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Camus, the Mediterranean man…

By ARTHUR GOLDHAMMER [in the translator’s note from the new English edition of Algerian Chronicles] – After listening to Camus lecture, the writer Julien Green described him in terms that one might apply to a secular saint: “There is in this man a probity so obvious that it inspires almost immediate respect in me. To put it plainly, he is not like the others.” This quality of authenticity is unmistakable throughout the pieces collected here. Camus wrote as a moralist, in the noblest sense of the term. In fact, he was a moralist in two different senses. In the French sense, he was a worthy heir to La Rochefoucauld and La Bruyère, moralistes who exposed the hidden selfishness in ostensibly selfless action, the hypocrisy in what society, for reasons of its own, hypocritically honors as virtue. But he was also a moralist in the American sense, a writer of “jeremiads,” which, as Sacvan Bercovitch revealed, are best understood as appeals to the fatherland to return to the high ideals that it has set for itself and from which it has strayed. Here, it is primarily this second type of moralism that is on display. Camus addresses France, his second home, which he believed had not, in its policies toward Algeria, remained true to the founding ideals of its republican tradition – liberty, equality, and fraternity – which for Camus were the political virues par excellence.

In this respect, Camus was quitessentially French, but he saw himself not only as a Frenchman but also as a man of the Mediterranean, a spiritual heir of Saint Francis who, as Camus put it in an early manifesto on “Mediterranean culture” (included in the supplementary material to this volume), “turned to nature and naïve joy.” But “nature and naïve joy” could not survive in the climate of “soulless violence” that descended on Algeria, the land of Camus’s birth and the very root of his being…

Abstraction was not Camus’s natural element….Although he may on ocasion use an abstract and value-laden term like “justice,” what moves him is plain fellow-feeling for other suffering human beings. With almost Franciscan faith he hopes the example of his own compassion will suffice to elicit the compassion of others.

…out of Africa.

 

Albert Camus.

Albert Camus. (Wiki)

By JAMES CAMPBELL [from a review of Algerian Chronicles in The Wall Street Journal] – Camus’s mother, Catherine, an illiterate, deaf widow, became for him the representative French Algerian. Her right to a decent, peaceful existence was illustrated in the oft-quoted maxim, “Between justice and my mother, I choose my mother.” In an appendix to Algerian Chronicles, however, the editor, Alice Kaplan, shows that Camus never made this remark. Its true form, stated at the time of the Nobel award, is more thoughtful: “People are now planting bombs in the tramways of Algiers. My mother might be on one of those tramways. If that is justice, then I prefer my mother.”

As this and related statements make clear, the impetus behind the repeated pleas for constructive dialogue that occupy the later parts of “Algerian Chronicles” was personal as much as political. While recognizing that “the era of colonialism is over,” Camus could not accept that it must lead to the extinction of the community that had nourished him as a child and given a subject to the young writer. “The French are attached to Algerian soil by roots too old and deep to think of tearing them up,” he wrote in 1955. His stance led to the quarrel with Jean-Paul Sartre and others at Les Temps Modernes, postwar Paris’s leading intellectual magazine.

By the time Algerian Chronicles was published, Camus’s attempts to mediate a “frank final discussion” between the contending forces sounded increasingly forlorn and occasionally self-important: “Had my voice been heard 20 years ago, there might be less bloodshed today,” he wrote in the preface. The final chapter, “Algeria 1958,” must have sown further doubts among his diminishing group of supporters:

No matter how favorable one is to Arab demands, it must be recognized that to demand national independence for Algeria is a purely emotional response to the situation. There has never been an Algerian nation. The Jews, Turks, Greeks, Italians, and Berbers all have a claim to lead this virtual nation. . . . The French of Algeria are themselves an indigenous population in the full sense of the word.

No Parisian radical would have accepted “full”—as perhaps few people would today—but if his mother was not Algerian, what was she? If she could not live in the only home she had ever known, how was her life to be meaningful? Can the banishment to involuntary exile of a native—for that’s what she was, in Camus’s sense—be morally justified?

In a foreign country such as France, Catherine Camus would have been a stranger, one more Camusian character struggling to understand the whirl of absurdity between birth and death. In “The Plague,” the stranger is Dr. Rieux, a heroic physician who debates with his friend Tarrou whether it is possible to live as “a saint without God.” In Camus’s earlier novel—called “The Stranger” in the U.S., though in Britain the title is always rendered as “The Outsider”—a senseless act of violence committed by the narrator Meursault on a nameless Arab creates ultimate strangers out of two men who, while sharing a city and a nationality, would never have met or talked to one another in the course of daily life.

Continued at The Wall Street Journal | More Chronicle & Notices.

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