I.

Introduction

Albert Camus (1913-1960), French-Algerian novelist, essayist, dramatist, and journalist, a Nobel laureate whose concepts of the absurd and of human revolt address and suggest solutions to the problem of meaninglessness in modern human life.

II.

Life

Camus was born at Mondovi (now Drean), Algeria, to a French father and a Spanish mother. After his father was killed in 1914, at the beginning of World War I, Camus was raised in poverty by his grandmother and his mother, an illiterate charwoman. Tuberculosis put an end to his studies at the University of Algiers, forcing him also to abandon soccer and to curtail his life in the theater as a playwright, director, and actor. These activities were the passions of his youth. Camus then became interested in politics, was briefly a member of the Communist Party, and in the 1930s began a career in journalism.

Camus’s articles revealing the misery of the Arab population in Algeria led to his dismissal from his newspaper job in Algiers. In 1940 he accompanied his friend and colleague Pascal Pia to Paris to work for the newspaper Paris-Soir. Soon he became involved in the Resistance movement against the occupying German forces, and he began writing for the underground newspaper Combat in 1943 (he served as managing editor from 1944 to 1947). He also published his first major works. Although Camus was associated with the group of writers surrounding French writer and philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, he and Sartre always agreed that Camus did not belong to the philosophical movement known as existentialism, of which Sartre was a major proponent. His attack on Stalinist Communism in L’homme révolté (1951; translated as The Rebel, 1957) ended his friendship with Sartre, who at that time still supported Stalin, and alienated Camus from the French political left. In 1957 he received the Nobel Prize for literature. Deeply troubled during his last years by the Algerian war for independence (1954-1962), he immersed himself in the theater and in work on an autobiographical novel (Le premier homme, 1994; The First Man, 1995). He was about to be named director of a national theater at the time of his death in an automobile accident.

III.

Works

Camus’s early writings, collected in Le premier Camus (1973; Youthful Writings, 1961), announce the themes of his later works. Noces (1939; Nuptials, 1967) and L’envers et l’endroit (1937; The Wrong Side and the Right Side, 1968) are lyrical and narrative essays about the beauty of Algeria and the joys, sorrows, and intellectual preoccupations of the young Camus. The novel L’étranger (1942; The Stranger, 1946), the essay Le mythe de Sisyphe (1942; The Myth of Sisyphus, 1955), and the plays Caligula (1944; translated 1958) and Le malentendu (1944; The Misunderstanding, 1958) make up what Camus called ““the cycle of the absurd.” In these works, Camus illustrated his sense of the absurdity of human existence: Human beings are not absurd, and the world is not absurd, but for humans to be in the world is absurd. In Camus’s view, humans cannot feel at home in the world because they yearn for order, clarity, meaning, and eternal life, while the world is chaotic, obscure, and indifferent and offers only suffering and death. Thus human beings are estranged or alienated from the world. Integrity and dignity require them to face and accept the human condition as it is and to find purely human solutions to their plight. The protagonist of L’étranger, who was awaiting death after being condemned, and the Greek mythical hero Sisyphus, who was condemned to roll a heavy rock up a hill forever, both know a uniquely human kind of happiness because they accept the limits of human reason and life. The Roman Emperor Caligula, in Camus’s play of that name, exceeds those limits, tries to be a god, embodies the absurd, and must be destroyed by the revolt of his subjects.

“The cycle of revolt” consists of the novel La peste (1947; The Plague, 1948), the philosophical essay L’homme révolté (1951; The Rebel, 1951), and the plays L’état de siege (1948; State of Siege, 1958) and Les justes (1950; The Just Assassins, 1950). The concept of revolt in these works extends the philosophy of the absurd expressed in the earlier works. Human beings, recognizing the limitations implied in being human, cannot create a world that ignores these limitations and the absurdity of existence. But they can revolt. The kind of revolution Camus envisions is a collective effort of human beings to build a society consistent with the values of moderation and social justice. In La peste, the protagonist, Dr. Rieux, and his team of plague fighters in Oran, Algeria, revolt against the epidemic, just as the Resistance fighters in Paris revolted against the Nazi occupation. L’homme révolté recounts the history of revolution from ancient to modern times, demonstrating that revolt will succeed only when the means of the revolution reflect and justify the ends. The Russian revolutionaries of Les justes refuse to bomb their political enemy’s carriage because his children are with him; this action would be unacceptable under their new regime, and they therefore refuse to justify it as a revolutionary act.

Although no single idea unifies Camus’s final works in the way that the notions of the absurd and the revolt do in the earlier cycles, judgment is a dominant theme of the essays in L’été (1954; Summer, 1968), the stories of L’exil et le royaume (1957; Exile and the Kingdom, 1958), and the novel La chute (1956; The Fall, 1957). These works remind the reader that in a world without God or absolute values no one is entirely innocent or guilty, and they assert that moderation is therefore appropriate in our judgments of one another.

Besides these essential works, Camus published selections from his journalistic writings in the collection Actuelles (3 volumes, 1950, 1953, and 1958) and in various magazines, newspapers, and journals. Some of these are available in English in Resistance, Rebellion and Death (1960) and Lyrical and Critical Essays (1968). A number of Camus’s works, both finished and unfinished, have been published since his death. His Carnets (2 volumes, 1962, 1964; Notebooks, 1967, 1970) have appeared, as have his earliest effort at novel writing, La mort heureuse (1971; A Happy Death, 1972), and the partially completed autobiographical novel Le premier homme. The manuscript of this novel was found on the highway at the scene of his death.

IV.

Assessment

The young Albert Camus inherited and accepted the challenge of the negativism and gloom that followed upon two world wars. In his life and work he resisted despair and calls to replace a lost belief in God with some abstraction or ideology that might be used to justify crimes similar to those he had witnessed. Many readers have come to consider him the most profound, honest, and effective advocate of liberal humanism of our time. His name, ideas, and writings have been invoked during every major political or cultural crisis since his death. The clarity, simplicity, and elegance of his language and style have made his works accessible to each new generation. His literary masterpieces L’étranger and La chute are judged by many critics and scholars to be among the best works of prose fiction in the 20th century. Camus was a man who spoke to and for his fellow human beings about what concerns them most: morality, justice, and love.