By coincidence I was in Paris on
the 7 November on the 100th anniversary of the birth of Albert Camus (1913-1960). He lived some of
his life in the city. The timing made me think about his continuing relevance
beyond the hothouse intellectual climate of the city of his time.
His novels, especially The
Stranger, The Plague and The Fall have a continuing resonance
as we continue to search for meaning and clarity in a world that borders on,
and often collapses into, the absurd. His life, is also an example and reminder
of the awkward position and creative pain of being an outsider. His novel L’Etranger,
so often given the English title of The Stranger, is best translated I
feel as The Outsider. Outsider status is an interesting category to
understand the contemporary world. We all have states of the outsider,
some temporary, others fleetingly and for others, the category is more
permanent and more penal. French-speaking, born in Algeria to a very poor
family, he straddles the awkward shift from colonial to postcolonial and his
own responses to the colonial struggle in Algeria have all the compromised
difficulty of the torn and the divided. His uncompromising pacifism is also a
continuing message. In an editorial for the journal Combat in a response
to hearing of an atomic bomb exploding in Hiroshima he wrote,
"The
world is what it is, which is to say, not much. That's what each us
learned yesterday thanks to the formidable chorus that radio, newspapers, and
information agencies have just unleashed regarding the atomic bomb. We are
told, in fact, amid a host of enthusiastic commentaries, that any mid-sized
city whatever can be totally razed by a bomb about the size of a soccer
ball…We'll sum it up in one sentence: mechanical civilization has just
reached its final degree of savagery. We are going to have to choose, in
a future that is more or less imminent, between collective suicide and the
intelligent use of scientific conquests...Faced with the terrifying prospects that
are opening up before humanity, we see even more clearly than before that peace
is the only fight worth engaging in.”
His arguments are all the more
powerful and brave because of their time and place. Unlike his contemporary
Jean Paul Sartre, Camus was never so ideologically committed to the
authoritarian regimes of communism despite enormous pressure in postwar Paris.
He wrote clearly and accessibly. His love of football and his prizing of
everyday friendship make him seem more human than the arid intellectualism of
his Paris contemporaries. Few lives can be summed up as ‘philosopher, writer,
goalkeeper’.
Chess players in the Luxembourg Gardens (Photo: © John Rennie Short)
His pained response
to the atomic age is all the more disturbing because it has the anguished
realization of a new world that is now an accepted, taken for granted world.
We have, by and large, incorporated and thus by default accepted the notion of
mass destruction, global war and the possibility of annihilation. When
he wrote, “To revolt today means to revolt against war”,
he was leaving us a message that still has power and meaning and guidance.
