Albert Camus (1913-1960), French writer, philosopher, representative of the "absurd philosophy", the main works include "The Outsider", "Plague", "Sisyphus Myth", "Rebel", etc., won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957.
The Outsider
Author: (French) Albert Camus
Translator: Jin Yi
Version: Reader Culture
Jiangsu Phoenix Literature and Art Publishing House
March 2019
The Plague
Author: (French) Albert Camus
Translator: Liu Fang
Edition: Shanghai Translation Publishing House
August 2013
The Myth of Sisyphus
Translator: Shen Zhiming
Camus's Notebook
Translator: Huang Xinhui
Edition: Qizhenguan | Zhejiang University Press
August 2019
Poster for the film of the same name (2011), based on Camus's posthumous manuscript.
Today, it has been exactly sixty years since the French writer Albert Camus was killed in a car accident. He has written countless inspiring words with the weak hand of a tuberculosis patient, and with his sad eyes, he has witnessed a tiny individual's resistance to nothingness, to despair, and to the pursuit of happiness. Camus, with his indomitable courage, propped up the conscience of mankind and "brought real and meaningful happiness to those who were poisoned by the misfortunes of the century" and became a generation of literary legends.
Camus once said, "Our time is such a great fire, and its unstoppable flame will surely burn many of our works to ashes." However, the remaining works, their iron armor will become more and more indestructible, and we will share the joy of the heart for this purpose. "His words are undoubtedly the crystallization of this fire, which has survived and coexisted with us. He once quoted Stendhal as saying, "My soul is a flame, and if it does not emit light, it will be damaged." "This raging flame travels through time and is still burning in the hearts of readers around the world.
Camus's Death: A KGB-Orchestrated Murder?
Recently, a news story that has nothing to do with current affairs suddenly caused a sensation on the Chinese Internet: the well-known French writer Camus may not have died in a car accident, but from a KGB murder. This sensational view comes from the Italian scholar Giovanni Cateri. As early as 2011, he wrote in an Italian newspaper claiming to have found clues to the truth about Camus's death in a 1980 diary by Czech writer Jan Zabrana: Zabrana mentioned that well-informed sources told him that camus's car had been passive and eventually led to a car accident. In 2013, Caterry's book The Death of Camus was published in Italy, detailing his speculations. In 2019, the French version of the book was released, and the content of the original book was supplemented, which in turn caused heated discussions around the world. Caterry believed that France and the Soviet Union would benefit from Camus's death, because Camus's uncompromising exposure of Soviet hegemonism contradicted France's national policy of improving relations with the Soviet Union. Caterry said in an interview:
"France and the Soviet government, including the French Communist Party, spent months carefully preparing for a grand visit to France by Soviet leaders. It was an extraordinary eleven-day visit, from 23 March to 4 April 1960: a true tour of the Tour de France that would surely conclude the great friendship between France and the Soviet Union. No voice of resistance shall be uttered on this occasion. We can imagine how Albert Camus's attack on Khrushchev and the media heat he could generate would destroy the image of the Soviet Union in the realm of public opinion until the rapprochement between the two countries was put at risk. This is intolerable for incumbent leaders. I believe it was in order to avoid such failures that led to the decision to get rid of Camus. ”
How absurd it is to stifle Camus, who might be critical, in order to prevent twists and turns in Khrushchev's visit to France, and france under de Gaulle! It is no wonder that as soon as this view came out, it was immediately attacked by a large number of Camus research experts in Europe and the United States, including Camus's daughter Catherine Camus, who also held a completely opposed attitude towards it. What's more, although the entire book provides various indirect records, it lacks real evidence of a final sound. So, this conspiracy theory about Camus's death may be just a sensational gimmick that may not have much meaning in itself, but the mentality of its advocates is worth thinking about. Asked how he initially cast doubt on the official claim to Camus's death, Cathary replied:
"From the moment I discovered Camus's work, and especially how he intervened in the politics of his time, I have always felt, almost convinced, that the accident that preyed upon this great writer could not be the result of chance, but was triggered by his previous actions."
"It can't be the result of chance", these words say it all. Therefore, whether it is Cartery's motivation for research or the spread of his views on the Internet, in addition to artificial hype, in essence, it fits into the psychology that we cannot believe that a writer like Camus can really simply die in a car accident and disappear from the world in such a simple and rude and unreasonable way. This makes us unbearable, unwilling, and even more incomprehensible. We need a reason, and the emergence of the KGB just right fills this point. We are reluctant to admit that the absurdity occurs savagely in life in such a naked way, despite camus himself's repeated affirmation of its existence in his writings.
The absurdity of everyday life may be more terrifying and alarming than political murder. This reminds us of The Outsider, of camus's setting for the novel: not the splendor and displacement of wartime, but the ordinary to the point of almost banal everyday life. But it is precisely in this way that the absurd is inevitable, because it does not need to be inspired by a specific historical moment, but it is silent and omnipresent to envelop our lives, leaving us with nowhere to escape. Camus's death brings this to light in a shocking way.
Perhaps, we will pessimistically think that Camus will eventually die of absurdity. But Camus had thought it through as early as his twenties: "Believing that death will unfold another life does not make me happy." For me, death is a closed door. I don't say it's a threshold that must be crossed, but rather a horrible and filthy accident. "I fear death because it separates me from the world because I am nostalgic for the fate of the living, rather than gazing at the eternal sky."
Every man who loves life will not escape death, but this does not prevent him from living fully, nor does it prevent him from facing death with nostalgia for the fate of the living. As the American writer William Faulkner put it in his eulogy for Camus, "When the door closed behind him, he had written on the other side of the door what every artist who had lived with him and shared a premonition and hatred of death had hoped to do: I had lived in the world." ”
Superb writers and "capitalizers"
Camus was born on 7 November 1913 in Algeria, then the Overseas Department of the French Third Republic. Less than a year after his birth, world war I broke out, his father enlisted in the army, and was soon shot and wounded on the battlefield of the Marne, and soon after, he died in the field hospital in the rear. The death of his father plunged the family into abject poverty, and her mother had to take the young Camus to belcul, a slum on the outskirts of Algiers, to live with her stern grandmother. The loss of his father at an early age, the semi-deafness of his mother, the illiterate family, and even the lack of a book in the family, this is the material life of Camus, the future Nobel Laureate in Literature, in his childhood.
At the age of 17, Camus suffered from the tuberculosis that was difficult to cure at that time, and was once deeply threatened with death, but it also sharpened his will, and made him have a understanding of life and death at a young age. With the help of several school teachers, Camus was able to complete his basic studies and gradually embarked on the path of writing for a living.
In 1933, Camus was admitted to the University of Algiers to study philosophy and classical literature, reading in depth the works of Stendhal, Dostoevsky, Malraux and especially Gide. The following year, he married Simone Iye, but Iye was deeply addicted to drugs and had an affair with his personal doctor, and the two divorced more than a year later. Camus then joined the French Communist Party, but was expelled from the party two years later for accusing the party leadership of not supporting the Algerian people, who were oppressed by colonialism, and was considered to be dissident from the party.
After the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Camus and his friends collectively composed "The Uprising of Asturias" on the theme of the Spanish people's uprising, and the script was published by Charlot Press. In 1937, Camus's absolute debut film "Anti and Positive" came out. Soon after, he entered the Algiers Repubblica at the recommendation of Pascal Pia, and from then on began a dual career as a writer and journalist.
In 1940, Camus married Francina Fuhr and entered the Paris Evening News. He also joined secret organizations that resisted German invasion, was responsible for intelligence gathering and underground newspaper publishing, and participated in the preparation of the Battle Newspaper. In 1942, The Outsider and The Myth of Sisyphus were published and widely acclaimed. After the premiere of Sartre's play "The Fly", Camus met and became closely associated with young intellectuals such as Sartre and Beauvoir. He was also awarded the Order of the Resistance and served as a literary advisor to the Gallima Publishing House. However, after the publication of The Rebel in 1951, Camus and Sartre had a fierce argument and finally broke up completely.
In the late 1950s, Camus intensively created a series of novels, plays, essays, and political treatises. On January 4, 1960, when Camus's creative life was at its peak, he unfortunately died in a car accident, but he still left us with a heavy manuscript of "The First Man", which was compiled and published by his daughter in 1994 and once again caused a sensation in the literary world.
Throughout Camus's life, he wrote a long series of documentary articles on the poor life of the Kabili people in Algeria in the 1930s, calling on the whole society to change the discriminatory gaze and predatory laws of the Arabs, which can be described as justice; as the editor of the "Combat Newspaper", he used paper and pen to fight the Nazis for a long time during the resistance movement, which can be described as courage; during the Algerian war, he constantly traveled between the two sides of the Mediterranean, calling on all parties to stop killing and engage in peaceful dialogue, which can be described as moderation He has insight into and thoroughly understands the absurdity and rebellion of human beings in modern society, which can be described as wisdom. The ancient Greek "four virtues" reappeared in him in this way. He was a superb writer, but also a man of dignified capital letters, and Camus deserved it.
"I will first defend my mother before justice"
Camus's short life of 47 years has experienced the bloodiest, cruelest and craziest half century in human history, and has experienced a black era of war, slaughter, exile, concentration camps and atomic bombs. Of these, he was most involved and hurt him personally the most was undoubtedly the Algerian War. His idea of peace was rejected by both warring sides, and he endured the deadly siege of countless contemporaries, and had to fall silent and go into exile in his homeland. On December 13, 1957, after winning the Nobel Prize in Literature, during a symposium at Stockholm University, an intruding Algerian student sharply rebuked Camus for being silent about the cause of Algerian independence, and Camus responded with only one roundabout sentence: "I believe in justice, but before justice I will first defend my mother." ”
This is perhaps the most questioned, misinterpreted, and reproachful sentence of Camus's life. First of all, it must be pointed out that in Camus's vocabulary, "mother" does not refer to "motherland", especially not to "France", which Camus described in detail in the autobiographical novel manuscript "The First Man". Therefore, the conflict between "mother" and "justice" is by no means an ideological conflict between the mother of the motherland and national independence. What Camus wants to defend is the mother who really lives in Algeria and is threatened by the terrorist attacks, and it is also the feeling of closeness and fraternity between people represented by the mother, as well as all innocent and weak lives symbolized by the mother in the face of violence, which is the justice of the individual; and the word "justice" refers to the justice of the Arabs in their pursuit of the right to life, the justice of the nation, the justice of the group, and the justice that Camus himself has been calling for for the Arabs since his appointment in the Algerian Republic in the 1930s.
Camus not only supported the Arabs' quest for an equal life, but for the entire twenty years from 1937 to 1957 he was attentive to the living conditions of the Arabs, who knew their suffering better than most French intellectuals and outraged the incompetence of the French government's policies. He endorsed the Arabs' demand for independence, but he could not accept the tactics they used to achieve this goal: to launch terrorist attacks on innocent people.
Camus said in The Rebel that "the ultimate paradox contained in the greatest revolution that history has undergone is that it pursues justice through a long list of endless injustices and violence." Such a logic is fundamentally and absolutely unacceptable to Camus. Camus insisted that true justice does not come out of violence, but must come from fraternity and trust between people. He believed in justice and resolutely placed the "individual justice" represented by the "mother" above the "group justice" of "great righteousness". But he failed. In the face of bloody reality, Camus's overly upright humanitarian ideals may seem inactive, but he did not give up and betray his position until his death, and the value orientation in this cannot but be moved.
In this regard, the eulogy written for him by his lifelong friend and enemy Sartre is perhaps most accurate: "His stubborn, confined and pure, harsh and fleshly humanitarian feelings challenge the broad and ugly order of our time." But it is also through these tenacious struggles that Camus reconfirms the existential value of morality in our world of real money and Machiavellianism. ”
"I'm not an existentialist"
Camus's greatest opponents in his life, including these specific people and events, may all be summed up in one word: "absurdity." Although he won and lost battles against the absurd, he never raised his hand and conceded defeat. So, don't be fooled by The Outsider, Camus himself is by no means an "outsider" engulfed in absurdity. As Camus put it, Sisyphus "left the top of the mountain and gradually went deeper into the cave of the gods, and he dominated his own destiny." He was stronger than the boulder he was pushing. This can also be seen as Camus's own belief in survival.
On the way to the foot of the mountain, Sisyphus knew that the boulder he had worked so hard to push up the mountain would still slip, but he chose to resist the absurd boulder with his shoulder again and dare to bear everything. It was this sober consciousness that gave his actions a heroic splendor that set him apart from a slave who pushed stones. Thus pushing the boulder, which was originally the divine punishment of Sisyphus by the gods, became Sisyphus's tempering of his will to life. Although absurdity still envelops the world, and although he cannot escape from this world, fate is no longer at the mercy of the gods, but only to himself. Sisyphus re-created meaning and value for life with his efforts to climb upwards, and thus began the absurd defeat and the triumph of humanity. As he pushes and competes with one of the boulders symbolizing suffering and absurdity with the strength of his flesh, a negative myth of eternal punishment is transformed into a tragic and majestic inspiration to search for the meaning of life.
For Camus, every human being must and must confront in his life the absurd and its variants, but they are by no means the end of life, much less everything of life. It is important to establish a new code of conduct and attitude towards life after all this is recognized, and to strive for the restoration of human dignity. Camus took all the heat of the "unquenchable sun" in his heart and broke into this cold and desolate world. He knows that "absurdity arises in opposition between the call of mankind and the irrational silence of the world"; he knows that in human life he is destined to encounter absurdity, and he knows that such encounters are accompanied by pain; but he has also said that he cannot ignore "this world that makes me feel powerful and courageous" and cannot "stubbornly deny what my palm touches and my lips touches". It is here that we see why Camus later emphasized that he was "not an existentialist." This had nothing to do with the rupture of his friendship with Sartre.
At the root of thought, Camus believed that there is an innate essence in this world, and not everything is acquired and chosen. Camus opposed the modern philosophy of "placing values at the end of action." The criterion for judging value is a priori for Camus, fixed in respect for the instincts of life, and such transcendentality requires no metaphysical speculation and is related to his perception of life directly. Camus's world has a solid core, which comes from his simple life experience, from the gaze of his eyes and the touch of his hands, not pure logical speculation, not the clear talk and mystery of the proud sons of the Parisian Masters. This is why Camus also denied being "a philosopher", although his writings did not lack abstract thinking.
"To feel the connection between the earth and the self" and "to reproduce on earth the harmony that Plotinus aspired to" can be seen as the deepest will of a writer full of absurdity. Camus said, "To be pure, one has to return to the homeland of the soul, where kinship with the world becomes perceptible, where flesh and blood are once again joined by the pulse of the two o'clock sun in the afternoon." The alienation of man from the world creates absurdity, which is the "destiny" that every modern man must face, and it is also the pain that every brave person must bear; and when they firmly step into the world again, love can be born.
In Camus's view, such a sober and clear love is a true love. "Without despair of life, there is no love for life", this sentence he wrote in his early years is not an exaggerated paradox. This seemingly irreconcilable conflict creates Camus's unique poetry, so that the reader can still perceive a deep warmth even in his cold as a knife, so that we understand that in the face of inescapable absurdity and death, there is still a happiness worth seeking and insisting on.
"I rebel so we exist"
Camus said in the Myth of Sisyphus that absurdity arises from the opposition and collision between man and the world, and a person who recognizes absurdity cannot return to the state of numbness. In The Rebel, Camus argues that the absurdity should be confronted by rebellion, and that humanity can regain the dignity of existence only in its eternal struggle against its dark side. Without such resistance, the absurdity can only lead people to suicide, which will be nothing more than an escape and submission.
At the same time, Camus had a great ambition in his heart, he wanted to get out of his personal loneliness and become one with the wider human race, so he wrote a deafening quote: "I rebel so we exist." Expanding the individual "me" to the collective "we" leads the inner struggle of the individual alone to the all-round struggle of a group of people. This rebellion will free one from his own loneliness and personal logic, and he will still fight for himself while fighting with others and for others. This is Camus's great love for humanity, and it is also where his true idealism lies.
As Roger Grenier put it in Albert Camus: Sunshine and Shadows, "If his initial analysis leads to absurdity, it must not satisfy him, but rather a search for a way out, a search for resistance and love." In The Rebel, Camus says in a straightforward way, "So people learn that resistance cannot give up a strange love." Those who can neither find a place in God nor in history must survive for the sake of those who, like them, cannot survive: for the sake of all those who are insulted. The purest movement of resistance will then carry on Karamazov's cry of grief: If people are not saved, what good is it to save one!" Camus used the power of his human light to witness his solid steps on earth in the name of life.
When Camus was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957, he emphasized in his personal speech, The Artist and His Time, that "beauty, even today, especially today, cannot serve any partisanship, and for a long or short period of time it can only serve human suffering and freedom." That's exactly what he preached. He said, "The artist, at the end of his path, will forgive rather than judge." This is Camus's respect and love for human beings as a writer, he is a true benevolent man, which is soaked with Camus's love for the human world.
Sontag once said in His Diary of Camus: "Kafka evokes pity and fear, Joyce evokes admiration, Proust and Gide evokes respect, but apart from Camus, I cannot recall that there are other modern writers who can evoke love." In Camus's own words, "the artist really defends out of love for his fellow human beings.". This deep love, which connects Camus with the world, with others, with himself, makes him not an outsider in any sense, but as a rebel, shooting "the strongest arrow of freedom" for all.
Camus once said, "I have always insisted that there is no transcendent meaning in this world." But I know that something in this world is meaningful, and that is man, because man is the only creature that proposes to be born meaningful. Camus was always on the lookout for an indelible humanity, which was the goal he had sought all his life. The Nobel Prize in Literature awarded to Camus by the Royal Swedish Academy can be described as saying: "Camus personally, he has been far free from nihilism. His serious and stern contemplation, his attempt to rebuild what has been destroyed, to make justice possible in a world without justice, all of which made him a humanitarian. ”
The fire that Camus burned in his work will not be extinguished again. And we will all be like him, in this desolate world, difficult but determined to go on.
"Those who love each other but are separated may live in pain, but this is not despair: they know that love lasts forever. That's why I was able to endure exile without tears in my eyes. I'm still waiting... I can set sail at any time and ignore despair. "Camus's creation and life are far more than a gesture of waiting, he has set sail, death is powerless to break it, and we will set out with it.
□ Zhang Bo (PhD student in French literature at the Sorbonne University in Paris)