Endymion the shepherd.
Selene kisses with her light a wretched emperor who would be
a happy shepherd, a Caligula who would be an Endymion. The
madness of a sick mind has made of Drusilla a Selene.
Selene-Drusilla, is not this love a perversion? Caligula now
commits with the moonlight an incestuous affair as he once
had done with his sister: incest with a mortal is trans
ferred to incest with a goddess.
Caligula's love for nature has become incestuous. Hav
ing spurned the healthy human love of nature Scipion pro
posed to him, he now makes of the moon a horrid caricature.
He commits incest with natural beauty: "Je veux meler le
ciel e i la mer, confondre laideur et beaute, faire jaillir
le rire de la souffrance." He is a systematic lunatic; how
better to degrade the hated universe which killed his
sister, how better to turn the world upside down than by
fornicating with beauty?
His parody of Venus is a corruption of natural beauty,
I
a willful degradation of the Flesh given to man by the gods.
He also seeks to assume the impersonal force of a destruc
tive nature but his human cruelty merely counterfeits its
awesome grandeur. He tries to reduce the kingdom of the
j
gods to his own whims, but instead he brings down his palace!
on his head, like a mad Samson. His position has always
been false, intricately perverse.
The moon is more than his madness; it is his incapacity
to love what he knows to be true and real. Even before
Drusilla1s death and his subsequent conversion to the ab
surd, his incestuous love was the seed of his destruction.
The universe destroyed one mortal, therefore it itself must
perish. Because a girl died, an empire must also die.
Caligula crushes the happiness of others because his own was
destroyed. The death of Drusilla gave him the absurd, a
negative virtue which he pursued loyally to the bitter end.
i
He accomplished his purpose, but he forgave nothing, loved
nothing and in so doing he betrayed his subjects; he could
show them the truth only by killing them.
In conclusion, then, we must say that the role of
mature within this play is much less important than in
iL'Etranger, but it contributes not only to the character
portrayal but to the action. Caligula's is the lucid revolt
of a madman, of a hero and a monster.
CHAPTER XX
LE MALENTENDU:
THE LANDSCAPE DRIVES TO MURDER
Calioula was the first of Camus' plays and the most
successful. Written in 1938, it was not performed until
after the war and enjoyed three separate productions in the
following decades. Camus owes very much to Suetonius, who
wrote a vivid account of Caligula's life and who provided
him with several theatrical incidents which add considerable
value to the play. Le Malentendu. Les Justes and L'Etat de
Sieae fared much worse on the Parisian stage, which granted
|each play only one short production. The last two plays,
in spite of their brilliant intentions, suffer from a cer
tain didactic rigidity; Camus' moralizing, however commend
able it may be, appears rather pedagogical and verbose.
Le Malentendu. written during the war, was performed first
in 1944, and after a short run, was followed by Caligula in
1945; Camus thus suffered the surprise of seeing his earlier
play gain the fame which he had hoped would be bestowed upor
331
332*
the later one. His adaptations of Faulkner and Calderon
fared much better; he succeeded in realizing the dramatic
potential of Faulkner's novel, as he did Calderon's play.
His theatrical originality, therefore, appears somewhat less
than his indisputable genius as an essayist and novelist;
the failure of L'Etat de Si&oe. which owes its genesis to
his brilliant novel La Peste. attests to an unequal distri
bution of ability.
Le Malentendu reveals a certain transition in Camus'
life. The Africa of his youth became a distant memory in a
I dark, cold and hostile Europe, the bitter land of his exile.
This personal experience is almost directly translated into
the play; two continents, two different races of men, and
two different landscapes clash throughout and provoke murder
land suicide. Le Malentendu is as much a dialogue between
jopposing landscapes as between characters. It is above all
ja play written about Europe by a North African. This is
precisely what misled Parisian audiences who saw in it the
typical setting of a Grand Guicmol horror story laced to
gether with verbose understatements.
This play diametrically opposes Calioula in almost
every respect; the intensely opulent and striking theatri
cality of a Dionysiac crisis gives way to the muted under-
tones and sinister forebodings of impending disaster. In
Calioula everything is visible, in Le Malentendu everything
is hidden; Caligula may be called a play of presences and
Le Malentendu a play of absences. The former makes a spec
tacle of suffering which the latter hides; Caligula is too
lucid about his fate and Jan is too completely ignorant of
his; the former is torn to pieces by a mob and the latter
drowns while asleep. Caligula murders from grief; Martha
and her mother murder for money. Considered as a whole,
these two plays suggest an intentional opposition of two
different peoples and landscapes. They are joined, however,
by a few important details: Caligula and Jan, in varying
degrees, act before, others and do not reveal themselves;
the former is an accomplished mimic but the latter simply
does not reveal his identity; both, however, suffer because
they refuse to be themselves. In the two plays love fails;
Caligula spurns Caesonia and Jan turns away from Maria. In
his subsequent fictional works the happy couple, like the
father, is conspicuously absent.
Camus' unhappy pre-war experience in Prague, as de
scribed in L1Envers et L'Endroit. appears to have inspired
33<
1
the play directly. The fact that his commitment to the
French Underground obliged him to live in France appears to
i
I
corroborate and strengthen his previously unfavorable view
of continental European life. Camus very likely may have
felt that he was personally reliving the dark European
|
struggle which had deprived him of his father. It is not
i
surprising, then, in consideration of all these personal
experiences, that Le Malentendu is his most pessimistic and
negative play.^
j The plot is quite simple and is based upon the well-
Iknown and legendary "deadly inn," in which travelers are
jkilled for their money. Martha and her mother own just such
an inn but derive no pleasure from their profit. Martha's
jonly objective is to make enough money so that she can take
her mother away with her to a warm shore where "le soleil
tue les questions" (I, i). Money, as in La Mort Heureuse. j
becomes the means of escaping the native country where one
i
is an exile. The long absent son returns after having
*The play was formerly entitled Budoiuvice after a
small town in the center of Czechoslovakia which Camus may
have visited.
^"The expression which Camus gives to the absurd varies
from optimism to pessimism in the degree to which his memory
of North Africa is strong or weak." (Thody, p. 65)
335
amassed a small fortune in the warm Mediterranean country
his mother and sister covet. He decides, however, not to
announce his identity to them, but to enter the inn as a
stranger, whereupon they accordingly rob and kill him. When
the two women learn the truth they commit suicide.
The inclusion of the plot of this play within L1 Stran
ger suggests that Camus may have thought of writing the play
long before he did so. The mood of the novel, however, is
reinforced by this inclusion.
Meursault in prison finds under his mattress an old
newspaper clipping which describes the action of the play.
The only important difference between the journalistic
account and the latter is the method of murder: Jan is
killed with a hammer in L1Etranaer. but is drugged and then
drowned in the play. Violence is thus replaced oy careful
calculation. The climate of a murder thus coincides with
the oppressive gloom of the country. After reading the
clipping, Meursault accordingly comments upon the tragedy:
D'un cote, elle etait invraisemblable. D'un autre
elle etait naturelle. De toute fa?on, je trouvais
que le voyageur l'avait un peu merite et qu'il ne
faut jamais jouer. (p. 114)
The latter part of this comment appears to support the
meaning Camus may have intended for Jan's strange behavior:
336
one must not "play" with love but declare it openly and
honestly. Jan's motive, however, appears as vague as it
does suspect; most scholars have disputed his intentions
while also indicating this lack of clarity.3
The theatricality of the play depends upon two devices:
the murderesses almost stumble upon Jan's true identity:
they just miss glancing at his passport on the table but do
4
not do so until after they have killed him. The second
dramatic device consists of the disparity between the casual
discussion of the technical means of the murder and the
gravity of its consequences, The cold horror which results
is also suggestive of the influence the landscape has on its
unwilling prisoners; murder by cold calculation replaces the
unpremeditated and heated killing in L1Etranoer: two anti-
3Quillot offers the most plausible explanation: "Jan
nous emeut par sa bonne volonte naive et sa maladresse; il
rayonne du desir de rendre heureux ceux qu'il a delaisses;
mais il a peur des mots. Cet aventurier a un coeur d'en
fant: il biaise, car 1'instant de retrouvailles l'effraie
plus qu'aucun des combats qui lui valurent sa richesse. Une
fois fortune faite, il s'est souvenu, s'est attendri sur son
passe et n'a eu de cesse qu'il n'eut retrouve la demeure
familiale. Mais il a prefers s'y introduire, si j'ose dire,
par effraction. II la voulait pour lui seul, par surprise:
il entendait forcer sa solitude, pour mieux rompre la sien-
ne, la solitude du bonheur." (p. 132)
4"Le Malentendu est la pi&ce des occasions manquees."
(QuiHot, p. 126)
337
i
podal landscapes both drive to murder, but each in its own
separate way: Meursault kills because the Arab blocks his
path to the shaded spring which would bring him relief from ;
the sun; Martha kills her brother because his money would
provide an escape from a cold and dark landscape. One has
the impression that if both these murderers had changed
places before committing their crimes, neither would have
killed. Considered as a whole, these two works form an |
equilibrium, always present in Camus' mind, which may have 1
been his intention: man is thus the prey of any extreme
found in nature: the plot of Le Malentendu appears to have !
been included in L1Etranqer for such a reason. This ancient;
I
novelistic device of a story within a story is especially
clever, since Meursault never relates the newspaper article
to his own experience.
Martha seeks regeneration by a warm sea and is willing
to pay any price to get there. She appears never to have
become accustomed to the depressing atmosphere of her home
land and has learned of a desirable Mediterranean shore
from books and travel brochures. She dominates her mother,
who no longer has any hopes and who complains that "tuer
est terriblement fatigant" (I, i). Martha's longing for
the sea, which introduces the drama, is so strong that it
33$
appears almost innate:
Ah 1 M&re'. Quand nous aurons amasse beaucoup d'argent
et que nous pourrons quitter ces terres sans horizons,
quand nous laisserons derrifere nous cette auberge et
cette ville pluvieuse, et que nous oublierons ce pays
d1ombre, le jour ou nous serons enfin devant la mer
dont j'ai tant reve, ce jour-la, vous me verrez sou-
rire. Mais il faut beaucoup d'aurgent pour vivre libre
devant la mer. C'est pour cela qu'il ne faut pas
avoir peur des mots. C'est pour cela qu'il faut
s'occuper de celui qui doit venir. Car, s'il est suf-
fisamment riche, ma liberte commencera peut-etre avec
lui. (I, i)
In a few sentences Martha presents her motive and the murder
which will take place. She reflects accurately Camus' own
repugnance of such a country, but unlike him, she has never
lived in communion with nature. Her "terre sans horizons"5
opposes his intense love of the crystalline atmosphere of
the Mediterranean coastline and his aversion to a damp,
foggy atmosphere which drives people indoors. Martha, how
ever, is corrupted by her passion and has no pleasant mem
ories to console her as does Meursault. For Camus she is
also the image of an evil Europe of which "killing and pos-
£
sessing" are the principle attributes. Ironically it is
Martha's greed which destroys her quest for happiness and
5She repeats this dislike: "Je suis lasse de mourir
de cet horizon ferme." (I, vii)
^"La Mer au Plus Prfes," p. 184.
339
greed necessarily lends value to the future which then is
looked upon for fulfillment of a want. Her covetousness
thus not only'denies her present, but it is like a vacuum
which seeks a substance outside itself. Meursault, on the
other hand, Afl. but does not have? he is immersed in a total
state of being which seeks nothing alien to itself. His
love of nature thus coincides with being and not with hav
ing. Possessiveness destroys the love of nature; no man can
possess a landscape, one can only join it by loving it. In
Martha, Camus has created a young girl who has been made
inhuman by her surroundings and who instinctively seeks a
felicitous environment which will restore her humanity to
her. When she says " ... j'ai hate de trouver ce pays ou
le soleil tue les questions" (I, i), she is repeating her
creator who said " ... oft le soleil scelle les bouches"
and
Non, si le langage de ce pays s’accordait a ce qui re-
sonnait profondement en moi, ce n'est pas parce qu'il
repondait h. mes questions, mais parce qu'il les rendait
inutiles. (p. 138)
Martha's stifled life of claustration has also deprived
her of her youthful ioie de vivre and made of her an unwill-
7"L'Enigme," p. 138.
340
ing virgin:
Personne n'a embrasse ma bouche et meme vous n'avez
vu mon corps sans vetements. M&re, je vous le jure,
cela doit se payer. (Ill, i)
8
She does not have the warped inhibitions of a puritan but
rather appears to be the victim of circumstances beyond her
control; her constant work in the gloomy inn probably pre
vented her from meeting young men her own age.
Maria, Jan's wife, is one of the most attractive char
acters in Camus' repertory and accordingly she is the pre-
9
cise opposite of Martha. She has achieved an inner happi
ness by her marriage. She represents the full bloom of the
ideal Mediterranean woman.10 She is precisely what she
wants to be: "Quand on aime, on ne reve pas" (I, iv). When
Martha asserts her love for the still unseen sun "which
kills questions," both she and her sister-in-law are de
scribing the inviolable fulfillment of love which renders
dreams, like questions, useless. Maria is love fulfilled
and seeks only its survival. This is the meaning of her
Q
M. Quillot refers to her as a "puntaine du crime."
(p. 131)
9Carl A. Viggiani, "Camus' L'Etranqer." PMLA. 71:66-87,
1956, analyzes Camus' use of these names.
10Cf. Chapter VII.
341
life. Her feminine intuition warns her first about Jan's
strange intention, then about the ominous landscape:
Mais je me mefie de tout depuis que je suis entree dans
ce pays ou je cherche en vain un visage heureux. Cette
Europe est si triste. Depuis que nous sommes arrives,
je deviens soupgonneuse. (I, iii)
Her feminine intuition is thus reinforced by a Mediterranean
sensitivity to people and places: she is not closed in upon
herself like Martha, but i$ open to the world. She may be
called a static personality because of her fulfillment. Had
Meursault never experienced his imprisonment and trial he
undoubtedly would have remained just as static, although on
a different level of awareness. Martha is accordingly a
dynamic personality which seeks change and fulfillment.
Maria is innately a preserver and Martha a destroyer. The
former possesses the security of her femininity; the latter
has betrayed hers by becoming a "puritan of crime" and
assumes the masculine trait of aggressiveness. At twenty
she is already a failure as a woman and Maria a success.
This cleavage between the two intensifies as the action
progresses; Maria as an innocent victim reveals her sympa
thetic attributes as Martha asserts her inhuman brutality.
We are thus obliged to conclude that the former is really a
personification of the Mediterranean and the latter of con-
342
tinental Europe. Like the Mediterranean, Maria j j g . and like
Europe, Martha becomes. The former embodies a self-assured,
eternal world of anthropocentric values and the latter sug
gests the flux and turbulence of upheaval and quest for
political and social absolutes. Jan stands between the two
like a no-man's-land; Maria wants to love him for himself
and Martha sees in him a rich corpse to be robbed. Accord
ing to this dichotomy Jan is neither "fish nor fowl"; he
represents the continental European regenerated by contact
with the Mediterranean, but he remains uncertain of his true
nature; he appears to vacillate between two antithetical
landscapes, two hostile ways of life, and two different
psyches. His insensitiveness and naivete really describe a
man who is uncertain of himself in the most obvious and
fundamental way: a son sure of himself certainly would act
openly•towards his mother and sister. The average Mediter
ranean man, for example, would burst into the inn with a
joyous and lachrymose display, and thus he would prevent the
tragedy. A Prussian or English aristocrat, however, would
be more inclined to act with a reserve similar to Jan's.
His behavior, then, suggests that of a former continental
European temperament which he regains upon returning home.
His game of love, moreover, indicates a lack of love which
343
also is an expression of insincerity; a genuine love is
quite aware of the happiness its declaration brings to the
beloved. Jan insults the love of his mother; he has behaved
towards her in an inhuman way and she will respond in an
equally inhuman way— by killing him.1* He is a son who
cannot decide if he loves her or not. On the other hand,
Jan may have done some terrible wrong to his mother and his
attitude reflects shame and fear. We are never informed of
a logical reason for his behavior.
If his love of his mother is vaguely suspect, then his
open rejection of Maria's is clear; he wants to enter the
inn as a lone traveler, without his wife. This strange
behavior suggests smother enigma which Camus does not ans
wer: Maria is such a sympathetic person that a normal hus
band, especially a Latin, would want to introduce her to
•^Camus appears to symbolize in Jan a man who cannot
decide whether he is a husband or a brother and son. His
role of husband has been a happy one, yet he leaves his
wife, against her wishes and her sense of foreboding disas
ter , to play the role of the son in disguise. In this re
spect, he may be incapable of reconciling his love for his
wife with his love for his mother and sister. He cannot
decide, and because of this, like Hamlet, he is killed.
Were he openly to declare his love for one alone, however,
he would have avoided his fate. In this respect he is psy
chologically a "no-man's-land" whom Camus has transposed to
a landscape, a landscape which seeks its "definition." (I,
iv)
his mother. Why then does he want to pass the night at the
inn alone? He gives several groundless reasons which leave
the audience guessing and vrtiich Maria sees through immedi
ately. He claims that he is searching for his "definition"
(1, iv) which appears equally questionable. The use of this
word, however, seems to have an ironic implication since his
mother will give him the final "definition" of the grave.
Like Meursault, he is portrayed as a sacrificial goat head
ing blindly towards its death. Jan's manner of death, more
over, is most interesting and relates to Camus' attitudes
towards continental Europe; the victim is given a sleeping
potion; symbolically his senses have been put asleep by the
cold, drowsy, indoor life of the land-locked town— "il
glisse insensiblement vers la mort"; he is totally unaware
of impending disaster because he has lost his sense of life.
He is then drowned in the river— a symbolic form of death
suggesting a slow, unconscious asphyxiation; the landscape
thus appears to swallow him up.
The fatality, as almost all Camus' scholars have sug
gested, uses the play of lucidity and ignorance in Oedipus
Rexi Jan knows something about his mother and sister that
they do not know— that he is the long-lost son and brother;
they know something he does not know— that they will kill
345
him. Each thus has half of the information that will pre
vent a tragedy. The fatality, then, is composed of a per
fect and balanced dichotomy between knowledge and ignorance.
It is the latter which precipitates the forward movement of
the tragedy.
Maria and Martha both represent clearly defined land
scapes but not Jan. Accordingly, he is a very weak charac
ter who acts as a pawn between the two women; the former,
trying vainly to appeal to the reasons of the heart, con
fronts him honestly; the latter greets him with deceitful
and ominous "indifference bienveillante" (I, vi).1^ Maria
portends a living present and a promising future, Martha
precisely the opposite. Does Jan, by returning to the inn,
seek to revivify a dead and unhappy past, to shed his pre
sent wealth on those who have been denied it? Is he drawn
by some nostalgic love? Camus never clarifies this problem;
Jan merely stumbles forward into his death.
When he enters the inn he describes the warm beauty of
his country of adoption to Martha. Ironically he thus gives
12
This expression curiously resembles the "tendre in
difference du monde" of L'Etranger. Martha, who represents
for Camus the murderous European landscape, is no more
"bienveillante" towards Jan than the world is "tendre" to
Meursault.
346
I
her an added incentive for hilling him by whetting her al- j
ready eager appetite:
Martha: Et souvent, comme aujourd'hui, au milieu de
l'aigre printemps de ce pays, je pense a la mer et aux
fleurs de la-bas. Et ce que j*imagine me rend aveugle
tout ce qui m'entoure. j
Jan: Je comprends cela. Le printemps de la-bas vous
prend a la gorge, les fleurs eclosent par milliers au-
dessus des murs blancs. Si vous vous promeniez une
heure sur les collines qui entourent ma ville, vous !
rapporteriez dans vos vetements l'odeur de miel des
roses jaunes.
!
Martha: Cela est merveilleux. Ce que nous appelons I
le printemps, ici, c'est une rose et deux bourgeons j
qui viennent de pousser dans le jardin du cloitre. j
Cela suffit a remuer les hommes de mon pays. Mais i
leur ame ressemble a cette rose avare. Un souffle plus j
puissant les fanerait, ils ont le printemps qu'ils
meritent.
j
Jan: Vous n'etes pas tout a fait juste. Car vous avez
aussi l'automne. I
I
Martha: Qu'est-ce que l'automne?
Jan: Un deuxieme printemps, ou toutes les feuilles
sont comme des fleurs. (II, i)
l-^This dialogue appears closely related to the follow- ;
ing quotation from Camus' Carnets. 1939-1942, p. 176: "Le I
printemps a Paris: une promesse ou un bouton de marronier
let le coeur chavire. A Alger, le passage est plus brusque.
Ce n'est pas un bouton de rose. C'est mille boutons de ro
ses qui, un matin, nous suffoquent. Et ce n'est pas la j
qualite subtile d'une emotion qui nous traverse, mais
l'enorme et denombrable afflux de mille parfums et mille
couleurs eclatants. Ce n'est pas la sensibilite qui s'af-
firme mais le corps qui subit un assaut." (Cf. Ch. XV, p.
180) The cloister Martha mentions appears to have been
347
Martha really lives elsewhere in time and space; she has
rejected an unbearable present and anxiously awaits a future
which never materializes; concomitantly she has rejected the
ugliness of her native country and lives imaginatively in a
warm, fertile land filled with flowers. Jan's description
of this landscape not only coincides with her vision of
earthly happiness but surpasses it; he surprises her with
¥
the autumn which is like a "second spring."
I
In the dialogue between these two 1 1 landscapes" the
1
[profusion and odor of flowers compose the principal imagery.
(The evocation of a far-away natural beauty contrasts unmer-
i
cifully with the somber and gloomy interior of the inn where
the scene takes place. The wild and profuse Mediterranean
flowers evoked by her brother are for her a thinly veiled
call to love and the life of the senses, a redeeming eroti
cism; at twenty Martha fears a life of enforced celibacy.
Camus' imagery is particularly effective in describing her
attitude: a "miserly spring," she says, consists of a "rose
and two buds in the garden of the cloister": claustration
is again evoked in its literal, etymological sense and
derived from an almost identical one in Prague which Camus
described in "La Mort dans L'Ame," p. 87.
348
refers indirectly to a girl who bitterly resents her condi
tion. The rose represents love which is destined to wither
behind the cloister walls. She derides the young men of
this country who "resemble this niggardly rose," who are not
warm-blooded enough to be capable of love. They are accord
ingly granted "the spring they deserve." Martha, then, ex
presses to Jan her innermost torments in an indirect way.
His lack of perceptiveness prevents him from understanding
her. He appears, moreover, to understand no one in the
play, perhaps because of his insensitivity and perhaps also
because of the strange, dark compulsion which drives him
into the inn. In this scene he unconsciously becomes a
catalyst; he makes himself the accomplice of his execution
er. He goes to his death as the lemmings go to theirs.
After belatedly discovering the identity of her victim,
Martha realizes that she has destroyed her only hope of
ever joining the landscape she longs for. She vents her
wrath on her native country because now she is without hope.
Czechoslovakia is her punishment:
II me faut demeurer avec, a ma droite et a ma gauche,
devant et derriere moi, une foule de peuples et de
nations, de plaines et de montagnes, qui arretent le
vent de la mer et dont les jacassements et les murmures
349
etouffent son appel repete. (Ill , ii)14
She is imprisoned within a "noisy tomb" and every access to
the sea is blocked; she is like a land-locked ship. She
execrates her country with vehemence: "Oh', je hais ce
# 15
monde ou nous sommes reduits & Dieu" (III, ii).
Her salvation is the sea, the "water of [her] bap
tism"^ which she will never reach. Ironically her dead
brother lies at the bottom of the river which will some day
wash him out to sea. Symbolically his corpse, like that of
the Arab in L'Etrancer. is a barrier which bars her route
to salvation. Like Meursault, she too appears driven by
some strange instinct towards the sea of regeneration. He,
however, could contemplate his shining Mediterranean from a
prison window. Even this sight is denied Martha. Her
anguished longing rancors and turns to hate.
After Jan's death and the revelation of his identity,
Maria and Martha confront each other for the first time.
^■ 4This sentiment was thoroughly developed in "L'Exil
d'Helene."
15The failure of religion is the dominant theme of
"L'Ironie," in which the dying grandmother finds no consola
tion in her rosary or in her "plaster saints."
"La Mer au Plus Pr&s," p. 170.
350
Quite ironically Jan, while still alive, had prevented them
from meeting, but now his death joins them by their bitter
loss. Symbolically he was the neutral territory which kept
two antithetical landscapes from clashing. Now the two
oppose each other directly; a loving Mediterranean confronts
a murderous European. Each suffers from his absurd death:
Maria has lost the love of a good husband, but Martha has
lost the possibility of ever loving; her tragedy is all the j
more desperate; a dead love is better than none at all:
"Car il y a seulement de la malchance h, n'etre pas aime: ili
K 17
y a du malheur a ne point aimer." Martha, the "puritan
of crime" had reached for heaven only to plunge down deeper
18
into hell, "un enfer ou tout suppose le paradis." She
condemns the very thing which formerly she extolled, like
Caligula, and this volte-face makes of her a bitter, de
17"Retour a Tipasa," p. 157.
18npar quoi un coeur se gouverne-t-il? Aimer? rien
n'est moins sur. On peut savoir ce qu'est la souffrance
d'amour, on ne sait pas ce qu'est 1'amour. II est ici pri
vation, regret, mains vides. Je n'aurai pas l'elan; il me
reste l'angoisse. Un enfer ou tout suppose le paradis.
C'est un enfer cependant. J'appelle vie et amour ce qui me
laisse vide. Depart, contrainte, rupture, ce coeur sans
lumifere eparpille en moi, le gout sale des larmes et de
1'amour." (Carnets> 1939-1942, p. 229) Camus wrote this at
about the same time he wrote Le Malentendu. Martha's suf
fering seems close to his own.
351
formed person. When Maria turns to religion for consola
tion , her sister-in-law cruelly attacks even this last
refuge:
Priez votre Dieu qu'il vous fasse semblable a une
pierre. C'est le bonheur qu'il prend pour lui, c'est
le vrai bonheur. Faites comme lui, rendez-vous sourde
a tous les cris, rejoignez la pierre pendant qu'il en
est temps. Mais si vous vous sentez trop lache pour
entrer dams cette paix aveugle, alors venez nous re-
joindre dans notre maison commune. Adieu, ma soeur1 .
Tout est facile, vous le voyez. Vous avez a choisir
entre la stupide felicite des cailloux et le lit
gluant ou nous vous attendons.
When Martha's pagan hopes are destroyed, she becomes a
vengeful nihilist by seeking to inflict her despair on her
sister-in-law. Martha has already chosen the "lit gluant,"
the river bed, which first had claimed her brother, then
her mcther and now awaits her. Each death is related to
the other: Jan died without suffering physically or spiri
tually; the mother's suicide was a mechanical action which
took place immediately, almost without anguish. Martha's
suicide will express her hatred of herself and the world.
She will die with the most spiritual suffering. She is also
the youngest character and she longs desperately for life.
By means of three deaths Camus creates a progression of
suffering.
The passage above reflects directly Camus' own revul
352
sion of Christian asceticism, which for him was a death
within life, and a man who struggled for life as he did was
not apt to cast it aside so easily. As a result Camus,
standing behind Martha, appears to chastise Maria's pitiful
attempt to find religious consolation; the silent old ser?
vant, who is aware of the impending disaster before it
occurs, does nothing to prevent it; he is really a Dieu-
fiaslbL an indifferent and negative deity who turns his back
on Maria:
Entendez-moi, Seigneur, donnez-moi votre main'. Ayez
pitie de ceux qui s' aiment et qui sont sejaares. (La
porte s'ouvre et le vieux domestigue parait.)
Scene IV
Le Vieux. d'une voix nette et ferme
Vous m'avez appele?
Maria, se tournant vers lui. Oh I je ne sais pas!
Mais aidez-moi, car j'ai besoin qu'on m'aide. Ayez
pitie et consentez a m'aider!
Le Vieux, de la meme voix. Non!
Rideau
The old servant, the Dieu cache of a negative Christ,
who had witnessed the preparations of a murder, but had
never once intervened, now defines, for the first and last
time, his concern for Maria: God is the word no.
When Martha likens Christianity to petrification she
353
is echoing Camus, her creator, almost verbatim. In L1Envers
et L'Endroit. he described the old woman who, in love with
her tomb, becomes like it— the cold insensitiveness of
stone. Martha scornfully entreats her sister-in-law to deny
her humanity as did Lady Macbeth, who implored the hellish
demons to "take [her] milk for gall." Martha cruelly en
treats her to find the self-contained and self-justified
19
imperviousness of the stone commander in Don Juan, to be
come blind, deaf and dumb, dead to the world, a saint of
stone:
Pensons a £akia-Mouni au desert. Il y demeura de
longues annees, accroupi, immobile et les yeux au ciel.
Les dieux eux-memes lui enviaient cette sagesse et ce
destin de pierre. Dans ses mains tendues et raidies,
les hirondelles avaient fait leur nid. Mais, un jour,
elles s'envolerent a l'appel des terres lointaines.
Et celui qui avait tue en lui desir et volonte, gloire
et douleur, se mit a pleurer.cw
Because of Pygmalion's human love, a statue became
Galatea; because of Qakia-Mouni1s inhuman love he became a
statue and a saint; asceticism has reversed a myth to be
come, in turn, another. The lowest circle in Dante's Infer
no. reserved for the cold-hearted traitors and murderers,
19Cf. Chi V, p. 60.
2°"Le Minotaure," p. 62.
354
is not hot but frigid; the damned are contained by ice, held
fast by it, and have become statues frozen in a living death
for all eternity. Martha, who betrayed all human warmth
and the meaning of life, has found just such a hell on
earth.
Maria and Martha are not only personifications of two
antagonistic landscapes but embody also living images of
Camus' loves and hates; Martha is Camus' hatred personified
and Maria his love. The former ends in absolute negation
while the latter asserts an affirmation of love.
CHAPTER XXI
LES JUSTES: THE EPITAPH OP NATURE
Nature and discussions of it are conspicuously absent
in Les Justes. performed in 1949. Since Camus reflects
upon nature in philosophical and political works, Le Mvthe
de Sisvphe and L'Homme Revolte, and in his newspaper arti
cles, we are obliged to consider the reasons for this omis
sion in this play. The intrigue consists of an intended
assassination, the act itself, the moral and social conse
quences, and the subsequent execution of the assassin. The
scene alternates between a sordid little room where the act
is plotted and a prison cell. Claustration is much greater
than in Le Malentendur however, the characters seem oblivi
ous of their deprivation. Only one short mention of nature
takes place:
Dora
La bonne voie est celle qui mene a la vie, au soleil.
On ne peut avoir froid sans cesse ...
355
356
Annenkov
Celle-la m&ne aussi a la vie. A la vie des autres.
La Russie vivra, nos petits enfants vivront.
Souviens-toi de ce que disait Yanek:
"La Russie sera belle." (V, i)
Life proceeds to the sun, which will dissipate cold and
death. Of considerably more importance than this short
passage is the consistent revulsion towards snow in Camus'
works. In this play it is "dirty" (V, i). Such a descrip
tion, repeated in other works, leads one to suggest that
very probably he found it unbearable, especially in view of
his physical condition.
Although one would not expect nature to play a dominant
role in this drama, its almost total absence appears to be
intentional. Since Camus never describes the nature of a
place he has not visited, this artistic honesty may very
likely explain its short mention, its epitaph. We may also
suggest that because "la Russie enti&re est une prison" (V,
i), all nature also appears imprisoned within a polar fri
gidity .
«
CHAPTER XXII
LA PESTE: THE FOUR SEASONS OF THE PLAGUE
Qpe Form of Suffering Seen
in Terms of Another
Written shortly after the war and published in 1947,
La Peete soon became Camus' most popular work. At that time
the novel summarized for readers the long and bitter enemy
occupation from which they had just emerged. A new post
war generation which has no such memories finds the novel
equally stimulating and its popularity has continued to
grow. This masterpiece has been discussed thoroughly from
the social and political point of view, has often been
harshly and unjustly criticized, but it has scarcely been
considered as a work of art. Undoubtedly many readers were
too deeply affected by their own war-time experiences, which
they saw repeated in it, to be able to judge it objective
ly.^ Camus very skillfully had transferred the struggle to
^■"Camus himself remarked in a radio interview in 1955
that his careful composition of the novel had passed almost
357
358
overcome the German occupation to an allegorical combat.
Men react to a natural upheaval in much the same way
that they react to political turmoil, however, so that this
transfer appears natural and not forced. Camus, moreover,
describes the pathological and social effects of the plague
with a clinical precision which could not possibly be con
fused with a human invasion; the novel reveals a very thor
ough medical research which is never falsified for the bene
fit of an allegorical meaning. Since the epic dimensions of
a plague are also like those of a modern war, the harsh
criticism aimed at Camus' allegorical use of disease is of
a very small importance. Modern readers have forgotten,
moreover, that 1 1 il y a eu dans le monde autant de pestes que
2
de guerres." Every plague produces a regimentation of
individuals, a systematized reduction of men to animal
level, the horror of pointless death, and the exhaustion of
living in constant fear, in a word, all the symptoms of war.
Camus' greatest novel concerns itself with the human effort
without comment. This was, he added, a sign that he had
done his work almost too well, since no one noticed that
the book's division into five parts expressed the invasion,
triumph, and eventual departure of the plague." (Thody,
p. 107)
2La Peste. p. 49.
359
to combat an implacable, inhuman scourge and the terrible
suffering which results. It is a timeless novel, born from
very real events which it transcends without deforming them.
It achieves a universality which posterity will continue to
uphold.^
The suffering of the innocent from an outside force
rather than from the struggle against human evil prevails
throughout the novel and lends more authenticity to the
plague, rather than to war, as the subject of primary con-
3This universality is almost prophetic: currently the
most brilliant scholars and technicians at Fort Detrick,
Maryland, are undertaking biological research in an attempt
to increase the virulency of pneumonic plague, the most
deadly form of pestilence which Camus describes in his nov
el. Enough of this concentrated agent to kill all human
life on the planet is now in storage and can be dropped like
bombs. The use of the plague as a weapon is more feasible
than atomic power: "The area of effectiveness far outstrips
that of nuclear weapons: 450 pounds of a concentrated agent
would blanket 34,000 square miles; a 20 megaton bomb will
cause severe burns within 28,000 square miles. Moreover,
the biological agents do not destroy buildings ..."
fNewsweek. March 4, 1963). Biological warfare is very old;
more American Indians were killed by means of it than by
bullets. (Blankets from the smallpox wards were often dis
tributed as "peace offerings" to hostile tribes.) The power
of the plague, like that of the atom, is a natural force,
one which man discovered, rather than invented. Since there
are annually five to twenty cases of bubonic plague reported
in large American seaports, medical prevention is all that
stands in the way of a modern outbreak of the disease. As
in the novel, individual cases today are not mentioned in
newspapers in order to prevent panics.
cern. Pestilence is a cataclysmic upheaval of nature
against humanity in much the same way as are conflagrations,
floods, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. Disease, al
though as implacable as any of the above, however, has by
far the slowest pace, and is therefore much better suited to
a novel. The other forms of natural holocaust all destroy
buildings, and therefore resemble the external ravages of
war more closely. Camus thus uses pestilence to describe
an enemy occupation: restriction of civil liberties,
claustration, loneliness and constant fear prevail.
Not very much has been said about Thucydides' account
of the Plague of Athens in 430 B. C. which occurred during
the Peloponnesian War. Since there are so many resemblances
in his narration and Camus', it appears quite likely that
La Peste was partially inspired by Thucydides. The same
impersonal and objective tone of understatement dominates
in both works, and because of this, the horrors described
do not overwhelm the reader. The climate of Athens also
resembles that of Oran and the pagan life of the average
4"By using the plague as a symbol and by emphasizing
its arbitrary nature, Camus places political evil outside
the scope of human responsibility." (Cruickshank, Albert
Camus and the Literature of Revolt, p. 176.)
361
Athenian quite closely reflects that of the average Oranese
during the epidemic. The dissolution of moral and social
standards, like the mass burials and cremation, are close
parallels in both works.
More important, however, is the fact that the Athenian
plague was directly accompanied by the invasion of the
Lacedaemonians and their allies. One evil reinforced the
other as the enemy without prevented the terrified Athenians
from fleeing their city while yet another enemy stalked them
5
within; they were caught between Charybdis and Scylla. The
cordon sanitaire imposed upon the citizens of Oran produced
exactly the same tangible results. The Athenians believed
that they were visited by twin evils because their own dei
ties were useless against the evil power of the oracle which
had been given to the Lacedaemonians and which proved devas-
tatingly true.^
5"Such was the nature of the calamity, and heavily did
it weigh on the Athenians; death ranging within the city and
devastation without." (Thucydides, Complete Writings and
the Peloponnesian War, trans. John H. Finley, Jr. TNew York,
1951], p. 113.)
6"When the God was asked whether they should go to war,
he answered that if they put their might into it, victory
would be theirs, and that he would himself be with them/
With this oracle events were supposed to tally. For the
plague broke out so soon as the Peloponnesians invaded
362
The citizens of Oran likewise believe themselves to be
abandoned by God. When Paneloux affirms before his congre
gation that the plague is the expression of God's vengeful
wrath against the sins of humanity, he is echoing a senti
ment which ran rampant throughout ancient Athens during its
plague. In summation, then, Thucydides described a war
which appeared allied to pestilence while Camus combined
them allegorically in one evil.
Qy.an; the Death of a Snail
A plague, like any other form of a natural holocaust,
is an expression of the inhuman force of the Cosmos which
periodically threatens the existence of men. Caligula first
tried to mimic this force by overturning the social order7
but his accomplishments were puny in comparison to those of
his inhuman rival in La Peste. The reader senses that the
Algiers which destroyed Meursault in such an inhuman fashion
may have become itself the afflicted Oran of La Peste. If
Attica, and never entering Peloponnese (not at least to an
extent worth noticing), committing its worst ravages at
Athens, and next to Athens, at the most populous of the
other towns. Such was the history of the plague." (Thucy
dides, Cvmplstg, Writings, p. 114)
7"C'est moi qui remplace la peste" (IV, ix? cf. p.
322) .
363
both novels are considered in their relationship to each
other, then it appears that Camus in the latter work chas
tises the human collectivity which blindly crushed the pro
tagonist of the first work.
The plague is propagated by animal life, trade-winds,
and above all by the seasons. If we consider these natural
forces according to their scientific importance, then we
are obliged to treat the plague as a reality rather than as
an allegorized form of the German occupation of 1941-1944.
This point of view also coincides directly with that of Dr.
Rieux, the narrator of La Peste. The lucid objectivity of
this observer does not preclude an aesthetic ordering of
the novel, rather it cleverly subordinates it to the course
of the epidemic. As in L'Etranqer. two prose styles alter
nate and each gains intensity by opposing the other. The
concrete aesthetic images which we will discuss, moreover,
do not detract from the objective narration, but reinforce
it by adding a new and seldom discussed dimension to the
novel.
Oran is the victim. Its multitudes will be trapped
within its walls, awaiting contamination by an unseen mi
crobe which brings an agonizing death. Wind, sea, sun,
even the life-giving air itself, will all conspire to crush
364
the life out of this city. Why did Camus choose this par
ticular victim when he disliked certain other cities much
more? He knew this city intimately and chose it because it
had a certain nondescript and average appearance. It rep
resents, however, most of the traits he disliked in the
modern metropolis— the refusal of nature, the life behind
walls, and the artificiality of social values.
In 1939 Camus very accurately described Oran in "Le
Minotaure." An unprepossessing city whose "laideur estmeme.
anonyme" (p. 33) and which occupies one of the most impres
sive of natural settings consisting of cliffs on each side,
the African desert behind, and the sea before it. Within
the city walls vegetation is as scrupulously absent as in
the desert which threatens to push it into the sea. Its
people live within themselves and within the city. "Ce
peuple sans religion et sans idoles meurt apr&s avoir vecu
g
en foule." Camus described a city which had fallen asleep
and had become indifferent to any external threat. Oran was
a victim who awaited an executioner, and he came in 1941.
So closely does the imagery in "Le Minotaure" coincide with
that of La Peste that Camus almost appears to have written
®"L'Ete & Alger," p. 61.
365
the first chapter many years before he had thought of the
novel. In this work, as in his others, his process of ar
tistic creation is cumulative, assembles images from a dis
tant past, then builds them into a solid edifice; Camus was
an artist who had constant recourse to his earlier works.
The most salient characteristic of the Oran of La Peste
was already described in detail in "Le Minotaure":
On trouve une cite qui presente le dos k la mer,^ qui
s'est construite sur elle-meme, k la fagon d'un escar
got. oran est un grand mur circulaire et jaune, re
convert d'un ciel dur. (pp. 28-29)
The image of the snail contains this city: this gastropod
is slimy, attracted toward dampness, ventures forth in the
evening, and its habits are changeless. Its mineral shell
hermetically seals it from contact with the outside world.
The sun is its worst enemy and would dry it up and roast it
immediately outside of its waterproof armor. The snail is
blind, deaf and dumb, coils about itself for company, pos
sesses both sexes which fecundate it. This creature lives
completely within its body, within the miniature labyrinth
9"On peut seulement regretter qu'elle (la ville) se
soit construite en toumnt le dos k cette baie . . . " (La
Peste. p. 16).
10"Dans la ville, batie en escargot ... " (La Peste.
p. 43).
366
of its shell, growing around itself, coiling ever inward,
never outward.
The snail responds to danger with a proverbial torpor
and when it does act, it retreats within its shell. It does
not understand courage. Believing itself impregnable within
its mineral excrescence, it knows no life, no death, only
sleep and food. If by chance it ingests one grain of salt,
however, it will writhe, shrivel up and die within its
fortress, now the mausoleum of a senseless existence. Its
shell counterfeits life; only the unmistakable odor of death
reveals the truth.
The citizens of Oran are snails wearing the shell of
the city walls. They eschew the brutal sun which drives them
within their mineral dwellings, since outside of these
"shells," and far from water, they would dessicate rapidly.
The Oranese venture forth in the evening and the sea at
tracts them by droves; habit nurtures them and change
frightens them; danger consists of change."^ These inhabi
tants, as Camus describes them, are blind, deaf and dumb to
^Thomas N. Hubble ("The Act Itself and the Word: A
Study of Abstraction Versus the Concrete in the Work of
Albert Camus," unpub. dissertation [Univ. of So. Calif.,
1962], pp. 5-50), discusses the role of habits and their
interruption in La Peste and k.'JEUangsr.
367
the outside world and breed within their own number in which
they find company. They live completely within their bod
ies , within their modern Gnossus of steel and cement. This
huge mineral labyrinth grows around itself but never out of
itself.
The Oranese respond to danger with a proverbial torpor,
and when they do so decide, they retreat within their walls,
according to their cordon sanitaire. They do not understand
courage. Believing themselves impregnable within their
mineral fortress, they know no life, no death, only sleep
and food. If by chance they ingest a pincfi of microbes,
enough to put on the head of a pin, however, they will
writhe, shrivel up and die within their city which has now
become their mausoleum. This city-shell counterfeits life;
only the unmistakable odor of death reveals the truth. The
life and death of a snail coincides with that of a city—
this death contains the microcosm of a long novel.
Camus certainly does not refer to the Oranese as
"snails," for to do so would render ridiculous their very
human suffering, nor does he call the city a shell, but he
does constantly allude to these symbols which have a vivid
pictorial quality.
When the citizens accept the truth, then resolve to
368
combat the danger, they evolve to a higher level of being
and thereby transcend their former "snail-like" selves.
The Mathematics of Death
All natural upheaval rigidly conforms to certain physi
cal laws which constitute its destructive force. The sov
ereign horror of pestilence resides within the mathematical
laws of contagion; biological destruction joins forces with
an impersonal equation. Camus exploits the mathematics of
death throughout the novel, making of a science a cohesive
horror which binds the novel together. The form of the
narration duplicates the dimensions of the plague itself.
What is this mathematical law and how does it relate
to biology? It is the Malthusian law of geometric incre
ment, that is, the square of the product: 2x2=4, 4x4
=16, 16 x 16 = 256, ad infinitum. All life, both animal
and vegetable, seeks to increase by these proportions.
Natural enemies, drought, floods and disease tend to inter
rupt this progression in the lower forms of life just as do
war, famine and pestilence in human societies, according to
Malthus. Pestilence alone of all these forms of natural
decease, however, duplicates this mathematical law of in
crement, subverting it to its own purposes; microbes, the
369
lowest form of life, rigidly follow this progression. The
eighteenth-century philosophers and mathematicians thorough-
12
ly discussed this abstract principle.
"La demesure est un incendie, selon Heraclite,"
wrote Camus, and no words more accurately apply to La Peste:
the spark that ignites a haystack, that cremated European
capitals regularly, is also the first infected rat in the
city of Gran. Fire, according to Heraclitus, is a concate
nation, a chain reaction— in our time this fire has become
atomic; the mathematics of an explosion are also those of
an epidemic. Long before he had considered writing this
novel, Camus observed this principle:
L'Horreur vient en realite du cote mathematique de
l'evenement ... Aucune morale, aucun effort ne sont
a priori justifiables devant les sanglantes mathema
tique s qui ordonnent notre condition.
La Peste, then, is a conflagration which takes a year to
l^The law of geometric increment, however, was first
understood by the ancients, who transferred it to litera
ture: Lucian used it in his Sorcerer1s Apprentice - which
became the source of Goethe's work. Cervantes, in El Curi-
oso Impertinente. transferred this mathematical progression
to the growth of'delusion, obsession and self-deception.
Flaubert used this principle in Madame Bovarv. which is a
model of this genre.
13"L'Exil d’Helfene," p. 115.
14Le Mythe.flg Sigyphe, p- 30.
370
burn itself out, an explosion in ultra-slow motion.15
On the 16th of April Dr. Rieux stepped on a dead rat.
He noticed that the animal was on a stairway, not the habi
tual place for a rat to die. He thought nothing of this
incident until he heard that many rats came out of their
dark nooks and crannies to die in the fresh air. The city's
garbage disposal system then collects the bodies and burns
them. This is precisely what will happen to the people of
Oran, yet secure inside their snail-shell labyrinth, they
sense no danger. The rats choose to "mourir pr&s des hu-
mains" (p. 26), thus contaminating them. Thousands of peo
ple, already infected, ignorantly and happily incubate with
in their bodies the cause of their death.
The thousands of dying rats have lost the fear of their
natural enemies as the plague seizes them, drives them from
the shelter of their "reduits, sous sols, caves, egouts,"
out of the nurturing comfort of man-made detritus from which
they "montaient en longues files titubantes pour vaciller I t
la lumifere, tourner sur eux-memes et mourir ... 1 1 (p. 26).
15In the Masctue of the Red Death Poe describes the
symptoms of a fictitious plague which runs its course in a
greatly accelerated fashion by claiming its victims in less
than an hour.
371
The plague leads them to death as did the Pied Piper of
Hamelin. The rodent population, once nurtured by human
offal, becomes rejected by the city itself:
On eut dit que la terre ou etaient plantees nos maisons
se purgeait de son chargement d'humeurs, qu'elle lais-
sait monter & la surface des furoncles et des sanies
qui, jusqu'ici, la travaillaient interieurement. (p. 26)
Oran, described in a pathological anthropomorphic
imagery, is like the human body which purges its "chargement
d'humeurs." Camus thus very cleverly relates animal pathol
ogy to human pathology; the city is already plague-ridden,
yet its citizens are asleep to the truth. The rats which
axe the carriers of the plague, moreover, exist because of
human filth, because of the conditions which all cities fur
nish. Symbolically, the visible death of the rats corres
ponds to the inner corruption of the city which now makes
itself visible. Death is everywhere yet no one is willing
to see it.
The old concierge, the one person most directly exposed
to rats, is accordingly the first to die of the plague. Dr.
Rieux suspiciously associates them with the plague but in
an indirect manner: "bans les intervalles de la respira
tion, il lui semblait entendre des petits cris de rats"
(p. 29)— the dreadful word plaque is still unuttered. Dr.
372
Rieux knows, however, and so does the stricken concierge,
who with his mouth "tapissee de fongosites" (p. 32) mutters
prophetically "Les rats." Next the night watchman senses
disaster" "Quand les rats quittent le navire" (p. 38)— and
the rats have already left a sinking Oran.
The dreadful word is spoken but only a few hear. The
city fathers take no heed, although Rieux mentions that
"A Canton, il y avait soixante-dix ans, quarante mille rats
etaient morts de la peste avant que le fleau s'interessat
aux habitants" (p. 51)— a warning repeated in Oran. The
mathematical progression which had eliminated the rats now
applies to humans; "En quatre jours, cependant, le fifevre
fit quatre bonds surprenants: seize morts, vingt-quatre,
vingt-huit et trente-deux" (p. 75). The chain reaction be
gins as the Grim Reaper takes "quatre bonds surprenants."
Riexu, who is a doctor and scientist, is well aware of the
geometric increment of a concrete evil which has suddenly
swollen the ranks of the condemned to five hundred:
Etait-ce vraiment 1'abstraction que ces journees pas-
sees dans son hopital ou la peste mettait les bouchees
doubles, portant h, cinq cents le nombre moyen des vie-
times per semaine? Oui, il y avait dans le malheur une
part d'abstraction et d'irrealite. Mais quand 1'ab
stract ion se met a vous tuer, il faut bien s'occuper
de 1'abstraction, (p. 103)
The city does "concern itself with the abstraction";
373
Joseph Grand, an unfortunate office worker, laboriously
compiles the mortality statistics; death exists in little
pins on a city map— almost like a military campaign. Ab
straction has become a reality too horrible to behold. This
is the Leitmotif of our times; the victims of the atom bomb
testify to the singular efficacity of abstract thinking.*6
The cordon sanitaire makes of Oran a vast prison which
is partitioned into zones and districts: the enemy has
divided the city by military barricades. Claustration be
comes methodical— it is necessary to isolate thousands of
individuals to prevent each one from coming in contact with
another. Ironically, a crowded place must assume the lone
liness of the desert; friends, playmates, husbands and wives
must flee from each other; the plague feeds on warm, human
contact, friendships and loves. Prisoners, like members of
religious orders and soldiers, succumb first to the holo
caust; the plague inflicts its tyranny on saints, sinners,
and heroes alike. The inhabitants finally become ciphers
on a mortality scale, nameless "casualties"— they have lost
their names since only their bodies are counted. Three,
^Hubble, pp. 5-50, discusses in great detail the role
of abstraction in La Peste.
374
four, five hundred a day, too many corpses to be counted
accurately. The crematoriums are overworked and the living
throw the dead into the sea— how ironic— the sea which once
was the summer refuge for the living now becomes the dumping
ground of their corpses. The multitudes exposed directly to
the plague are quarantined in a huge stadium where they live
and die in tents on the field while death, sitting in the
empty rows, watches the spectacle below: the stench of the
crematorium mingles with that of decomposing bodies. "L'Ef-
ficacite mathematique et souveraine" (p. 290) holds unques
tioned dominion. Seen in this light, the modern concentra
tion camp is but a human imitation of the mathematical hor
ror of nature.
When the 1 1 joyous fires" of the plague burn out, when
the crematoriums become cold, the rats return. Life begins
anew, but they are always hidden, always present, always
waiting.
The Four^Seasons
Spring
The novel is divided into five parts. Four of them
correspond to the seasons, and the fifth part is a recapitu
lation; this novel begins one spring and ends the next. The
375
*
solar year contains and accentuates the action.
"C'est un printemps qu'on vend sur les marches," the
first page informs us; no trees, no "rustling of leaves," no
17
lawns, not even any pigeons soften the mineral asperity of
Oran; flowers are imported and constitute the spring "sold
in the markets." "Le changement des saisons ne s'y lit que
dans le ciel." The first page also describes a city that
burns under the summer sun, then is deluged by mud in au
tumn. The good weather "comes only in winter." How ironic
and prophetic this sentence is— it augurs the arrival, tri
umph and final departure of the plague according to th$
seasons: spring warmth will nurture the microbe, summer
heat will make a giant of it, fall will numb it, and winter
will kill it.
Human and animal life exist alone, unaccompanied by
any form of plant life within this modern Gnossus. No
flowers and no trees will affirm the continuance of life
after the rats, the cats which prey on them, and the human
population succumb in this order.
The death of the concierge brings "brumes, pluies
^The constant mention of pigeons throughout Camus'
works and his beautiful descriptions of them attest to his
love for this particular bird.
« 6»
376
' 4
diluviennes et br&ves" which beat down upon the city. "Une
chaleur orageuse" follows these tempests. The sea loses
its "bleu profond," takes on "des eclats d‘argent ou de fer"
(p. 43). This ominous weather, so suggestive of a quiet
before the storm, will become the vehicle and the slave of
pestilence. The innocence of spring has become a threat.
The sluggish citizens react by a "torpeur morne."
The increasing warmth of spring coincides with the
rising fever of an entire population. Meursault's heat
prostration has most of the symptoms of an acute fever, a
fever which relives in this novel, perhaps to haunt the
multitude of a sister city, a multitude which will shortly
be decimated by a more rigorous and absolute justice than
the one which had condemned him. His fate stirs none of
those who read about it is the newspaper. Camus' narration
within a narration, as in L1Etranoer. is thus ironic.
Spring ends with flowers fading on the sidewalks and
death incubating within the houses:
Des milliers de roses se fanaient dans les corbeilles
des marchandes, au long des trottoirs, et leur odeur
sucree flottait dans toute la ville. Apparemment,
rien n'etait change, (p. 76)
The "sweet" perfume of the flowers will soon be re
placed by another, an unmistakable odor.
377
Summer— tears shall drown
the wind
The city is closed. Summer will count cadence for the
ranks of the dying led by the Plague. A population awaits
a death which comes from within the walls. Each individual
is a tuft of straw, heated by the summer sun, awaiting a
spark. Now the long exile begins. Time is constricted to
the immediate present. Pestilence has already killed du
ties, obligations, hope, and the future. Capital punishment
is a joke, prison an absurdity. As in the Athens of 430
B. C., the dictates of mad pleasure seeking vainly mask the
ubiquitous presence of the Black Death. A multitude is
"reduit h. tourner en rond dans [sa] ville morne"— the pulpy
flesh begins to squirm within its shell. The horror before
the eyes obliges the prisoners of death to look upwards,
into the clear blue summer sky:
II semblait, a les voir, qu'ils recevaient pour la pre
miere fois, et directement, l1impression du temps qu'il
faisait. Ils avaient la mine rejouie sur la simple vi-
site d'une lumifere doree, tandis que les jours de pluie
mettaient un voile epais sur leurs visages et leurs
pensees. (pp. 89-90)
These people, "livres au caprice du ciel" are direct coun
terparts of the former inmates of the Island of Cayenne.
The tiny pits which served as cells had only a few iron bars
in place of a roof, as was customary in Roman times, so that
378
the guards walking above could easily detect an escape. In
this way these prisoners, exposed to the wrath of a tropical
sun, evoke the citizens of Oran. The weather then becomes
supreme.
At the outbreak of the plague Rieux recalls the huge
wall the people of Provence had built in the Middle Ages in
a vain attempt to stop "le vent furieux de la peste" (p.
52). Neither will the labyrinthine walls of Oran halt the
"furious wind of the plague" which will blow through every
chapter and snuff out the lives of the citizens of Oran.
Since the gates of the city are closed, the Sunday
pilgrimage to the beach can no longer compete with Father
Paneloux's predications. An overflowing congregation one
Sunday listens to his wrathful sermon while a tempest rages
outside. As God punished Pharaoh so will He punish "les
orgueilleux et les aveugles":
La pluie redoublait au-dehors et cette derniere phrase,
prononcee au milieu d'un silence absolu, rendu plus
profond encore par le crepitement de 1'averse sur les
vitraux, retentit ... (p. 110)
"Un vent humide s'engouffrait a present sous la nef et les
flammes des cierges se courberent en gresillant" (p. 113).
The wind, almost blowing out the candles, appears to answer
Paneloux's harsh warning by a more ominous rebuttal.
379
Wind becomes the breath of the plague, bearing within
its sighs the deadly bacillus, blowing death into every
dwelling, carrying away the sobs of the dying as it passes
through them— "For tears shall drown the wind":
Au-dehors, il semblait k Rieux que la nuit etait pleine
de gemissements. Quelque part dans le ciel noir, au-
dessus des lampadaires, un sifflement sourd lui rappela
1'invisible fleau qui brassait inlassablement l'air
chaud. (p. 116)
Fleau means both flail and scourge; no better word could be
chosen. Did not Osiris, the Egyptian god of the Underworld
clutch in his hand a flail? Pharaoh also held a tiny
jewelled replica which was his symbol of authority. Perhaps
Father Paneloux had also invoked the Egyptian god without
knowing it.
The weather alternates between a broiling sun and a
thrashing wind which becomes particularly violent during the
month of August. As the plague takes a greater and greater
daily toll, so also does the hostility of the weather in
crease . The seasonal wind drowns in its pestilential breath
the unhappy city:
De la mer soulevee et toujours invisible montait une
odeur d'algues et de sel. Cette ville deserte, blanchie
de poussi&re, saturee d'odeurs marines, toute sonore des
cris du vent, gemissait alors comme une lie malheureuse.
(p. 186)
Oran is now an "island" contained within the hostile ele-
380
ments. The danger of conflagration becomes extreme and
threatens to burn up the city the way Chicago or London once
burned to the ground. Many grief-stricken survivors, de
prived of those they most love, set fire to their homes, as
was common during the Middle Ages; the "furious wind of the
plague" lights fires within the lungs of its victims as
well. Fire, air, earth and water, the ancient alchemical
elements, thus join hands and conspire against humanity.
Even the most heroic efforts are useless.
The novel reaches a zenith in horror and pathos upon
the death of Judge Othon's small son. This judge, who care
fully imposed human justice upon the guilty, is now ironi
cally forced to witness the arbitrary and inhuman force
which claims the lives of innocent and guilty alike. The
religious convictions of Father Paneloux are violently
shaken; his theology cannot justify the death of the inno
cent. Nature releases all the Gehennas of destruction upon
this pitiful child:
Justement 1'enfant, comme mordu k l'estomac, se pliait
k nouveau, avec un gemissement grele. II resta creuse
ainsi pendant de longues secondes, secoue de frissons
et de tremblements convulsifs, somme si sa frele car-
casse pliait sous le vent furieux de la peste*-8 et cra-
18Thody relates the description of the wind in "Le Vent
381
quait sous les souffles repetes de la fifevre. La
bourrasque passee, 11 se detendit un peu, la fi&vre
sembla se retirer et 1'abandonner, haletant, sur une
grfeve humide et empoisonnee ou le repos resseniblait
dejk h. la mort. Quand le flot brulant l'atteignit a
nouveau pour la troisi&me fois et le souleva un peu,
1'enfant se recroquevilla, recula au fond du lit dans
l'epouvante de la flamme qui le brulait et agita fol-
lement la tete, en rejetant sa couverture. De grosses
larmes, jaillissant sous les paupieres enflammees, se
mirent a couler sur son visage plombe, et, au bout de
la crise, epuise, crispant ses jambes osseuses et ses
bras dont la chair avait fondu en quarante-huit heures,
l1enfant pris dans le lit devastee une pose de crucifie
grotesque, (p. 234)19
The death wind literally flails the pitiful little body
which writhes, seeking to escape the repeated blows. The
fury of the wind which had lashed out at the condemned city
now has redoubled and concentrated its entire force on this
a Djemila" to this scene (p. 112). The searing wind of
death that blew through the essay redoubles its force in the
novel: "Je me sentais claquer au vent comme une mature.
Creuse par le milieu, les yeux brules, les levres craquan-
tes, ma peau se dessechait jusqu'ci ne plus etre la mienne.
... Comme le galet verni par les marees, j'etais poli par le
vent, use jusqu'a l'ame" (p. 34). We might add that Camus
was seriously ill with tuberculosis when he wrote this pas
sage. He thus appears to have transferred his. own physical
suffering which he associated with the wind to that of the
dying child in La Peste. In this passage he already uses
the wind to juxtapose fire "les yeux brules" and water "le
galet verni par les marees," a device which gains greater
intensity in La Peste.
l^This scene takes place in autumn but we have placed
it here in order to show the use of the wind.
382
one pitiful victim. When the wind momentarily subsides, so
20
then does the fever. The child in his deathbed becomes a
piece of wreckage cast upon "a damp and poisoned shore" by
an ocean "squall": the wind and the sea have joined forces.
The wind comes again as a wave which "lifts him up" but does
not extinguish "the flame which was burning him." ,The fire
21
raging within his body makes him "cast away the blankets."
Pestilence gives him the pose of a "crucifie grotesque."
This last phrase gains even more horror by its clinical
precision: victims of the plague really do assume this
pose; the ganglia in the arm-pits and the groin swell up and
become so painful that the victims are obliged to stretch
out their limbs away from their bodies.
The groans of the dying child are answered only by "une
maree de sanglots" which "deferla" (p. 256) in the huge
In L'Etat de Si&qe the role of the wind is reversed;
it blows away the plague. We have omitted a study of this
play because it is a dramatic adaptation of the novel and
analyzing it would entail a needless repetition. This play
was quite unsuccessful because theatricality appears to have
been sacrificed for a rather rigid and verbose pedagogy.
But internally it [the plague] burned so that the
patient could not bear to have on him clothing or linen even
of the very lightest description; or indeed to be otherwise
than stark naked." (Thucydides, p. Ill)
383
22
hospital ward. The horrible duet ends in death.
Wind flails the stricken city by night and the sun
beats down upon it by day; humanity is crushed between
Charybdis and Scylla. The flux in the seasons charts the
course of the plague. Time is likewise charted by a fever
ish increase in heat and mortality; the citizens now clearly
understand the lethal force of the weather; the wind will
scatter pestilence among them and the sun will incubate it.
Even an earthquake would have been less horrible, claims an
old man talking to Tarrou:
Ah', si c'etait un tremblement de terrel Une bonne
secousse et on n'en parle plus ... On compte les morts,
les vivants, et le tour est joue. Mais cette cochon-
nerie de maladiel Meme ceux qui ne l'ont pas la por
tent dans leur coeur. (p. 131)
The plague knocks down people but not buildings. Its vic
tims walk with a "pas saccade mais lent" as does the plague
itself, which cuts down many here, none there, but reaps an
increasingly large harvest.
Le soleil poursuivait nos concitoyens dans tous les
coins de rue, et s'ils s'arretaient, il les frappait
alors. (p. 127)
^The theme of the dying child was popular among many
nineteenth-century poets and composers. The "Erlkbnig" by
Schubert resembles this passage by a similar evocation of
tempest and precipitous movement.
384
The plague of the sun strikes down its victims with the
spear Father Paneloux ascribed to it. The inhabitants vain
ly bolt their doors and windows against the unwelcome entry
of this stranger:
Toutes les portes etaient fermees et les persiennes
closes, sans qu'on put savoir si c'etait .de la peste
ou du soleil qu'on entendait ainsi se proteger. (p.
127)
They do not realize that they carry the plague within them
selves .
The bacillus incubates in the heat and silence of early
afternoon:
Vers deux heures, la ville se vide peu k peu et c'est
le moment ou le silence, la poussikre, le soleil et
la peste se rencontrent dans la rue.
So Tarrou's journal informs us. His dramatic personifica
tions and poetic metaphors contrast with Rieux's clinical
objectivity and understatements. The streets are empty at
four in the afternoon, as if the plague were catching its
breath:
C'etait une de ces heures ou la peste se faisait invi
sible. Ce silence, cette mort des couleurs et des
mouvements, pouvaient etre aussi bien ceux de l'ete que
ceux du fleau. On ne savait si l'air etait lourd de
menaces ou de poussikres et de brulure. (p. 158)
A monument dedicated to the fallen war heroes of Oran
"is located on the only spot where one can perceive the
385
sea," (p. 169) atop a high hill. Ironically this monument
now looks down upon the horror of the vast necropolis be-
23
low. The shore where once a population went swimming is
deserted. The access to the sea is blocked by an apocalyp
tic panorama.
Autumn
The third subdivision of the novel does not begin with
autumn to end with the arrival of winter, rather it de
scribes the hottest period of the African solar year, the
period between the middle of August and the beginning of
September. This rather short interval is introduced by the
violent seasonal winds and culminates with the macabre
itinerary of the street cars; they are charged with corpses
which have become too numerous to transport by customary
means. At the end of the line the bodies are thrown into
23Although Camus describes the suffering of the popula
tion which can no longer go to the beach, he does not de
scribe the abnormal craving for cold water engendered di
rectly by the disease: "What they would have liked best
would have been to throw themselves into cold water; as in
deed was done by some of the neglected sick, who plunged
into the rain-tanks in their agonies of unquenchable thirst;
though it made no difference whether they drank little or
much." (Thucydides, p. Ill) Camus accurately describes
this same thirst but does not mention the tactile craving
for water.
the sea from a high ledge while a few passers-by, having
evaded the armed patrols, distribute flowers over their
watery grave. The mortality rate and the summer heat, like
the wind, reach a zenith of concatenated horror. Camus thus
creates a small subdivision which becomes a concentration of
effects.
The fourth part of the novel extends from September to
Christmas but is divided into small subdivisions comprising
about one month each. By this means the seasonal fluctua
tions which chart the course of the plague are always pre
sent in the mind of the reader. The entire city, in a
sense, has acquired the subjective value of time typical of
prisoners who anxiously await a final reprieve. Neither
suffering nor the plague can last forever but must eventu
ally burn out. The reader, like the citizens of Oran, be
comes aware of time as a consciousness of death, and feels
compelled to learn the fate of the city: as the horror be
comes almost unbearable, the reader, like the characters,
feels driven to reach the end of it; empathy, produced by
terrible suffering, becomes a kinetic force driving him
forward.
September and October are months of alternating mist,
heat and rain. Even passing flocks of birds circle the city
387
rather than fly overhead:
Des bandes silencieuses d'etourneaux et de grives,
venant du sud, pass&rent trfes haut, mais contournfc-
rent la ville, comme si le fleau de Paneloux, l'etrange
pi&ce de bois qui tournait en sifflant au-dessus des
maisons, les tenait a l'ecart. (p. 207)
These birds also add an ironic note; starlings, which
usually fly in large flocks and take possession of many
trees and neighborhoods, often constitute an irritation by
resisting with great indifference human attempts to drive
them away: Paneloux's flail has for them a terrifying ef-
ficacity. Perhaps the odor of death has also reached them,
but it has not attracted birds of carrion which tradition
ally clean up the carnage of war; death is not announced by
vultures and buzzards because the plague has poisoned even
them, as Thucydides relates:
All the birds and beasts that prey upon human bodies,
either abstained from touching them (though there were
many lying unburied), or died after tasting them. In
proof of this, it was noticed that birds of this kind
actually disappeared; they were not about the bodies,
or indeed to be seen at all. (p. 110)
Traditionally human famine furnishes a feast for these
birds. The well-fed North African vulture, noted for its
size, is conspicuously absent from La Peste.
The absence of any mention of .sexual relationships is
also conspicuous; a cruel chastity reigns throughout the
novel. Rambert and Rieux sure separated directly from their
wives who await outside the city. No seductions are men
tioned; the random kiss may become the kiss of death; the
plague has blighted love more effectively than the "mal de
Venus"; Orpheus will never lead his Eurydice out of hell.
The plague makes a terrifying impromptu stage appear-
24
ance during a performance of Orpheus and Eurvdice. During
a duo with Eurydice Orpheus staggers forward, and amid the
"bergeries du decor," convulses and dies like a "histrion
desarticule" (p. 219). A panic results, but the suggested
irony is tragic; Rieux's wife outside the walls of the
plague will die; only Rambert, the eternal lover, will ven
ture forth from his hell to find his Eurydice awaiting him.
The fleeing spectators will never again feel the bucolic
delights their dead Orpheus extolled; a mythological and
25
theatrical hell has become the very real hell of Oran.
QA
This is most likely the opera by GlUck. Numerous
critics have rightly mentioned that all places of public
congregation would be closed during such an epidemic. We
consider, however, that the artful introduction of the opera
creates an admirable aesthetic effect which justifies Camus'
use of it.
25a subtitle of "Le Minotaure" is called "La Pierre
d'Ariane," which not only appears to be the nucleus of the
labyrinth symbol in La Peste. but also appears to be the
source of the opera performance: "Ce sont les tenfebres
389
Their labyrinth, shaped like serpentine coils, like the in
volute shell of a snail, constricts: the legions of the
dying shuffle round and round the spirals of their cement
necropolis.
All Saints' Day, the Day of the Dead, becomes the day
the dead mock the living: "C'etait tous les jours la Pete
des Morts" (p. 256). The traditional laying of wreaths on
the tombs of ancestors is forgotten as the living swell the
ranks of the dead: death has ceased being a memory and has
become an odor: "Les feux de joie de la peste brulaient
avec une allegresse toujours plus grande dans le four cre-
matoire" (p. 256). The medieval dance of the dead is a
daily performance as Pestilence, advancing with his "allure
patiente et saccadee," mimics the paroxysms of the dying.
Death is a dance-master, and all follow his steps. His
26
music is not Saint-Saens' "Danse Macabre," however, but
d'Eurydice et le sammeil d'Isis" (p. 61). Camus may also
have been inspired by Poe's "The Masque of the Red Death,"
in which one of the King's entertainers dies of the plague
in much the same way. We consider, however, that Camus'
scene is far more convincing than Poe's, which exceeds the
bounds of good taste.
26Most musical rhythms fall between sixty and eighty
beats a minute, thus corresponding to the human pulse. The
rhythms of the Dance of Death thus correspond to the irreg
ular pulsations of a failing heart.
390
the more ironic "Saint James Infirmary."
The medieval "Dance of the Dead" was horn of a graphic
representation of the death throes. Still preserved in
ancient societies, especially in the Orient, this dance has
a very recognizable syncopated rhythm, a relentless forward
movement accompanied by lurches and jolts. Its step is
"patiente et saccadee," and the death dancers mimic the
paroxysms of the stricken opera singer who staggers like a
"histrion desarticule," or a Perez who stumbles like a "pan
tin disloque": these dancers mimic the disjointed, mechan
ical steps of puppets. Death cuts the strings and the dance
ends. This is the rhythm of the plague and to a certain
degree, that of the novel itself. The implacable forward
movement of the plague, as personified by the wind, accom
panies intermittent scenes of unbearable crisis and suffer
ing, such as the death of the opera singer and that of the
child. Considered visually, the necropolis of Oran, like a
panorama of Brueghel the Younger or Bosch, is illuminated
by individual scenes of dramatic crisis seen in the fore
ground. Camus thus very artfully includes detail within a
general perspective, the incident within an epic scope, in
such a way that both reinforce each other rather them de
tract from each other.
391
All Saints' Day announces a shift in the weather, as
heavy clouds flee from "un horizon I t 1'autre," and the heat
has given way to the "lumi&re froide et doree du ciel de
4
novembre" (p. 255). Although the plague has become pulmo
nary, which accelerates contagion, it appears to have
reached its zenith. It now takes a steady toll with the
"regularite d'un bon fonctionnaire" (p. 256). The first
cold weather thus has broken the lethal geometric progres
sion. The nocturnal swim of Tarrou and Rieux during this
stage of the plague thus augurs a decline in tension and
strikes the reader as a welcome relief after the description
of the suffering of a population denied access to the beach ,
I
during the summer. Rieux's medical passport allows the two
men to leave the stricken city.
The nocturnal ocean is a temporary reprieve from suf
fering and death: for the first time since the beginning
of the novel, nature does not inflict suffering but assuages
it; the sea has retained the summer's warmth while the city
shivers:
Il savait que la mer, ce soir-lk, etait ti&de, de la
tiedeur des mers d'automne qui reprennent a la terre
la chaleur emmagasinee pendant de longs mois. (p. 278)
The dark tides of night and the sea wash away "les
392
images noires et grimapantes qu'y avait laissees le
27
monde." Bitter memories and the presence of death dis
solve in the wake of their regular strokes. The distant
stars draw Rieux's attention away from the proximity of suf
fering: "Rieux se mit sur le dos et se tint immobile, face
au ciel renverse, plein de lune et d'etoiles" (p. 278). The
two solitary men appear to reenact unconsciously an ancient
rite of purification, to have found the innocence of bap
tismal waters:
Pendant quelques minutes, ils avancferent avec la meme
cadence et la meme vigueur, solitaires, loin du monde,
liberes enfin de la ville et de la peste. (p. 278)
Tarrou will later die because his commitment will force
him to reenter the city where he will be stricken. This
"saint without God," as Camus calls him, thus sacrifices
himself.
An event as startling as the death of the rats at the
beginning of the chronicle occurs. Grand falls victim to
the plague, but is almost miraculously spared by a "sponta
neous remission"; the devoted civil servant and frustrated
artist cannot die. Shortly after his recovery, the rats
make their reappearance in the city. The end is in sight as
27Carnets. p. 62. Cf. Ch. XIV, p.
393
the weary population interprets their presence as a good
omen— how ironic, since in normal times they constitute a
dangerous nuisance.
Winter and liberation
The month of January numbs the deadly bacillus. The
population ironically greets the coldest month of the year
with a warm reception:
Pendant les premiers jours de janvier, le froid s'in
stalls avec une persistance inusitee et sembla cris-
talliser au-dessus de la ville. Et pourtant, jamais
le ciel n'avait ete si bleu. Pendant des jours entiers,
sa splendeur immuable et glacee inonda notre ville
d'une lumiere ininterrompue. Dans cet air purifie, la
peste, en trois semaines et par des chutes successives,
parut s'epuiser dans les cadavres de moins en moins
nombreux qu'elle a l i g n a i t . 2 8 Elle perdit, en un court
espace de temps, la presque totalite des forces qu'elle
avait mis des mois a accumuler. (p. 290)
The cold sky "never seemed so blue" because the mists of
the plague, like the smoke from the crematoriums, has de
parted. The cold "splendor" and the pure light contrast
strongly with the murky and polluted atmosphere which had
accompanied the epidemic. The plague, personified in this
passage as a military foe, has already lost its strategic
position and now suffers heavy casualties. When the popu-
2®The "aligning" of corpses is also typical in military
mass-burials, here suggestive of the German occupation.
394
lation begins to hope again the plague loses its psychologi
cal grip on them; its tyranny ends when death is no longer
feared.
Shortly after the arrival of the rats, the first cat is
seen and the eternal balance of nature is reestablished.
The population notices this tiny incident because pets and
rodents compose the only "natural life" of Oran.
The jubilation is general as a pounding rain and hail
alternate with a penetrating cold. Ironically Tarrou, the
handsome athlete and tireless hospital assistant, is the
last*victim of the plague. Because of the rapid diminution
in the daily mortality toll, the reader unconsciously as-
«
sumes that all of the main characters in the novel have
successfully walked over the burning coals. Tarrou's death,
therefore, strikes one as a brutal surprise— but brutal
surprise is the very nature of pestilence, which in its
death throes has bitten for the last time. Again it is the
warmth of life which has beckoned the plague:
Et il semblait que la maladie chassee par le froid, les
lumieres et la foule, se fut echappee des profondeurs
obscures de la ville et refugiee dans cette chambre
chaude pour donner son ultime assaut au corps inerte
de Tarrou. Le fleau ne brassait plus le ciel de la
ville. Mais il sifflait doucement dans l'air lourd
de la chambre. (p. 308)
In this passage Camus gain artfully personifies the plague
395
as a military foe who makes a last stand; a panoramic in
vasion has dwindled to street fighting and thence to house
fighting; coldness and jubilation combined have forced the
living micro-organism of pestilence to seek refuge. This
passage can also be accurately interpreted from a physio
logical as well as a literary point of view: fleas, carried
by rats, are dispersed by the "flail of the wind" and thus
infect humans widely. In a sense they are broadcast by it.
The first cold snap, however, drives them indoors from the
"profondeurs obscures" of the city. The citizens are liter
ally forced to undertake a "house to house offensive," or
"cleanup." Diseases carried by mosquitoes went virtually
unchecked until medical science literally undertook such an
offensive against them; yellow fever, transmitted by mos
quitoes in much the same way as bubonic plague by fleas,
frustrated De Lessep's building of the Panama Canal and
yearly halved the population of eighteenth-century Phila
delphia .
The ghost of the small child haunts the deathbed of
Tarrou; the former, who was pictured as a tiny piece of
debris lashed by the "flail of the plague," has grown into
a violent shipwreck in the form of Tarrou, the tall and
handsome athlete. Rieux's science is to no avail as he
396
witnesses the death of a dear friend:
L'orage qui secouait ce corps de soubresauts convulsifs
1' illuminait d' eclairs de plus en plus rares et Tarrou
derivait lentement au fond de cette tempete. Rieux
n'avait plus devant lui qu'un masque desormais inerte
ou le sourire avait disparu. Cette forme humaine qui
lui avait ete si proche, percee maintenant de coups
d'epieu, brulee par un mal surhumain, tordue par tous
le8 vents haineux duciel, s'immergeait a ses yeux dans
les eaux de la peste et il ne pouvait rien contre ce
naufrage. II devait rester sur le rivage, les mains
vides et le coeur tordu, sans armes et sans recours,
une fois de plus, cbntre ce desastre. (p. 311)
The ship of life shudders before the gale and Rieux can
throw no lifeline from the safety of his shore. The light
ning which illuminates the shipwreck has become the "spear
thrusts" hurled by the plague, the sheets on his bed have
29
become the torn and flapping sails of a foundering ship.
His pain-racked body, like a burning ship, is kindled by
the fever of a "superhuman sickness," then sinks drowning
30
into the "waters of the plague"; fever and suffocation of
2^In Dickens' "A Christmas Carol" Scrooge sees "ghosts"
which are really his own bed-linen.
3®The rhythm of the "Sorcerer's Apprentice" by Dukas
describe a torrential flood interspersed with the violent
and spasmodic percussions of the broomsticks. Although this
program piece appears almost made for this passage, Camus
makes no musical allusions. The shipwreck scene of Wagner's
Rienzi. however, has no rhythms which resemble Tarrou's
death throes.
397
the pulmonary plague combine in fire and water. It has
claimed its last victim, but the bitter cold outside the
death chamber will vanquish it:
Au dehors, c'etait la meme nuit froide, des etoiles
gelees dans un ciel clair et glace. Dans la chambre
k demi obscure, on sentait le froid qui pesait aux
vitres, la grande respiration bleme d'une nuit polaire.
(p. 312)
Even the stars are "frozen" in the clear sky and the
cold "weighs on the window panes": the intense cold almost
becomes matter as the "respiration" of the "polar night"
suggests a personification by anthropomorphic imagery so
effectively used in descriptions of the sea. This intense
cold, which Camus personally found almost unbearable, iron
ically saves the stricken city from total destruction. All
human attempts to halt the plague have ended in failure;
the rigid curfews and barbed wire zoning, like all the pro
phylactic measures, attest to the reign of an inhuman force.
Ironically nature has ended what nature had begun.
The gates of the city finally swing open one February
dawn as the jubilation drowns out the angry cries of one
lone man who resented the departure of the plague. Cottard,
the profiteer and black-marketeer, having followed the
plague like a scavenger, exploiting the suffering in its
wake, becomes mad. He fires at passers-by on the street
from his window, an act which suggests that perhaps he would
like to assume the function of the plague. He is captured
like a wild animal. The reader, strange as it may seem,
feels a certain relief from Cottard's mad acts, not because
they were portrayed as particularly odious, but because mad
ness and suffering of purely human origin have replaced an
impersonal reign of terror. His pistol fight really comes
as a relief for the reader; the police at last have the
power to halt a menace. Violence and death of purely human
origin can finally re-enter Oran. When thousands lay dying
from the plague, a crime of violence would pass unnoticed.
Now everyone witnesses Cottard's capture. Camus very art
fully has used this violent anti-climax as a means of show
ing that the plague has ended.
At last Rieux can resume a normal practice. Now he
can cure; against the plague his science was useless. Na
ture will now heal rather than destroy. Time will slowly
cover the graves of the victims who will once again be
annually honored on All Saints Day; mourning will again have
meaning as individual decease will be noticed; the death of
a friend will no longer be a cause of terror but a loss.
The infernal metabolism of the plague has ceded to the
indolent pace of normality. Within the serpentine shell of
399
their city the citizens will once more feel secure. Outside:
a great, transparent night looks down upon the houses: "Le
grand ciel froid scintillait au-dessus des maisons et, pr&s
des collines, les etoiles durcissaient comme des silex" (p.
330).
In conclusion, we must again state that the critical
approach we have undertaken in discussion of this great
novel is only one among many, and therefore can in no way
be considered representative of an over-all view; we have
not analyzed the social and political messages of this work
because they cure outside the realm of this thesis. A great I
novel, however, can be considered from many vantage points,
some of which may be even contradictory, yet each one may
be consistent within itself and contribute to scholarly
knowledge. We have attempted to demonstrate that the sub
ject and action of the novel can be contained within the
world of nature as well as within social and historical
events. Certain events would tend to validate our approach
as certain others would tend to invalidate it; several
scenes could not have taken place within an enemy occupation
nor could others have taken place within a real epidemic.
This lack of consistency, however, is of a very minor im
portance since the author contains each event within an
aesthetic whole which gives it relevancy and an unsurpassed ;
evocative power: after reading the magnificent scene in j
l
I
which the stricken opera singer collapses on stage, one is
not impressed by the fact that opera performances would not ;
be given during such an epidemic; a greater truth has been
achieved in spite of a minor discrepancy. |
La Peste is a testimonial to our time. The average man
!
of just a few short years ago directly experienced deporta- j
!
tion, slave labor, starvation, the battle line, or perhaps
31 i
the crematorrum. He was grateful to simply be alive.
This is also a strong message of the novel; through con
sciousness of suffering and death we will no longer take j
things for granted, we will have learned the value of life.
The plague, like an enemy occupation, is a gratuitous form
of suffering which tests our mettle more than a merited
punishment. The suffering of Caligula and his victims, like
that of Meursault, Maria, and Janine is gratuitous, inhuman,
almost like the absurd destructivity of the cosmos. Like
Siva, the Hindu deity, nature creates and destroys, making
S
i
31
"The great discovery of recent modern literature is
human suffering and this sustained concern for what is pa
thetic in human existence is the central characteristic of
the great literary works of this century." (Hanna, p. 263)
401
of men so many pawns in the game of life which they can
scarcely comprehend.
The devastation left by the plague is all the more un
bearable because it is absurd, inexplicable, beyond the
control of man, yet constitutes his "human condition."
Stendhal contains the nucleus of the novel within a para
graph:
Un chasseur tire un coup de fusil dans une foret, sa
proie tombe, il s'elance pour la saisir. Sa chaussure
heurte une fourmiliere haute de deux pieds, detruit
1'habitation des fourmis, seme au loin les fourmis,
leurs oeufs ... Les plus philosophes parmi les fourmis
ne pourrent jamais ccmprendre ce corps noir, immense,
effroyable: la botte du chasseur, qui tout a coup a
penetre dans leur demeure avec une incroyable rapidite,
et precedee d'un bruit epouvantable, accompagne de
gerbes d'un feu rougeatre. ... Ainsi la mort, la vie,
l'eternite, choses fort simples pour qui aurait les
organes assez vastes pour les congevoir ... 32
The hunter's boot, like the plague, is an absurd force,
beyond the scope of the mind, and destroys the ant hill in
much the same way as war and epidemics destroy cities.
We have attempted to demonstrate that the relationship
of mathematical abstractions to concrete horror, as well as
32Le Rouge et Le Noir (Paris, 1951), p. 454. Rachel
Bespaloff, "Le Monde du Condamne k Mort," Esprit. 2:1-5,
January 1950, discusses the relation of Julien Sorel to
Meursault.
402
the role of the climate, are all forces contained within
nature. Also we maintain that La Peste is an' extremely well
composed novel which never loosens its hold upon the reader.
The consummate artistry and attention to detail dramatically
support the philosophical and social messages of this mas-
33
terpiece.
33”To the degree that Camus writes more completely as
an artist, so does his writing become a more effective ex
pression of his ideas." (Hanna, p. 221)
CHAPTER XXIII
1&.SHPTE:
THE LANDSCAPE OF A BAD CONSCIENCE
Jean Baptiste Clamence, the middle-aged narrator of
this recit. springs from the guilt, doubts and conscience-
probing of a post-war bourgeoisie. The work as a whole may
be characterized by a prise de conscience, a sudden awaken
ing of self-recrimination. Camus again surprises the reader
by creating a totally new and different character who had
never yet appeared in any of his previous works. Clamence
is certainly one of the most intriguing characters and again
demonstrates the flexibility and virtuosity of Camus' re-
In order to understand Clamence it will be necessary
to consider briefly the source of Camus' inspiration and the
particular circumstances affecting him at the time of com
position. Post-war Paris was a necessity for Camus' liter-
i
ary success, but was scarcely agreeable to him. Clamence
reflects this attitude indirectly. Particularly significant
i * •
403
404
is the fact that Clamence is a North European and quite un
like the characters of Camus' previous works. He does not
think, act or react in a manner common to the characters of
these other works. Camus would never have been able to
create him had he not lived in Paris among people so differ
ent from his native Algerians. He has succeeded in showing
us a North European from within and not from without. Con
sidering the great character differences between French
Algerians and continental Frenchmen, this is no small feat
of character portrayal, and above all it is a masterpiece of
verbal mimicry.
L1Etranger and La Peste revealed Camus' attitude to
wards lawyers and judges, who were seen from the exterior
in these works. Le Malentendu studied the psychology of
continental Europeans. Clamence, who is both a lawyer and
a continental European, is thus a fusion of these two
groups. Because he is seen solely from within, he was
created only after Camus had had long personal experience in
Europe. Meursault and Caligula are both Mediterranean char
acters who reflect a pre-war outlook on life. Neither re
flects a bourgeois mentality, and both have the same age as
Camus when he created them; both are young and have had
little experience of life. Like Camus himself during the
405
creation of La Chute. Clamence is a man who has experienced
much, who has a certain position in society, and who belongs
to a certain class.
In every respect Clamence is antipodal to Meursault.
As a narrator the former literally gre&s the reader by his
lapels and urges him to listen to a display of articulate
verbal pyrotechnics. He dazzles and overpowers in much the
same way as Diderot's Neveu de Rameau: like the nephew, his
presence imposes upon the reader and like him he is disso
lute and too lucid— he suffers from an excess of self-
awareness, from an extreme consciousness of himself and of
every word he utters. These characteristics may apply to
the French perhaps more than to any other people. The
Algerians of Noces and L'Ete. however, are of a much differ
ent mold. Like North Americans, they are friends but not
confidants: Clamence makes of the reader a confidant but
not a friend. Like Stavrogin in Dostoyevsky's The Posses
sed.1 he is a disintegrated personality who exults in a
masochistic self-degradation of which he is thoroughly
^Camus wrote a stage adaptation of this novel. L1 Hom
me Revolte also reveals that Camus had a thorough under
standing of Dostoyevsky. Stavrogin, moreover, is a contin
ental European and not a Mediterranean, a fact which is
important in considering his similarity to Clamence.
406
aware. The landscape of Amsterdam is also that of Cla
mence 's soul; Camus has placed a guilt-ridden character in
the center of a guilt-ridden landscape.
His name alone is suggestive of several meanings:
Jean-Baptiste, a Christian name more common in former times,
refers to John the Baptist, which in the novel has an ironic
meaning; the lawyer is not at all a saint, but he is alone,
in a "desert," and no one wishes to hear his confessions.
His inner compulsion to reveal himself totally may also ex
plain his aggressiveness towards the reader— he is so alive
that he almost speaks to us directly; we almost forget that
he is fictional. "Clamence" obviously suggests "clemency,"
but this name may also refer to the Latin "clamens," or
"clamoring," "shouting," which could allude to his legal
gymnastics in court.
As in preceding works, certain sections of "Le Mino-
taure" appear to have inspired La Chute. Although Camus
had not yet been to Amsterdam when he wrote the early essay,
he already has a very clear picture of what just such a city
meant to him. Cities are deserts inhabited by a "solitude
/ 2
peuplee," a "Lonely Crowd," whose citizens are "alone but
2Cf. Ch. IV, p.
407
not alone" (p. 15). In these "deserts" an individual can
hide within the "man swarm" much better than in a real des
ert whose emptiness would reveal his presence immediately.
"Le Minotaure" informs us that Descartes "chose his desert:
the most commercial city of his time, Amsterdam" (p. 16).
Clamence, who dissects himself before us with Cartesian pre
cision, chooses this "desert" where he is "alone but not
alone," where ironically he wants to be heard but not to be
noticed, where he can expose himself or retreat whenever he
so desires. He is like a blinking light which shouts atten
tion to itself one moment, then the next hides itself in
t
darkness: his narration is the moment when he lights himself
up before us; the reader feels that once his life story is
told he will retreat into the fog or hide within some foul
bar.
The fog-enshrouded landscape of Le Malentendu revealed
to us a landscape which was not what it wanted to be but
which could not change. This is also the landscape of
Amsterdam, as well as that of Clamence's tormented soul.
The narration begins as he derides the silence of the
"barman-Gorilla," yet his derision is already self-inflict
ing, since he is indirectly referring to his tormented ver
bosity: "and when you can no longer dwell in the solitude
■408
of your heart you live in your lips, and sound is a diver-
3
sion and a pastime": "Des que j'ouvre la bouche, les
phrases coulent" (p. 17).
The scene is set in the Zeedijk section of Amsterdam,
a foul neighborhood which is the Dutch capital of crime and
prostitution. Clamence is seated in a dingy bar called
«
"Mexico City" and bids the reader, who ostensibly has just
entered, to be seated and join him in a round of "geni&vre."
Ironically the epithet "Gorilla," like the name "Mexico
%
City," suggests a tropical exoticism which clashes with the
cold, sordid setting of Amsterdam. This symbolism intro
duces a dichotomy between hostile and friendly landscapes
which Clamence will develop throughout the course of the
narration. These names also allude to a disparity between
reality and illusion which his mordant wit will attack.
Camus wrote this work in Paris when this city seemed
most unbearable to him. Clamence reflects this personal
attitude, but suffers no loss in autonomy since he is cer
tainly no puppet whose strings are visibly manipulated by
his creator. Once a noted and respected Parisian lawyer,
Clamence unleashes a sarcastic and excoriating attack on
3Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet, p. 60.
409
this city which also appears to be Camus' own definition of
it:
Paris est un vrai trampe-1'oeil, un superbe decor habite
par quatre millions de silhouettes. Prks de cinq mil
lions, au dernier recensement? Allons, ils auront fait
des petits. Je ne m'en etonnerai pas. II m'a toujours
senible que nos concitoyens avaient deux fureurs: les
idees et la fornication. A tort et a travers, pour ain-
si dire. Gardons-nous, d'ailleurs, de les condamner;
ils ne sont pas les seuls, toute 1'Europe en est la.
Je r£ve parfois de ce que diront de nous les historiens
futurs, Une phrase leur suffira pour l'homme moderne:
il forniquait et lisait des journaux. (p. 11)
Clamence is also one of these "millions of silhouettes," one
of these cerebral "fornicators," but he is only too pain
fully aware of this. The Dutch citizens of the Zeedijk are
procurers and prostitutes referred to as "males and fe
males," an expression particularly derogatory in French but
not in English. Clamence derides equally the "respectable"
bourgeois customers who purchase gin and prostitutes but who
have come there by "mythomanie ou par betise" (p. 11).
These sure the solid citizens who "tuent en famille, k l'usu-
re."
Bourgeois Vikings
Clamence interrupts the narration to mention that the
fog is thickening along the Zuyderzee. By so doing he as
serts his unpleasant consciousness of the landscape and also
410
makes the reader aware of it. These interruptions thus
assert continually the oppressive ambiance.
He explains that he "likes" these victims of claustra-
tion, those deprived of sunlight and physical liberty:
' i
Ce pays m'inspire d'ailleurs. J'aime ce peuple grouil-
lant sur les trottoirs, ccince dans un petit espace de
maisons et d'eaux, cerne par des brumes, des terres
froides, et la mer fumante comme une lessive. Je l'aime,
car il est double. II est ici et il est ailleurs. (pp.
17-18)
Clamence, who expresses himself by ironic innuendoes, im
plies the opposite of what he says. He really scorns these
people, who, isolated by fog, "squeezed" between a foul sea
and a cold earth, are "here and elsewhere," within their
dreams of tropical splendor and within their own cold coun
try at the same time. Perhaps he mocks them because they
are so much like himself. He "enjoys" the presence of those
who reflect his own inner torment; misery likes company.
The description of his native Parisians reveals a scornful
half-truth, as does the following passage about the citizens
of Amsterdam:
Ils marchent pres de nous, il est vrai, et pourtant,
voyez ou se trouvent leurs tetes: dans cette brume de
neon, de genievre et de menthe qui descend des enseignes
rouges et vertes. La Hollande est un songe, monsieur,
un songe d'or et de fumee, plus fumeux le jour, plus
dore la nuit, et nuit et jour ce songe est peuple de
Lohengrin comme ceux-ci, filant reveusement sur leur
noires bicyclettes a hauts guidons, cygnes funfebres
411
qui tournent sans treve, dans tout le pays, autour des
mers, le long des canaux. Ils revent, la tete dans
leurs nuees cuivrees, ils roulent en rond, ils prient,
somnambules, dans l'encens dore de la brume, ils ne
sont plus I k . Ils sont partis k des milliers de kilo
metres, vers Java, l'ile lointaine. Ils prient ces
dieux grimagants de 1'Indonesia dont ils ont garni
toutes leurs vitrines, et qui errent en ce moment au-
dessus de nous, avant de s'accrocher, comme des singes
somptueux, aux enseignes et aux toits en escaliers,
pour rappeler k ces colons nostalgiques que la Hollands
n'est pas seulement l1Europe des marchands, mais la mer,
la mer qui mene a Cipango, et a ces lies ou les hommes
meurent fous et heureux. (pp. 18-19)
These Dutchmen, according to Clamence, are not what they
want to be. They refuse to be what they are because they
bury everything within themselves, even the love of life.
They are solid businessmen who dream of Rimbaud's voyage to
Harrar--Charleville is not far from Amsterdam. They dream
because reality is boredom. Lohengrin, whose love is an
impossible transcendency, is their opiate. The dream of
faraway beauty closes their eyes to the native landscape
which enshrouds them. These are the people who resemble
the happy Clamence of former years who had not yet gained
self-knowledge. Because of this, his attitude towards them i
is scorn mixed with condescension. They are the antithesis ,
of Meursault, who is what he wants to be in every breath he
draws.
These bourgeois citizens do hot revolt, they dream.
412
i
Their landscape is a dream and they have joined it.
In this passage Camus' precision of detail is faultless^
he has brought to life the most salient, although negative
i
aspects of a people. The silence and restraint of this
Nordic people also coincide with the landscape. Dreams and
etiquette close their mouths, but not their thoughts. Like
4
"funereal swans" they float silently over their country on
their bicycles, and like swans, their feet paddle rhythmi-
cally while their bodies remain stately, upright, and mo
tionless. Mist, water, bicycles, and dreams of Java are all
little details of a people which indirectly relate them to
the landscape. Clamence ironically describes them as part
of the decor, not as individuals detached from it.
The Dutch whom Clamence satirizes are a Nordic people
who closely resemble the Scandinavians and the English.
Their orderly, bourgeois existence is one of resignation.
Their temperament prevents the revolt which describes the
Slavic disposition of Martha in Le Malentendu. The sea has
^Clamence is alluding to Lohengrin's arrival on a boat
drawn by a swan. The Lohengrin motif is also suggested by
the transformation of the swan into a dove which will lead
;him to the Holy.Grail. Clamence's obsession with doves is
thus reinforced. Sibelius composed a popular tone-poem
based upon the Norse legend of a black swan which carries
away the dead into the next life.
413
has always exerted a strong influence on such Nordic peo
ples . Once they were Vikings who saw in the sea a route
towards plunder, orgy, wine, women and song. They did not
work and no labor separated them from what they were and
what they wanted to be. Once they exultantly plundered and
raped and gorged themselves in warmer climates. They grew
older, however, and in the course of many centuries they
married, became respectable, learned to work, and finally
to dream: they became tame, European and civilized. The
Dutch, like their Scandinavian cousins, have become frus
trated Vikings. In large steamers they settled their cor
porate structure on tropical islands where they negotiated
I
their dreams. Even this is no longer possible; the tropical
peoples wish to imitate them by literacy, hard work, even
dreams.
Wagner, Ibsen, Strindberg, even Flaubert and Maeter
linck, were the descendants of Vikings. Their music and
literature reflect a dim memory of former pagan glories.
The modern North European, living in their shadow, in vain
covets a former barbarity. The Danes, once the most feared 1
and bloodthirsty of Vikings, have turned their former ag
gressions inward and now have the highest suicide rate in
Europe. Kierkegaard, the tormented minister who was too
414
timid to ask the hand of his beloved in marriage, once was
tempted by this form of death; he was a direct descendant of
the Vikings. The rapacious Teutons became sentimental, or- :
derly and efficient. Only a modern war can reveal the an
cient nature of these peoples. Seen in this respect, "Hol
land is not only the Europe of merchants, but the sea, the
sea which leads to Cipango, and to those islands where men !
die mad and happy." Such a sea, which "steams like wash
ing," needless to say, is no delight in itself, but an es
cape route, always present, always before the eyes, always
tempting. Gauguin took just such a route.
A Bourgeois Hell
Clamence sees himself in the inner circle of Dante's
Inferno.5 in the very "heart of things," in the lowest
depths of hell:
Car nous sommes au coeur des choses. Avez-vous remarque
que les canaux concentriques d'Amsterdam ressemblent aux
cercles de l'enfer? L'enfer bourgeois, naturellement
peuple de mauvais reves. Quand on arrive de l'exterieur,
k mesure qu'on passe ces cercles, la vie, et done ses
crimes, devient plus epaisse, plus obscure. Ici, nous
/’Alfred Galpin, "Italian Echoes in Albert Camus; Two
Notes on La Chute." Symposium. 12:110-117, 1958. Mr. Galpin
discusses the reference to Dante's Inferno as well as the
hame symbolism of the narrator.
415
sommes dans le dernier cercle. Le cercle des ... Ah I
Vous savez cela? Diable, vous devenez plus difficile
a classer. Mais vous comprenez alors pourquoi je puis
dire que le centre des choses est ici, bien que nous
nous trouvions k 1(extramite du continent. Un homme
sensible comprend ces bizarreries. En tout cas, les
lecteurs de journaux et les fornicateurs ne peuvent
aller plus loin. Ils viennent de tous les coins de
1'Europe et s'arretent autour de la mer interieure,
sur la gr&ve decoloree. Ils ecoutent les sir&nes,
cherchent en vain la silhouette des bateaux dans la
brume, puis repassent les canaux et s'en retournent a
travers la pluie. (pp. 19-20)
Clamence had previously informed us that the Zeedijk was
"the place of one of the greatest crimes in history," the
genocide of "sixty thousand Jews, deported or assassinated"
(p. 16). This section of the city, moreover, was and still
remains a center of smuggling and prostitution. Thus before
Clamence compares it to hell, the Zeedijk already evokes it.
Clamence's description accurately conforms to Dante's
Inferno. The more respectable citizens inhabit the outer
concentric canals, just as the lesser sinners dwell within
the outer circles of hell. The center of Dante's Inferno
is lower than the surrounding circles and the Zeedijk (Sea-
dike) is also the lowest part of Amsterdam. The foulest
crimes are committed here and they are correspondingly
punished in the Inferno. Clamence knows for what crime
this circle is reserved, but he refuses to mention it— "Le
cercle des ... " Judas and Brutus, those who betrayed the
416
trust given them, who mimicked love and friendship, are the
central attractions. Martha, as we already mentioned, could
easily belong here. Clamence is aware that he does. He
knows that he has been false and betrayed the trust of his
calling.
The Zeedijk is cold and watery: the corresponding
circle of hell is a frozen lake resembling the dead, land
locked Zuyderzee. In the Zeedijk the coldest, most calcu
lating crimes are committed and in Dante's inner circle
similar perpetrators are correspondingly frozen in ice,
since their hearts have long since turned to ice and stone.
In this respect Martha appears to be more likely a candidate
than Clamence; we never know whether his regrets are sincere
or feigned; often he appears to mock his suffering. Cla
mence, however, represents a much higher level of self-
awareness than Martha; she is more truly the victim of cir
cumstances .
The Zeedijk, the inner circle, is located at the "ex
tremity of the continent" where "newspaper readers and for-
s' ' ■
nicators can go no further." This implies that Clamence is
also one of their numbers and that he too drifted there and
was stopped by the sea. This small allusion, however, does
not satisfy the reader's curiosity, which wants to know why
417
a man would choose to live in hell. This is one of the most
difficult problems in the novel, and no one solution seems
sufficient. In the course of the narration Clamence gives
more reasons why this particular place is so repugnant to
him: he appears to have voluntarily entered his hell with
a complete realization of the fact. One may also consider
that he prefers the company of similar reprobates or that he
wishes to punish himself.
Clamence's Zeedijk bears an interesting resemblance to
the Oran of La Peste. whose serpentine labyrinths curiously
suggest the concentric canals of Amsterdam. Both cities are
seaports, refuse natural beauty, and both are hells, al
though of a different nature.
The universal debauchery of the Zeedijk attracts Cla
mence— he has a certain appetite for hell, which helps ex
plain his presence there. The prostitutes of the Zeedijk
sit behind large windows from which they beckon their cli
ents. When a customer enters, they draw the curtains.
Clamence describes them with a consummate irony and scorn:
Ces dames, derriere ces vitrines? Le reve, monsieur,
le reve a peu de frais, le voyage aux Indesl Ces per-
sonnes se parfument aux epices. Vous entrez, elles
tirent les rideaux et la navigation commence. Les
dieux descendent sur les corps nus et les lies deri-
vent, dementes, coiffees d'une chevelure ebouriffee
de palmiers sous le vent. Essayez. (p. 21)
418
This description of prostitution certainly ranks among the
best in literature; it comes as a surprise to the reader andj
yet it has been very carefully prepared; it uses most of thej
I
imagery previously described in a different context and thus^
makes a rather dramatic climax by means of it; dreams, trop
ical voyages, in a word escape, form the essence of this
passage; carnality is almost absent. The "ladies" thus
satisfy a psychological need; they are substitutes for the
beautiful nude Tahitians Gauguin painted and they take the
"traveler" on a substitute voyage. Dreams of tropical is
lands and "palms under the wind" end in a sordid reality.
Ironically the poor boys of young Camus' Belcourt had a
beautiful nocturnal beach and a starry sky for romance; such
dreams for them would be senseless. Clamence's lucid de
scription of this scene appears almost painful to him; he
is like a man who mocks the thing he cannot resist; he
despises what he desires. The last little word, "essayez,"
which so boldly strikes the reader, reveals this ironic
scorn in the most masterful form.
Ihg, "Malg.gnfsrfr"
The first chapter set the scene of the narration by a
'description of the Zeedijk-hell and the second tells us how
419
Clamence got there. His former life, he explains, was quite
exemplary and successful; no inner torments and doubts dis
turbed his tranquillity. Unaware of himself, he was inte
grated within his world and within himself. Like Camus, he
too preferred high, open places and eschewed any physical
confinement. Like a king, he reigned over his unfortunate
clients as he reigned over the surface of the earth:
Oui, je ne me suis jamais senti h. l'aise que dans les
situations elevees. Jusque dans le detail de la vie,
j'avais besoin d'etre au-dessus. Je preferais 1'auto
bus au metro, les caliches aux taxis, les terrasses aux
entresols. Amateur des avions de sport ou l1on porte
la tite en plein ciel, je figurais aussi, sur les ba
teaux, l'eternel promeneur des dunettes. En montagne,
je fuyais les vallees encaissees pour les cols et les
plateaux; j'etais l'homme des peneplaines, au moins.
Si le destin m'avait oblige de choisir un metier manuel,
tourneur ou couvreur, soyez tranquille, j'eusse choisi
les toits et fait amitie avec les vertiges. Les soutes,
les cales, les souterrains, les grottes, les gouffres
me faisaient horreur. J'avais meme voue une haine spe-
ciale aux speleologues, qui avaient le front d'occuper
la premiere place des journaux, et dont les performances
m'ecoeuraient. S'efforcer de parvenir a la tete coincee
dans un goulet rocheux (un siphon, comme disent ces in-
conscients) me paraissait 1' exploit de caracteres per-
vertis ou traumatises. II y avait du crime la-dessous.
(pp. 30-31)
Clamence reveals the most intense claustrophobia of
Camus, a fear which reaches the pathological horrors of
Poe's pits, mausoleums, collapsing walls, et al. This
passage, however, does not detract from the recit but con
tributes directly to it; Camus has exploited his own inner-
most fears for the benefit of literature. Like his creator,
Clamence loves open spaces where he is in contact with the
wind, whether in taxis, carriages, open cockpits or the
bridges of steamers. Also like Camus, he refers frequently
to objects by respiratory images and often expresses a feel
ing of suffocation. Speleology is the ultimate horror.
This pathological fear, however, is shared by many people
and almost everyone has experienced a degree of claustro
phobia. Clamence's terror of caves is extremely common and
understandable. So great is his claustrophobia that he has
no fear of high, dangerous places. Since fear of falling
is innate in all people, its absence is particularly strik
ing. Never does Camus describe dread of heights or of open
spaces, but only the single, contrary fear which dominates
his imagery. Acrophobia is equally as common in most peo
ple, depending on the circumstances. Just as most people
would fear speleology or descent in a submarine, so also
would these same people fear flying in open airplanes.
Since bombings and strafings are commonplace in our time,
death from the air has created a new dimension to acro
phobia. Camus never mentions this war-induced fear.
Vanity and the need to feel superior have inspired
Clamence's love of high places; moral and spiritual super-
421
iority require a certain altitude, according to him:
Un balcon naturel, a cinq ou six cents metres au-dessus
d'une mer encore visible et baignee de lumiere, etait au
contraire l'endroit ou je respirais le mieux, surtout si
j'etais seul, bien au-dessus des fourmis humaines. Je
m'expliquais sans peine que les sermons, les predications
decisives, les miracles de feu se fissent sur des hau
teurs accessibles. Selon moi, on ne meditait pas dans
les caves ou les cellules des prisons (a moins qu'elles
fussent situees dans une t o u r ,6 avec une vue etendue);
on y moisissait. Et je comprenais cet homme qui, etant
entre dans les ordres, defroqua parce que sa cellule,
au lieu d'ouvrir, comme il s'y attendait, sur un vaste
paysage, donnait sur un mur. (pp. 31-32)^
Clamence on his "natural balcony" curiously reminds us of
Barr&s contemplating Toledo from the summit of a high hill.
Although Clamence claims that he can "breathe better" in
such a place, his pose is also theatrical. Since he was a
clever lawyer who sought to produce effects by a theatrical
stance and verbal posturing, this love of altitude appears
logical: perhaps he even coveted the superior altitude of
the judge's bench. His theatricality almost appears to
satirize the nineteenth century's love of eloquent display.
6Meursault was imprisoned high above Algiers, in a
large prison. Fabrice del Dongo, although imprisoned in a
high tower, could not see the landscape because a wooden
construction covered the window and prevented such a con
templation of nature.
?In "Le Desert" Camus describes the monastery at Fie-
sole where natural beauty was a "justification" for the
monks.
422
His imagery is rather suggestive of the Sermon on the Mount
— a vast panorama of "human ants" seen from a majestic
height— and a didactic message.
Clamence, when ignorant of himself, reigned "librement
dans une lumiere edenique" (p. 34). He suffered from no
conflict between mind and body and his "accord avec la vie
etait total" (p. 35). He interrupts the narration of his
past life again by proposing a promenade in the city which
he "loves":
J'aime le souffle des eaux moisies, l'odeur des feuilles
mortes qui mac&rent dans le canal et celle, funfebre, qui
monte des peniches pleines de fleurs. (pp. 52-53)
Although he "admits that he forces himself to love these
canals," the reader is only too aware that he really abhors
them.
Clamence relates a tragic incident which revealed to
him his fundamental nature. One somber November night in
Paris, he saw through the drizzling rain a girl jump off
8
the Pont Royal to her death, but he made no attempt to save
her. He realizes now that as a defense attorney who took
the cause of the weak and helpless he was a sham, that he
®As in Le Malentendu. a cold depressing landscape for
Camus is suggestive of drowning.
423
only wanted to placate his own vanity by appearing noble.
After narrating this incident, Clamence will somewhat lower
his mask and speak more sincerely to the reader-1istener;
a painful self-awareness now changes his tone. In the fol
lowing description of Amsterdam he no longer "loves" the
"negative landscape" but directly reveals his antipathy for
it:
Voilk, n'est-ce pas, le plus beau des paysages negatifs'.
Voyez, h. notre gauche, ce tas de cendres qu'on appelle
ici une dune, la digue grise a notre droite, la gr&ve
livide a nos pieds et, devant nous, la mer couleur de
lessive faible, le vaste ciel ou se refletent les eaux
blemes. Un enfer mou, vraimentl Rien que des horizon-
tales, aucun eclat, l'espace est incolore, la vie morte.
N'est-ce pas l'effacement universel, le neant sensible
aux yeux? Pas d'hommes, sur tout, pas d'hommes'. Vous
et moi, seulement, devant la plan&te enfin deserte'. Le
ciel vit? Vous avez raison, cher ami. II s'epaissit,
puis se creuse, ouvre des escaliers d'air, ferme des
portes de nuees. Ce sont les colombes. N'avez-vous
remarque que le ciel de Hollande est rempli de millions
de colombes, invisibles tant elles se tiennent haut, et
qui battent des ailes, montent et descendent d'un mdme
mouvement, remplissant l'espace celeste avec des flots
epais de plumes grisatres que le vent emporte ou ra-
mene. Les colombes attendent la-haut, elles attendent
toute l'annee. Elles tournent au-dessus de la terre,
regardent, voudraient descendre. Mais il n'y a rien,
que le mer et les canaux, des toits couverts d'enseignes,
et nulle tete ou se poser. (pp. 86-87)
The first five sentences paint a very accurate picture
of the landscape. Sand, sea and canals appear to have fused
in one amorphous and colorless substance; dunes, dikes, sea
and atmosphere are all grey. No projecting object relieves
424
the monotonous, flat horizon which is absorbed by the grey
atmosphere. For Clamence it is a "soft hell"'which encloses
around him from all sides, weighs down upon his chest, iso
lates him, and contains him within its "universal nothing
ness." The numb, exultant secrecy of fog hides his face
from others but cannot hide him from himself: Clamence has
chosen well his tailor-made hell.
The first half of this passage reveals a favorite sub
ject of many Dutch landscape painters who accentuate all of
the details Clamence has just described. The "invisible
doves" which compose the second half of the passage are also
a favorite subject of the Japanese landscape artist Hokusai.
In several of his prints sea foam turns into flying doves
and high clouds are composed of very tiny birds. We doubt,
however, that the Japanese prints and the Dutch paintings
influenced his creation. Camus gives great meaning to this
last image. Doves, traditionally a symbol of innocence and
purity, "turn around above the earth, want to descend," but
the "soft hell" of Holland repulses them. Just as Poe's
ominous raven alighted on the head of a bust, so do these
harbingers of innocence and peace wish to do likewise, but
there is "no head where they may alight." They circle
above him, remind him of himself, haunt him as dreams of
425
innocence haunt the guilty; a heavenly bird is for him
another source of inner torment.
In this passage Clamence1s direct addresses to the
reader-listener who accompanies him produce a strong effect.
He is constantly beckoning us to share his suffering, his
guilty conscience, his revulsion of a "guilty" landscape.
So artful and imperceptible are these direct addresses that
we feel a certain complicity in the life of Clamence; his
guilt "rubs off" on us; we are not innocent either.
The memory of past joys and beauties in his life do not
relieve his present anguish but accentuate it. His vivid
recollection of Sicily, Java, and above all Greece, are like
a glimpse of a lost Eden, the Algerian Eden Camus himself
constantly dreams of. In the Dutch hell where he is now
imprisoned, the depressing interpenetration of sky, sea and
earth suggest a limbo of confused values, a landscape com
posed of doubt, guilt and vain self-recrimination. His
Greek Eden, on the other hand, was clarity in the literal
and figurative senses; time, life and movement then were
visible and had meaning; distance was directly related to
motion, an impossibility in his foggy hell, where "naviga
tion was a dream" (p. 113) . Figuratively the lost land
scape of his Eden suggests a comprehensible and uncompli
426
cated life; Clamence could see where he was going, he could
relate himself to the outside world of men as he could to
the landscape; his progress and accomplishments were visi
ble. His was a clear atmosphere of absolute values> that of
Amsterdam a confusion of relative values. A guilty con
science now conforms to a troubled, indistinct horizon just
as a clear conscience once conformed to a clear horizon:
Sans cesse, de nouvelles lies apparaissaient sur le
cercle de 1'horizon. Leur echine sans arbres tracait
la limite du ciel, leur rivage rocheux tranchait nette-
ment sur la mer. Aucune confusion: dans la lumiere
precise, tout etait rep&re. Et d'une ile a 1'autre,
sans treve, sur notre petit bateau, qui se trainait
pourtant, j'avais 1'impression de bondir, nuit et jour,
& la crete de courtes vagues frarches, dans une course
pleine d'ecume et de rires. Depuis ce temps, la Gr&ce
elle-meme derive quelque part en moi, au bord de ma
memoire, inlassablement ... (p. 114)
Clamence had once sailed through the Parisian courtroom like
a galleon of justice and liberation. The distant shore of
acquittal was always visible, as were the reefs and shoals
of the prosecution. Judges and jurors were so much rigging
to be manipulated in order to catch a favorable wind of
public opinion. Clamence then was the Argus with eyes in
its bow; now he is blinded by the North Sea fog.
In this voluntary hell Clamence punishes himself be
cause he is unwilling to forgive himself. By so doing he
considers himself justified in condemning others. He is
427
like the plague; all stand condemned before him. The Zuy-
derzee for him is "an immense holy water font" in which he
drowns in the waters of his bad conscience. He chooses his
"malconfort"; the very thing he dreads most becomes the
instrument of his lyrical self-hatred. This instrument of
torture, this cage, imposes upon its victims the most pain
ful form of claustration. For Clamence guilt and imprison
ment become one; the dimensions of a cage become those of
his tormented spirit: his soul occupies a "malconfort."
Cette cellule se distinguait des autres par d'ingenieuses
dimensions. Elle n'etait pas assez haute pour qu'on s'y
tint debout, mais pas assez large pour qu'on put s'y
coucher. II fallait prendre le genre empeche, vivre en
diagonale; le sommeil etait une chute, la veille un ac-
croupissement. Mon cher, il y avait du genie, et je
pese mes mots, dans cette trouvaille si simple. Tous
les jours, par l'immuable contrainte qui ankylosait son
corps, le condamne apprenait qu'il etait coupable et que
1'innocence consiste a s'etirer joyeusement. Pouvez-
vous imaginer dans cette cellule un habitue des cimes
et des ponts superieurs? Quoi? On pouvait vivre dans
ces cellules et etre innocent? Improbable, hautement
improbable'. Ou sinon mon raisonnement se casserait le
nez. Que 1'innocence en soit reduite a vivre bossue,
je me refuse a considerer une seule seconde cette hypo-
these. (p. 127)
Clamence was once an habitue of "summits and upper decks"
but now dwells within the "malconfort" of his mind. Ironi
cally, he asserts that innocence is space, the physical
freedom to "stretch out joyously," while guilt conforms to
the inhuman dimensions of this prison, to physical torment.
His "hunchbacked" innocence, as he sees it, is a denial of
genuine innocence. Clamence implies, therefore, that guilt
consists of grotesque suffering and innocence of joyous
freedom: the prisoner of a "malconfort" cannot be innocent
because he is in it: his punishment has made him guilty;
one acquires guilt through suffering. Like the "pestiferes"
in La Peste. spiritual suffering springs from contamination.
Physical degradation reveals a corresponding moral collapse.
Innocence knows no pain, only guilt does. This is the ethic
of the concentration camp which the torturers, during the
last war, imposed on their victims. Clamence had been a
prisoner of war and has espoused, in bitter mockery, the
morale of the prison camp. Physical pain is a recognition
of the efficacity of torture, of the enemy's power, and of
the victim's complicity with him. Thus suffering is a form
of cowardice. Such a twisted psyche simplified human be
havior: before Clamence all stand guilty.
The source of the "malconfort," as well as of this
passage, appears to spring from Camus' personal experiences.
In "La Mer au Plus Pr&s" he describes a terrible claustro
phobia within the tiny cabin which he calls a "cellule
429
* 9
metallique" where he "dreamt of carnage, orgies. Without
space, neither innocence nor liberty! Prison for him who
cannot breathe is death or madness" (pp. 183-184). This
small passage quite accurately describes Clamence within
his "malconfort." Like Camus, he "dreams of carnage, or
gies," and like him he believes that space is an inseparable
attribute of innocence and liberty. The word "breath" im
plies space, distance, even life and sanity. Camus thus
succeeds in transferring the physical attributes of an ob
session to an abstract level.
This claustrophobia, which for him is almost a synonym
for hell, separates La Chute from Le Malentendu: Martha did
all she possibly could to escape the torment of her claus-
tration, while Clamence voluntarily enters his. Oddly
enough, the same revulsion thus drives two people in oppo
site directions.
As a youth Camus made the following categorical state
ment in his Carnetst "Je ne serais pas digne d'aimer la
nudite des plages si je ne savais pas demeurer nu devant
moi-m6me" (p. 77). A middle aged Clamence applies this
9Cf. Ch. IV, p. 49, Ch. XVI, p. 201.
430
imperative to himself literally: he mortifies himself be
cause he feels unworthy of beauty: he divests himself of
his psychic armor before the reader and seeks to stand naked
in front of the mirror of his conscience.
The "Malconfort," however, is not the ultimate prison
which haunts Clamence: it can grow even smaller, even more
unbearable:
Avez-vous au moins entendu parler de la cellule des
crachafcs qu'un peuple imagina recemment pour prouver
qu'il etait le plus grand sur la terre? Une boite
maconnee ou le prisonnier se tient debout, mais ne
peut pas bouger. La solide porte qui le boucle dans
sa coquille de ciment s'arrete a hauteur de menton.
On ne voit done que son visage sur lequel chaque gar-
dien qui passe crache abondamment. Le prisonnier,
coince dans la cellule, ne peut s'essuyer, bien qu'il
lui soit permis, il est vrai, de fermer les yeux.
(p. 128)
10
Camus' "cage of heat and blood," his incandescent Iron
Maiden, has become Clamence's cold "cellule des crachats,"
composed of cement, steel and spittle. Claustration can
scarcely proceed further; it has reached its ultimate hor
ror . Nothing could arouse Clamence's dread of claustro
phobia more than the "spitting cell," yet he senses he be
longs in it. He invites the reader to enter an identical
cell just opposite his: "Tous cancres, tous punis, cra-
10Cf. Ch. XIII, p. 169.
431
chons-nous dessus, et hop1 , au malconfort*. C'est a qui
crachera le premier, voilk tout" (p. 129). Clamence thus
has invited the reader to join him in reciprocal execration
and torment— companionship in hell.
His auto-flagellation reaches lyrical heights: "II y a
cent cinquante ans, on s'attendrissait sur les lacs et les
forets. Aujourd'hui nous avons le lyrisme cellulaire" (p.
144). He is a poet of disenchantment, bitterness, self-
hatred, a godless prophet of a bourgeois hell:
Dans la solitude, la fatigue aidant, que voulez-vous,
on se prend volontiers pour un prophete. Apres tout,
c'est bien la ce que je suis, refugie dans un desert
de pierres, de brumes et d'eaux pourries, prophete
vide pour temps mediocres, Elie sans messie, bourre
de fievre et d'alcool, le dos colle a cette porte
moisie, le doigt leve vers un ciel bas, couvrant
d*imprecations des hommes sans loi qui ne peuvent
supporter aucun jugement. (p. 135)H
Everyone is guilty, none may escape an avenging jus
tice, claims Clamence, who curses "lawless men who can bear
no judgment." His "cellular lyrism" feigns apocalyptic
threats. Unlike Caligula, who becomes the real Apocalypse
of his subjects, Clamence reigns over the customer-subjects
I1"Si l'on peut definir le desert un lieu sans ame ou
le ciel est seul roi, alors Oran attend ses prophetes."
("Le Minotaure," p. 31) Amsterdam for Clamence is also a
desert.
432
of the "Mexico City" bar by means of his tongue. He has
become a prophet of a bourgeois damnation— perhaps the only
modern prophet possible in large cities. His "desert of
stones, mists and stagnant water" joins the psychic land
scape of a merciless, corrupt legality, and the numb, con
fused, self-deceiving souls of those whom he condemns:
landscape and suffering have become one. Clamence leaves
us on a cold, misty night as the snow begins to fall.
In conclusion, we consider that this recit is not just
a pessimistic and bitter reflection of the author's personal
fears and dislikes, but a brilliantly written monologue.
As literature it reveals the profound soul-searching truths
of the great French moralists. It is neither a confession
nor a dramatic monologue, but contains the virtualities of
both. Although the sentiment of nature is only one of its
many intriguing facets, Camus has created insuperable ef
fects by means of it. Freedom-slavery, judgment-forgive-
ness, solidarity-solitude, innocence-guilt, all the impor
tant dualities scrutinized within the narration use nature
as a vehicle; not a single object in nature is gratuitous,
but expressive of a deeper meaning. Camus questions the
very foundations of society in almost all its important
433
aspects and his questioning has created an enduring master
piece .
CHAPTER XXIV
LLEXIL ET LE ROYAUME
This collection of six short stories is the last fic
tional accomplishment of Camus yet derives the source of its
inspiration from his very earliest works. Although the
style and literary form are in many respects daringly new,
Camus proves that he remains more loyal than ever to his
origins. North Africa furnishes the setting of the first
four stories, Paris the fifth, and Brazil the last.
Each of the six stories reflects the title of the col
lection. "Exile," as we have demonstrated in his preceding
works, corresponds to isolation from nature, mankind, and
generally both. The "Kingdom" is accordingly solidarity
within the world of nature, mankind, or both, and just
balances the negative aspect of the title. This duality
forms the basis of each story in which one of these two
opposing forces dominates. In the first, "La Femme Adul-
tfere," Janine accepts solidarity with the natural world and
isolation within society. The Renegade suffers from a
434
435
complete exile in every respect. His is the most total
deprivation expressed in all of Camus' works, although Jonas
runs a close second. In both stories alienation, either
from nature or society, results in a tragic loss of luci
dity. In "Les Muets," Yvars suffers from a partial exile;
however, in "La Pierre Qui Pousse" D'Arrast achieves social
solidarity.
"La Femme Adult&re":
A Symbolic Seduction bv Sand. Wind and Stars
This short story, like all the others in L'Exil et Le
Royaume. with the exception of "Le Renegat," is narrated by
the omniscient third person of the author. This rather
traditional form represents a departure in style from Camus'
fictional narrations in the first person, which in L'Etran
ger . La Chute and "Le Renegat" presents the narrators to
the reader directly, who is thus obliged to make all value
judgments. All three of these narrator-characters are of a
very unusual mold and thus interest us because they force
us to grasp them by means of our resources rather than by
means of the author's intervening third person. For this
very reason these works have been frequently misunderstood;
the author, by making himself invisible, has created master
pieces which provoke but do not explain. La Peste. however,
436
depends upon the "false" third person of a narrator who is
contained within the action and refers to himself in the
third person just as Julius Caesar does in his letters to
the Senate. The plague, rather than its narrator, is of
dominant interest, so accordingly Rieux subordinates him
self to the event he describes. Although he is both a wit
ness and a participant in the action, his use of the third
person requires an effacement, a certain selflessness.
Rieux, accordingly, is modest and objective. Camus thus
always adapts his mode of narration to his characters.
Janine is not a complex, unusual or provoking person;
she does not need to appear directly to the reader without
an intervening third person in order to assert the authen
ticity of her behavior. Camus accents her surroundings here
more than her psychological subtleties. Throughout the work
she is seen in context with a certain nature which produces
an effect upon her. Camus presents to us a character who
reaches the most intense and conscious pantheistic union.
Since she is not an exceptional person, her union with na
ture is all the more striking to the reader.
Camus sets the scene of the action which occupies the
present, then returns to the past in order to furnish the
reader with necessary knowledge and insight concerning the
437
character. This interruption is always flawless, almost
imperceptible, so that the action recommences effortlessly.
All of Camus' fictional works exploit this form of narra
tion1 with the exception of La Peste. a chronicle in which
all events sure written as they occur.
Janine and her husband are riding in an uncomfortable
bus over an inhospitable desert which recalls that of "Le
Vent c i Djemila." He is a salesman who is obliged to travel
great distances through the "bled" where he sells cloth to
the Moslem natives. His wife is accompanying him on his
business trip because she is bored, has no children, and
wants to be with him. Both are middle-aged and resigned to
a dull existence with no future prospects of happiness. It
is winter and the desert wind, laden with stinging sand,
assaults the vehicle, stops up the carburetor, and promises
nothing but a cold loneliness:
Soudain, on entendit distinctement le vent hurler et la
^■This is not exactly true of L1 Etranger. The use, ex
tent and meaning of fictional narrated time in this work is
extremely complex and would necessitate an entire study de
voted to it. M. Barrier, in L'Art du Recit dans L1Etranger
(Paris, 1962), proves, however, that Meursault attempts to
make the action appear to begin at the death of his mother.
This is somewhat of an over-simplification and it will be
necessary to consult M. Barrier's book for a complete ans
wer .
4
438
brume minerale qui entourait 1'autocar s'epaissit encore.
Sur les vitres, le sable s'abattait maintenant par poi-
gnees comme s'il etait lance par des mains invisibles.
(p. 12)
"Brume minerale" is a composite of two elements which
Camus thoroughly disliked. Sand and dust are everywhere as
Janine reflects that as a girl she did not lose her breath
2
so easily; the depressing scene has given rise to a rev$ry
of the past. Once, when she was young and in love, the
future looked bright, but a dull routine of endless work
eroded her ioie de vivre. Although she had hoped to see
palm trees or an oasis in the desert, she sees nothing but
dust and sand:
Elle voyait a present que le desert n'etait pas cela,
mais seulement la pierre, la pierre partout, dans le
ciel ou regnait encore, crissante et froide, le seule
poussi&re, comme le sol ou poussaient seulement, entre
les pierres, des graminees seches.
A mineral wind and a mineral desert from a mineral empire
which has killed the only living things visible, the "gra
minees seches"; the dead flowers correspond to an exhausted
^Clamence also mentions constantly his difficulty in
breathing the heavy air of Amsterdam. A stifling atmosphere
always heralds a negative landscape in Camus' fiction; all
of the characters in L'Exil et Le Royaume mention a diffi
culty in breathing. Camus' dread of suffocation thus ap
pears to have entered his works unconsciously.
439
and barren love vtfiich has brought her no children.
When they reach a tiny Moslem village they enter a
depressing little hotel where they will spend the night.
It is five o'clock in the afternoon and the desert gale,
having ceased, now reveals a clear sky. They climb up to
the parapet of an old fort where the desert spreads before
them in a vast panorama. The scene has already enticed her,
and her former mood of dejection has changed. She becomes
aware of the extreme silence of the desert which accentuates
the slightest sound:
A mesure qu'ils montaient, l'espace d'elargissait et
ils s'elevaient dans une lumiere de plus en plus vaste,
froide et seche, ou chaque bruit de 1'oasis leur par-
venait avec une purete distincte. L'air illumine, sem-
blait vibrer autour d'eux, d'une vibration de plus en
plus longue k mesure qu'il progressait, comme si leur
passage faisait naitre sur le cristal de la lumiere
une onde sonore qui allait s'elargissant. Et au mo
ment ou, parvenus sur la terrasse, leur regard se per-
dit d'un coup au-dela de la palmeraie, dans 1'horizon
immense, il sembla k Janine que le ciel entier reten-
tissait d'une seule note eclatante et brkve dont les
echos peu k peu remplirent l'espace au-dessus d'elle,
puis se turent subitement pour la laisser silencieuse
devant l'etendue sans limites. (pp. 29-30)
Light and sound form an exquisite and magnificent synes
thesia. Typical of many of Camus' most inspiring scenes,
an upward ascension coincides with distance, freedom and
beauty; as the couple climbs up, space and light increase,
then become one: "une lumikre de plus en plus vaste." The
440
air becomes "lit up" and appears to vibrate like a "crystal"
and produces a "wave of sound"; it is almost alive. One
thinks of the vibrant light of Van Gogh which shimmers,
undulates before one's eyes as if endowed with life. Light
invests the air with sound, with a single note born of an
instant which echoes and re-echoes, refusing to die. It is
3
the first note of a "fugue a l'echelle du monde." In this
passage space, light, sound and air have fused into a living
4
substance. The desert is living and life is what Janine
covets as she sees her own slipping away from her; no child
will attest to her existence after she dies. The desert is
a splendid absence and it beckons to her; its silence has
called out to her, its infinite horizon has embraced her:
"Au-dessus du desert, le silence etait vaste comme l'es
pace" (p. 31).
From the parapet she observes the Bedouins, "seigneurs
^"Dans cette grande respiration du monde, le meme souf
fle s'accomplissait a quelques secondes de distance et rep-
renait de loin en loin le theme de pierre et d'air d'une
fugue k l'echelle du monde. A chaque fois, le theme dimi-
nuait d'un ton." ("Le Desert," p. 96) This passage appears
to have inspired the above quotation, which is more arrest
ing.
4Camus collaborated with Walt Disney in making "The
Living Desert" (see Bibliography).
441
miserables et libres d'un etrange royaume." Like sailors on
a sea of sand, they live with a strange liberty and detach
ment that has always been denied her. The desert is their
master and they serve no man. Silence is their language.
They dwell in this "kingdom" that "had been promised her,
but would never be hers except in this fugitive instant"
(p. 32).
Her husband's indifferent love for her has become a
carnal habit consummated in a joyless darkness:
Ils s'aimaient dans la nuit, sans se voir, k tatons.
Y-a-t-il un autre amour que celui des tenebres, un
amour qui creerait en plein jour? (p. 35)
Stifled love in the den has reached an impasse; carnality
will bring no children, only disgust: "Son coeur lui fai-
sait mal, elle etouffait sous le poids dont elle decouvrait
soudain qu'elle le trainait depuis vingt ans" (p. 37). For
the first time she struggles consciously against an oppres
sive love with "toutes ses forces." She awaits another. . .
In the "extremities of night," as she lies awake beside
her sleeping husband, she hears the distant "voix extenuees
et infatigables des chiens" from the oasis, where "plus
personne ne vieillissait ni ne mourait" (p. 37). She aris
es, "throws herself into the night," in the vast arms of a
tender and indifferent lover. "Des guirlandes d'etoiles
442
descendaient du ciel noir au-dessus des palmiers et des
maisons" (p. 38). The cold air "burns her lungs," but she
continues towards the heart of silence, towards the parapet
which she had visited previously. Her lover greets her with
silence and cold, surrounds her and possesses her:
Aucun souffle, aucun bruit, sinon, parfois le crepitement
etouffe des pierres que le froid reduisait en sable, ne
venait troubler la solitude et le silence qui entouraient
Janine. (p. 39)
The sound of silence is the "dull sputtering" of stones
5
which the cold night splits. Her heart is quiet as a per
fect love holds her motionless. Her eyes "open to the
spaces of the night" (p. 39), she perceives the course of
the stars as they swing like "sparkling icicles" through
the sky towards the horizon. She is unable to "s'arracher
e i la contemplation de ces feux a la derive." In the cold,
liquid night, the moving stars are like the phosphorescent
flicker of foam in the wake of a nocturnal ship. These
"feux I t la derive" then seem to fall down upon the desert:
Devant elle, les etoiles tombaient, une h. une, puis
5 " ... 1'on entend eclater une a une, dans les nuits
silencieuses, les pierres du desert qui gelent apres avoir
brule ..." ("La Mer au Plus Pres," p. 186) This image is
also repeated in "L'Hote."
443
s'eteignaient parmi les pierres du desert, et a chaque
fois Janine s'ouvrait un peu plus a la nuit. (p. 40)
The very stones of the desert suggest fallen stars which
have lost their fire.
The seductive beauty of the "liquid" night reaches a
crescendo as stars take possession of the sky and ecstasy
embraces Janine:
Les dernieres etoiles des constellations laisserent
tomber leurs grappes un peu plus bas sur l1horizon du
desert, et s'immobiliserent. Alors, avec une douceur
insupportable, l'eau de la nuit commenga d'emplir Ja
nine, submerges le froid, monta peu a peu du centre
obscur de son etre et deborda en flots ininterrompus
jusqu'a sa bouche pleine de gemissements. L1instant
d'apres, le ciel entier s'etendait au-dessus d'elle,
renversee sur la terre froide. (pp. 40-41)
The constellations "drop their clusters of stars" on the
horizon; Janine has been transported a million miles away
from her stifling routine existence; she "stands outside of •
g
herself." She has been freed. The tides of night lift her
7
up, bearing her up to "the surface of herself." She and
the night have become one; she has adjusted her body to its
temperature. The tender embrace of night flows over her in
" ... je m'ouvrais pour la premiere fois a la tendre
indifference du monde," (L*Etranger. p. 171) Meursault
also says this at night.
7"Amour de Vivre," p. 109.
444
g
"flots ininterrompus" and she sobs with joy.
Janine returns to the confining dimensions of the hotel
room and as she goes to bed, her husband awakens: "II se
leva, donna la lumiere qui la gifla en plein visage." A
glstring artificial light "slaps her right on the face," as
if her half-conscious husband expressed by means of his act
a jealous anger. He gets up, drinks some mineral water,
goes to bed again. .Janine sobs, saying, "Ce n'est rien, mon
#
cheri, ce n'est rien." The wise, tender and infinite light
of the stars has ended in a "slap on the face" and bitter
sobs; ugliness after‘the sight of beauty is unbearable.
Conjugal love is insufficient but love of nature is fleeting
8
This masterful passage represents the culmination of
many past descriptions of the desert and the sea; Camus has
fused sea, desert, and eroticism in one short fictional work
which has become an intense and perfect impression of his
love of nature. In his "Guide pour des Villes sans Passe"
(p. 96) he already associated eroticism with the desert:
"Etant ne dans ce desert, je ne puis songer en tout cas « i
en parler comrne un visiteur. Est-ce qu'on fait la nomencla
ture des charmes d'une femme trfes aimde?" (Cf. Ch. XIV, p.
164). In his Carnets (1939-1942) at an early age he wrote:
"Ce qu'on presse contre soi, est-ce un corps ou la nuit
tiede?" (p. 233; cf. Ch. XIV, p. 168). The ritual purifica
tion of Rieux and Rambert in the sea (cf. Ch. XXII, p. 393),
and Camus' own (cf. Ch. XIV, p. 165) finds an equally in
tense expression in the passage quoted above from "La Femme
Adultfere." This passage thus represents an intensification
of past experience rather than a search for novelty although
the expression is more perfect than in earlier works.
445
and evaporates with the click of a switch. Janine has des
cended again into her stifling limbo.
Her pantheistic love of the night contains elements
common to both religion and romantic love: the finite is
i
transcended and along with it the particular, confining di
mensions of her own life; she has embraced infinity and it
has restored her— but only for an instant; the tiny, dark '
hotel room dominated by an inert and indifferent husband
9
immediately overcomes her. Camus thus accentuates the
weakness of such a pantheistic union which has become a
tragic joy; sadness and deprivation express themselves in
terms of beauty: "II n'y a pas d'amour de vivre sans deses-
10
poir de vivre." Beauty and ugliness, happiness and suf-
9The imagery of this scene appears to have been in
spired by a short passage from "Entre Oui et Non" written
when Camus was very young: "Nuits d'^te, mystferes oh crepi-
tent des £toilesl II y avait derrifere l1enfant un couloir
puant ... " (p. 63. Cf. Ch. I, p. 9.)
Janine's emotivity suggests Camus' own: "Pour moi,
j'avais envie d'aimer comme on a envie de pleurer." ("Amour
de Vivre," p. 114). Camus, moreover, wrote this sentence
after he had just experienced a beautiful sunset. The fol
lowing sentence in this early essay is equally revealing:
"II me semblait que chaque heure de mon sommeil serait de-
sormais volee k la vie ... " Sleep, for both Janine as well
as for Camus himself, is described as an unconsciousness of
life, as an inert torpor. Seen in this respect, the sleep
ing husband is a more significant image.
ia'Preface," L'Envers et L'Endroit. p. 27.
446
fering, thus oppose each other in a fragile equilibrium.
"La Femme Adult&re" is a microcosm containing a world
of thought and feeling. The action and events are reduced
to a minimum. The two characters are ordinary people living
ordinary lives. They do nothing exciting, yet from one tiny
little incident, a world-view is born; the fundamental atti
tude of man towards the universe and towards his own life is
implicit in the narration. A tiny incident, like an under
statement, reveals in this work the domination of expression
and thought equal to that of the greatest French short story
writers.
"Le Renecrat":
The Human Sacrifice til the Sun God
In substance La Chute resembles this short story. In
spite of contrasting decors, both are penetrating character
studies narrated in the first person and both accentuate an
ignorance of self which finally leads to spiritual collapse.
Although Clamence has acquired a very clear self-knowledge,
he reaches a spiritual impasse and is completely unable to
act; he exults in the awareness of his betrayal. The Rene
gade, however, has lost all self-knowledge and acts vehe
mently with a perverted zeal; he exults in the blind madness
of his betrayal. Clamence is a self-confessed false
prophet who is no longer dangerous to anyone; he provokes
our collective conscience. The Renegade becomes the most
blind and fanatical false prophet; he is a danger to every
one. The former no longer can betray anything; the latter
covets the opportunity to betray everything. Clamence
suffers from the disenchantment of a cruel lucidity which
denies all values; he is a conscious nihilist; the Renegade
joyously espouses any fanaticism which denies human values;
he is an unconscious nihilist. One punishes himself by a
voluntary exile in the northernmost periphery of Camus'
geography, the other is made a slave in the southernmost
periphery. La Chute and "Le Renegat" oppose each other by
a balanced tension; both are the two sides to the same coin
and that coin is the continental European psyche which Camus
systematically condemns; he is tender and indulgent only
towards his Mediterraneans.
Camus originally intended to include La Chute within
L'Exil et Le Rovaume but the length of this recit prevented
his doing so.
Seen in this respect, these two recits again prove that
Camus' works must be seen in relation to each other and
cannot well be understood as separate and unrelated. Unlike
most writers, he must be grasped intuitively as a whole and
448
only by so doing can the reader understand the significance
of the detail; each work, in a sense, is a detail which
composes a panorama. Accordingly, the part always refers
back to the whole; one can comprehend a trompe-11oeil only
by the totality which gives it meaning.
As in La Chute, the Renegade describes the scene of
the action which occupies the fictional present. A series
of reminiscences which interrupt the narration explain his
presence in a certain place, exactly as in La Chute. This
fictional present is of small importance to Clamence, who is
unable to act in any important respectbut in "Le Renegat"
it creates suspense and urges the reader towards the conclu
sion: the Renegade is going to murder a priest.
In the first sentence the Renegade informs us that his
tongue has been cut out and that he is alone. As a result
the entire narration can be contained only within an inner
monologue. Even before his mutilation, moreover, he reveals
that he could carry on 'no conversation with the cruel
■^Clamence reaches out only towards his past which de
vours him. By renouncing the future he "loses the name of
action." In this respect, he is the very opposite of the
Renegade, who is a future in the process of taking place.
His mad acts ally violence and religion, again opposing
Clamence, who is an atheist.
savages whom he intended to convert because of the language
barrier. Throughout the narration, verbal communication is
non-existent; shouts, screams, curses alternate with a
senseless babble. The impossibility of communicating is
absolute. The reader thus becomes omniscient by having a
direct access to his mind. Ironically, the Renegade's cruel
masters understand not his words but his character and his
inner compulsions. On the other hand, Clamence, who domi
nates the spoken word, is not understood by those who sur
round him: he succeeds in manipulating everyone, jurors and
mistresses alike, by hiding his motives behind a veil of
elegant rhetoric. The Renegade throughout his entire life
reveals that he never manipulated anyone nor did he ever
succeed in hiding his motives; his tongue, even before he
left Europe, was a useless appendage which betrayed his real
intentions. In comparison to Camus' other priests, Paneloux
and Meursault's confessor, the Renegade is the most negative
and appears to reflect Camus' deepest antipathy. He por
trayed these earlier priests as verbalizers who use their
skill to betray human values and the love of the earth. By
making him tongueless, Camus appears to punish in him the
verbalism which characterized the most odious qualities of
the two earlier priests. As a result, the Renegade babbles
450
"camme un bruit de cailloux remues" (p. 45), like a would-be
Demosthenes learning to orate.
The first scene begins with dawn on the desert where
the Renegade is hidden behind some rocks and armed with an
old rifle with which he will kill the missionary who comes
to replace him. The last scene will take place late in the
afternoon after the Renegade has killed his unarmed victim.
Considered symbolically, the action occupies a solar day,
as in L'Etranger, although the total time of the action
extends over a long period of time.
While he is waiting, he narrates his life story in a
disconnected and half-hysterical stream of consciousness.
He covets "le long hiver, la burle glacee, les cong&res,
les fougeres degouttantes" of his native Massif Central.
His family was Protestant, but he stubbornly insisted upon
becoming a priest against their wishes. "Le Catholicisme
c'est le soleil" (p. 46) the village priest once said to
him, but now he remarks that his native sun was "pale."
Suddenly he utters "r£ ra" and without a pause mentions that
he "ought to have killed his father" had he not died from
drinking too much bad wine. Throughout the story "r£ ra"
constantly reappears and coincides with an outburst of
religious fanaticism. Only later does the reader learn that
451
the Renegade is invoking the deity of the savages who have
converted him to their religion. "Ra" is the most important
presence in the story; he is the hidden source of the ac-
12
tion. Another name for Amon Re, the sun god of ancient
Egypt, R& is generally portrayed with a brass facsimile of
the sun over his head— a very real and brutal sun shines
over the Renegade1s head.
The history of this god is most interesting when com
pared with the action of "Le Renegat." Amon Re once was
worshipped in Thebes where he was one of many Egyptian dei
ties and was especially revered by the Pharaoh Amenhotep
III. His son, Amenhotep IV, inherited in 1375 B. C. a
throne and an empire which had shortly before become a great
world power. The young Pharaoh found that the traditional
gods neither reflected the imperial dimensions of Egypt nor
his own grandiose schemes. Accordingly he sought a new
deity. He transformed Amon Re into Aton, a powerful sun-
god over whose head hung a metal disk from which rays radi
ated downward, each ray terminating in a human hand. The
young Pharaoh intended to become a "Roi-Soleil" by imposing
^Camus appears to have chosen the "r£" form because
it is more sonorous and also has a sinister ring to it.
452
a monotheistic and universal cult upon his polytheistic
subjects. The powerful priesthood of Thebes found its
existence threatened and was shortly eliminated. Amenhotep
IV, whose name meant "he in whom Amon is present" according-*
ly changed his name to Ikhnaton, signifying "Aton is satis
fied." Throughout the Empire he effaced the name Amon,
even from his father's tomb. When his subjects revolted he
undertook a series of bloody purges which killed great
multitudes. He was obliged to found a new city, called
Akhetaton ("the horizon of Aton"), where he devoted himself
almost exclusively to the worship of the new deity. Accord
ingly the Empire degenerated rapidly, and after his early
death at the age of thirty, only a shambles remained. The
ancient gods then regained their former position of respect.
Ikhnaton thus appears to be a source of the Renegade.
Both are strong-willed fanatics who bring only.havoc and
destruction to those around them and both worship the sun.
In their vain quest for power they betray their responsi
bilities and obligations. The Renegade, like Ikhnaton,
detests his father. Tcighaza, the city of salt which the
Renegade hopes to convert, is located in the center of the
desert and is isolated from almost all human intercourse.
Since Ikhnaton imposed his religion far outside the boun-
453
daries of Egypt, it appears possible that this city accepted
sun worship during his reign and was able to maintain it
against the pressures of Moslem and Christian invasions.
13
Camus may have chosen "T&ghaza" rather them "Akhetaton"
because the name has a sinister ring to it like "RS," which
is more evocative than "Aton." For an Algerian the ruins
of the Egyptian city of the sun sure more comprehensible than
the Gothic ruins of a France located on another continent.
The narration continues as the Renegade reveals parcels
f
of a past life which he is incapable of understanding. The
reader, as sole judge, forms the picture of a man whose
love of martyrdom is but a thin veil for his fierce thirst
for power. He hopes to gain ascendency by degrading him
self, by "stooping to conquer." He is a man who "counter
feits the angels" and, failing in this impossible quest,
now turns wrathfully upon them. The new missionary will be
just such an angel.
The present interrupts the Renegade1s reminiscences
and the present comes in the shape of the sun:
Soleil sauvagel il se leve, le desert change, il
n'a plus la couleur du cyclamen des montagnes, o ma
montagne, et la neige, la douce neige molle, non c'est
l^There is no city by this name in North Africa.
454
un jaune un peu gris, l'heure ingrate avant le grand
eblouissement. Rien, rien encore jusqu'k 1'horizon,
devantmoi, l&-bas ou le plateau dispar ait dans un
cercle de couleurs encore tendres. (p. 48)
The Renegade with great precision observes the course of the
sun and the changing colors of the desert. No sooner does
he utter "mountains" them the very word recalls his native
mountain in Auvergne with its "soft snow," its assuaging
frigidity. His thoughts are led by the unconscious associa
tion of words which form his silent, inner babble: curious
ly, he gives the impression of having been overcome by the
word itself. He remembers the priest who once attempted to
convert TaghSza and returned beaten, with salt in his wounds
and in his mouth. His failure pricks this proud priest who
intends to succeed but who knows not one word of the langu
age of Taghaza: " ... je subjuguerais ces sauvages, comme
un soleil puissant" (p. 50). The Renegade does not realize,
however, that he has been taught only servitude, not domi
nation; he is a slave who would be master; he wishes to
avenge his previous humiliations in Europe, but TaghSza in
stead teaches him an even greater humiliation and servitude.
Like a "grand eblouissement" the sun rises, the temper
ature increases:
Le soleil est encore monte, mon front commence & bruler.
Les pierres autour de moi crepitent sourdement, seul le
455
canon du fusil est frais, frais comme les pres, comme
la pluie du soir ... un voile de chaleur commence & se
lever de la piste. Viens, missionaire, je t'attends ...
(pp. 50-51)
The sun burns his forehead, tortures his body and also his
mind. Like Meursault, he observes every tiny detail, takes
his pulse constantly, but unlike him, he will never know
the healing coolness which would restore him; the sun has
made of the Renegade a madman. The coolness of his rifle
barrel automatically becomes for him the impossible coolness
of his native meadows. When the sun will heat it up he will
fire. As the temperature of the desert increases so too
does the temperature of the narration; horror is piled upon
horror, madness upon madness. As the heat increases and the
priest approaches his death, so too does the Renegade's
narration of his past approach his present. The remembrance
of Europe coincided with the pre-dawn on the desert. With
the arrival of dawn the Renegade remembers when he reached
the desert for the first time. At the moment his past be
comes his present, the victim will appear and the Renegade
will kill him. Thus the past, the arrival of the victim and
his murder are all charted by the course of the sun, which
creates suspense: Camus' concentration of effects in this
short story cannot be surpassed; every element introduced
456
focuses on the absurd murder.
The Renegade's first contact with the desert several
months earlier was painful, but he is neither warned nor
discouraged by his experiences; he advances steadfastly
towards his madness:
... les vagues de sable pendant des centaines de kilo
metres, echevelees, avan?ant puis reculant sous le vent,
et la montagne a nouveau, toute en pics noirs, en aretes
coupantes comme du fer, et apr&s elle il a fallu un
guide pour aller sur la mer de cailloux bruns, inter
minable, hurlante de chaleur, brulante de mille miroirs
herisses de feux, jusqu'a cet endroit, a la frontiers
de la terre des noirs et du pays blanc, ou s'eleve la
ville de sel. (pp. 51-52)
The landscape becomes an affliction, the beginning of his
false Calvary. Everything has become mineral and every
thing is sharp, metallic, and inflicts pain. "Arete," both
a backbone and a ridge of mountains, suggests an incisive
quality. The "sea of brown pebbles, screaming with heat" is
a dramatically vivid synesthesia of temperature and sound.
Likewise the "thousand mirrors bristling with fire" joining
flame and light, compound his suffering. This image also
joins the incisive quality of the landscape to that of
light. The desert is white, the city of salt is white, and
14
its inhabitants are black— "white upon white" is not only
14Bree, Camus. p. 103. Cf. p. 265.
457
an aesthetic device in "Le Renegat/' but compounds madness
and suffering. An intense white first blinds, then leads to
delusions. White, not red or black, as is traditionally the
case, is the color of the Renegade's suffering and of his
despair. White becomes the color of madness and murder.
The above passage is indicative of the precipitous,
half-hysterical narrative style which coincides with the
mad impulses of the Renegade. The reader also feels driven
forward toward the conclusion by this impetuous, unpunctua
ted, breathless narration. The Renegade, who rambles as if
he were trying to say everything at once in one breath,
forces the reader to accompany his mad pace, to witness the
events of his life at a vertiginous speed. Everything in
the story creates suspense, drives the reader forward, and
yet the outcome is clearly indicated in the first page— a
masterful literary tour de force. No less artful is Camus'
ability to contain the most precise and vivid images and
experiences within such a narration; natural objects almost
jump out of the unpunctuated matrix of the monologue.
The natives of TaghSza aggravate the suffering which
the sun first inflicts on him;
... ils sont comme le soleil qui n'en finit pas, sauf
la nuit, de frapper toujours, avec eclat et orgueil,
qui me frappe fort en ce moment, trop fort, c i coups de
458
lances brulantes soudain sorties du sol, oh h. l'abri,
oui II l'abri, sous le grand rocher, avant que tout
s'einbrouille. (p. 52)
The hands radiating from Ikhnaton1s sun have turned to fists
and spear-thrusts. The past is joining the present: un
consciously he associates the fist blows which he just ex
perienced with the "spear thrusts of the sun" which now
assail him. Human brutality shifts to solar brutality in
an instant. The two intermingle in a mad fusion. Every
thing becomes hysterical: subjective time is not a pro
gressive development, but a series of lurches and starts;
image replaces image in a rapid and disconnected succession.
In short, past, present and future, as well as sight and
sound, the real and the illusory, become an intense expres
sion of a permanent hysteria. The Renegade no longer knows
who he is, where he is, or why he is alive; God and Devil,
like light and shadow, change places. RS is the agent of
his madness. He has become a sun-dazed Meursault multiplied
by ten; an epileptic style has replaced the lucid observa
tions of the former. Camus illustrates, with a limpid
clarity, the chaos of a man's mind; he has succeeded in the
difficult task of creating order by using the form of dis
order, of suggesting sound by silence: his Renegade is a
mute who screams madly from the inside of his head.
459
He describes Taghaza and its inhabitants in a series of
flashbacks. The city is carved from a mountain of salt and
lies in "the hollow of this basin full of white heat" (p.
52) which not only reflects light, but concentrates it as
does a magnifying mirror; the Renegade is subjected contin
ually to the same torment which Meursault experienced for
only a few hours.
The Renegade imagines that the natives carved the
"streets, the interiors of their houses and windows" (p. 53)
with a "stream of boiling water." He considers that they
have chosen to live there because of pride, because "they
could live where no one else could" in their "white hell."
He still remains ignorant of the economic nature of Africa,
which adds a new dimension to the story and which demands a
certain knowledge on the part of the reader. In primitive
countries where commerce is limited to bartering, the basic
necessities of life must be obtained at great expense with
extreme difficulties. In Africa, where both commerce and
mining are undeveloped, salt is literally worth its weight
in gold. The heat of the country also compounds the value
of this mineral without which no one can live. Explorers
traditionally have exchanged salt, rather than trinkets,
for innumerable services and Arab slave traders in the
460
present day still purchase African slaves with it. Seen in
this perspective, the citizens of Tagh&za enjoy a virtual
monopoly and are capitalists who enforce their power by the
most brutal means. Ironically, the debris made in carving
out their houses is a precious substance. For a few pounds
of salt these people purchase slaves whom they force to mine
more salt— the mineral which indirectly enslaved them.
Camus thus makes of a mineral a concrete expression of an
economic tyranny.
Ironically the natives of Taghaza have so much of a
rare substance that they use it as a means of torture; they
stuff salt in the Renegade's mouth and also in the open
wounds they have inlficted upon him. They recall the an
cient Incas who, having captured Pizarro, the rapacious
seeker of gold, melted a large quantity of it and poured it
down his throat. The Renegade is imprisoned within a win-
dowless cell of salt; he is enclosed by a precious substance
which will deny his contemplation of the tranquil, lucid
stars which shine also above his native Auvergne.
His description of his captors is most unusual and
intriguing:
... dans ce creux au milieu du desert, ou la chaleur du
plein jour interdit tout contact entre les etres, dresse
entre eux des herses de flammes invisibles et de cristaux
461
bouillants, oii sans transition le froid de la nult les
fige un k un dans leurs coquillages de gemme, habitants
nocturnes d'une banquise s&che, esquimaux noirs grelot-
tant tout d'un coup dans leurs igloos cubiques. (p. 53)
The use of "herses de flammes invisibles" which "pre
vents any contact among people" is quite effective: a
"herse" in French is a harrow, an iron gate armed with
spikes, and a candelabra used in churches. All of these
meanings suggest an incisive sunlight, the last is an eccle
siastical expression familiar to a priest. In the context
"sans transition" accurately describes the alternation be
tween extremes of temperature, but considered in an abstract
sense, it describes the character of the Renegade as well:
almost "without transition" he forswears all that he previ
ously upheld. Camus' use of colors in this passage is truly
masterful. White heat, almost "without transition" becomes
the whiteness of ice; at night the mountain of salt becomes
an "ice floe" inhabited by "black Eskimos" in "cubical ig
loos." The reversal of effects in this description has
become absolute and can go no further; the Renegade dwells
within a "froide cite torride."
He mentions that his captors are covered from head to
foot in thick black cloths which they wear even when exposed
to the mid-day heat. This would appear quite improbable,
462
but again Camus has not distorted facts. A branch of the
Touareg tribe actually does dress in this fashion. Their
entire bodies, even their faces, are wrapped in a black
cloth which has only a small opening for their eyes.
Within his salt prison the Renegade prays for rain
which would melt the walls so that the whole city would
dissolve into a "visquous torrent." No rain will ever come
to melt their "igloos" of salt.
The scene shifts momentarily, "without transition,"
to the narrational present. The desert heat is becoming
unbearable, and as in L1Etranger. Camus introduces a syn
esthesia of light and sound which is percussive:
... je sens le soleil sur la pierre au-dessus de moi,
il frappe, frappe comme un marteau sur toutes les
pierres et c'est la musique, la vaste musique de midi,
vibration d'air et de pierres sur des centaines de
kilometres r£ comme autrefois j'entends le silence.
(p. 54)
The Renegade's ears ring as did Meursault's when he was
struck by the "cymbals of the sun." When the former men
tions the word "silence," however, he unconsciously recalls
the silence of his initiation into the cult of R&. Ironi
cally the "percussiveness" of the sun was transformed into
a blow on the ear which the guard gave him. With great
silence the sun worshippers placed him in the center of an
463
arena surrounded by concentric terraces; the reader recalls
Camus' cities, which are all described in similar terms.
The Renegade, kneeling in the center of this "bouclier
blanc," and greeted only by absolute silence, became the
center of attention for the entire population. Not only has
he been displayed as an object of curiosity, but he appears
also to have been exposed directly to the sun in a rite of
baptism. He is then given as a slave to the tribal sorcer
er, who directs the barbaric religious practices of the in
habitants . The sorcerer or shaman appears to have recog
nized in him a "mad" European cult which could not with
stand the harsh reality of the "true" religion; the failure
of the previous missionary to Taghaza would tend to confirm
the sorcerer's opinion. The implication becomes more ironic
as the Renegade almost "without transition" embraces the
primitive and barbaric cult. (Here it must be mentioned
that the sun-worship of Ikhnaton was not at all primitive,
but instead was much ahead of its time. By comparison the
cult of Taghaza appears to be a degraded form which some
how managed to persist.) The "baptism" rite consists of
undressing him, shaving his head, and beating him. After
this cruel initiation he refers to the shaman as "le fe
tiche mon dieu" (p. 59). His horrible mutilation completes
464
his psychological conversion; he embraces whole-heartedly
the principle of gratuitous evil. By serving Satan he has
found his true master, and like a hellish inmate, hating
everybody and everything, he seeks to inflict on others his
own suffering. His hatred makes him as negative as
... la ville sterile sculptee dans une montagne de sel,
separee de la nature, privee des floraisons fugitives
et rares du desert, soustraite ci ces hasards ou ces
tendresses ... " (p. 64)
The Renegade has become a human desert. The police, accom
panied by a small detachment of soldiers, inquire about this
runaway priest who is now hidden and held captive with a
knife at his throat. They do not know if he ever reached
TaghSza or died along the way, but in spite of the lack of
evidence proving his arrival there, they suspect foul play
and remain outside the village. The Renegade knows that the
natives of Taghaza are thus endangered by his presence
there. He escapes, seizes an old rifle, then waits in am
bush for the new missionary who appears to have been in
spired by the Renegade's mad quest. The narrational part
has now joined the present, and the Renegade's mad and
vengeful hatred, having been revealed progressively, has
reached a zenith. Accordingly the missionary arrives,
walks forward toward Taghaza and into the setting sun and
465
death; sun and murder await him in ambush. His death will
also alert the soldiers, who will then attack the city of
the sun. Equally symbolic is the position of the Renegade,
with his back to the sun and his rifle pointing in the
direction of its rays. Invoking his new deity with a lyri
cal hatred, he fires several times upon the defenseless
missionary and his guide. The camels flee towards the hori-
son "ou un geyser d'oiseaux noirs vient de s'elever dans le
ciel inaltere." He delights in imagining what will shortly
take place:
... tout est consomme et partout dans le desert, jusqu'a
des heures d'ici, des chacals hument le vent absent,
puis se mettent en marche, d'un petit trot patient, vers
le festin de charogne qui les attent. (p. 69)
Shortly Taghaza will be attacked by the soldiers and perhaps
everything will be "consumed." The reader will never know,
but is led to suppose the ultimate outcome as in "L'Hote."
The Renegade thus has betrayed everyone and is legally
innocent since he is mad. A slave has succeeded in pitting
his former European and present African masters against each
other. The soldiers and the natives may all perish and the
desert will be rid of all life; it will triumph as it has
already triumphed over the Renegade. Everything will become
negative, dead, a perpetual absence.
466
Why does the Renegade remain nameless throughout the
narration? He cannot converse with the natives, therefore
he cannot reveal his name. More important, however, is the
fact that he is not narrating his experiences to a reader,
as is traditional in literature, rather the reader enters
his mind directly: a man talking to himself does not men
tion his name. Camus thus has observed a psychological
realism even in the smallest details.
The last sentence achieves a masterful literary tour
de force: "Une poignee de sel emplit la bouche de l'esclave
bavard." The babbling inner monologue for the first and
last time is broken by the author's direct commentary. A
little sentence ends the narration with an ironic gravity.
In conclusion, we consider that this short story is an
excellently composed work of art. Again, as in L1Etranger.
the author has hidden behind a narrator who reveals a wealth
of stylistic artistry, an abundance of concrete and verbal
imagery of which every single detail contributes to the
total effect. The role of nature is so perfectly related
to that of religion that each supports the other. This
particular genre of narration, evidently one of the most
difficult to master, has no loose ends, no single detail
which does not relate to some greater meaning outside
467
itself. Time is the ally and not the enemy of such a well-
composed work of art.
"LsS-MusM!Li Algiers Revisited
Of all the short stories comprising L'Exil et Le
Royaume. "Les Muets" is most directly inspired by Camus'
youthful experiences. His uncle, whom he loved and respect
ed, was an impoverished cooper like Yvars, the protagonist
of "Les Muets." As a child Camus frequented his uncle's
tiny factory where he would watch the laborers at work.
The precise details Camus mentions attest to an unfailing
memory and a fondness for his humble origin.
The theme of "Les Muets" was already contained within
"L'Ete k Alger":
Un ouvrier de trente ans a dejci joue toutes ses cartes.
II attend la fin entre sa femme et ses enfants. Ses
bonheurs ont ete brusques et sans merci. De meme sa
vie. (p. 59)
Yvars has lost his youth, his work, his joy. The small
factory which produces wooden casks by time-honored manual
labor has been rendered obsolete by tank-cars and machine-
stamped metal barrels. The owner is forced to discharge
most of his employees and lower the wages of those who re
main. Unfortunately the workers refuse to accept that tech
nological progress has rendered their skill useless, and
468
blaming the owner for their plight, they begin a strike
which fails. At work again in the factory, they "send their
boss to Coventry"y they express their anger by refusing to
speak to him. A tragic misunderstanding reigns, yet it
comprises only a part of Yvars' unhappiness: he is a like
able man who is progressively deprived of all that consti
tutes his happiness and security. Circumstances exile him
from his "kingdom."
The opening sentence announces a beautiful winter day
in Algiers as Yvars bicycles to work.
On etait au plein de l'hiver et cependant une journee
radieuse se levait sur la ville dejk active. Au bout
de la jetee, la mer et le ciel se confondaient dans un
meme eclat. (p. 75)
The opulence of solar light promises happiness, an accord
between man and nature. The radiance of the Mediterranean
shores in winter is Camus' kingdom, his point de reofere. the
center of his world, whose vast, beautiful, eternal sun
shines down upon the small and tragic life of a humble man.
Unhappiness has prevented Yvars from noticing the sun which
he loves so much. He is forty years old, has always lived
by the use of his muscles, but now has lost the vitality of
his youth; he gets out of breath easily as does Janine.
His lameness adds to his predicament, because he can use
469
only one pedal of his bicycle. The road to the little fac
tory "never seemed so long to him" (p. 76). Because of his
struggle to survive and the loss of his youth, he no longer
cares to look towards the shining sea which once gave him
happiness; memory of past joys during present sorrows is
quite unbearable:
N'etait-ce pas pour cela que depuis longtemps il ne
regardait plus la mer, pendant le trajet qui le menait
k 1'autre bout de la ville ou se trouvait la tonnelle-
rie? Quand il avait vingt ans, il ne pouvait se lasser
de la contempler; elle lui promettait une fin de semaine
heureuse, a la plage. Malgre ou a cause de sa boiterie,
il avait toujours aime la nage.
Yvars is a simple man who once lived by the enjoyment of
his five senses. Once he found regeneration in the sea,
which made his life more bearable. On land his step was a
grotesque and painful hobbling, but in the sea he was no
longer lame. Then the interests of the land drew him away
from the sea: marriage, children and extra shifts at the
factory to support them deprived him of his greatest joy.
He is like a great sea turtle, graceful and rapid in its
habitat, but driven by some ancient memory of land, it is
compelled to crawl awkwardly and slowly upon the beach where
it will lay its eggs. Yvars' love of the sea painfully re
calls his youthful life on its shores and in its surf:
II avait perdu peu k peu 1'habitude de ces journees
470
violentes qui le rassasiaient. L'eau profonde et claire,
le fort soleil, les filles, la vie du corps, il n'y avait
pas d*autre bonheur dans son pays. Et ce bonheur passait
avec la jeunesse. Yvars continuait d*aimer la mer, mais
seulement h. la fin du jour quand les eaux de la baie
fongaient un peu ... Les matins oil il regagnait son tra
vail, au contraire, il n'aimait plus regarder la mer,
toujours fidele au rendez-vous, mais qu'il ne reverrait
qu'au soir. (pp. 76-77)
Ironically Camus was of the same age as Yvars when he wrote
this story, and like him, he remembered the sea of his
youth. Like him, Camus was committed to a land-locked life
and a struggle within the world of men which gave him little
happiness. The mood and imagery of this passage closely
resembles that of "Retour h. Tipasa": Yvars' present state
and his dejection is summed up in one sentence: "Le soleil
avait beau briller, la mer ne promettait plus rien" (p. 81).
He then enters the tiny factory in which a resentful
gloom adds to unhappiness. The description of cask-making
and the labor-management strife occupies a greater part of
the story. Although M. Lassalle, the owner, is considerate
and kindly towards his employees, a gulf separates him from
them. They answer his concern for them by turning their
backs and refusing to speak with him. In a sense he is the
"sacrificial goat" of their blind resentment. Physically
he resembles Tarrou in La Peste:
... il avait l'air h. l'aise dans son corps. Malgre son
471
visage tr&s osseux, taille en lame de couteau, il inspi-
rait generalement la sympathie, comme la plupart des
gens que le sport a liberes dans leurs attitudes.
Like Yvars, he too loves sports and the life of the body.
Camus views him sympathetically, as he does the boxers in
"Le Minotaure." Athletics for Camus represents a disintoxi
cation of the mind as well as of the body, a naive and ex
uberant democracy in which physical vitality erases class
distinctions. It is rather significant that both Tarrou
and Lassalle share Camus' own physical type.
The angry silence of the laborers at work is broken
several times by the beautiful "fresh" and "liquid" light
(p. 88) which shines through the windows: "IIs etaient tous
I k dans 1'atelier silencieux, sous les flots de lumiere
jaune deverses par les verrieres ... " (p. 94). A radiant
sun shines down indifferently upon a cruel misunderstanding:
a generous nature contrasts with an uncharitable humanity.
After work, on his bicycle, Yvars already thinks of
sitting down at home to contemplate the evening sea "qui
11accompagnait deja, plus foncee que le matin, au-dessus des
rampes du boulevard" (p. 96). He will look out upon the sea
of his youth. Seated beside Fernande, his wife, he accounts
to her the unhappy events of the day as "le ciel devenait
transparent; par-dela le mur, on pouvait voir la mer douce
472
du soir" (p. 96). The last two sentences of the story
accentuate the slow and gentle tragedy of his life:
... il resta immobile, tourne vers la mer ou courait
dej&, d'un bout a 1'autre de 1'horizon, le rapide cre-
puscule. "Ah, c'est de sa fautel" dit-il. II aurait
voulu etre jeune, et que Fernande le fut encore, et
ils seraient partis, de 1'autre cote de la mer. (pp.
96-97)
The setting sun corresponds to the of Yvars' life.
The loss of solidarity in the world of - oincides with
the loss of youth, the future, a beautiful landscape; an
eternal nature derides a transitory humanity. Yvars will
never again be young, strong, and one with the sea.
As in "La Femme Adultfere," "Les Muets" begins and ends
with the solar day, and with this brief passage of time,
Camus poignantly evokes the love and suffering of a simple
person ensnared in an unhappy human commitment which is
beyond his comprehension. Exile in the world of men is no
less absurd and implacable than in the world of nature.
Yvars' is the tragedy of almost everyone, and it is all the
more real and touching because of this.
"L'Hote": A Kind Man
and a Cruel Desert
This is the tragic story of a kind and unselfish man
whose good intentions and courageous acts are misinterpreted
473
by those whom he wisjies to help. An unhappy incommunica-
bility which furnished the theme of "Les Muets" becomes more
intense and cruel in "L'Hote." Like Lassalle, Daru the
elementary teacher becomes the victim of a large group of
humble people who depend upon him for their well-being. In
both works a mistaken attitude springs from an unwillingness
to accept the truth. Seen in this respect, diligent and
responsible leadership by a single individual is betrayed
by the blind urges and instincts of the masses— again a
reflection of the political upheaval in Algeria before its
independence; the responsible and intelligent mediation of
the moderates was overthrown by fanaticism. These two short
stories not only portray individual tragedies but protest
against the willful ignorance of the "human condition"; good
intentions have been answered by cruelty, generosity by
selfishness, and courage by fear.
"L'Hote," like "Le Renegat," is a modern parable of the
desert and is correspondingly cruel. Daru, unlike the
Renegade, however, is a genuine missionary of culture and
charity. He is a native Algerian who knows himself, the
country, those whom he serves, and is accordingly one of
Camus' most sympathetic characters. His one-room school-
house is located on the edge of a high and desolate plateau,
474
and he is the only French Algerian within many miles. The
inhabitants whose children he teaches are starving shepherds
dressed in rags. The inspiration for this short story pro
ceeds directly from Camus' early newspaper articles concern
ing the famine in Kabylia and the paucity of modern schools
for the Moslem inhabitants. Camus has thus based his work
upon a familiar landscape and its inhabitants which he uses
to dramatize a terrible crisis that was tearing asunder his
native country when he wrote this story.
The action begins as Daru, in his tiny school-house,
looks down upon two men climbing up the hill towards him.
Balducci, the gendarme, is riding a horse and leading a
native who has a rope around his neck and his hands tied.
The prisoner is on foot. As Camus describes their movement
he also vividly and accurately describes the landscape:
Ils peinaient, progressant lentement dans la neige,
entre les pierres, sur 1'immense etendue du haut plateau
desert. De temps en temps le cheval bronchait visible-
ment. On ne l'entendait pas encore, mais on voyait le
jet de vapeur qui sortait alors de ses naseaux ...
L'instituteur calcula qu'ils ne seraient pas sur la
colline avant une demi-heure. (p. 101)
The season, the temperature, the rocky landscape of a vast,
empty desert are all vividily integrated within the action.
Distance is never mentioned directly, but is accentuated by
tiny, precise details. The crystalline clarity of the air
47 5
reveals the "jet de vapeur" at a distance beyond the reach
of sound. Since Daru estimates that it will take them a
half-hour to reach him, we know that they are a considerable
distance away from the school house. Camus' artistry thus
has evoked the most striking aspect of a landscape by photo
graphic detail rather than by verbal generalities; he never
once mentions "distance," "clarity," or "coldness."
The desert, as in his other works, vacillates between
one extreme and another; between heat and coldness, between
dryness and aridity; it has no life-giving neutrality and
spares its inhabitants no quarter:
... 11epaisse neige tombait au milieu des tenebres in-
cess antes, avec de petites sautes de vent qui venaient
secouer la double porte de la classe ... La neige etait
tombee brutalement h. la mi-octobre, apres huit mois de
secheresse, sans que la puie eut apporte une transi
tion ... (pp. 102-103)
In "Le Renegat" the natives of Taghaza are masters of the
desert who exploited its cruelty to their own advantage, but
in "L'Hote" the Berber inhabitants are its victims. The
increase or decrease in their numbers is regulated by the
mood of the desert. The terrible famine of Kabylia is
evoked in the following passage:
Mais il serait difficile d'oublier cette misere, cette
armee de fantdmes haillonneux errant dans le soleil,
les plateaux calcines mois apres mois, la terre re-
croquevillee peu a peu, litteralement torrefiee, chaque
476
pierre eclatant en poussi&re sous le pled. Les moutons
mouraient alors peu: milliers et guelques hommes, et
la, sans qu'on puisse toujours le savoir. (pp. 103-104)
The legions of the starving wander silently and unnoticed,
like "tattered ghosts," but they die individually and are
forgotten. The land itself shrivels up and even the stones
cannot withstand the blazing sun, but "split underfoot," an
image repeated in almost all of Camus1 desert scenes. The
inhabitants have been fashioned in the image of the desert
which controls their lives. Like it they are silent, cruel
and unforgiving: "Le pays etait ainsi, cruel ^ vivre, meme
sans hoitunes, qui pourtant, n'arrangeaient rien" (p. 104).
This sentence suggests to the reader the liaison between
man and his natural environment; the struggle for survival
within a cruel and indifferent natural order makes man cruel
and indifferent; morality generally seems a senseless luxury
to the starving. The prisoner whom Daru is obliged to de
liver to the authorities killed because hunger apparently
had driven him mad.
When Daru first arrived in the desert, its silence and
solitude weighed heavily upon him but gradually he learned
to love its austere beauty:
Au debut, la solitude et le silence lui avaient ete durs
sur ces terres ingrates, habitees seulement par des
pierres. Parfois, des sillons faisaient croire k des
477
cultures, mais ils avaient ete creuses pour mettre au
jour une certaine pierre, propice a la construction.
On ne labourait ici que pour recolter des cailloux.
D'autres fois, on grattait quelques copeaux de terre,
accumulee dans des creux, dont on engraisserait les
maigres jardins des villages. C’etait ainsi, le cail-
lou seul couvrait les trois quarts de ce pays. Les
villes y naissaient, brillaient, puis disparaissaient;
les hommes y passaient, s'aimaient ou se mordaient k
la gorge, puis mouraient. Dans ce desert, personne, ni
lui ni son hote n'etaient rien. Et pourtant, hors de
ce desert, ni l'un ni 1'autre, Daru le savait, n'auraient
pu vivre vraiment. (p. 113)
The solitude and the silence of the desert flowed over Daru
and became part of him. Although his presence before the
natives is synonymous with the life and culture of a distant
country, he has inwardly become one with his adopted land
scape. He shares with his silent and willing prisoner the
regal independence born of vast and empty space. He has
consciously adopted the way of life the landscape has im
posed upon him while the native, who knows no other, has
accepted it unconsciously.
15
In this desert "the pebble is king." It testifies
to the beginning and the end of man's collective effort to
erect his structures upon an inhospitable surface. Man
"harvests" it, makes of it cities which shine briefly, then
wither and return to the primitive state of small stones.
15"Le Minotaure," p. 29. Pebbles are described in an
almost identical fashion in this early work.
478
As in the dead city of Djemila, the skeletal ruins remain
long after life has departed; the desert never buries its
dead under vegetation, but exposes bones as it does ruins;
life does not hide death by absorbing it, but remains for
ever transient and a stranger. Men on the desert are like
ships on a sea and they know it. The strange silence of
the prisoner is perhaps that of a certain race of men who
believe that life is precarious, transient and alien to the
surface of the earth. The Berbers resemble the Eskimos more
than they differ from them. Both inhabit wastelands from
which no one will ever drive them away. The hostility of
the landscape has fashioned their ethic. Other peoples
neither envy their lot nor covet the barrenness upon which
they alone have the audacity to exist. Such peoples exper
ience the independence which comes from accepting a life
too hard and precarious for others. Wars for possession of
sand-banks, as for ice floes, are almost incomprehensible
for such peoples; only civilized man finds this an urgency.
Their struggle for life has necessitated a unique and rigid
code of ethics. The understanding of this code is indis
pensable to "L'Hote."
As in ancient Greece, hospitality is sacred. A Berber
may never turn away from his door anyone seeking food, water
479
and shelter. The host is even obligated to protect the life
of a guest who is attacked by enemies or to care for him if
he is sick. Moreover, the host is morally compelled to give
his guest a drink of water even should there not be enough
for his own children. Frequently the Berber women are
obliged to carry water for distances of five to ten miles.
The parable of the Good Samaritan is a categorical way of
life. The Berbers scarcely understand private ownership;
they share their meager possessions communally, including
the necessities of life. That which is outside the door of
their huts is understood to belong to everyone. They know
neither what a court of law consists of nor a prison. The
tribe considers that it alone has the right to pass judgment
upon a transgressor. As with the Eskimos, he who violates
the code is rejected from the tribe and soon succumbs to the
vicissitudes of nature. In his newspaper articles Camus
accurately described the mores of the Berbers. Sociologists
would call these people "ethnocentric."
Seen i . this light, the action of "L'Hote" is compre
hensible and coherent. The Arab had killed his cousin be
cause of a dispute over some grain. This is all the infor
mation supplied the reader. Balducci, the gendarme, then
makes a prisoner of the Arab and intends to deliver him to
the legal authorities in a small neighboring town. This act
is as incomprehensible to the Berber children whom Daru
teaches as it is to the tribesmen and to the prisoner; the
abstractions "trial" and "judgment" are meaningless to him.
When he is delivered to Daru, he assumes that he will obey
the code and give him food and shelter. Daru treats him
well because he is a compassionate man. Once untied, the
Berber believes that his "host" will comply with the code.
For this reason he does not attempt to escape. Daru, more
over, has the courage to oppose the wishes of his friend
Balducci and thus decides to help his "guest" escape into
the desert. His prisoner, however, does not understand what
this means, since he now assumes, that the strange French
authority in the person of the gendarme has finished with
him. Daru thus provides his "guest" with food, water, and
money, then sends him towards the hills where he will be
safe. Unpredictably, the Berber turns around and takes the
path which will lead him to the village where he will be
imprisoned and tried; to him all roads are the same; he does
not understand what he is walking into. Meanwhile, while
all this was going on, the school-children were observing
everything from a distance. They saw only that their teach
er had sent away a fellow tribesman. Daru had thus broken
481
the inviolate code of the desert. The children, moreover,
were aware of the existence of France and French justice;
the Arab, who spoke only a few phrases of French, quite
likely had never heard of such things. They mistakenly be
lieved that Daru had betrayed a tribesman by sending him
0
away and refusing to protect him against Balducci. For them
such a single betrayal is tantamount to betraying the entire
tribe. Daru had thus compromised his relationship to the
Berbers and to French authority because of a compassionate
good-will and understanding. The misspelled message
scrawled by a childish hand on the blackboard portends exile
and death.^
Verbal incommunicability, as in the preceding short
stories in L'Exil et Le Royaume. thus is not merely a domi
nant theme which subordinates human relations to a hostile
environment, but is expressive of the more deeply rooted
and tragic misunderstanding of generous and noble intentions.
Humanity, as Camus sees it, is too eager to impose a false
and deceitful judgment on the lone individual because the
truth is difficult or unpalatable. In "L'Hote" Daru is
ironically judged by children, the only ones in the native
16Cf. Ch. IX, pp.114-115.
482
settlement who ostensibly understand anything about France
or the French language; he has been misunderstood by the
only ones who could have saved him, by those who have writ
ten on the blackboard: "Tu as livre notre frfere. Tu
paieras."17 The closing lines of the story reveal the
tragic plight of a good man:
Daru regardait le ciel, le plateau et, au-delci, les
terres invisibles qui s'etendaient jusqu'a la mer.
Dans ce vaste pays gu'il avait tant aime, il etait
seul.
The desert has its own ethic which is born of sand, rock
and death.
"Jonas":__Paris Is the Whale
Not so much as a single blade of grass or a dead leaf
relieves the atmosphere of Montmartre, the locale of this
short story. Why, then, is "Jonas" relevant to the subject
of this thesis? The conspicuous absence of nature accents
the overpowering presence of Camus' "anti-nature," of a
corrupt and voracious ant-hill which devours a defenseless
individual, Jonas the painter, a little man, too weak to
resist. As we have previously shown, the "anti-nature" can
be understood only within the context of Camus' natural
17Cf. Ch. IX, pp.114-115.
483
world.
Of all the short stories included within this collec
tion, "Jonas" is the only one which takes place in Paris.
In consideration of Camus' innate antipathy for European
cities in almost every fictional work, "Jonas" not only
reinforces this attitude but appears to be a crystallization
of it. As early as the writing of L1Etranaer. Meursault,
who. had never traveled outside of Algeria, described Paris
18
by quite unfavorable images. La Chute attacked the false
values and self-deception which for Camus characterized the
lives of many Parisians. Like this work, "Jonas" was con
ceived about the same time and under almost identical con
ditions. Both describe contemporary experiences which up
hold and reinforce his earliest notions of continental
European cities rather than reflecting a change of outlook.
All of Camus' biographers mention that after he at
tained world renown he eschewed the fame which Paris be-
stowed upon him and preferred the simple life of his family
18
"C’est sale. II y a des pigeons et des cours noires.
Les gens ont la peau blanche." (L*Etranaer. p. 69) Camus
describes Paris verbally the way Bernard Buffet paints it.
The grey-green atmosphere, the cold rectangular masonry,
like the pallid, half-famished humanity of his portraits
quite accurately coincides with Camus' lasting impression
of this city.
and a few friends. He disliked any form of notoriety,
especially Parisian literary polemics which he considered
to be just so many vituperative squabbles. Rarely did he
argue with literary critics nor did he seek to defend him
self. He scrupulously avoided arguments with scholars who
often misunderstood his works. All of this is contained
within the action of "Jonas," which appears to be almost
autobiographical in content. The unfortunate artist is a
thinly veiled Camus who reacts against a way of life and
environment which generally revolted him. As in all his
previous fiction, his innate dislikes become almost insep
arable from equally innate fears. His claustrophobia,
therefore, reaches huge proportions in this bitter and pain
ful short story. Equally significant, however, is the theme
of artistic bankruptcy— no writer, regardless of his talent,
can possibly relish such a subject; it touches him too per
sonally, especially a writer who had achieved recognition
and therefore had everything to lose and little to gain.
In this respect Jonas closely resembles Wenceslas, the young
Polish sculptor in La Cousine Bette, who is also devoured
by Paris. In La Peste. artistic failure was already sug
gested by Grand's frustrated literary attempts.
In this short story Camus again demonstrates his
485
insuperable gift of verbal mimicry by a style which had not
yet appeared in any of his previous works. He hides his
personal sentiments behind a mask of patronizing indiffer
ence and ironic understatements. As in Voltaire, a feigned
simplicity and naivete coupled with a prestissimo meter
contrast with a sordid reality.
Jonas is a dilettante who first dabbles in literature,
then settles upon painting as a means of expressing his
latent talents. When he marries Louise, a patient and self-
sacrificing girl, his problems appear solved; she cares for
him as one cares for an indigent child and thus allows him
the complete expression of his fancies. The young couple is
obliged to accept lodging in one of the ramshackle tenements
in Montmartre which shelters a multitude of ambitious and
starving artists. Their apartment had ingeniously been
created by landlords who found they could divide the for
merly large apartments of the building into many smaller
ones. Only the high ceilings attest to the former amplitude
of their tiny dwelling; the high walls and tight corridors
compress the occupants into a tiny space; their future is
already menacing:
Le problfeme de l'espace vital l'emportait de loin, pour-
tant, sur les autres problemes du menage, car, le temps
et l'espace se retrecissaient du meme mouvement, autour
486
d'eux. (p. 137)
Time and space constrict like the coils of a serpent which
crushes the artist and his wife, then swallows them whole;
the Oran of La Peste is transposed to an apartment which
grows steadily smaller and smaller as the narration pro
gresses. As children arrive the "espace vital" shrinks with
each new birth. Jonas is then obliged to construct parti
tions which will give him the privacy necessary for artistic
inspiration and accomplishment: the walls literally grow
closer and closer; the Parisian monster has already caught
its prey; Jonas looks out of the huge windows, the only
access to the outside world. They are like the open maw of
the beast which swallowed up his biblical counterpart who
vainly saw the light of day from within his prison of flesh.
The bowels of the biblical monster have become dark and
19
fetid corridors of stone and plaster which absorb Jonas,
incorporating him within a hideous metabolism.
During the progress of the plague the city of Oran was
progressively divided into zones which made of the city
19
Camus appears to have had a particular antipathy
towards corridors, as his claustrophobia would suggest.
The "couloir puant" which first appeared in "Entre Oui et
Non" (p. 63), then in La Peste. crystallizes in "Jonas."
487
many small partitions. Within these zones, the fear of con
tagion forced individuals to avoid human contacts by isolat
ing themselves within the confining walls of their dwellinga
An identical process occurs in this short story but for an
entirely different reason; Jonas, in seeking solitude under
impossible conditions, is forced to extricate himself from
his environment— the greatest folly of an artist; he liter
ally puts walls in front of himself so that he will not be'
forced to view an ugliness which destroys his inspiration.
He makes of himself a painter without a landscape; he paints
from the inside of his head, he screams abstractions. When
in despair he finally entombs himself in his dark, box-like
scaffolding, he destroys all contact with the outside world;
he blinds himself. He complements the Renegade: a mute
priest and a blind artist.
As his artistic career progresses, his apartment be
comes progressively partitioned into a geometric maze:
La hauteur vraiment extraordinaire des plafonds, et
l'exiguite des pifeces, faisaient de cet appartement
un etrange assemblage de parallelepipfedes presques
entiferement vitres, tout en portes et en fenStres,
oh les meubles ne pouvaient trouver d'appui et ou les
etres, perdus dans la lumifere blanche et violente,
semblaient flotter comme des ludions dans un aquarium
vertical, (p. 140)
He occupies a "hall of mirrors" (p. 140), a three-dimension-
488
al, cubistic "trompe-1'oeil" which destroys visual reality.
Within the goldfish bowl of the apartment the occupants be
come so many "Cartesian divers" who have lost contact with
the reality of the natural world. Within the context,
liquidity is suggestive of Camus' innate revulsion against
drowning, a form of suffocation particularly unbearable for
sufferers from respiratory sicknesses.
As Jonas becomes increasingly alienated from the out
side world, he paints his feverish imagination and not what
is before his eyes. His fame increases as his art becomes
more and more abstract, and fame brings a host of garrulous
and admiring students, art critics, and false friends. His
goldfish bowl apartment is always crowded; he is surrounded
by a humanity which presses against him in every possible
respect and at all times. He thus creates less, yet ironi
cally his reputation continues to grow— fame is a Parisian
monster which denies the conditions which make art possible.
At the height of his meteoric trajectory Jonas is no
longer the only painter in his "studio": his "disciples,"
who aspire to his glory, take him away from his own easel.
Critics assault his ears with pompous verbalism and jour
nalistic word juggling; his plastic art is defined by the
printed word; the dichotomy between pictorial reality and
489
abstractions has become complete. An "official" artist
commissioned by the government then paints Jonas before his
easel. A critic understands the full significance of this
act:
^ "Eh bien, croyez-moi, il baisse. — Deja? dit Rateau.
— Oui. C'est le succfes. On ne resists pas au succes.
II est fini, — II baisse ou il est fini? — Un artiste
qui baisse est fini. Voyez, il n'a plus rien a peindre.
On le peint lui-meme et on l'accrochera au mur." (p. 158)
Ironically the outward appearance of success corresponds to
an inner collapse. Jonas has now been officially and per
manently defined for posterity; he is already dead as an
artist; as in L'Etranger and Les Justes. final definition
20
is tantamount to a death sentence. He vainly seeks to
paint the sky, the only unblemished natural image available
to him, but again the human swarm drives him from his "stu
dio," then into the corridor, afterwards into the bathroom,
and finally into the kitchen. The cold weather prevents him
from going outside to paint. Finally he is driven into the
cafes, where strong drinks and excitement give him "la meme
exaltation que les journees de grand travail" (p. 166).
2°Sartre likewise considers that a "final definition"
corresponds to an essentialistic refusal to accept the con
tingencies which life imposes and which characterize the
nature of life itself.
490
In desperation Jonas takes the only avenue of escape
left to him; he decides to isolate himself completely from
life and from the world. In the narrow corridor in his
apartment he constructs a tiny, closet-like scaffolding
just under the high ceiling. This construction, which re
calls Meursault's hermetic paddy-wagon, likewise admits
nothing from without. Jonas believes that by the light of
a candle he will be able to paint great works again within
this "perchoir." His project ends disastrously:
II ne peignait pas, mais il reflechissait. Dans 1'ombre
et ce demi-silence qui, par comparaison avec ce qu'il
avait vecu jusque-la, lui paraissait celui du desert ou
de la tombe, il ecoutait son propre coeur. (p. 171)
At last he is free from his wife, his children, crit
ics, students and friends; his wooden box has become his
dwelling. In the darkness, with a blank canvas before him,
he undertakes a "major" painting. He refuses to eat, and
after a week, the silence of his new studio frightens his
wife, who calls the doctor. An unconscious Jonas is removed
and in his hand is the blank canvas with one tiny word
scrawled in the center of it. It is impossible to tell
whether this word is "solitaire" or "solidaire." Jonas
knows neither solitude nor solidarity, but instead a madness
which has isolated him from the world and from himself. The
491
Parisian whale has swallowed up his sanity.
The loss of lucidity is a theme which unites both "Le
Renegat" and "Jonas." An oppressive sun and cruel humanity
in the former produce results similar to the darkness and
the adulating human swarm in the latter. The Renegade, how
ever, reacts by a mad brutality and Jonas by a gentle with
drawal; two constrasting landscapes produce two opposing
forms of madness. Also, in "Le Renegat" all effects con
verge slowly and implacably: Jonas' withdrawal from the
world is the result of marriage, children, fame and his
21
inability to persevere under arduous conditions. His
similarity to a biblical counterpart not only contributes
to a convergence of effects through symbolism, but also adds
depth and meaning to the narration. Like La Chute and "Le
Renegat," this short story appears to have religious under
tones which reflect a change in Camus' attitude towards evil
^Johann Sebastian Bach, like many great composers and
artists, had a large family which interfered little with
his creative output. In his time, however, the rise to fame
was not as meteoric as during the present age. The small
and select group of admirers who patronized the arts has
been replaced by modern methods of publicity which directly
control the artist's fate. In "Jonas" Camus derides the
falsity and corrupting effects of this modern influence.
492
22
and suffering. This apparent change has become the source
of much conjecture.
The image of claustration which is central to this
short story, however, indicates an intensification of early
experience rather than a change in outlook. Jonas within
his grotesque construction quite accurately resembles the
description in "L'lronie" of Camus' grandmother who remained
"in her corner, like a dog" and who always "turned off the
light when she was alone." Like the old woman who bought
23
her tomb and spent her Sundays praying within it, Jonas
loses his hold upon life. Seen in this respect, Camus' per
sonal experiences described years before in L'Envers et
L'Endroit devolve directly upon this short story which he
wrote near the end of his life. He thus relates his past to
his present by a creative use of memory through which con-
22" m The Plaque he was interested primarily in serving
men, not saving them. But in The Fall (1956) and his recent
collection of stories, Exile and the Kingdom, he stresses
the new values of penance and expiation. The themes of
transcendence, the creative values of suffering and human
solidarity are added to the Camusiah vision. The French
writer exhorts us, with the fervor of a moralist he cannot
help being, to count ourselves among those who do battle
against the accumulated guilt and ignorance of the world."
(Bernard C. Murchland, C.S.C., "Albert Camus: Rebel," The
Catholic World. 188:312, January 1952).
23Cf. Ch. II,
temporary events are filtered and interpreted. In La Chute.
Clamence's malconfort attached the physical suffering of
claustration directly to the remorse of a guilty conscience.
Because of an awareness of moral failure and a betrayal of
trust, Clamence builds his malconfort within his mind and
occupies it spiritually. Jonas, however, builds his mal
confort. his wooden tomb, into which he retreats physically
and spiritually. A mental image of claustration thus is an
expression of a painful lucidity for Clamence, while the
concrete reality of claustration for Jonas is an expression
of his loss of lucidity. In consideration of the two dis
tinct characters of Clamence and Jonas, such a dichotomy is
entirely consistent.
The comparison of these two works again illustrates
indirectly the organic process of Camus' artistic creation.
The images of claustration which he first described in
"L'Envers et L'Endroit" reappear in later works which invest
them with specific meanings integral within new and differ
ent contexts. Camus' earliest imagery which remains inher
ent to his way of feeling thus can adapt itself to a crea
tive description of present circumstances.
494
"La Pierre Qui Pousse":
Solidarity and, the Jungle
"La Pierre Qui Pousse" ends L'Exil et Le Rovaume on a
final note of optimism and spiritual triumph absent in the
preceding short stories. The "Kingdom" at last has been
found through solidarity and a warm human love.
As in the preceding stories, the action begins as the
main character enters into a world previously unknown to
24
him. A new landscape is boldly introduced to both the
reader and the main character simultaneously, with the re
sult that the former unconsciously feels himself drawn into
the pictorial experiences of the latter. In L1Etrancrer. La
Chute. and "Le Renegat" verbal mimicry creates interest by
an ingratiating psychological hold which is sufficiently
strong to make the reader feel involved in the character's
moral and spiritual predicament. These short stories thus
gain strength by exploiting intricate psychological reac-
-tions through the use of the first person. This is most
evident in the genre of "confessions." "La Pierre Qui
^Although jonas remains in Paris, he enters into the
artistic world with which he is unable to cope. His en
trance into this world initiates the story. Daru in
"L'Hote" entered his desert kingdom about a year before the
action began and therefore can be considered a relative
stranger to it.
495
Pousse/1 like the other stories narrated in the third per
son, creates empathy by visual means rather than through an
internal character analysis.
An automobile trip through the Brazilian jungle intro
duces D'Arrast to a strange and unknown natural world as did
Janine's bus ride through the Algerian desert. In both
cases, the landscape is presented dynamically rather than
25
statically by a cinematographic device. Such an intro
duction is striking by its vividness.
The constant use of zoomorphic imagery imparts a keen
and ubiquitous sense of life to the poetic description of
the jungle:
L'homme regardait le fleuve, en contrebas, signale seule-
ment par un large mouvement d'obscurite pique d'ecailles
brillantes ... les phares eteints, le fleuve etait
presque visible ou, du moins, quelques-uns de ses longs
muscles liquides^6 qui brillaient par intervalles. (pp.
180-181)
The jungle is alive. The river is a living thing, a ser
pentine mass of "shiny scales and liquid muscles." The
^5In L1Education Sentimentale. Flaubert also introduces
the main character and his environment through the use of
movement. The slow, meandering voyage on the river boat
alludes to Gustave Moreau's passivity and lack of direction.
26" ... nous filons sur une mer claire et musclee" ("La
Mer au Plus Prfes," p. 182) .
496
visual verisimilitude of this poetic imagery is not the re
sult of disembodied imagination, since Camus visited Brazil
during the ocean cruise which inspired "La Mer au Plus
27
Prfes." Shortly thereafter he wrote an article of which
several partitions appear almost intact in "La Pierre Qui
Pousse." This article reflects a certain sympathy towards
a people whose poverty and way of life are akin to Camus'
own in Algeria. This attitude also dominates in the short
story.
Water, mist, and a steamy dampness dominate the land
scape. The river, which is the main artery of communication
and transportation in the Brazilian jungle, is always de
scribed in a poetic prose as a strange, dark, living pres
ence:
L'homme regardait la trouee par ou le fleuve surgissait
de la grande foret bresilienne et descendait vers eux.
Large h. cet endroit de plusieurs centaines de metres,
il pressait des eaux troubles et soyeuses sur le flanc
du bac puis, libere aux deux extremites, le debordait
et s1etalait c i nouveau en un seul flot puissant qui
coulait doucement, c i travers la foret obscure, vers la
mer et la nuit. Une odeur fade, venue de l'eau ou du
ciel spongieux, flottait. On entendait maintenant le
clapotis des eaux lourdes sous le bac et, venus des
27"Une Macumba au Bresil. Extrait inedit d'un journal
de voyage," Livres de France. 2:5-7. November 1951.
497
deux rives, l'appel espace des crapauds-buffles ou
d'etranges cris d'oiseaux. ‘ (p. 184)
Visually this tableau is composed of large, vague masses
rendered almost invisible by the dense night. Only the
"troubled and silken waters" next to the boat appear as
specific details because of their visual proximity. They
thus contrast with the dark mass of the forest. Strange new
odors and noises evoke a landscape which is sensed rather
than perceived directly and clearly as was the Algerian
desert or the Mediterranean coastline. These landscapes
burst into a dazzling panorama visible all at one glance.
D'Arrast in his slow, nocturnal voyage is presented to a
moving landscape which he can apprehend only vaguely. For
this European, the jungle at night appears as a beckoning
mystery which reveals itself only partially by alluding to
its other half-seen attributes. The indigenous humanity is
presented in an identical fashion; the paradoxical behavior
of the chief of police, the strange dances and religious
practices into which D'Arrast is progressively drawn form
the psychic landscape born from the matrix of the jungle.
D'Arrast is directly involved with the landscape it
self: he is a French engineer who has come to Brazil in
order to direct a flood control project. He receives a warm
498
welcome from the inhabitants who have no scientific know
ledge and who hope that he can prevent the periodical deluge
which washes away the numerous shacks of the poor people.
Considered symbolically, D'Arrast has imposed on himself a
voluntary exile in which he will find regeneration through
humanitarian service. Unlike Dr. Rieux, whom he most re
sembles, he appears to seek a deeper meaning to his own life
by participating more directly in the joy and suffering of
an unfortunate people. The bitter misunderstanding which
crushed Daru has been replaced by a mutual bond of trust
and instinctive friendship: D'Arrast has found a "kingdom"
which he will make his own.
Stifling heat and humidity dominate his new country.
By opposing the steaming jungle with its "spongy sky" and
fetid rivers, he seeks to correct a natural world which
oppresses the inhabitants of the poor village. This re
flects a shift in Camus' attitude toward nature: for the
first time the human collectivity effects a positive change
in the landscape itself. In "Le Minotaure" Camus painted a
human ant swarm which violated the natural beauty of Oran
by constructing a huge and ugly port. D'Arrast, however,
eventually will build a wall and a drainage system which
will withstand the ravages of seasonal floods. In "L'Hote"
499
and "Le Renegat" man's alliance with the landscape formed a
cruel fatality which destroyed human solidarity. In these
works the native population crushed the European foreigner
who dared to intrude into their lives. Differences in race,
language and mores proved insurmountable. D'Arrast is the
only European in Camus' works who overcomes these three
barriers. This victory appears to suggest a final, impor
tant reconciliation in his attitude towards peoples and
their relationship to the landscape. Seen in this respect,
the theme of triumph in "La Pierre Qui Pousse'1 suggests a
new optimism which may have developed further had not his
death intervened.
The Brazil into which D'Arrast penetrates is a vast
"continent d'arbres" forming a "mer vegetale" (p. 185).
Everything becomes liquid; the earth itself is like a
sponge:
Sur toute la surface des arbres tombait maintenant un
voile d'eau fine cpie la foret epaisse absorbait sans
bruit, comme une enorme eponge. (p. 191)
Autour de lui, les pfelerins attendsient, sans le re-
garder, impassible sous l'eau qui descendait des arbres
en voiles fins. (p. 200)
A travers les espaces spongieux du ciel, la rumeur du
fleuve et des arbres parvenait, assourdie, jusqu'a eux.
(p. 205)
Le ciel, d'un noir pale, semblait encore liquide. Dans
500
son eau transparente et sombre, bas sur 1'horizon, des
etoiles commen?aient de s'allumer. Elies s'eteignaient
presque aussitot, tombaient une & une dans le fleuve,
comme si le ciel degouttafct de ses derni&res lumieres.
(p. 209)
The stars, like the horizon, contours of objects, light and
shadow, distances, are absorbed in a watery miasma. The
repetition of the "sponginess" of land and earth suggests
an unhealthy landscape which must have been particularly
oppressive to Camus, who could not help but relate it to
his physical condition; his struggle for breath made him
acutely aware of atmospheric conditions which healthy people
would tend to ignore. Although most of his preceding main
characters appear endowed with his own physical sensitivity,
D'Arrast, however, is large and strong. His physical
strength, which plays an important part in the action,
alludes also to a strength of character. Correspondingly,
the physical suffering of the Renegade alludes to a physical
weakness accompanying his spiritual collapse.
Exotic flora and fauna constitute only small details
which designate a particular landscape and therefore do not
play a dominant role. It is no longer possible, as it once
was in the eighteenth century, to paint verbal pictures of
a landscape which few Europeans had ever seen; the present
popularity of travel films and magazines has produced a
501
more discriminating public which will no longer accept the
inaccuracies of a Chateaubriand— in our time fantastic land
scapes are relegated to the inventiveness of science fiction
writers. Camus thus does not draw our attention to the
strangeness of exotic details, which would detract from the
action and meaning of this short story, but instead uses
them to create a certain mood:
Le soleil lourd, les montagnes pales et ravinees, les
zebus fameliques rencontres sur les routes avec, pour
seule escorte, un vol fatigue d'urubus depenailles, la
longue, longue navigation c i travers un desert rouge ...
(p. 187)
Sun, mountains, oxen and birds create a certain tropical
melancholy which pervades this story and contributes to the
convergence of effects. Accordingly, the urubus are painted
in precise details, applicable to this bird alone, yet these
details produce a strong poetic mood. Their "tattered" and
"famished" appearance, moreover, coincides with that of the
poor people whom D'Arrast seeks to help. This minute,
subtle convergence of effects is only another indication of
Camus' artistry. The evocation of a poetic mood thus pre
cludes a gratuitous nomenclature of exotic flora and fauna.
This is quite true of the following clause: " ... des
grappes de fleurs etranges devalaient le long des lianes
entre les bananiers et les pandanus" (p. 198). Camus
502
focuses our attention on the "clusters of strange flowers,"
which is a combination of precision and intentional vague
ness: the "clusters" are a specific characteristic and
"flowers" refer to a general, hence vague term. By refusing
to name them he implies that their identity is unknown to
him as well as to the reader. The "strangeness" of the
flowers thus dominates. Had he named them, this effect
would have been lost. "Pandanus," the only strange word in
the passage, occupies a subordinate position because it is
associated with "bananiers," a more widely known plant.
Camus does not succumb to the pitfall of using too many
exotic names which would require the reader to consult a
botanical dictionary frequently.
Socrate, D’Arrast's new-found mulatto friend, explains
to him the origin of a strange, half-Christian, half-pagan
religious shrine which is central to the action:
"Tu voisl Un jour, la bonne statue de Jesus, elle est
arrivee de la mer, en remontant le fleuve. Des pScheurs
l'a trouvee. Que belle1 . Que belle'. Alors, ils l'a
lavee ici dans la grotte. Et maintenant une pierre a
pousse dans la grotte. Chaque annee, c'est la fete.
Avec la marteau, tu casses, tu casses des morceaux pour
le bonheur beni. Et puis quoi, elle pousse toujours,
toujours tu casses. C'est le miracle." (p. 199)
The "growing stone" again indicates Camus' fascination with
the mineral world, which in this case, however, has under-
503
gone a considerable change and is seen in a different con
text. In all of his previous works stone was almost synon
ymous with man-made prisons which isolated the individual
victim from humanity and from the natural world. The
"growing stone," however, now creates solidarity, altruism
and self-sacrifice by means of a strange, superstitious
belief. Although D'Arrast does not believe in this miracle,
the sight of the pilgrims before the cave fills him with a
28
pervasive and mysterious sense of expectation. As in
Balzac's "La Messe de l'Athee," this shrine, which has for
him no religious significance, does arouse in him a love
towards the pilgrims.
The image of the "growing stone" indicates a reversal
in Camus' attitude towards the mineral world. In all of his
other works, especially "Le Vent k Djemila," stones, peb
bles, sand and dust formed a dead mineral empire whose man-
made walls evoked a skeletal remains, the end of life.
28»xi attendait, dans la chaleur rouge des jours hu-
mides, sous les etoiles menues de la nuit> malgre les taches
qui etaient les siennes, les digues k batir, les routes a
ouvrir, comme si le travail qu'il etait venu faire ici
n'etait qu'un pretexte, 1'occasion d'une surprise ou d'une
rencontre qu'il n'imaginait meme pas, mais que l'aurait
attendu, patiemment, au bout du monde" (p. 200).
504
Wind, rain, heat and cold in his other works constantly
conspire to reduce solid stone into dust: his mineral em
pire undergoes a constant process of disintegration. The
"growing stone," however, is invested with a zoomorphic
4
life; the process of disintegration is reversed; a small
dead mineral particle becomes greater, acquiring the char-
29
actenstxcs of life.
This "miraculous" stone, moreover, contributes directly
to the convergence of effects. The overpowering presence of
life is what most characterizes the essence of the jungle:
death is a transitory state, an intermediate step in the
transformation of one form of life into another. In this
respect, no living thing ever dies, but is instead absorbed
by another living form; death is part of the metabolism of
life.
The "miracle" of the "growing stone" must therefore be
seen within the context of the natural world to which these
Brazilian natives unconsciously belong. Their ancestors
were composed principally of Negro slaves, who in Africa had
29This brings to mind Balzac's Le Peau de Chagrin, in
which human life forces are symbolically pictured as suffer
ing constriction and eventual death with the passage of
time— the exact reversal of Camus' image.
505
known a nature almost identical to that of Brazil, and in
digenous Indians who were little affected by European in
cursions. The modern descendants of these two groups pre
serve almost intact an ancient and primitive animism over
which a Christian veneer has been imposed. Animism, which
attributes life to all objects in nature and which accepts
no eternal death, is almost inseparable from the jungle and
the forest where it persists today. The desert, on the
other hand, appears to have inspired religions which center
upon corporal death and the immortality of the soul. The
ubiquitous suggestion of death which characterizes the very
nature of the desert is also inherent in Judaism, Christian
ity and Islam. These religions have evolved to a high level
by distinguishing spirit from matter, but in animism they
are one and the same. The "growing stone," seen in this
respect, is related indirectly to the landscape itself by
means of a primitive belief.
The "growing stone" can also be explained in Freudian
terms which strengthen rather than detract from the animism
of the natives. The statue of Christ, probably a figure
head from a sailing vessel wrecked at sea, could have en
tered the estuary of the Amazon and have been carried up
stream by the rising tide. This phenomenon is common to
506
the Amazon, where objects will often travel several hundred
miles in this fashion. Symbolically the estuary and the
river represent the entrance into the womb, and the cave
30
the womb itself. The statue, representing the male fig
ure, thus "fathers" the stone, which accordingly suggests a
foetus. A miraculous anthropomorphic life thereby invests
31
the wooden statue of Christ which in turn imparts life to
the stone. Viewed from afar, this "miracle" is an animistic
version of divine conception.
We are now obliged to consider Camus' intentions con
cerning the use of this "miracle." Did he wish the reader
to interpret it in such a manner, or are we attempting to
attribute to him an unconscious symbolism, which at its
best is a suspicious form of criticism? He never explains
directly such imagery, but he appears to allude to it
throughout the work by constant references to other fertil
ity symbols. The ubiquitous presence of water and the dark,
3°Camus' antipathy towards dark corridors, which he
describes as "fetid" or "stinking" may be of interest to
Freudians.
31This statue is not located within the cave itself
but in a corner of the garden in which there, is a fountain.
In Freudian terms a fountain is a phallic symbol which in
this context reinforces the central meaning.
507
overgrown jungle serve as constant reminders. Even the
fetid odor of a rank vegetal life, like the presence of the
"fine rain" and the "strange flowers" in the garden at the
mouth of the cave appear to indicate a conscious use of this
image. Since Camus understood thoroughly the ancient Greek
myths, which abound in very similar imagery, he may have
created the story independently of any Freudian inspiration.
La Vida Es Sueno. a play written by Calderon which Camus
adapted for the French stage, makes use of a womb symbolism
which in several ways is related to its use in this short
story: Segismundo is imprisoned within a dark tower which
32
has been likened to a womb. Considered symbolically, his
release from the tower and entrance into the world of men
corresponds to his birth. Since his mother, who had died
many years before, is necessarily absent in the play, this
meaning is thereby reinforced. When he is obliged to re
turn to the dark solitude of his tower, he reflects upon
his experiences in the outside world. Upon each release
3^"The prison tower represents a womb symbol. Segis
mundo has to be returned to the womb prior to his 'rebirth'
as a 'new' individual. He is brought back to the tower,
where he must undergo a change of his animal nature. This
idea of rebirth is found not only in mythic legends but also
in the Bible." (Everett W. Hesse, Calderon's La Vida Es
Sueno [New York, 1961], p. 36.)
508
from the tower he acquires a new level of awareness. After
the third and last confinement he has achieved the highest
state of being, that of spirituality. Considered in this
respect, the tower no longer represents the material aspect
of fecundity, but serves as an instrument in attaining the
highest level of spiritual awareness. D'Arrast, within the
33
cave, likewise experiences a new consciousness. He does
not yet know precisely what he is seeking, but he senses a
"surprise" which "would have waited for him at the end of
the world."
Very possibly such a strange shrine does exist some
where in Brazil or in Latin America where the deformation
of Christian miracles is widespread. The source of the
"growing stone," however, is less important than Camus' use
of it within the plot. After D'Arrast has witnessed this
"miracle," his sense of social solidarity and love of the
inhabitants become greater. By means of it and because of
the people's devotion to it, he appears to have undergone
an inner change. He does not al all consider it within the
existentialist context of an "absurd" behavior; the inhabi
tants who make their pilgrimage to this stone are psycho-
33Cf. p. 504.
509
logically different from a Meursault or a Tarrou, who by
pasting newspaper clippings in a scrapbook engage in an
absurd, existentialistic activity which has no meaning out
side of itself. The pilgrims believe in this miracle and
it is this belief which attracts D'Arrast. Seen at a dis
tance, the "growing stone" fulfills the function of a modern
myth. The life of these poverty-stricken Brazilians is thus
embellished by a naive, unconscious but inspiring cult.
D'Arrast, who is a European and an intellectual, thus inter
prets this "myth" as a sign of goodwill and human love.
These virtues inspire in him an active love which he ex
presses by participating in their collective "myth."
A strange orgiastic pagan ritual takes place that
night. Saint George is honored within one of the favelas.
or huts, by a violent rhythmic dance before a crude, palm-
covered altar above which hangs an extravagantly colored
print of the saint and the vanquished dragon. Underneath
the altar is a niche of papier-mSche in which reigns a
little red devil brandishing a sword made of silver foil
and paper. The men and the women are separated into two
34
rotating concentric circles, with the men in the center.
^The use of concentric circles is common to many
510
D'Arrast enters the orgy when Le Cog approaches him and in-
* 35
forms him very seriously of the right method: "Decroise
les bras, capitaine. Tu te serres, tu empeches 1'esprit du
saint de descendre" (p. 211) . D'Arrast complies and appears
to enter unconsciously into the spirit of the dance: "II
s'apergut alors que lui-meme, depuis un moment, sans depla
cer les pieds pourtant, dansait de tout son poids" (p. 213).
The strange rhythm is almost contagious. The dancers enter
in a trance, which for several hours absorbs their awareness
of poverty and suffering. D'Arrast is fascinated by this
interminable "danse ralentie" (p. 216) which lasts all
night. Finally, when he is completely exhausted and leaves
the orgy, he sums up for himself the meaning of the country
and its people by relating them to his own experiences in
life:
II lui semblait qu'il aurait voulu vomir ce pays tout
entier, la tristesse de ses grands espaces, la lumifere
glauque des forets, et le clapotis nocturne de ses
grands fleuves deserts. Cette terre etait trop grande,
le sang et les saisons s'y confondaient, le temps se
liqudfiait. La vie ici etait h ras de terre et, pour
s'y int6grer, il fallait se coucher et dormir, pendant
des annees, h. m&me le sol boueux ou desseche. La-bas,
African dances.
35camus' poor Brazilians, like his poor Arabs, address
everyone in the familiar form.
511
en Europe, c'etait la honte et la colere. Ici, l'exil
ou la solitude, au milieu de ces fous languissants et
trepidants, qui dansaient pour mourir. Mais, h. travers
la nuit humide, pleine d'odeurs vegetales, l’etrange cri
d'oiseau blesse, pousse par la belle endormie, lui par-
vint encore. (pp. 217-218)
Outside and away from the frenetic dance, D'Arrast loses the
almost unconscious empathy for these strange people and cus
toms whom he now considers objectively. This transition, so
frequent in Camus' writing, indicates a particular behavior;
his likeable characters, Tarrou and Rieux, for example,
participate wholeheartedly in a crisis, then temporarily
withdraw from it in order to observe its full meaning and
their relation to it. D'Arrast, by comparing this country
to his own and to himself, realizes that Brazil is "too
big," its dimensions too great for him to grasp. His fas
cination for this country is suggested by the haunting image
of "the strange cry of a wounded bird." "Blood," alluding
to the inherited characteristics of the inhabitants, becomes
inseparable from the weather and the tropical disposition of
the people. The equatorial man, as he sees him, is inte
grated within the physical nature of the land itself, "k
ras de terre." He sums up Europe with "shame" and "anger,"
two characteristics conspicuously absent in the poor Brazil
ians. This reinforces his previous opinion of a Europe
composed of "policemen and merchants" (p. 202). D'Arrast,
who compares himself with these "languorous and shuddering"
people, is acutely aware that he is a stranger in their
presence, that he is in exile. He represents the psyche of
the modern, strong-willed, "inner-directed" European who is
accustomed to studying himself and his motives. The na
tives, on the other hand, as demonstrated by their strange .
ritual which borders on the verge of mass hysteria, their
unconscious acceptance of themselves and their world, may
be considered "outer directed."
The Brazilian natives resemble in certain respects the
unfortunate Arabs who appeared constantly throughout Camus'
own works. Like them, these Brazilians act and feel as a
group rather than as individuals aware of their separate
natures. Their self-expression remains within the framework
of the "tribe"; they reveal love, hatred and joy collective-
36
ly, usually by means of the dance. D'Arrast, like Daru,
represents the well educated, "inner directed" European
psyche which suffers from loneliness, an unhappy state which
results inevitably from these virtues. The Moslem natives
36The similarity of these two names, like Marie and
Maria, may be intentional.
513
in "L'Hote," like the Brazilians in this story, are never
seen as lonely individuals within their own society, but as
integral parts of a collective mentality. They live within
what Jung calls the "collective unconscious." Moreover,
they are equally integrated within their two different nat
ural worlds which they express unconsciously by every act.
For the acutely analytical, cerebral and self-conscious
Frenchmen, this "collective unconscious" offers a tempting
escape from an over-developed ego. Daru and D'Arrast, then,
suggest the modern European man who, disenchanted with his
i
homeland, seeks spiritual absorption within the tribe.
Leaving the rather civilized Mediterranean coast and enter
ing the desert, Daru really hopes to become integrated with
a tribal people by serving them. Paradoxically, he has
rejected the European culture which he is obliged to repre
sent to people ignorant of it. Because they are like the
desert itself, they refuse a foreign attempt to draw them
37
out of their isolated life.
The Brazilian natives of "La Pierre Qui Pousse," on
■^Historically these people have always opposed any
attempt to change their way of life. They have tradition
ally considered hostile any government, either African or
European, which attempted to impose its authority on them.
514
the other hand, symbolize precisely the opposite; like the
jungle which affirms all life and denies none, they accept
everything and refuse nothing; their very hospitality is
symbolic. They have accepted Christianity, as they have
accepted European culture— by absorbing them. Figuratively,
their Christianity is a church which the jungle has immersed
in an exuberant overgrowth of tropical vines and flowers;
Christian asceticism, sacrifice, introspection and medita
tion have been covered over by a tropical ioie de vivre.
Their psyche expresses emotions physically, either by the
dance or by acts of violence. The Brazilian natives, like
the jungle itself, seek to incorporate D'Arrast within their
lives. When he feels driven to "vomit up this whole coun
try," he is consciously reacting against this unconscious,
yet persistent effort of a country and a people to absorb
him. Brazil, however, is just too much for him, too strong,
too huge.
The morning after the orgy is the appointed time for
Le Coq to fulfill a strange vow. Once he had been a sailor
on a ship which sank just off the coast during a heavy
squall. When he thought he would drown, he saw the light
of the church which directed him towards the shore and
safety. He then swore an oath that he would express his
515
gratitude by carrying a huge stone into the church.
Presently surrounded by a cheering throng, the tiny
mulatto now struggles forward with the stone balanced on his
head. Unfortunately, he has been weakened to such a point
by his participation in the dance that he soon falters and
collapses under the crushing load. While the crowd urges
him onward, D'Arrast steps forward and assumes his burden.
The stone of fifty kilograms is rather light for his huge
frame. As he ascends the hilly street leading toward the
church, he suddenly changes direction and heads towards Le
Cog's one-room hovel. Once there, when "his arms tremble"
from the long exertion, he deposits the stone on the hearth.
D'Arrast has performed his act of love and is filled with a
quiet inner happiness as Le Coq, with his family and
friends, stare silently at the stone on the hearth. The
sound of the great river now speaks to D'Arrast with a dif
ferent voice:
Seule, la rumeur du fleuve montait jusqu'a eux a travers
l'air lourd. D'Arrast, debout dans 1'ombre, ecoutait,
sans rien voir, et le bruit des eaux l'emplissait d'un
bonheur tumultueux. (p. 232)
The sound of nature is the voice of silence which has now
become a common bond between him and his new friends. The
great river, like the soul of the country, flows into him
516
38
with its vast murmuring. Finally the silence is broken
when Le Cog's brother casually says to him "sit down with
us." These simple words are the crowning touch upon D'Ar
rast 's "tumultuous happiness." He is one with nature and
with his fellow men; he is no longer a lonely exile on a
strange continent. He has wrought an act of faith and love
for his fellow men.
The meaning of his behavior is entirely eymbolic within
the short story. Had he carried the stone up to the church
he would have nullified the vow of the humble man whom he
sought to help; its presence on the hearth serves as a con
stant reminder of Le Coq's unfulfilled promise. Camus never
mentions this fact directly but alludes to it as he does to
the psychological motives and reactions of both D'Arrast and
the natives. In this respect the story is allegorical. The
reader is obliged to search for the intentions of the au
thor , who hides them behind unexplained events. What does
D'Arrast's act mean to him, and what does it mean to the
natives? We must suppose that for them it is more than an
obvious indication of friendship, that it is unexpected and
3®This image recalls the "water of the night" (p. 40)
which "filled" Janine with a momentary joy.
517
inexplicable in its more profound meaning. Perhaps they see
in D'Arrast an instrument of a new "miracle": an unbeliever
has performed an act of faith which gives a new meaning to
the stone. D'Arrast, in the eyes of his new friends, has
symbolically related the presence of this stone to that of
the growing stone in the grotto. They are quite aware that
he is a trained engineer who customarily considers stones,
like the earth itself, as obstacles to be blown apart and
rearranged according to a logical plan; for them a European
engineer is an intelligence who acts according to the laws
of reason and not of faith. That such a man would reverse
his role even temporarily appears "miraculous" to them. The
hearth, as in most animistic cultures, moreover, is consid
ered a familial altar. Le Coq's pitiful shack, in the eyes
of such people, thus becomes the site of an inexplicable
"miracle." D'Arrast, however, by placing this stone on the
hearth rather than in the church, intended to transfer the
love of God to the love of man. The stone, then, represents
a sacrifice of effort and suffering which also lends a
greater meaning to his construction projects; he does not
build dikes and dams for vanity or profit but for the love
of a suffering humanity.
"La Pierre Qui Pousse" has a vital importance within
518
Camus' life work: D'Arrast is a modern Sisyphus, a happy
Sisyphus who has at last conquered his stone by love. Like
his mythical counterpart, he also is aware that the stone is
an absurd burden and can have no meaning in itself; only
man's unconquerable will and love can invest it with mean
ing. It is quite significant that D'Arrast, who dominates
Camus' last published work, should be so closely related to
the Greek hero who inspired Le Mvthe de Sisvohe. D’Arrast,
seen in this light, represents a felicitous solution to the
problem of absurd suffering which gripped Camus so strongly
in his early essays. By voluntarily accepting a burden
almost identical to the one imposed on Sisyphus, D'Arrast
attains by means of it a new solidarity among men; in the
Greek myth the stone was a form of gratuitous suffering, an
obstacle opposed by Sisyphus' indomitable refusal to become
himself as negative and as absurd as this cold, dead pre
sence which frustrated his every effort. D'Arrast's burden,
however, consists of his exile among strange people in an
'equally strange and oppressive jungle. His bearing of the
stone, then, attests to his refusal to accept his painful
environment as a form of gratuitous suffering. He makes of
his burden an affirmation of the positive values of human
solidarity which denies the absurd suffering inflicted by
519
fate. Sisyphus overcame the gods by joyously accepting
their punishment rather than by resentfully acquiescing to
it; he does exactly the contrary of what they expect and
thus invalidates their intentions. Sisyphus has become an
engineer who fights against the ravages of the earth by
means of his technical knowledge. Such a struggle, however,
is meaningless without love. This is precisely what Camus
gave to D'Arrast and what his Sisyphus lacked; by accepting
the burden of another, by voluntarily becoming a Sisyphus,
D'Arrast transcends Sisyphus himself. The stone for the
engineer represents the burden of superstition which is
particularly heavy for a logical and reasoning mind. Super
stition is the enemy, an obstacle which imprisons humanity
within a maddening jungle and prevents it from solving its
own desperate problems. Symbolically D'Arrast bears super-
39
stition for the sake of love.
By assuming the burden of a people, a burden which is
the source of its suffering, D'Arrast suggests by his act a
39The fact that he bears the stone upon his head, the
seat of his rational being, presents a symbolic image;
superstition and rationality thus oppose each other direct
ly. This implication, however, is secondary, since this
method of carrying objects predominates in Latin America
and therefore appears entirely logical within the short
story.
520
Christian self-sacrifice and charity. His ascent up the
hill with his burden coincides also with a spiritual ascent
through love. This modern Sisyphus distantly echoes the
Calvary. Similar Christian undertones also pervade
"L'Hote": Daru, an innocent and altruistic man who suffers
injustice at the hands of a cruel and uncomprehending human
ity, almost appears to assume a Christ-like suffering.
Since Camus never commented upon any Christian elements
within these works, their authenticity is the subject for
scholarly research in this area. "La Pierre Qui Pousse,"
however, is a perfect realization of Camus' early contention
that "les mythes sont faits pour que 11 imagination les
40
amme" ; he has succeeded masterfully in integrating,
through the use of imagination, a Greek myth with various
religious elements.
The evolution of "La Pierre Qui Pousse" appears
throughout Camus' other works. His fascination with large
stones and engineering projects first appeared in "Le Mino
taur e." Camus likened the building of the modern part of
Oran to the construction of the Tower of Babel. The swarm
of men toiling ceaselessly to build it appeared as so many
40Le Mvthe de Sisvphe. p. 163.
521
"ants"; their work for him appeared essentially meaningless.
His Sisyphus, whom he created a few years later, springs
from a visual image very similar to that of the construction
41
workers, who, with their steam shovels and trucks, have
been fused into a solitary individual. Unlike them, Sisy-
phus is conscious of an absurd labor and seeks to invest it
with meaning. D'Arrast is thus the ultimate outcome of both
Sisyphus and the construction workers: his engineering
project is not only an urgent necessity but represents an
act of charity which solves the impasse of Sisyphus. The
"Pierre Qui Pousse" again proves that for Camus the Greek
myths were never static but grew with his artistic talent
and his world view; he invested them with the new meanings
which he found within himself.
Conclusion:__Silence. Babel and Beauty
The five short stories of L'Exil et Le Rovaume consti
tute quite accurately the extent of Camus' geography. The
Algerian desert, the European metropolis and the jungle form
three distinct landscapes within which individual dramas
4^The building of the pyramids possibly may be a fac
tual source for Sisyphus. Egyptian and foreign slaves,
compelled to engage in labor which they considered sense
less, suggest his absurd punishment.
522
unfold.
The six stories are really six individual lives in the
grip of a crisis which resumes the past and present, then
determines the future. Crisis is the moment, a moment which
is artfully and invisibly supported not only by the use of
time, but by characterization, description, action and the
landscape. In a word, the crisis is a microcosm containing
the individual around which the drama takes place. Camus'
demonstrated ability to create an art of this nature is
indeed great; mediocre writers create only parts but not
wholes.
Janine’s is the quiet, wordless crisis of the revela
tion of an inner truth, of an awakening— the sudden intui
tive grasp of a truth which reveals oneself to oneself,
one's place within the splendor of nature and the squalor
of human endeavor. After her marriage she fell asleep,
numbed by struggle, routine, indifference, drugged by the
coarseness of a husband who never longed for beauty. She
was asleep inside the cocoon others had made for her; she
was not herself. But she saw the night, and she awoke with
in it, reached out to it and it held her in arms of ecstasy
and pain, the inseparable halves of every great truth. She
did not arise to her self-awareness at dawn, she did not
523
walk out into the glaring midday blindness of men to find
herself; she stepped into the night which held her fast.
In its invisible clutches she was free. She had been dead
and now she has found life; her past, present and future are
dissolved in a timeless embrace which explains them by giv
ing them life. This childless woman with an indifferent
husabnd is now more than necessary, she is loved. She gave
herself to the night, to an infinite lover who seduced her
with beauty, joy, with a perfect communion. She became like
her nocturnal lover. She knew. She would never fall asleep
again inside the false world, the finite rational cocoon her
husband had spun about her. She was once a formless pupa
in a daylight prison, but at night she awoke a splendid
moth, and she knew she had wings.
The Renegade's crisis is that of a madman. All his
life he had been falling, bouncing off one rocky ledge to
the next, which in breaking his fall, prepared him for the
next. Bach ledge, like a preparatory crisis, had bounced
him onward towards the next, each of his false acts, in
striking back at him, prepared him for yet another of more
fearsome portent. Now he will make the last, final plunge
into the bottomless pit; he will kill the missionary. He
would kill Christ again if he only knew how. He hates what
524
he pretends to love and he hates because he is not himself;
he is another. The sun is the truth, the ardent truth of
an avenging deity which pardons nothing and no one. It
strikes him once for every lie he had told others, twice
for every lie he had told himself. First the desert, next
the savages, then his mutilation have all been commanded by
a solar deity which seeks only to reveal to him its truth
by harsh blows. On the desert this god warned him by oppos
ing his advance, in the city of salt it smote his ears deaf
to the truth, then it imprisoned him and finally cut out his
tongue. Still he persisted. The Renegade is literally a
boxer, battered and half-conscious, who under the glaring
light, thinks that victory will be his. First his family,
then his fellow monks vainly attempted to show him the truth
by reason alone, but he would not listen. Perhaps force
could succeed where reason had failed; the sun struck him
first from without, burned his skin, but he would not lis
ten. Then it pried open his jaws and cut out his lying,
deceitful tongue. Finally it reached into his head and cut
out his sanity. The more one showed him the truth the hard
er he clung to his lies. In the sun of fire, bullets and
death he has himself become a living lie.
Janine and the Renegade are literally as opposite as
525
day from night; the former has for an instant become a moon
goddess, the latter bites the hand of his salvation. Yet
each lives in banishment. The night has made of Janine a
conscious exile in the ugly, practical and desperate world
of men. She will always remember, however, the homeland of
beauty and truth. She has become aware of the two halves
of existence. Like Camus, she contains within herself a
poignant duality. The Renegade is an absolute exile, not
only from the comforting snow of Auvergne but from truth
and sanity.
Silence is the language of exile, a voiceless tongue
which utters more than the spoken word. L'Exil et Le Roy-
aume is a book of silences: before the starry night, Ja
nine 's wordless ecstasy transcends the finite limitation of
speech; she does not declaim her love before infinite beau
ty, she lives it. Silence is her language of love. Dis
course with her husband is no more than a few short mono
syllabic phrases expressive of a tragic silence composed of
dead love and indifference. Her exile and her kingdom are
situated beyond speech. Silence is perfect communion and
it is also loneliness, misunderstanding and suffering.
Among men the dignity of the spoken word has entered its
exile: Yvars1 stubborn silence is as fruitless as it is
526
angry; it is false. Daru makes of his native language an
act of love which he vainly attempts to bestow upon an un
comprehending and alien people. He painfully discovers that
they use it only to express their blind hatred of him.
Their silence is their hatred and the few misspelled words
on the blackboard signal the defeat of language: the writr
ten word has become an effort not to communicate, to share,
to understand— it is willful ignorance. Language kills it
self when it kills its nobility— that of intelligent, un
selfish communion. Language is a trust.
Camus clearly attacks the "anti-language" as Orwell
attacked "double-think." The Renegade's silence is a pro
gressive mutilation: when, like the biblical Renegade,
his ears are beaten, he hears no silence, only a mad ringing
inside his head which spurs on the insane babble of his
inner dialogue. His silence is composed of cacophony; his
inner speech is a protracted scream echoed and re-echoed in
a hollow, tongueless mouth. Jonas speaks only with a paint
brush which must remain still before a blank canvas. The
constant babble which surrounds him, the language of his
Parisian Nineveh, is as barren as the silence of the desert.
Words are but dead stones. Like Janine, D'Arrast is the
only character in L'Exil et Le Rovaume who speaks, and like
527
her, his discourse is silence: muted by ignorance of the
language of his hosts, he voices his love by a silent act of
love. His hosts understand. Alone among all the other five
characters in this great collection, he has at last spoken
with his fellow men, he has at last reached the haven of
communion with his fellow beings. Janine spoke with nature
and not humanity, D'Arrast alone succeeds in speaking with
both.
In a word, L'Exil et Le Rovaume. Camus' last creative
achievement, vehemently asserts the meaning of language,
the meaning of nature and their relationship to each other:
man expresses his indifference, his self-deception, his
belief in false doctrines, his blind hatred, his willful
ignorance, by babel, by a mutilated silence, by his "anti-
language." Only before the redeeming beauty of nature, only
by love of both man and the world does speech become intel
ligible. Camus leaves us a great and demanding truth: if
one cannot speak love, truth and beauty then one speaks a
hateful babble; if one is blind to beauty one's soul becomes
ugly, if one refuses truth then one becomes a lie.
CONCLUSION
When once asked what were his ten favorite words, Camus
replied "le monde, la douleur, la terre, la mke, les hom
ines, le desert, l'honneur, la misere, l'ete, la mer"— pro
tean, eternal words rising above the din of argumentative
literary schools and changing tastes, monumental words which
resume his greatness, his breath of life, which in this
essay we have tried to illustrate. We have sought to grasp
his intent through his achievement, to reveal to others the
manner in which his greatness struck us.
We have attempted to reveal the depth, extent and mean
ing of the kingdom of nature within his works. In so doing
we have not once treated his love of nature as a separate
entity, divorced from the other facets of his being. To do
so would have been to falsify, to misunderstand his inten
tion. Camus must be grasped intuitively as a whole, a whole
of which nature is only an indivisible part, albeit undeni
ably important.
In L 1Envers et L'Endroit we revealed that sea, sunlight
528
529
and beauty were the shiny side of the coin and poverty,
sickness and claustration were its tarnished side. Front'
this first youthful work we see a passionate love of beauty
that knew its price. His was not a dilettante's love, a
dabbling in landscapes, but a passionate struggle to reach
out into the world, to understand, to grow, in a word, to
seek life in all its virtualities. The enemy, a stifling
death in a tuberculosis sanatorium, haunted his bedside,
drew around him the dead, stone walls which could any
moment become his tomb.
Noces is youth and beauty seated at the wedding banquet
of this world, pantheistic nuptials between man and nature.
This thin volume contains the poetry of a life suddenly
aware of itself, an ecstatic hymn which chants a reality so
vast, so alive, personal, yet universal that it almost
threatens to absorb Camus into its huge, unconscious scheme.
He lives an eternity in the moment, he steps outside of
time. The tiniest flower is as delicate as its petals, as
huge as his thoughts of life and death, religion and love
of this world.
L1Ete bequeaths us an ancient, Mediterranean wisdom
which looks us squarely in the face, which scrutinizes our
modern twentieth century from the vantage point of a self-
530
knowledge sure of itself. Camus is not just a modern man
reacting in a contemporary manner to what he has known and
felt within his one life, rather he comes as a Hellenic
spirit which has the right to speak because it knows itself
to be true, feels itself obliged to utter a truth which,
once revealed, appears self-evident. We deserve more, he
expounds, than the prisons, concentration camps, slums,
regimented degradation, all the concatenated horror our
misled intelligence has fashioned for us. Man deserves his
dignity, his freedom, the simple and profound joy of being
alive. He cannot, however, create them outside of the king
dom of nature; he cannot fashion truth and beauty within the
squalid walls, within the tenement Gehennas which he has
built around himself. He must smash through the ugliness of
his own concoction, he must be willing to stand naked and
alone under the solar effulgency, under the immense revela
tion of the stars. Only then can man find dignity, freedom,
the simple and profound joy of being alive. The beauty of
this world is not a luxury, it is an urgent necessity: de
prived of nature, man knows neither freedom nor justice.
Living in himself and by himself he exists blindly within a
prison of his own making. Without beauty there is no sal
vation; the almond blossom, the albatross in flight contain
531
a redeeming truth which man is eternally obliged to contem-
plate.
What is a universal truth in Camus' fiction? What do
L1 Etranger. La.„£eate, L'Exil et Le Rovaume. as well as Cali
gula and Le Malentendu all have in common? Man is always
affected by his landscape, be it the pestilent walls of
Oran or the beckoning surf of Algiers. No less important
than the role of nature is that of justice, fraternity, lovej
and truth. None can exist without the other. Dedication to
humanity never stands outside of natural beauty. A Camusian
hero cannot love justice and simultaneously despise the
humble beauty of a sparrow; he cannot even be ignorant of
its existence. A cruel, implacable nature may arm itself
against mankind, may starve millions, may infect them with
plague, yet man cannot hide within himself from that which
threatens from without. To live with nobility, Camus
claims, we must accept both the ravages and the blessings of
the kingdom of nature. We must be courageous if we are to
be worthy.
Camus was a journalist who wrote like a poet. He was
also a dramatist, and a champion of a humanism which, upon
necessity, found political expression. How could such
commitments exist within a profound, Hellenic love of
532
nature? How could one associate the brilliant artifice of
the stage, of a box enclosed on three sides or the staccato
din of a newspaper office with the rhapsody of the sea, with
the quiet of the desert? We have shown that Camus' human
commitments exiled him from the beauty he loved, a beauty
which instead of being forgotten appeared all the more
vibrantly in his works. When he left behind his native sun
light to enter the dark and warlike turmoil of Paris he
brought within himself a memory of Algerian sunlight upon
his cheek. Maria, in Le Malentendu. honors her creator by
her own very-human suffering; bringing within herself a
Mediterranean warmth and love, she entered the dark, inhuman
inn of calculated murder. Camus brought to European liter
ature just such a warm, Mediterranean love.
What is "Camusian," what constitutes his most important
single attribute? What distinguishes him from a Colette or
a Giono, from a Gide? Obviously we cannot define his crea
tion with one word. Perhaps what he himself has said about
his work is the most accurate— the ten words quoted at the
beginning of this chapter. Above all he was a Mediterra
nean. He thought, felt and wrote about those ten words in a
way that only the Mediterranean spirit could. Algeria, not
France, was his native country, a homeland which before his
533
time had scarcely appeared in European literature. We have
shown that the universals which constitute the matrix of his
work are treated from the vantage point of his Mediterranean
formation. Truths which had scarcely appeared before in
European literature now dazzle us. Who else has ever creat
ed a Camusian sun?
Colette and Giono, in creating a genuine communion with
nature, toppled a decadent romanticism whose natural world
had become a posturing, an effete attitude, a moribund elo
quence. Like Camus they were sincere in creating what they
felt and knew. Like him they did not relegate the kingdom
of nature to a Sunday afternoon in the Bois de Boulogne.
Their love of nature, however, was not acquired at the price
of a terrible personal suffering, they did not emerge from
the etherized stench of the hospital ward before smelling
the perfume of flowers. Likewise their heroes are not torn
from natural beauty by deportation, prison camps and mock
justice. Camusian nature is beauty, ecstasy, pain, impris
onment, all of these. Giono's peasants never held a bayonet,
never languished in prison. Colette's gardens and forests
did not stand opposite the slums and the pauper's grave.
In a word, Camus places nature within the context of the
entire world, within all that he knew, felt and experienced.
Camusian nature alone is profoundly aware of life, death,
suffering, injustice, fraternity, the ghetto and the garden
of delights. For these reasons one can assert that the
Camusian is a total nature. We have shown that one cannot
understand the tiniest detail in his nature apart from the
matrix of man's total existence. Camusian nature may be a
sheaf of corn, a blade of grass, but it feels the edge of
the scythe which will cut it down, it acquires the magnitude
of Pascal's thinking reed. His nature, as we have demon
strated, does not lend itself to a mechanical and systematic
analysis, rather it must be grasped intuitively as a whole.
His landscapes do not lead us along a facile and legible
path; they immerse us in a lake of being. His nature is not
linear, but multi-dimensional.
Camusian nature is not French; its ambivalence, its
violent upheavals, its cataclysmic joys and pains belong to
mother world, characteristic more of Spanish literature than
French. Above all it is African; it knew the dimensions of
the Algerian sun, of desert flowers and of famine. Above
all, Camusian nature is life. Sartre, compared to him,
lacks a dimension because he lacks a landscape, has no ten
derness, no redemption outside of himself. The heroism of
Sartre can leave a taste of ashes in the mouth, that of
535
Camus a taste of life, a longing for innocence and beauty.
Ardor, perhaps more than any other word, is Camusian— the
ardor of a continent, of the love of the earth, the sky and
the sea.
Camus bequeathed us a solar truth, a flower of fire and
blood.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
BIBLIOGRAPHY
I. WORKS PUBLISHED BY CAMUS IN BOOK FORM.
(Dates of composition are givgn.in
parentheses. All listings in chrono
logical order.)
Revolte dans les Asturies. Essai de Creation Collec
tive. (play) (1935) (Algiers, 1936).
L1Envers et L'Endroit (essays) 1935-1936, Chariot (Al
giers, 1936) . Republished, with a preface, by Gallimard
(1958).
Caligula (play). Revised edition, Gallimard (1958).
Noces (essays) (1936-1937), Chariot (Algiers, 1938).
Reprinted by Gallimard (1950).
L'Etranger (recit) (1939-1940) Gallimard (1942).
School's edition published by Methuen (1958), with a
specially written Avant-Prooos (dated January 8, 1955)
by Camus.
Le Mvthe de Sisvphe (essai sur l'absurde) (1940-1941),
Gallimard (1943).
Lettres £ un ami allemand (letters) (1942-1944). First
published in book form in 1945 by Gallimard.
Le Malentendu (play) (1942-1943). Revised edition,
Gallimard (1958).
La Peste (chronique) (1941-1947), Gallimard (1947).
L'Etat de Sifege (play) (1948), Gallimard (1948).
Les Justes (play) (1948-1949), Gallimard (1950).
537
538
Actuelles I, II, and III (collection of political
, articles). Published in 1950, 1953 and 1958 respec
tively by Gallimard.
L'Homme Revolte (essay) (1945-1951), Gallimard (1951).
LlEis. (essays), Gallimard (1954). The various essays
were written between 1939 and 1953.
La Chute (recit) (1955-1956), Gallimard (1956).
L'Exil et Le Royaume (short stories written between
1953-1957), Gallimard (1957).
Reflexions sur la Guillotine (1957), Calmann-Levy
(1957).
Discours de Su&de (speeches made in Stockholm on the
occasion of the award of the Nobel Prize for Litera
ture, 1957), Gallimard (1958).
II. ADAPTATIONS AND TRANSLATIONS BY CAMUS.
James Thurber, The Last Flower (La Derniere Fleur).
Translated by Camus. Gallimard (1952).
Calderon de la Barca, La Devocion de la Cruz (La Devo
tion c i la Croix). Texte frangais d'Albert Camus.
Short preface by Camus. Gallimard (1953).
Pierre de Larivey, Les Esprits. Short preface by
Camus. Gallimard (1953).
Dino Buzatti, Un caso clinico (Un cas interessant).
Adaptation d'Albert Camus, L'Avant Sc&ne (1955).
William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun (Requiem pour une
Nonne). Adaptation d'Albert Camus. Gallimard (1956).
Lope de Vega, El Caballero de Olmedo (Le Chevalier
d'Olmedo). Texte frangais d'Albert Camus. Short
Avant-Propos by Camus.
539
Dostoyevsky, The Possessed (Les Possedes). Piece en
trois parties adaptee du roman de Dostoievski par
Albert Camus. Gallimard (1959).
III. ARTICLES BY CAMUS PUBLISHED IN PERIODICALS
AND NOT YET REPRINTED.
"Un Nouveau Verlaine," Sud. Algiers (March 1932), p.
90.
"Jehan Rictus," Sud. Algiers (May 1932), pp. 90-91.
"Essai sur la Musique," Sud. Algiers (June 1932), pp.
125-150.
"La Philosophic du Sifecle," Sudr Algiers (June 1932),
p. 90.
Book reviews in Alger-Republicain between October 1938
and July 1939. Articles on Remarque, Sartre, Blanche
Balain, Jean Hytier, Rene Janon, Paul Nizan, Edmond
Bruca, Giono, Renand de Jouvenel, Montherlant, Pascal
Pia, Jorge Amado, Simenon, Silone, Andre Chamson,
Berdiaeff, Bernanos, Albert Ollivier.
"L'Intelligence et L'Echafaud," Problfemes du Roman.
Confluences (July-August 1943). Reprinted in Brus
sels, Editions Prevost (1945).
"L'Exhortation aux Medecins de la Peste," Archives de
la Peste. Cahiers de la Pleiade, Gallimard (1947).
"Pluies de New York," Formes et Couleurs. 6:20-25,
1947. 2 photos.
"Reflexions sur le Christianisme," Vie Intellectuelle
(April 1949), pp. 336-351.
"Rencontres avec Andre Gide," NRF (1951), pp. 5-7.
"Une Macumba au Bresil," Biblio (November 1951), pp.
5-7.
"Herman Melville," Les Ecrivains Celfebres. Ill,
Mageroud (1953).
o
540
"La Vie d'Artiste: mimodrame en deux parties."
Simoun (March 1953), pp. 14-20.
Walt Disney, Le Desert Vivant. Societe Frangaise du
Livre (1954).
"Lettre k Roland Barthes," Club (January 1955), pp.
7-9.
IV. PREFACES NOT YET PRINTED IN BOOK FORM.
Presentation of Rjyqgfegj Revue de Culture Mediter-
raneenne. Chariot, Algiers (1939).
Chamfort. Maximes et Anecdotes. Dac, Monaco (1944).
William Faulkner. Requiem Pour Une Nonne. Gallimard
(1957).
Jean Grenier. Les lies. Gallimard (1959).
V. THE FOLLOWING FULL LENGTH STUDIES PUBLISHED
ON CAMUS HAVE BEEN QUOTED OR REFERRED TO IN
THIS THESIS.
Rene Marill Alberes, Les Homines Traques (Albert Camus
et la Nostalaie de 1‘Eden, pp. 187-220). (La Nouvelle
Edition, Paris, 1953).
M. G. Barrier, L'Art du Recit dans L'Etranaer d*Albert
Camus (Nizet, Paris, 1962).
Roland Barthes, Le Deere Zero de L'Ecriture (Paris,
1953).
Germaine Bree, Camus (Rutgers University Press, 1959).
Jean Claude Brisville, Camus (Gallimard, 1957).
Robert Champigny, Sur Un Heros Paien (Gallimard, 1957).
Carina Gadourek, Les Innocents et les Coupables. Essai
dVexeg&se de l1oeuvre d'Albert Camus (Mouton & Co.,
541
The Hague, 1963).
Thomas Hanna, The Thought and Art of Albert Camus
(Henry Regnery, Chicago, 1958).
Thomas Hanna, The Lvrical Existentialists (Atheneum,
New York, 1962).
Thomas N. Hubble, The Act Itself and the Word: A Study
of Abstraction versus the Concrete in the Work of
Albert Camus (Doctoral dissertation, University of
Southern California, 1962).
Robert de Luppe, Albert Camus (Temps Present, Paris,
1951).
Albert Maquet, Albert Camyis. The Invincible Summer,
transl. from the French by Herma Briffault. (George
Braziller, New York, 1958) .
Jean Prevost, Probiernes du Roman (Paris, n.d.).
Roger Quillot, La Mer et Les Prisons. Essai sur Albert
Camus (Gallimard, 1956).
Philip Thody, Albert Camus (Hamish Hamilton, London,
1961).
Stephen Ullman, The Image in the Modern French Novel.
Gide. Alain-Fournier. Proust. Camus (Cambridge, 1960).
VI. THE FOLLOWING ARTICLES PUBLISHED ON CAMUS
HAVE BEEN QUOTED OR REFERRED TO IN THIS
THESIS.
Francois Bondy, "Albert Camus' Djemila," Atlanta. 1:
392-393 (1956).
Rachel Bespaloff, "Le monde du Condamne h. Mort)"
Esprit (January 1950), pp. 1-26.
Nicola Chiaromonte, "Albert Camus: In Memoriam,"
Dissent. 7:266-270 (Summer, 1960).
542
John Cruickshank, "The Art of Allegory in La Peste."
Symposium. 11:66-74 (Spring, 1957).
Roger Dadouin, "Albert Camus le Mediterranean. Le R£ve
de Lumi&re et le Complexe du Clos-obscur," Simoun. 3:
42-47 (1952).
Jean Daniel, "Albert Camus 1'Algerien," L*Action.
Tunis (October 21, 1957), p. 284.
Pierre Desgraupes, "Geographie du Desert," Confluences
(September 1945), p. 7.
W. M. Frohock, "Camus: Image, Influence and Sensibil
ity," Yale French Studies. 2:91-99 (1949).
c
Alfred Galpin, "Italian Echoes in Albert Camus: Two
Notes on La Chute." Symposium. 12:65-79 (Spring-Fall,
1958).
Thomas L. Hanna, "Albert Camus and the Christian
Faith," Journal of Religion (October 1956), pp. 224-
233.
Leo Hertel, "Albert Camus' Offener Horizont," Fest
schrift fiir Karl Jaspers, Books Abroad (Spring 1954),
p. 184.
S. Beynon John, "Image and Symbol in the Work of Albert
Camus," Yale French Studies. 9:42-53 (January 1955).
Morvan Lebesque, "Albert Camus, 1*Algerien," Le Canard
Enchaine (October 23, 1957), p. 284.
Claude E. Magny, "La Litterature Frangaise Depuis
1940," La France Libre. 9:392-304 (February 15, 1945).
Bernard C. Murchland, C.S.C., "Albert Camus: Rebel,"
Catholic World. 188:308-314 (January 1959).
Henri Peyre, "Camus the Pagan," Yale French Studies.
25:20-25 (Special Camus Issue, Spring 1960).
Roger Quillot, "L'Algerie d'Albert Camus," Revue
Socialiste (October 1958), pp. 121-131.
543
Jean-Paul Sartre, "Explication de L1 Etranaer.1 1 Lea
Cahiera du Sud (February 1943), pp. 189-206.
0. SSdergard, "Un Aspect de la Prose de Camus: le
rythme ternaire," Studia Neophiloloaica. 31:128-148
(1959).
Germaine Tillion, "Albert Camus et L'Algerie," Preuvea.
91:69-72 (September 1958).
Carl A. Viggiani, "Camus' L1Etranaer." PMLA. 71:865-
877 (1956).
Carl A. Viggiani, "Camus in 1936: The Beginnings of a
Career," Symposium. 12:7-18 (Spring-Fall, 1958).

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