Between the idea
And the reality
Between the notion
And the act
Falls the shadow
T. S. Eliot, The Hollow Men
How can we live without grace? We must really get down to it and do what Christianity has never done: concern ourselves with the damned. Camus, Carnet
One does not discover the absurd without being tempted to write a manual of happiness. Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus
Aggressive, stubborn, refusal of systems. Aphorisms from now on. Camus, Carnet
Although he frequently disowned any such appellation, Albert Camus was a key figure in the existentialist movement, which swept across Europe and America in the mid-twentieth century. In his polemic and fiction, in his notebooks and plays, he helped to fashion a philosophy of the absurd, a philosophy which saw the problem of individual existence as beginning with a confrontation with a disconcerting sense of meaninglessness. Camus’s work began by tackling the nihilism which Nietzsche had seen as the indelible mark of a post-Christian civilisation. His struggle gave birth to a number of original metaphors and irradiating concepts which cast a beam on the plight of the self in the modern era. He brought a supreme lucidity to the dark knot of human existence.
In an entry dated September 1950 in one of his many notebooks, Camus jotted down: What I have to say is more important than what I am. Stand aside – and delete. It is as if the writer is catching a contradiction in his thinking, even as he is thinking. The first idea is clear enough: what he is saying matters more than who he is. Then the second idea charges in, demanding a distance from the first thought and its immediate negation. Why is the first thought deleted? Because in the second move of his mind it no longer seems valid. The thought cannot be isolated from the thinker.
What matters, first and foremost, is existence: thinking in and through existence. In an afterword to his novella The Outsider, Camus wrote of his anti-hero, Meursault: He says what he is. This is the seal of authenticity. It is the recognition of the existential moment, the true self. For this author there is no higher accolade.
In his notebooks, which range across the whole of western culture from Socrates to Montaigne, from Nietzsche to Heidegger, the implications of Camus’s position become more and more clear. Later, he writes: I don’t like people’s secrets. But I am interested in their confessions. Again, the concern is not with the object of knowledge, but with the subject who is confessing: the mood, manner and mode of his or her being-in-the-world. The pang of subjectivity. Among his prolific literary and philosophical reflections, Camus often included miniature narratives taken from conversations and newspapers, which exhibit the human predicament and the feelings underlying it. One account reads: In the camp, a proud intellectual is put in the cell where everyone can spit at him. The whole of his life after then: survive in order to kill. Another reads: During the flogging at Buchenwald, an opera singer is forced to sing his great arias. There is no further amplification; no justification. The minimal descriptions are left, stark metaphors of the self in extremis.
Written in 1950, the exact middle of the twentieth century, these bleak narratives reveal a fundamental disenchantment and anguish. For two or three decades, a sense of deep unease spread like a dark shadow across the whole of Europe. Many individuals felt like refugees living in the aftermath of some ill-defined, but all-consuming, catastrophe. Perhaps no book expressed this feeling of estrangement more concisely than The Outsider.
Published in the original French in 1942, the book quickly became a cult novella permeating an entire culture, from erudite philosophical literature to pop songs, t-shirts and films. It gave compelling form to the elusive and painful emotions of a post-war generation which had lost faith in both Christianity and the Enlightenment, and had devastating reasons to doubt the Romantic concept of the innate goodness of humankind. The work made the concept of homo absurdus wholly cogent. It was, as we shall see, a form of auto-mythography – for Camus, born into the ‘pied-noir’ working-class on the border between Tunisia and Algeria, French and not French, identified with his central figure of alienation. This was fiction as unconscious memoir.
Around 1960, most intelligent people in the western world felt themselves to be outsiders too, on the social edge, dispossessed, without a metaphysical habitat. In a short span of time Camus’s novella became a modern myth. In 1956 Colin Wilson stole the title for his polemical book The Outsider, now long forgotten, and provided a popular history of estranged and creative figures working against the zeitgeist, from Blake to Rilke to Nijinsky and Camus. It came out in the same week as John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, and was reprinted no fewer than eight times in the same year of publication. Alienation and anxiety seeped into the torn fabric of post- war civilisation. To be authentic was to be on the other side of bourgeois society, in a state of perplexed but absolute rebellion. The rebel was the answer to the tribal banalities of mundane existence.
What was it about Camus’s The Outsider that made it so formative in the story of the self? It has much to do with the main character, the estranged Meursault. While always saying what he feels, he seems for much of the story to be imprisoned in a narrow cage of unexamined habits. He sleeps when he is tired; eats when he is hungry; has sex when aroused. He never questions others and never interrogates himself. A marginal innocent, he lives unconsciously and initiates nothing. His daily life is casual, uncomplaining, almost anodyne. A few days after the death of his mother (for whom he appears to show no grief), Mersault randomly shoots an Arab on the beach in Algiers. He does not exactly choose to murder; it happens by chance, a key word in the vocabulary of the novella. Certainly, if the apocalyptic sun had not been blazing so intensely in the blue Mediterranean sky, the killing would not have happened.
From this climactic moment, placed at the very centre of the story, Meursault begins to change; he becomes more and more conscious of his individual existence. He becomes self-reflexive and self-assertive. Confronting the falsifying rhetoric of both courtroom and chaplain and anticipating his imminent execution, Meursault, finally, feels a pitch of revulsion against a system which has cast judgement on him. His own being is affirmed. Openly facing his predicament, he embraces existence, a passion for life against the nullity of death. This is the existential moment.
Camus’s novella is all about the conditions of the modern contingent self, a person outside the social system, without traditions of belief or inherited values. It is presented as a dramatic monologue narrated by Meursault himself. The style is the man; his particular way of talking reveals much about his being. His manner of speaking is mostly confined to the past imperfect and the past continuous. There are very few qualifiers. His way of talking is flat and anecdotal. One event simply follows another in an almost arbitrary fashion. The narrative thus accumulates, rather than evolves, through a series of static and isolated events. There is no forward movement through the animated flow of time, past into present, present into future: I had trouble getting up… I caught the tram down to the bathing station at the port. I dived straight into the narrows. It was full of young people. In the water I met Marie Cordona, who used to be a typist at the office. I fancied her at the time, and I think she fancied me too. This and this and this,without causal connectives and without introspective speculation or focussed intentionality. Even much of the dialogue is recorded not as direct speech, but as indirect discourse. This adds further to the sense of life as a series of instants, petrified and disconnected.
Meursault’s manner of speaking may protect him from the Latinate language of high abstraction and complex elaboration, which so easily smothers immediate experience. But it also tends to imprison him in a one- dimensional world of mindless repetition and temporal dislocation. The limits of his speech reveal the limits of his world.
Indeed, the central theme of The Outsider relates to language, and how it can close or open a universe. Camus is particularly aware of the way in which a lexicon of urbane abstractions can choke the quick of life. This smooth impersonal language is represented at the very outset of the story in the telegram which Meursault receives (Mother passed away today. Funeral tomorrow. Yours sincerely), and it is there at the end when he ponders his imminent death using the abstract language of the legal system (I would be decapitated in a public square in the name of the French people). But this kind of language cannot grasp the existential moment. The abstract words convert what is mobile and elusive into a series of dead objects – ‘decapitation’, ‘public square’, ‘the French people’ – and, in the process, anaesthetise the emotions that belong to the hidden experience. The language reifies. It is almost impossible to think in and through existence with such a vocabulary. It is, no doubt, largely for this reason that many of the existentialist writers – Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, Sartre as well as Camus – turned again and again to fiction, myth, fable, drama, autobiography and poetry to embody their subtle and fraught insights.
One of the peculiar strengths of Mersault is that he stubbornly resists common linguistic usage. He is able to hold at bay the multitude of clichés manufactured in the collective imagination of unreflective social life. At times, he doesn’t hear what is being said. He falls asleep or stares at the sky. He has no intention of adopting a self shaped by others.
One obvious counter-identity is put forward by the prosecutor during the trial. The prosecution have a stereotypical image of Mersault which, for all its plausibility, fails to fit the man. He is cast as a person who, having no feelings for his mother, is a criminal type, and thus able to murder without compunction. Here is a complete character kit. Donning such a persona,
Mersault could easily escape execution and, after a short prison sentence, return to society, a reformed man, even an insider. All that is required is some conventional role-play. The accused has only to express sorrow at the death of his mother and remorse for the killing. A few tears in court, an abject bow of the head. However, Mersault consistently resists the false image, the fabricated expectation of the collective psyche. A perpetual rebel, he refuses to join the club. His fidelity is always to himself: to what he feels and knows.
Then, towards the end of the novella, Camus makes a dramatic and questionable turn. The text begins to allude to the figure of Christ. First, the magistrate starts referring to Mersault as ‘Mr Antichrist’. Then, by a dialectical turn, ‘Mr Antichrist’ starts to become, more and more, Christ himself. The opposites converge. Like Christ, Mersault is silent before his accusers, while the very last sentence of the book begins: Pour que tout soit consommé: In order for all to be consummated. The phrase deliberately echoes the resigned and resonant consummatum est of John’s Gospel. Mersault’s desire for a large crowd of mocking spectators also alludes to the drama of the crucifixion. The absurd fool is made to mirror the divine fool. Once again, in the story of the self, from Augustine to Thomas ã Kempis, to Jung and Camus, we find de imitatione Christi … it as if Camus has suddenly stumbled upon an archetype of suffering and redemption for his modern dislocated story. In an afterword, written for the American edition in 1955, he wrote: So one wouldn’t be far wrong in seeing The Outsider as the story of a man who, without any heroic pretensions, agrees to die for the truth. I also once said, and again paradoxically, that I tried to make my character represent the only Christ that we deserve.
The truth? … The only Christ that we deserve? … Camus’s analogy may give the story some of its mythical semtex but surely it inflates the character of Mersault beyond his worth? If there is something missing in his solipsistic nature, it has to do with what Christ possessed in abundance: an ethical sensitivity to life. For, as the prosecution insists, it does seem true that Mersault does not feel any emotion over his mother’s death. Even Marie, his mistress, is not loved, but viewed as a reassuring object, offering little more than a glamourous smile and the possibility of a sexual thrill: a mannikin constructed for the Mediterranean male gaze. (One catches here a nasty whiff of misongyny so common in the story of the self, from Augustine to Petrarch, from Rousseau to Nietzsche.) But far worse is the fact that Mersault never acknowledges the humanity of the man he has killed. His existential rights are not confronted. The Arab does not even have a name. For Camus, the murder is a random event devoid of meaning. Yes, but the murder can also be read as a violent act of racism, directed by the unconscious of a colonial mentality. One outsider kills another outsider. How random is that? Mersault shows neither love, nor compassion, nor forgiveness, nor any awareness of the subjectivity of the life he has taken. A figure more unlike the historical Christ it is difficult to conceive.
Yet out of his heretical ‘no’ comes the secular benediction of ‘yes’; a pagan affirmation of the natural world and of all that lies beyond the smooth hypocrisy of the courtroom and the ensnaring dogmas of Christianity. And the story ends with a rhapsodic revelation almost religious in its intensity: I looked up at the mass of signs and stars in the night sky and laid myself open for the first time to the benign indifference of the world. And finding it so much like myself, in fact so fraternal, I realized that I’d been happy, and that I was still happy. Accompanying this affirmation is a bitter, Rousseau- like, rejection of society with its constraining edicts and collective evasions: For the final consummation and for me to feel less lonely, my last wish was that there should be a crowd of spectators at my execution and that they should greet me with cries of hatred.
Out of the objective absurdity erupts a lyrical authenticity, a Stoic’s epiphany worthy of Seneca or Marcus Aurelius, yet entirely different in mood because of its historical context, its late arrival in the long procession, at the end of shared collective values. Meursault’s account marks a halting journey from daily pre-reflective existence to existential enlightenment. In the first part of the novella we encounter self-estrangement through unconsciousness; in the second half an estrangement from society, with a new kind of lucid consciousness. The Outsider is, in brief, an unexpected story of metanoia, a narrative of individual transformation, albeit of affirmative nihilism, almost unique in the story of the self.
To understand better the estranged nature of Mersault we must turn to another literary source. Perhaps the greatest clue lies in the inspirational blueprint of the novella, Baudelaire’s prose poem L’Étranger.
Camus’s title pays explicit homage to the earlier work. In Baudelaire’s poem the estranged speaker denies any love for his mother (mère) or father (pére), for his friends (amis), for his fatherland (patrie), for money (l’or). He feels only an innate attraction to Beauty (la beauté) and, in the climactic last line, to: les nuages qui passent … lá-bas… lá-bas… les merveilleux nuages!: the clouds that are passing … over there … over there … the marvellous clouds! The ‘I’ of Baudelaire’s short poem bluntly rejects the claims of the dialogical and the ethical, to embrace what is fleeting and beautiful: the mysterious clouds drifting across the distant horizon. How similar this is to the existential position of Camus’s outsider.
For Mersault, by the end of the court case, there is only the lovely face of Maria Cordona, the lapping sea and the implacable fire of the huge sun, perpetually burning away to no purpose. The correspondence is striking. The novella is an amplification of the prose-poem through another literary genre. Following his predecessor, Camus’s homme énigmatique moves systematically from the complete denial of society, to the avowal of what is sensuous and beautiful, however ephemeral, however meaningless: the benign indifference of the natural world. It can be no accident that Mersault’s name may be a compound of two French words; mer for the sea, certainly, and possibly soleil for the sun. Having nothing to do with either history or civilization, these are the two things that he loves unconditionally. If we apply Kierkegaard’s schema of three developmental stages to life – the aesthetic, the ethical and the religious – we can see, at once, that both Baudelaire’s and Camus’s solitary outsiders have reached the first stage, but reject or have no conception of any further move.
However, Mersault is only one character for the reader to contemplate; one possible contemporary resolution to the perplexing enigma of the self.
The social dimension he disowns will be brought back into Camus’s later work, in what is often seen as his second cycle of writings, the epic novel The Plague (1947) and the related series of essays The Rebel (1951). If the ethical is absent in The Outsider, then it will return with the concept of solidarity, and the idea of the sacred, though shorn of the idea of personal immortality.
Camus’s writing never stayed still. It was radically open and experimental. Until his untimely death in 1960, his work was in a state of creative tension, always keen to transcend the status quo, always dialectical, always looking for the next possible move. An innovative writer, he forever wrestles with form, compulsively experiments with style and genre. One book comes out of another; there seems a dialectical logic of development, but the manner of exploration is unfailingly different. In his journal in the summer of 1938, Camus wrote: Absurdity is king, but love saves us from it. And in February 1942 he copied down the magisterial words of Marcus Aurelius: Wherever it is possible to live, it is possible to live well. These entries show ethical concerns, emerging at the time of writing The Outsider, but point way beyond its miniature canvas; they were to become his philosophical preoccupations in the years that followed. In some ways, they were latent answers to the dilemma posed by his solipsistic anti-hero. Somehow the existential self had to be placed inside the species of humanity and given some kind of historical background, however frayed, however discredited. For Camus it was a question of living the contradictions to the full, without flight into deceptive answers or intellectual fashions, like Sartrean Marxism. For the philosopher of the absurd, there were always unseen gaps and unforeseen consequences. Refusal of systems, he wrote, aphorisms from now on. And behind all the work, from Between Yes and No (1935) to the unfinished The First Man (being written around1959) lay the constant and disorientating awareness of the absurd.
What exactly was this feeling for the absurd? Where does it belong in the story of the self? And why did Camus suffer it so intensely?
The absurd has its origin in a smarting discrepancy between the desire for harmony and the irrational nature of the world. Between the idea and the reality/ Falls the shadow. As a young student doing his diploma in 1935, Camus made a study of the neo-Platonic philosopher, Plotinus. He was drawn to the metaphysical score of a sublime unfolding, each particular note having its place in the architectonic symphony of the whole; but he felt, simultaneously, that the cosmic ‘music’ did not correspond to the world as he experienced it, in the pulse, from moment to moment. The philosophy represented a yearning of the spirit which had no foundation. The transcendental music did not mirror the actual world that seemed adrift, indeterminate and void of meaning. Significantly, ‘absurd’ derives from the Latin absurdus denoting ‘inharmonious’ and meaning literally away from the right sound. In his journals, Camus records discordant narratives that jolt, notes that jar.
One such fragment found its way into The Outsider. In prison, Mersault discovers under his mattress a torn column of faded newspaper. It tells of a man who leaves his village to make a fortune. Years later, the man returns, now rich, with a wife and child. As a kind of practical joke he decides to stay, alone and incognito, in the small hotel his mother and sister are now running in the village. On the first night, as he sleeps, his mother and sister enter the room, club him to death and take the money. The next day, the wife arrives at the hotel to reveal the identity of the man. Realizing what they have done, the mother hangs herself and the sister throws herself into a well. As if to stamp indelibly the catastrophic bleakness of life on his mind, Mersault reads the story a thousand times, but his reaction is pragmatic and ‘street-wise’: On the one hand it was improbable. On the other hand, it was quite natural. Anyway I decided that the traveller had deserved it really and that you should never play around. Because there is no redemptive meaning, there can be no Plotinian metaphysical harmonies.
The idea of the absurd was not, of course, Camus’s invention. He was well aware that it had emerged during the Renaissance, after the breakdown of medieval tribal culture and the breakthrough of entrepreneurial capitalism. The absurd found powerful expression in Montaigne’s introspective project to understand his most immediate and elusive experiences. Finding that his life did not fit any previous pattern or any a priori shape, Montaigne called himself a new figure in history: the accidental philosopher. As his autobiographical essays advanced, they became more and more open to the floundering uncertainties of existence. He wrote: Is it possible to imagine anything so ridiculous as that this miserable and puny creature, who is not even master of himself, exposed to the attacks of all things, should call himself master and emperor of the universe, the least part of which is not in his power to know, much less to command? For Montaigne, man was a somewhat absurd creature, vulnerable to chance, stuffed with grandiosity, and inherently limited in understanding: equally incapable of seeing the Nothing from which he was made, and the Infinite in which he is swallowed. Human beings as precarious, contingent animals.
Following in his tracks, but with a more evangelical agenda, Pascal continued to sound the same note of metaphysical alarm. With a cold disapproving eye, he observed the way in which human beings evaded their mortal predicament by courting endless distraction. He reflected how whole days passed at court with the king happily chasing a running hare. He catalogued the diverting ploys of the false self and mocked their absurdity. All humanity was in flight from the existential moment and the inexorable journey to death: being-unto-death. It is not surprising to find both these French precursors of the absurd endorsed in Camus’s journals. They sharpened his vision and guided his fiction towards the evasive and senseless, the indeterminate and tragic: the bleak articulation of contingency.
Later in the nineteenth-century, the idea of absurdity became entwined with the concept of alienation in relationship to industrial mass-society. It informs much of Romanticism. Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, for example, is surely a solitary figure representing the alienation of the individual from society, from Nature, from God and even from himself: an earlier version of the outsider. The word ‘alienation’ occurs in the writings of nearly all the major European philosophers: Hegel, Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. The philosopher-economist, Karl Marx, is especially insistent on the degree of alienation which comes about when the worker no longer relates existentially to what he does: This is the relationship of the worker to his own activity as something alien and not belonging to him, activity as suffering, strength as powerlessness, creation as emasculation, the personal physical and mental energy of the worker, his personal life as an activity which is directed against himself, independent of him and not belonging to him. This is self-alienation.
Marx’s definition raises the paradox of a self which can no longer know itself, so deep is the psychic distortion through the impersonal engines of capitalist organisation. If Marx’s analysis is correct, it follows that the dominant society is one of profound inauthenticity, of non-being, and that the only way out would be through some form of personal defiance or revolution. The individual rebel might then be closer to the springs of life but, at the same time, he would forfeit his place in society. He would be an oddity, a fool, an alien – an absurd individual in an alienated world. Here, indeed, we are amazingly close to the final state of Mersault: absurd, without meaning, free and pitted against society.
Everywhere, the influence of Camus’s wide and insatiable reading is palpable. And yet the greatest source of his acute sensitivity to the absurd must lie in his own life. Not only was he born into a poor labouring class on the remote periphery of the French empire, but when he was a year old his father was killed in the First World War at the Battle of the Marne. The missing father is crucial to understanding Camus’s acute sensibility. Seen through the lens of Freud’s psychoanalysis, it can be seen as a formative trauma, which the writer is continually trying to face and overcome. His writing is a compulsive act of personal therapy, healing for a short time, then breaking down, then starting again.
Significantly, in his unfinished autobiographical novel The First Man, the opening section is titled In Search of the Father. In the second chapter Jacques Cormery/Albert Camus visits his father’s grave in the small French town of Saint-Brieuc. Throughout the chapter the father is linked to the strange and unknowable: Cormery had made up his mind to go and visit this dead stranger… so that afterwards he would feel completely free. In Camus the disparate themes of the dead stranger and personal freedom are locked indissolubly together. Contemplating the dates on the grave – 1885- 1914 – Cormery is suddenly aware that he is nineteen years older than his father at his death. He feels outrage at the discrepancy: something here was not in the natural order, but only madness and chaos when the son was older than the father. He is unable to catch the right sound; he does not hear Plotinian harmony, but only cacophany. In spite of the jarring discord, Cormery feels a strong affinity with the dead stranger: Yet the secret he had eagerly sought to learn through books and people now seemed to him to be intimately linked with this dead man, this younger father, with what he had been and what he had become, and it seemed that he himself had gone far afield in search of what was close to him in time and blood. The sons’s identification with the dead father has become an association with the mad and the lawless.
The traditional Logos of the Father has become illogical. There has been a breakdown in metaphysical meaning and cultural continuity. At the end of the chapter, Cormery sounds like an inconsolable child as he prepares himself: to face for another night the endless solitude he had been hurled into and then deserted. This is an existential moment when Cormery/Camus confronts the burnt-out sense of cosmic abandonment. In the margin of a script that he was still frenetically revising, the author scrawled a note to himself: From the beginning, should show the alien in Jacques more. It is as if Cormery’s alienation cannot be over-dramatised, as if he had become the dissociated Hamlet of the modern age.
It was during the time he was writing The Outsider that Camus discovered what Jung would have called his personal myth. It was the story of Sisyphus, the solitary mortal who, showing contempt for the gods, was doomed to roll a rock to the top of the mountain only, as he neared the summit, to watch it roll back down again. In a short essay, inspired by Kierkegaard and Kafka, Camus imagined the moment when Sisyphus returned to the fallen boulder, grasping the utter pointlessness of his task, while preparing himself to take on the labour once more. What interests him is the reflexive pause: the existential moment of stoical consciousness. Although Sisyphus is powerless to change his wretched condition, and although he still rages at the manifest injustice, he nevertheless feels a sense of liberation in the crystalline thought: this is how it is. The futility is embraced as the fatality of his life. And his destiny is partly surmounted by two redemptive energies: his withering scorn for the gods, and the supreme lucidity of his own thinking. Defiance and enlightenment coincide.
Camus compares the condition of Sisyphus to that of Oedipus who, when blind and despairing, realised that the one link he had with the world was the guiding hand of a girl. Yet he is able to affirm his existence. Oedipus concludes that in spite of the tragedy, All is well. The absurd predicaments of life have to be embraced with all their limitations. Only then can there arise an authentic passion for the passing (always passing) moment. Sisyphus, returning to his rock, decides that it is his fate to be yoked to the task: Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself forms the world. The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. The essay closes with the magnificent short sentence: One must imagine Sisyphus happy. Like Mersault, the solitary protagonist discovers a certain felicity.
In the same humanist spirit, Camus scrawled in his dairy on March 15th 1951: Every achievement is a servitude. It compels us to a higher achievement. This is Sisyphus as he turns back to his boulder, heaving it up the steep incline yet again – with a certain rage and a certain joy. Seen through the eyes of Camus, the myth embodies the partial transcendence of absurdity. It is a modern tale of eudaimonia, of revolt, freedom and self- affirmation, of the self choosing its singular life without higher appeal. For Camus the absurd is the starting point, not the conclusion. In the first stage it is simply recognized as the condition of life. In the next movement there is an act of rebellion against the state of meaninglessness, a pure defiance, and then in the final stage comes an affirmation of life in spite of. It is a form of modern Stoicism.
Camus’s commitment to the absurd possesses intellectual courage but, in the context of his life, it has a cutting pathos. Early in 1960, he was planning a trip from his home in Provence to Paris. He had bought his rail ticket, but then accepted the offer of a lift with his publisher-friend, Michel Gallimard. On 4th January, on Route National 5, near the small town of Monterreau, the speeding car swerved off the icy road, colliding with a tree. Camus, in the passenger seat, died instantly. The train ticket was still in his pocket. The broken dashboard clock stopped at 13.54, recording, perhaps, the exact moment of his death. In the wreckage, scattered across the road, was his briefcase. Inside were two books, Nietzsche’s The Gay Science and Shakespeare’s Othello, and the almost illegible manuscript of his unfinished autobiographical novel, Le Premier Homme …
In the very last paragraph of that work-in-progress the character Jacques Cormery, representing the author, was pictured as a solitary and ever- shining blade of a sword … destined to be shattered with a single blow and forever, an unalloyed passion for life confronting death. Uncannily, the philosopher of the absurd had penned his own epitaph.
The accident turned Camus into an iconic figure, like James Dean and Jackson Pollock. It was a most sensational death and in the most modern manner – a road crash, in a fashionable car, at high speed. It seemed to scream out that life was badly flawed, lacking any fundamental coherence or eschatology. It was prime and shocking evidence that Camus’s central thesis about human absurdity had purchase, and that the traditional religious pieties and metaphysical explanations had lost their power either to explain or expiate. The feeling that things had fallen apart, that there was and could be no centre, that there could only be a kind of incredulity towards all grand narratives, including that of the self, had suddenly become dominant.
In Camus’s philosophy one still has to affirm life in spite of. The authentic person counters nihilism by accepting existence, and living it to the full. The self can still flower, for a season. In fact, in Camus’s work, something of the spirit of the religious and romantic continues to find expression. Meursault’s sudden revelation under a night heavy with signs and with stars is nothing if not pantheistic in tone. But, some time after Camus’s tragic death, that mood changed. The sensibility became more plural, eclectic, ironic, playful, almost indifferent to the high seriousness of the existentialists. What had been forfeited was the pang of subjectivity. Towards the end of the twentieth century something like a transmutation in the life of feeling was taking place. The huge paradox of the postmodern global identity was emerging. In part, it was a reaction against the inward intensities of existentialism, its dread and anguish, its fear and trembling, its revelations and rhapsodies. Another chapter in the story of the self was being scripted.