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Critical Survey of Long Fiction, 4th Ed. Albert Camus Born: Mondovi, Algeria; November 7, 1913 Died: Near Sens, France; January 4, 1960 Principal Long Fiction L'Étranger, 1942 (The Stranger, 1946) La Peste, 1947 (The Plague, 1948) La Chute, 1956 (The Fall, 1957) La Mort heureuse, 1971 (wr. 1936-1938; A Happy Death, 1972) Le Premier Homme, 1994 (The First Man, 1995) Other Literary Forms Albert Camus (kah-MEW) considered his vocation to be that of novelist, but the artist in him was always at the service of his dominant passion, moral philosophy. As a result, Camus was led to cultivate several other literary forms that could express his central concerns as a moralist: the short story, drama, and nonfiction forms such as the philosophical essay and political journalism, all of which he practiced with enough distinction to be influential among his contemporaries. Moreover, these works were generally written side by side with his novels; it was Camus's customary procedure, throughout his brief writing career, always to be working on two or more compositions simultaneously, each expressing a different facet of the same philosophical issue. Thus, within a year of the publication of his most celebrated novel, The Stranger, there appeared a long essay titled Le Mythe de Sisyphe (1942; The Myth of Sisyphus, 1955), a meditation on the meaning of life in an irrational universe that begins with the assertion that the only serious question confronting modern man is the question of suicide and concludes with a daring argument that finds in the legend of Sisyphus a strangely comforting allegory of the human condition. Sisyphus, who becomes in Camus's hands an exemplary existentialist, spent his days in the endlessly futile task of pushing a boulder to the top of a hill from which it always rolled down again. Every human life is expended as meaninglessly as that of Sisyphus, Camus argues, yet one must conceive of Sisyphus as happy, because he was totally absorbed by his assigned task and found sufficient satisfaction in its daily accomplishment, without requiring that it also have some enduring significance. There are close links between such reasoning and the ideas that inform The Stranger, but it is erroneous to argue, as some have, that The Myth of Sisyphus is an "explanation" of The Stranger. The former work is, rather, a discussion of similar themes in a different form and from a different perspective, in accordance with Camus's unique way of working as a writer. That unique way of working produced another long philosophical essay, L'Homme révolté (1951; The Rebel, 1956), which has affinities with the novel The Plague as well as with four of Camus's plays written and produced in the 1940's: Caligula (pb. 1944; English translation, 1948); Le Malentendu (pr., pb. 1944; The Misunderstanding, 1948); L'État de siège (pr., pb. 1948; State of Siege, 1958), and Les Justes (pr. 1949; The Just Assassins, 1958). Each of these plays is also related by certain thematic elements to the two novels that Camus published in the same period. Camus's earliest political journalism, written before 1940 and dealing with the problems of his native Algeria, attracted little attention, but his work for the underground newspaper Combat during and after World War II achieved considerable celebrity, and the best articles he wrote for Combat were later collected in a volume that was widely read and admired. During the civil war in Algeria, in the 1950's, Camus again entered the lists as a political journalist, and because he was by then indisputably Algeria's most famous man of letters, his articles were of major importance at the time, though highly controversial and much less widely approved than the wartime pieces from Combat. Camus produced only one collection of short stories, L'Exil et le royaume (1957; Exile and the Kingdom, 1958), composed during the same years as the novel The Fall, but those stories have been very popular and are regarded by many as among the finest short stories published in France in the twentieth century. The volume is particularly noteworthy because it offers the only examples Camus ever published of fiction composed in the third-person mode of the omniscient narrator. The first three of his published novels are variations of the limited-perspective first-person narrative. Deeply involved in the theater throughout his career, both as writer and director, Camus adapted for the French stage the work of foreign novelists Fyodor Dostoevski and William Faulkner, and of playwrights of Spain's Golden Age, including Pedro Calderón de la Barca and Lope de Vega Carpio. These adaptations have all been published and form part of Camus's contribution to the theater. Achievements To the immediate postwar public, not only in France but also throughout Europe, Albert Camus seemed a writer of unassailable stature. Although Camus himself repudiated the designation, he was regarded worldwide as one of the two principal exponents of existentialism (the other was Jean-Paul Sartre), the single most influential philosophical movement of the twentieth century. Indeed, the existentialist worldview--according to which the individual human being "must assume ultimate responsibility for his acts of free will without any certain knowledge of what is right or wrong or good or bad"--has profoundly shaped the values of countless people who have never read Camus or Sartre. In the 1950's, Camus was widely admired not only as a writer but also as a hero of the war against fascism, a spokesman for the younger generation, and a guardian of the moral conscience of Europe. That reputation was consecrated in 1957 with the award to Camus of the Nobel Prize in Literature, at the remarkably young age of forty-four. Yet, as has happened to many other recipients of the Nobel Prize, the award seemed almost a signal of the rapid deflation of his renown. Camus suddenly came under severe criticism for his stand on the Algerian Civil War, was attacked as self-righteous and artistically sterile, and was finally denounced as irrelevant by the new literary generation then coming to prominence, who were weary of moral issues and more concerned with aesthetic questions of form and language. Camus's fame and influence appeared to many to have suffered an irreversible decline by the end of the decade, at least in France. (In the United States, the case was different: Made more accessible by the "paperback revolution," Camus's works were enormously influential among American college students in the 1960's.) There were those who suggested that the automobile accident that took his life in January of 1960 was a disguised blessing, sparing him the pain of having to witness the collapse of his career. It is true that, in the late twentieth century, generations after the height of Camus's fame, French writers and intellectuals showed no influence of Camus in their writings and scant critical interest in his works. Still, his works have enjoyed steady sales among the French public, and outside France, especially in the United States, interest in Camus has remained strong. There has been an inevitable sifting of values, a crystallization of what it is, in Camus's work, that still has the power to survive and what no longer speaks to successive generations. It has become clear, for example, that his philosophical essays are too closely tied to the special circumstances that occasioned them; in spite of a few brilliant passages, those essays now seem rambling and poorly argued as well as irrelevant to the concerns of modern readers. Camus's works for the theater, too, have held up poorly, being too abstract and inhuman to engage the emotions of audiences. Although his plays have continued to be performed on both sides of the Atlantic, interest in them has steadily declined over the years. It is his fiction that still seems most alive, both in characters and ideas, and that still presents to the reader endlessly fascinating enigmas that delight the imagination and invite repeated readings. Although the total number of Camus's fictional works is small, those works are, in both form and content, among the most brilliantly original contributions to the art of fiction produced anywhere in the twentieth century. In particular, Camus expressed through fiction, more powerfully and more memorably than anyone else in his time, the painful moral and spiritual dilemmas of modern man: evil, alienation, meaninglessness, and death. He invented techniques and created characters by which he was able to make manifest, in unforgettable terms, the eternal struggle of Everyman for some shred of dignity and happiness. His stories have accordingly taken on some of the haunting quality, and the prestige, of myths. For that reason, it seems safe to predict that it is his fiction that represents Camus's greatest achievement--an achievement that will endure long after his philosophical musings and political arguments have been forgotten. Biography Although he was born in the interior village of Mondovi, near Constantine, Algeria, Albert Camus was actually brought up in the big city, in a working-class suburb of Algiers. His widowed mother, who was from Algiers, took her two sons back there to live after her husband was killed early in World War I. Albert, the younger of the two sons, was not yet a year old when his father died, and he was to grow up with a need for relationships with older men, apparently to replace the father he never had. It was important to Camus that his father's forebears had immigrated by choice to Algeria from France in the nineteenth century, since it made him feel that his roots were authentically both French and Algerian. Because his mother was of Spanish extraction, Camus felt himself to be even more authentically Algerian, for Spanish blood gave him his share of that passionate Mediterranean temperament that he felt made French Algeria distinctive and unique. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that the great bulk of Camus's writing is set in Algeria or relates directly to that country. Being Algerian was the central fact of Camus's consciousness. In his early twenties, Camus began to write essays for a leftist political journal published in Algiers; his subject was the political and economic plight of Algeria in its role as a colony of France. During those same years, he helped to found a theater group, for which he acted, directed, and did some writing, and he was a candidate for an advanced degree in philosophy at the University of Algiers. At times, he had to interrupt his studies because of ill health; he had contracted tuberculosis in 1930, at the age of seventeen, and was subject to periodic attacks from it for the rest of his life. When only twenty-one, he made a rather impulsive marriage that ended in separation within a year and eventual divorce. He worked at a number of odd jobs before becoming a full-time journalist, and he was active enough in politics in the 1930's to have become, for a few months, a member of the Algerian Communist Party. Altogether, his Algerian youth had been a difficult and turbulent experience, yet it had also been a time of growth and self-discovery, and he looked back on those years ever after with a special nostalgia for the sun, sand, sea, and simplicity of life that he felt had formed him and made him what he had become. Early in 1940, with a war in progress and the newspaper for which he worked closed down, Camus found himself forced to leave Algeria in order to make a living. He went to Paris to work for a Paris newspaper--a job procured for him by his older friend Pascal Pia, with whom he had worked on the Algiers newspaper before it folded. Within a year, the Paris job ended, and Camus, who had married again, returned to Algeria with his wife. They lived in Oran, his wife's hometown, and while she worked as a teacher, Camus worked at his writing projects, completing both the novel The Stranger and the essay The Myth of Sisyphus and arranging for their publication in Paris by Gallimard. By late 1942, Camus was so ill with tuberculosis that his wife persuaded him to seek a more favorable climate in the mountainous area of central France, which was then unoccupied territory. He went there alone, to continue writing, and found himself cut off from all contact with his family when the Allies invaded North Africa and the Germans occupied the rest of France as a defensive measure. During this period of isolation, Camus began to sketch out his next novel, The Plague. He also began to make frequent trips to Paris to see literary friends. His publisher, Gallimard, not only sent him royalties for The Stranger, which sold quite well, but also helped Camus by putting him on the Gallimard payroll as a reader--a position he enjoyed so much that he continued to fulfill it for the rest of his life. Late in 1943, Camus moved to Paris to be where the literary action was, increasingly associating with those friends who were in the Resistance movement, with which Camus was strongly sympathetic. Before long, Camus joined the Resistance and was assigned the task of writing for the Resistance newspaper Combat. After the liberation of Paris in 1944, Combat went aboveground as a daily newspaper, and Camus was for a time its editor. He had become part of the Paris literary world, had met its best-known figures--Sartre, André Malraux, and many others--and had achieved a certain fame. By that time, it was clear that he would never go back to Algeria to live. As soon as it was possible for her to do so, Camus's wife joined him in Paris, and in September of 1945 she gave birth to twins, a boy and a girl. By war's end, Camus was not only a confirmed Parisian but also a domesticated one, with a family to support. In the postwar years, Camus's fame quickly began to spread outside France--The Stranger appeared in English translation in 1946 and was an immediate sensation--and Camus took up the life of a lionized man of letters, dropping all employment except for his work with Gallimard and making lecture tours to foreign countries, including the United States. The publication of The Plague in 1947 was hailed by critics as the fulfillment of his great promise as a writer, and that book became one of the best sellers of the postwar era, making Camus economically secure for the first time. Success and fame seemed to make him artistically insecure, however--there were suddenly too many demands from admirers, too many intrusions into his privacy and working time, and, above all, too much self-doubt about his own powers for him to be able to live up to his public's expectations of him. Camus soon began to experience a crisis of literary sterility. It took him until 1951 to complete the essay The Rebel, begun nearly ten years earlier, and throughout the first half of the decade of the 1950's he published nothing and was rumored to have a permanent case of writer's block. The outbreak of violence in Algeria and the campaign for independence, which began in 1952, added severely to Camus's troubled state, and the controversial articles he wrote in that period on the Algerian question certainly lost him many friends and much support. His unhappy attempt to be the voice of reason and conciliation at a time in the dispute when opinions had already become hopelessly polarized ("If you are not with us, you are against us") is poignantly described in the powerful tale "The Guest," one of the best stories in the collection Exile and the Kingdom. Camus emerged from this period of intense personal suffering and frustration by venting his feelings in the short, bitterly satiric novel The Fall, published in 1956--his first work of fiction in nearly ten years, as his detractors were quick to point out. Nevertheless, the comic verve of the work attracted many readers, even though its intended meanings often seemed obscure to them. The book sold well, and Camus's reputation rebounded somewhat, especially outside France. The publication of the volume of short stories Exile and the Kingdom the following year earned for him additional respect as a writer who still had something to say. Internationally, his reputation peaked with the award of the Nobel Prize later that same year. Reinvigorated by the successes of 1956 and 1957, Camus was, as the decade ended, once again confidently and productively at work, with the usual three or four projects going simultaneously, one of which was an autobiographical novel about his youth in Algeria, to be called "Le Premier Homme" (the first man). His "block" seemed to be definitively overcome, and friends and family who spent Christmas of 1959 with him at the country retreat he had purchased in southern France recalled that he was in a generally optimistic frame of mind about his career. Fate, however, abruptly shattered that optimism. Camus's career came to a premature--and, he would have said, absurd--end only a few days after that happy Christmas. On January 4, 1960, Michel Gallimard, nephew of Camus's publisher, lost control of his car, in which Camus was riding as a passenger, just outside the tiny village of Villeblevin, and crashed into a tree. Camus, who had passed his forty-sixth birthday only two months before, died instantly. The evolution of the author's work strongly suggests that a banal motor accident cut him off when he seemed, finally, to have mastered his craft and to be entering his prime creative years. Analysis Two persistent themes animate all of Albert Camus's writing and underlie his artistic vision: One is the enigma of the universe, which is breathtakingly beautiful yet indifferent to life; the other is the enigma of man, whose craving for happiness and meaning in life remains unextinguished by his full awareness of his own mortality and of the sovereign indifference of his environment. At the root of every novel, every play, every essay, even every entry in his notebooks can be found Camus's incessant need to probe and puzzle over the ironic double bind that he perceived to be the essence of the human condition: Man is endowed with the imagination to conceive an ideal existence, but neither his circumstances nor his own powers permit its attainment. The perception of this hopeless double bind made inescapable for Camus the obligation to face up to an overriding moral issue for man: Given man's circumscribed condition, are there honorable terms on which his life can be lived? A Happy Death In his earliest attempt at casting these themes in fictional form, Camus made use of the traditional novel of personal development, or bildungsroman, to describe one young man's encounters with life, love, and death. The result was an episodic novel, obviously based on his own experiences but composed in the third person and so lacking in unity and coherence as to betray the central idea on which he wished to focus: the problem of accepting death. He called the novel A Happy Death and showed his hero resolutely fixing his consciousness on the inanimate world around him, striving to become one with the stones and achieve a happy death by blending gently and painlessly into the silent harmony of the universe while retaining his lucidity until his last breath. The book's last sentence strives to convince the reader by rhetoric that the hero has indeed achieved the happy death he sought: "And stone among the stones, he returned in the joy of his heart to the truth of motionless worlds." Camus seems to have sensed, however, that the rhetoric was unconvincing and that the ideal of a happy death was an illusion. Perhaps he even recognized that his hero's struggle to remain conscious of life until his last breath was, in reality, a protest against death and a contradiction of his desire to make the transition to death serene and imperceptible. It was doubtless some such sense of the book's failure that convinced Camus not to publish this work, composed when he was not yet twenty-five. Its posthumous publication has given scholars the opportunity to see Camus's first halting steps in trying to formulate the subtle and complex themes of the novels that were to make him great. The Stranger The Stranger, Camus's second attempt at writing a novel, includes a number of the scenes, characters, and situations found in A Happy Death (Mersault, the hero of A Happy Death, becomes Meursault in The Stranger). A detailed comparison of the two novels, however, makes it clear that The Stranger, which appeared in 1942, four years and many events after Camus abandoned A Happy Death, is a wholly different work in both conception and theme. No longer preoccupied with happiness in death, Camus turned his attention in The Stranger to the problem of happiness in life, to man's irrational and desperate need to find meaning in existence. His protagonist, Meursault, is not the frail, sophisticated, death-haunted figure of the earlier novel, but rather a robust primitive who seems eerily devoid of the normal attitudes, values, and culturally induced feelings of his society, as though he had been brought up on some other planet--a "stranger" in the fullest sense of the word. Moreover, Camus hit upon the device of first-person narration as the most effective and dramatic means of confronting his readers with his disturbing protagonist, so alien to his environment. The famous opening words shock the reader into an awareness of the disquieting strangeness of the narrator: "Mama died today. Or perhaps yesterday, I don't know. I received a telegram from the home: `Mother passed away. Funeral tomorrow. Yours truly.' That doesn't mean anything. Perhaps it was yesterday." Shrewdly focusing on a mother's death as a revealing touchstone of humankind's most deeply ingrained social attitudes, these words achieve a double effect: They tell the reader that the son of the deceased mother can speak of her death without any of the expected symptoms of grief, but, at the same time, they remind the reader that the rest of society, having no familial ties with the deceased, habitually masks its indifference under empty rhetorical formulas such as the telegraphic announcement. This dual perspective is fully developed in subsequent chapters as the basic theme of the book: While Meursault shows by his own forthright account of his life that he does not share his society's conventional notions about death, religion, family, friendship, love, marriage, and ambition, he also manages to reveal--often without realizing it--that those conventional notions are often shallow, hypocritical, or delusory and constitute the pathetic inventions of a society desperate to invest its existence with a meaning it does not have. Thus, when Meursault, asked by his boss whether he would be interested in an assignment to establish a Paris office for his boss's business, says that he has no interest in living in Paris, the reader recognizes that Meursault simply does not believe that material surroundings can make his life any different. At the same time, the boss's dismayed reaction to Meursault's indifference to opportunity subtly disturbs the reader with the suspicion that, after all, the boss may have a touching but misplaced faith in the value of ambition. A similar moment occurs when Meursault and his girlfriend, Marie, discuss love and marriage. The reader is surely made uncomfortable by Meursault's casualness in saying that he does not know what love is, but that he is willing to marry Marie if she wants it. It is, however, a different order of discomfort that overcomes the reader when Marie insists that marriage is a very serious matter and Meursault calmly replies that it is not. All of part 2 of the novel, devoted to Meursault's trial after he has killed an Arab, brings additional and even more disturbing changes on the same dual perspective, with Meursault showing no awareness or acceptance of conventional beliefs about justice, murder, legal procedures, and the nature of evidence, while all the "normal" people involved show unexamined or self-deceiving convictions about all such matters. The ironic meaning that emerges from the novel is that although Meursault is guilty of taking a life, society sentences him to death not for his crime, with which it seems incapable of dealing, but for his refusal to live by society's values, for not "playing the game." As Camus himself laconically remarked, his novel means that any man who does not weep at his mother's funeral risks being condemned to death. Critics have regularly protested that, in The Stranger, Camus manipulates his readers' emotions, inducing sympathy for Meursault even though he is a moral monster and ridiculing everyone else as representative of a society afraid to face reality, hence threatened by Meursault's clear-eyed and unsentimental acceptance of the world. Such protests are justified, however, only if one assumes that Camus intended The Stranger to be a realistic representation of the world, holding the mirror up to nature. In fact, Meursault is not a believable human figure, the events of the novel are but dimly evoked and unconvincingly motivated, and the very existence of the text itself, as Meursault's first-person account of events, is never explained. In The Stranger, Camus makes almost no concessions to the conventional procedures of realism, constructing instead a kind of mythic tale of philosophical intent to dramatize an imaginary confrontation between man's basic nature as a simple, sensual being and his grandly narcissistic self-image as an intelligent being whose every gesture has transcendent significance. Read as a kind of poetic allegory rather than as an exemplary tale of human conduct, The Stranger is seen as a powerful depiction of man's painfully divided soul, at once joyous for the gift of life and miserable at the absence of any discernible purpose in that life and at the indifference of the surrounding universe. Viewed that way, The Stranger deserves its reputation as one of the great works of art of the first half of the twentieth century. The Plague The allegorical mode is given a much more detailed and realistically human foundation in Camus's next novel, The Plague, regarded by many critics as his masterpiece. This time, Camus makes a concerted effort to create a strong sense of place in a real setting and to depict fully rounded and believable characters. With the vividness of concrete details and actual place-names, Camus takes the reader to the city of Oran, in Algeria--a city of which he had intimate personal knowledge, having lived there for an extended period--and describes the impact on that real place of an imaginary outbreak of bubonic plague. The reader shares the first frightening discovery of rats dying in the streets and apartment house hallways and experiences the spread of terror and panic as the first human victims of the plague appear in random locations around the city. Soon, the city is ordered closed, quarantined from the rest of the world, and the authorities try to mobilize the trapped population and lay down strict sanitation rules to try to limit the impact of a disease they know they cannot cure. The heart of the novel is the depiction of the various ways in which individuals react to the fear and isolation imposed by this sudden state of siege, in which the invading army is invisible. To convey the variety of responses to such an extreme and concentrated crisis in human affairs, Camus deliberately eschews the convenient device of the omniscient narrator, making the depiction of every event and scene an eyewitness account in some form: the spoken words of reports or dialogues, the written words of letters or private diaries, and, as the main device, the written record of the daily observations of the novel's main character, Dr. Rieux. Whereas in The Stranger first-person narration is primarily a device of characterization, used to portray an alien figure's disconcertingly remote and hollow personality, in The Plague it is a device of narrative realism, used to reduce devastatingly incomprehensible events to a human, hence believable, scale by portraying the way these events are seen by a representative group of ordinary citizens. The Plague differs from its predecessor not only technically but also thematically. Camus's inspiration for The Plague was no philosophical abstraction but a specific event of his own life: the frustration and despair he experienced during the war, when the aftermath of the Allied invasion of North Africa trapped his wife in Oran (while he was in the Resistance organization in the Massif Central) and cut off all communication between them. That experience started the fictional idea germinating in his mind, and a literary model--Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year (1722)--gave the idea more concrete form. Central to the idea of The Plague, certainly, is the theme of man's encounter with death rather than the theme of man's interpretation of life, which dominates The Stranger. Indeed, with The Plague, Camus was returning to the preoccupation of his earliest work of fiction, A Happy Death, but with a major new emphasis. The Plague concerns not an individual's quest in relation to death but a collectivity's involuntary confrontation with it. In The Plague, death is depicted as a chance outgrowth of an indifferent nature that suddenly, and for no apparent reason, becomes an evil threat to humankind. Death in the form of a plague is unexpected, irrational--a manifestation of that absurdity, that radical absence of meaning in life that is a major underlying theme of The Stranger. In The Plague, however, Camus proposes the paradox that when death is a manifestation of the absurd, it galvanizes something in person's spirit that enables the individual to join with others to fight against death and thus give meaning and purpose to life. From evil may come happiness, this novel seems to suggest: It is a painful irony of the human condition that individuals often discover their own capacities for courage and for fraternal affection--that is, for happiness--only if they are forced by the threat of evil to make the discovery. The hint of optimism in this paradoxical theme--happiness is, after all, possible for some if the circumstances are dire enough--is, however, insufficient to offset the fundamental pessimism of The Plague. A glance at the fates of the main characters will make the basic bleakness of this work manifest. At the center of the action is Bernard Rieux, a doctor who risks his life every day to lead the fight against the plague and who, more than anyone else in the novel, experiences the satisfaction and the joy of finding himself equal to a heroic task and feeling with others a fraternal bond engendered by their common struggle. His satisfaction is brief and his joys few, however. He knows that he cannot cure victims of the plague and must suppress his sympathy for them if he is to be effective in palliating their suffering and in keeping them from infecting others. The result of this bind is that Rieux strikes his patients and their families as cold and indifferent; he ends up being hated by those he is trying to help. The fraternal bond with others who are trying to help develops in only a few instances, since most of his fellow citizens are too frightened or egocentric to join him in the effort. Moreover, where the bond does develop, it proves too tenuous to penetrate his natural isolation. The limits of the fraternal bond are most graphically expressed by the moment in the novel when Rieux and Jean Tarrou (a traveler through whose journal part of the novel is related), seeing the first signs that the plague is receding, decide to go for a swim together, in celebration. The point is carefully made that, while each feels a sense of fraternity with the other as they swim in the same water, each is also conscious of being ultimately quite alone in the joy and freedom of moving serenely through the water and forgetting the plague for a short while. In spite of the shared emotion that unites them, each feels the swim to be predominantly a solitary experience. Finally, when the plague does end, Rieux finds himself strangely empty and alienated from the joyous crowds now once more filling the streets of Oran; the urgency of his task no longer exists to summon forth his courage. Indeed, because he has lost those dearest to him--his wife and Tarrou--he feels more alone than ever after the plague has gone. The other important characters fare no better than Rieux: Tarrou is killed by the plague; Joseph Grand suffers from it but recovers and resumes his self-imposed task of writing a novel, of which he has yet to complete the first sentence, because he has endlessly revised and recast it in a fruitless search for perfection; Rembart, a journalist who is trapped in Oran by the plague, leaves when it is over, but without having written anything about it, having found his profession inadequate to such an awesome task; and Cottard, who engages in black-market profiteering during the plague, goes crazy when the plague ends, shooting citizens at random until he is caught and killed by the police. There is little in this novel to nourish an optimistic outlook, except for the hesitant and tentative statement of Rieux, at the end of his chronicle, that amid the ravages of pestilence, one learns that "there are, in men, more things to admire than to despise." The Plague is the longest, the most realistic, and artistically the most impressive of Camus's novels, offering a richly varied cast of characters and a coherent and riveting plot, bringing an integrated world memorably to life while stimulating the reader's capacity for moral reflection. In spite of its vivid realism, The Plague is no less mythical and allegorical in its impact than is The Stranger. When first published, The Plague was widely interpreted as a novel about the German Occupation and the French Resistance, with the plague symbolizing the evil presence of the Nazis. Since the 1940's, however, more universal themes and symbols have been discovered in the book, including the frighteningly random nature of evil and the perception that humankind's conquest of evil is never more than provisional, that the struggle will always have to be renewed. It has also been widely recognized that The Plague is, in significant degree, a profound meditation on the frustrating limits of human language both as a means of communication and as a means of representing the truth about human existence. The discovery of that theme has made The Plague the most modern of Camus's novels, the one with the most to say to future generations of Camus's readers. For nearly a decade after the publication of The Plague, impeded by the consequences of fame, Camus struggled to find enough time and privacy to compose a new work of fiction and to complete philosophical and theatrical writings begun before he wrote The Plague. In the mid-1950's, he began to compose a group of short stories with the common theme of the condition of the exile, and it was one of those stories that he was suddenly inspired to expand into a short novel written in the form of a monologue and published in 1956 as The Fall. The Fall The product of a troubled time in Camus's life, The Fall is a troubling work, full of brilliant invention, dazzling wordplay, and devastating satire, but so profoundly ironic and marked by so many abrupt shifts in tone as to leave the reader constantly off balance and uncertain of the author's viewpoint or purpose. This difficulty in discerning the book's meaning is inherent in its basic premise, for the work records a stream of talk--actually one side of a dialogue--by a Frenchman who haunts a sleazy bar in the harbor district of Amsterdam and who does not trouble to hide the fact that most of what he says, including his name, is invented. Because he is worldly and cultivated, his talk is fascinating and seizes the attention of his implied interlocutor (who is also, of course, the reader) with riveting force. The name he gives himself is Jean-Baptiste Clamence, a name that evokes the biblical figure of the prophet John the Baptist as the voice crying in the wilderness (vox clamantis in deserto) and that coincides neatly with the occupation he claims to follow, also of his own invention: judge-penitent. When Clamence remarks to his interlocutor, near the end of his five-day monologue, "I know what you are thinking: it is very difficult to distinguish the true from the false in what I am telling you. I confess that you are right," the reader feels that Camus has suddenly made a personal intervention into the novel in order to warn the reader that he or she has been deliberately manipulated by Clamence's playacting and has every right to feel bewildered. Camus thus signals to the reader that the book's troubling impact has been calculated and deliberate from the start. Only in the closing pages of the novel does he clarify the purpose of Clamence's invented narrative and the meaning of his invented calling, but the explanation comes too late--deliberately so, for the reader can never be free of doubt about whether Clamence's entire performance has been designed to raise questions concerning what is true and what is false, what is good and what is evil. Clamence's "explanation" is, in fact, the most unsettling element in the book. He pointedly admits to his interlocutor that he has been penitently "confessing" his own sins in a carefully controlled pattern, only in order to induce his interlocutor to "confess" in turn, thus enabling Clamence to play the role of judge. Clamence begins his "confession" by describing his successful career in Paris as a much-admired lawyer known for his defense of "widows and orphans"--that is, the helpless and disadvantaged of society. He had every reason to see himself as a man of virtue, he says, until he began to "hear" a woman's mocking laughter whenever he looked at himself in the mirror with those feelings of self-satisfaction. The mocking laughter reminded him that his lawyerly altruism was only a mask for selfishness and forced him to recall an incident he had tried to forget: Crossing a bridge over the Seine one night, he had seen a young woman throw herself into the water and had made no effort to rescue her or to get help, instead walking hurriedly away without looking back. The mocking laughter was thus his conscience taunting him with the suppressed memory of his guilt: The admired man of virtue was in reality a fraud, a sinner like everyone else. Clamence goes on to explain that thereafter he had found it increasingly difficult to continue his career in Paris and live with his guilt. At the same time, he could not give up his need to feel morally superior to others. His solution to this private inner conflict, he then declares, was his brilliant invention of a new career for himself as a judge-penitent. He closed his Paris office and moved to the harbor section of Amsterdam--which, he notes, is in the center of the concentric circles of Amsterdam's canals, like the ninth circle of Hell in Dante's Inferno, and is, moreover, "the site of one of the greatest crimes of modern history," meaning the Nazi destruction of the entire Jewish community of Amsterdam. In these new surroundings, he not only could assuage his guilt by the feeling that he was in the ninth circle of Hell, where he belonged, but also could have access to the endless succession of tourists who gravitated to that spot, whom he could "help," in such propitious surroundings, to recognize their own guilt as well. His "help" consisted of a recital of his own sins, so arranged as to emphasize their universality, thus subtly prompting his listener to confess the same sins in turn. In this way, Clamence uses his perfected performance as a penitent to put himself in the deeply satisfying position of judge, hearing his listener's confession while basking in the warm glow of his own moral superiority. Because everyone, without exception, is a guilty sinner, says Clamence, he has solved the dilemma of how to live happily with his nagging guilt. The essential secret, he says, is to accuse oneself first--and of all seven cardinal sins--thereby earning the right to accuse everyone else. Clamence's "solution," which concludes The Fall, is a burlesque of moral reasoning, underscoring the bitterness of the satire that is at the heart of this novel. Like Camus's other novels, The Fall is an exploration of man's moral nature and his passionate search for happiness in a world that is indifferent to such spiritual values, but unlike any of his other works of fiction, The Fall is both unrelievedly pessimistic and irreducibly ambiguous. In Clamence's confession, is Camus's intention to castigate himself for having taken his own fame too seriously and thus expiate his personal sin of pride? Many critics read the book that way when it appeared in 1956. Or is he using Clamence, rather, to avenge himself on his enemies, whom he thought too quick to adopt a tone of moral superiority in judging his position on the Algerian Civil War? Many other critics saw The Fall that way. Generations later, it seems reasonable to suggest that both interpretations have validity. The Fall is a comic masterpiece, remarkably parallel in its tone, its themes, and its ambiguity to Camus's short story "Jonas," written about the same time--a story in which, everyone agrees, the author attempted to come to terms with his artistic sterility and with the conflict he felt between public obligation and the need for privacy. "Jonas" ends with a celebrated verbal ambiguity: The painter-hero of the story, after long meditation, translates his thought to canvas by means of a single word, but it is impossible to discern whether that word is "solitary" or "solidary." It is tempting to conclude, using that short story as analogue, that the ambiguity of The Fall is also deliberate and that Camus meant his work both as private confession and public condemnation. Those two meanings, the one private and the other public, are surely intended to combine retrospectively in the reader's mind to form Camus's universal condemnation of man's moral bankruptcy. As the title is meant to suggest, The Fall is a modern parable about Original Sin and the Fall of Man. There is reason to believe that the unrelenting pessimism of The Fall was not Camus's final word on humanity but was rather the expression of a temporary discouragement that he had almost succeeded in dispelling at the time of his death. In 1959, he was at work on a new novel, to be called "Le Premier Homme," the theme of which was to be a celebration of the formative experience of his Algerian youth. The First Man was not published until long after his death, in 1994; it addresses from a particularly personal perspective the subject that, at bottom, always animated Camus's fiction--the enigma of human beings' struggle against the indifference of creation and the unquenchable thirst for moral significance in life. Camus's unforgettable contribution to the ongoing dialogue inspired by that vast subject is embodied in the three great novels he managed to complete before his untimely death. Murray Sachs Other Major WorksShort Fiction: L'Exil et le royaume, 1957 (Exile and the Kingdom, 1958). Plays: Révolte dans les Asturies, pb. 1936 (with others); Caligula, pb. 1944 (wr. 1938-1939; English translation, 1948); Le Malentendu, pr., pb. 1944 (The Misunderstanding, 1948); L'État de siège, pr., pb. 1948 (State of Siege, 1958); Les Justes, pr. 1949 (The Just Assassins, 1958); Caligula, and Three Other Plays, 1958; Les Possédés, pr., pb. 1959 (adaptation of Fyodor Dostoevski's novel Besy; The Possessed, 1960). Nonfiction: L'Envers et l'endroit, 1937 ("The Wrong Side and the Right Side," 1968); Noces, 1938 ("Nuptials," 1968); Le Mythe de Sisyphe, 1942 (The Myth of Sisyphus, 1955); L'Homme révolté, 1951 (The Rebel, 1956); L'Été, 1954 (Summer, 1968); Carnets: Mai 1935-février 1942, 1962 (Notebooks: 1935-1942, 1963); Carnets: Janvier 1942-mars 1951, 1964 (Notebooks: 1942-1951, 1965); Lyrical and Critical Essays, 1968 (includes "The Wrong Side and the Right Side," "Nuptials," and "Summer"); Correspondance, 1939-1947, 2000; Camus à "Combat": Éditoriaux et articles d'Albert Camus, 1944-1947, 2002 (Camus at "Combat": Writing, 1944-1947, 2006). Bibliography Bronner, Stephen Eric. Camus: Portrait of a Moralist. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. Provides a thorough, detailed account of the life and work of Camus, but assumes that the reader is familiar with key places and figures in Camus's life. Black-and-white photos and a chronology put events and Camus's influence on history and literature into perspective. Carroll, David. Albert Camus, the Algerian: Colonialism, Terrorism, Justice. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. Analyzes Camus's novels, short stories, and political essays within the context of the author's complicated relationship with his Algerian background. Concludes that Camus's work reflects his understanding of both the injustice of colonialism and the tragic nature of Algeria's struggle for independence. Includes bibliography and index. Cruickshank, John. Albert Camus and the Literature of Revolt. 1959. Reprint. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1978. Important work on Camus as writer and philosopher includes a general discussion of his principal ideas as they relate to the literature and historical events of the period. Offers interesting comments concerning American literary influences on Camus. Hughes, Edward J., ed. The Cambridge Companion to Camus. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Examines Camus's major works as well as his life, including his poverty-stricken childhood, his education, and his political beliefs. Includes reference citations in English and French. Kellman, Steven G., ed. "The Plague": Fiction and Resistance. New York: Twayne, 1993. Discusses the novel in separate sections devoted to literary and historical context and to different readings of the work. Individual chapters examine major characters as well as the mysterious narrator. King, Adele, ed. Camus's "L'Étranger": Fifty Years On. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992. Addresses the contexts and influences of the novel, its reception and influence on other writers, textual studies, and comparative studies. Includes an informative introduction. Lottman, Herbert R. Albert Camus. 1979. Corte Madera, Calif.: Gingko Press, 1997. Extremely well-documented biography is based on extensive interviews with people who knew Camus well. McCarthy, Patrick. Camus. New York: Random House, 1982. A meticulous attempt to reconstruct Camus through his childhood and early influences. Also covers every major phase of the author's life and work. Includes notes and brief bibliography. Rhein, Phillip H. Albert Camus. Rev. ed. Boston: Twayne, 1989. Useful introduction to Camus's life and work includes chapters on his childhood, his understanding of the absurd, his career in the theater, his view of humanity and rebellion. Includes notes and bibliography. Rizzuto, Anthony. Camus: Love and Sexuality. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998. Presents both biographical material and literary and psychological analysis in addressing the evolution of Camus's use of the themes of love and sex in his fiction. Includes bibliography and index. Sprintzen, David. Camus: A Critical Examination. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988. Delves into the biographical experience that informs Camus's work. Includes chapters on The Stranger, Camus's drama, his interpretation of social dislocation, society and rebellion, revolt and history, metaphysical rebellion, confrontations with modernity, and the search for a style of life. Includes notes and bibliography. Todd, Olivier. Albert Camus: A Life. Translated by Benjamin Ivry. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997. Making use of materials such as unpublished letters made available after the death of Camus's widow, this detailed biography reveals much about Camus's love affairs and his many important friendships. |
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